USA Noir Noir: Best of the Akashic Noir Series

by Johnny Temple

  He turned back to the mattress and saw beside Mindy was Paula Rhodes, a new grad student who’d been struggling to find her place in the program. A bit more mature than the others, a woman who’d written for New York travel magazines and already had a Master’s degree. She, like Mindy, wanted, for some ungodly reason, to write poetry. To sing the body electric.

  She had risen up to her knees and was reaching out to Guy with her unloosened breasts wobbling and her eyes on fire with some chemical enthusiasm. Around the room, he made out at least four other students from the program, all of them tangling and untangling like a nest of snakes.

  “Hey, I want to thank you, professor,” Philly said. “You got us hooked up with a better class of consumer than we been seeing lately. I owe you, man.”

  Moon, the bull-necked gatekeeper, appeared in the doorway. He too was now wearing only his underwear. Saggy white briefs with dark hair coiling out around the edges. In one hand he was holding a silver tray with syringes and rubber straps, and an array of other nefarious equipment that Guy didn’t recognize. In the other he gripped the barrel of the SAW. Eight hundred–meter range, lightweight, just over twenty pounds with the two hundred–round magazine.

  Moon presented the hors d’oeuvre tray to Guy, poking him in the sternum with its corner.

  “A little hit of research, Guy?” Jumpy said.

  The walls of the bedroom were breathing in and out and the lights had invaded the interior of Guy’s chest.

  “You used me. You son of a bitch, you used me to take advantage of these kids.”

  “I used you, Guy? I fucking used you?”

  Mindy Johnston’s hand snaked inside the leg of Guy’s trousers, her fingers trickling up his calf. Her voice a swoon.

  “Come on, professor. Come on, it’s fun. It’s so wild.”

  Guy looked across the canal and saw the old couple still fox-trotting to some melody that didn’t pass beyond their walls. He thought of Shelly, his wife of ten years, the way they used to dance in their own living room. Languorous steps, drifting around their barren house for hours at a time.

  Jumpy edged to the door, slipping past Moon into the hallway. Moon slid sideways like the bars of a cell locking into place between Guy and the world he’d known.

  “Hey, Guy, enjoy yourself, man. Moon’ll show you the ropes, won’t you, big fellow?”

  Moon had stashed the tray and gun somewhere and now had a grip on Guy’s right bicep and was injecting some clear solution into a bulging vein in the crook of Guy’s arm. The room was bigger than Guy had originally thought. The ceiling was no ceiling. Where the roof should have been, there were stars, whole galaxies exposed, comets shooting from left and right. A cool solar wind swirling down from the heavens.

  “This is what you wanted, right?” Jumpy said from the hall. “Up close and personal.”

  There were bare hands on his ankles drawing him down to the quicksand mattress, down into a pit of flesh and crazy-colored lights, a world he’d written about before. But he’d gotten it all wrong. All completely wrong.

  SECOND CHANCE

  BY ELYSSA EAST

  Buzzards Bay, Cape Cod

  (Originally published in Cape Cod Noir)

  Cunningham said that he had set up the reform school on Penikese Island so we could have a clean break with our pasts. We couldn’t walk home from out here in the middle of nowhere Buzzards Bay. Couldn’t hitch or swim here, either. Even boaters considered the currents dangerous where we were, twelve miles out from the Cape, past the islands of Nonamesset, Veckatimest, Uncatena, Naushon, the Weepeckets, Pasque, and Nashawena, just north of Cuttyhunk. There was no Cumbie Farms, no Dunkin’ Donuts, no running water, Internet, or cell service here. Not even any trees. Just a house made from the hull of an old wooden ship that had run aground. Me and six other guys, all high school age, who were lucky to be here instead of in some lockup, lived with Cunningham and the staff, most of whom were also our teachers. The school had a barn, chicken coop, woodshop, and outhouse. The only other things were the ruins of a leper colony, a couple of tombstones that Cunningham liked to call a cemetery, and the birds. Lots of birds. Seagulls, all of them, that hovered over this place like a screeching, shifting cloud that rained crap and dove at our heads all day.

  This was our clean slate, a barren rock covered in seagull shit.

  We had to leave most of our things behind on the mainland when we were shipped out here on a rusty lobster boat called Second Chance, but our pasts couldn’t help but follow us here anyway. We were always looking over our shoulders and finding them there. Depending on the time of day, we were either chasing the shadows of our pasts or being chased by them. We cast them out over the water with our fishing nets. They were with us when we hoed the garden, split wood, and changed the oil to keep Second Chance, the school’s only boat, in working order. We watched them tackle and collide and fall to the ground next to us while we played football and beat the shit out of each other much like the waves that endlessly pounded this rock. I just wondered when our pasts would pick themselves up, dust themselves off, and walk away. You could say that’s what we all wanted them to do. Least that’s what I wanted for mine.

  * * *

  I never meant to be in the car that killed that girl. It was like that was someone else, not me. Like I wasn’t even there. But I was.

  * * *

  Mr. Riaf, my court-appointed lawyer, had said that the hardest thing out here on Penikese was figuring out how to survive the other guys. “Someone always cracks,” he said. “Don’t let it be you, kid.”

  * * *

  Freddie Paterniti said that when DYS told him he could go to school on an island for a year instead of being thrown back in the can, he thought he was gonna be spending his days jet skiing. Everybody gave Freddie a load of shit for being such a stupid fuck though they had all thought the same thing. Me, I never admitted to knowing better.

  Instead of jet skis, cigarette boats, and chicks in bikinis, we got Cunningham, the school’s founder, an ex-Marine who fought in Vietnam and looked like Jean-Claude Van Damme crossed with Santa Claus. Cunningham believed that our salvation lay in living like it was 1800, but the lesson wasn’t about history: “You boys were chosen to ride Second Chance here because you have shown a demonstrated capacity for remorse for your crimes. We’re here to teach you that your actions literally create the world around you. By creating everything you need with your own bare hands, you can re-form the person you are deep within. And you can take that second chance all the way back to a new place inside.”

  That’s why we carried water, slopped pigs, caught fish, dug potatoes, gathered eggs, and built tables and chairs, and if we didn’t, we wouldn’t have had anywhere to sit and nothing to eat.

  We chopped a lot of firewood that was brought in on Second Chance from Woods Hole. If we got pissed off—which was often—we were sent out to chop more. At first our muscles ached for days. The feel of the axe ricocheted up our elbows, into our shoulders, our skulls. But we got stronger. Soon we split wood and dreamed of splitting the take, splitting open girls’ thighs, splitting this place, this life.

  We were constantly making our world in this nowhere place, chopping it to bits, and redoing it all over again, but we couldn’t remake what we had done to earn our way here.

  “Boys,” Tiny Bledsoe would say when we made the cutting boards that were sold in a fancy Falmouth gift shop to help fund the school, “consider yourselves to be in training for Alcatraz. Soon you’ll graduate to making license plates and blue jeans!” Each time Tiny said this Freddie hit the woodshop floor, laughing.

  Freddie and Tiny were an odd couple. Freddie: sixteen, short, oily, wall-eyed, with the whiniest high-pitched Southie voice you could imagine. Tiny: seventeen, a lumbering, club-footed giant who came from East Dennis. They were nothing like me and my big brother Chad, but they reminded me of us in their own way. They both claimed to have killed people. That was their thing. Their special bond. Something that Chad and me have n
ow too.

  * * *

  That girl’s mother sent me a picture of her, lying in her casket. It looked like one of those jewelry boxes lined in pink satin with a little ballerina that spins while the music plays. All you have to do is turn the key and that ballerina comes to life, but there’s no key on a casket. Just some motor at the gravesite that lowers the box into the ground. My little sister Caroline had one of those jewelry boxes. There was nothing in it but some rings she got out of those grocery store things you put a quarter in. The rings weren’t worth anything, but Chad convinced me to steal her jewelry box anyway.

  * * *

  Freddie and Tiny. It was never Tiny and Freddie, though Tiny was a foot taller. Even Cunningham and our teachers caught on, always saying “Freddie and Tiny” like “I got Freddie’s and Tiny’s homework here!” “Freddie and Tiny are going to lead us in hauling traps!” “Freddie and Tiny . . .”

  One day early in the year, Ryan Peasely was rolling his eyes in mechanics class and mumbling behind Cunningham’s back, “Freddie and Tiny sucked my cock. Freddie and Tiny ate my ass.” It seemed like no one could hear him other than me, but Tiny had sonar for ears. He clamped down on Ryan with a headlock in no time flat. Freddie then whispered into Ryan’s ear that he would kill him by running a set of battery chargers off Second Chance’s engine block up his ass.

  Ryan is from Wellesley. Just cause he used to sell dope to his private school buddies he thinks he’s better than all of us, but Ryan just about shit his pants that day. Cunningham punished Freddie and Tiny by making them clean out the outhouse, but Freddie didn’t seem to care. He nearly died from laughing so hard.

  When Freddie laughs he sounds like the trains that went through the woods down the road from the cul-de-sac where I grew up back in Pocasset: “A-Huh-a-huh-a-huh-a-huh. A-Huh-a-huh-a-huh-a-huh.”

  * * *

  It was also Chad’s idea to take Caroline’s jewelry box and set it on the train tracks. Bits of that doll went flying everywhere. You could still hear the music playing long after the train left.

  Caroline cried so hard after she saw her jewelry box was missing, I went out and gathered up all the pieces of the ballerina that I could find. I wanted to give them to Caroline and make her feel better, but Chad shook his head and said, “What people don’t know can’t hurt them.”

  I threw the pieces of the ballerina in the yard later on. I still remember watching the bits of pink plastic and white gauze fly from my hand.

  Chad came into the room we shared later that night and said, “You’re a real man now, you know that, kid?”

  I was only eight, and he was thirteen but he had started shaving. He knew what it meant to be grown up.

  * * *

  Learning how to be a man is part of Penikese’s chop-wood-carry-water philosophy. Penikese isn’t like being in jail, boot camp, or even regular school, though we can earn our GED and learn a couple of trades like fishing and woodworking. It’s some of all of these things in an Abe-Lincoln-in-a-log-cabin kind of way. Cunningham leads us on walks and tells us stories about the island and calls it history. Wood shop is where Mr. Da Cunha teaches us how to make furniture, which is also his way to con us into measuring angles and calling it geometry. We whittle pieces of wood along with the time; we’re stuck here for a year unless we fuck up, which means getting shipped off to juvie, which none of us wants though there is something about this place that makes everything bad we’ve ever done seem impossible to escape. Like the fact that the house where we’re living is a ship going nowhere.

  At night we sit by kerosene lanterns and do homework around the kitchen table or play pool, except for Bobby Pomeroy who spends a lot of time in the outhouse where we’re all convinced he’s busy beating wood.

  Bobby grew up on a farm somewhere in Western Mass., where he was busted for assault and date-raping some girl. Cause he’s a farm boy, he teaches us things that even Cunningham doesn’t know. Useful things. Like how to hypnotize a chicken.

  We’d only been here for a few weeks when Bobby grabbed the smallest chicken in the coop by its feet and lifted it, so it was hanging upside down. The chicken was squawking and clucking, but as soon as Bobby starting swinging it around and around it quieted down. “That’ll learn ya,” Bobby said, then set the chicken back on the ground. Next thing you knew that chicken was walking in circles and bumping into things, like it was drunk. We all laughed our asses off, but for Tiny and DeShawn.

  “That’s not fucking funny,” Tiny said.

  “Whassamattuh?” Freddie said.

  “It’s just a little chicken.”

  “You feckin’ killed some girl and you’re getting ya panties in a wad over some dumb chicken that’s gonna end up in a pot pretty soon heyah?” Freddie said.

  “Just make it stop,” Tiny replied. His eyes were turning red, his lower lip quivering, but the chicken was still spinning around bumping into things. We couldn’t stop cracking up.

  “Fucking knock it off, you assholes!” Tiny yelled.

  Then the chicken lay down and stopped moving altogether. The chickens in the coop went quiet too. All we could hear was the wind whistling like a boiling kettle.

  “That’s fucking sick,” Kevin Monahan said. “You’re sick, Tiny. Killing your own girlfriend and defending some stupid chicken.” Kevin was in for burning down an apartment building in Springfield while cooking up meth with his father. Some old lady’s cat died in the fire.

  “Arson ain’t no big thing compared to killing a pretty little girl, pansy,” Freddie said.

  Bobby snapped his fingers over the bird, which rolled onto its feet and started walking again.

  “That’s like some voodoo or something,” DeShawn said, moving away from Bobby like he was a man possessed.

  Bobby had power over that chicken just like Freddie had power over Tiny and Chad had power over me.

  * * *

  Chad and me used to be like Freddie and Tiny: inseparable. I followed Chad everywhere, did whatever he did, and whatever he wanted me to do. Now he’s doing time on a twenty-year sentence on account of our accident. On account of me.

  * * *

  Sometimes we got Saturday afternoon passes to Woods Hole on the mainland. Saturdays in “the Hole” were good until Freddie convinced Tiny to steal Second Chance and take it over to Osterville where they said they were going to break into some boats cause Ryan Peasely told them how much money he cleared dealing from his dad’s summer house out thataway.

  As we ferried over that late September day, Tiny said, “I ain’t doin’ it.” Stubby Knowles, our mechanics and fisheries teacher who also captained Second Chance, was inside the wheelhouse and couldn’t hear us over the sound of the engine, the wind, and the squawking gulls.

  “Whassamattah? You chickenin’ out?” Bobby asked.

  “Fuck you,” Tiny shot back.

  Tiny didn’t like Bobby much. After the chicken-swinging incident, Tiny asked if taking care of the chickens could be his chore and his alone, like he wanted to keep the birds safe from Bobby. No one fought him for the honor.

  “Bawk!” Bobby said. Freddie snorted with laughter. They high-fived.

  Tiny stared so hard at Bobby he could have burned two holes straight through him with his eyes. Bobby shrank. Tiny was twice his size and could have easily snapped him in two.

  Tiny started to laugh that kind of laugh that sounds weirdly close to crying. “Fooled yas, I did,” Tiny said. But Tiny hadn’t fooled anyone. He was only staying in because he didn’t want Bobby to take his place as Freddie’s best.

  As soon as we stepped off the boat, Freddie said, “Listen, homies, we gonna bust this shit up like something real,” like we were a bunch of brothers who had escaped Rikers on some wooden raft and sailed our way up to the Cape to terrorize all the rich people.

  “DeShawn, my nigga, you reel in da hos for me.”

  Freddie always talked like a gangsta rapper to DeShawn, so did Bobby. Two boys, as white as they come. Even Freddie, though he’s It
alian, as pale as the moon. Tiny just stood to the side looking confused, waiting for them to get it over with and talk like their old selves again.

  Bobby and Freddie worshipped DeShawn cause he’s black and from Dorchester. DeShawn wouldn’t say anything about why he was here, but you could always see wheels turning behind his eyes, going somewhere way the fuck far away and running us over on his way there.

  Whenever DeShawn got that look on Freddie always said, “Like, DeShawn my man, you and me relate, homes, cuz your shit is real, brother, just like my shit is real, a’ight?”

  Freddie never seemed to notice the look that came over DeShawn’s eyes when he talked to him. Then again, if he did notice he didn’t seem to care. It’s kind of like Chad saying what you don’t know can’t hurt you, only with Freddie it was pretending that you don’t know, like pretending that DeShawn didn’t hate him would help keep him from getting his ass kicked all over the Hole.

  * * *

  The night of the accident, back in August, I pretended everything was okay.

  “Dudes,” Chad had said to some friends of his who pulled up next to us in front of the Cumbie Farms, “I bet you a thousand dollars my little brother and I can jack a car faster than you.”

  It had been a long time since Chad and me had broken into a car and I doubted he and his friends had any money, unless they were dealing, which they probably were, but I didn’t want to know. I hadn’t seen much of Chad in three years, not since he had turned eighteen and joined the Army.

  “Why you wanna go fight the war?” I asked him before he left.

  Chad pointed to his head and said, “Gotta be easier than fighting the war inside.”

  It wasn’t that Chad was a bad guy, it was that he was good at things you weren’t supposed to do, like breaking into places and stealing shit. And Chad had this ability to not get caught, which, in a twisted way, made me and Caroline think he was going to do well being off in the Army fighting terrorists. But not even Mom could explain why Chad was eventually discharged and came back from Afghanistan with scripts for all kinds of things, except to say, “It’s as if your brother has taken lots of bullets inside his heart, Tommy. You can’t actually see the place that got hurt, but if you could, you’d know how badly he’s suffering.” Sometimes I could see it written all over his face, though, like that night sitting and drinking in the car at Cumbie’s.