“Come on,” his father barked, dragging him off down the school hallway, but not to the front door, where the parking lot was.
“Where we goin’?”
“Adios, ameoba.” Dink thrust a hand out. They barely grazed fingers.
“Donnie!”
But his father said nothing, only shoved Joseph out and through a side door he’d never used before.
Mike and Sophia smashed their faces against the back window of the Bronco, giggles under glass.
“Get in.” His father shoved him past the back seat. Gramma and Aunt Lilla sat the back with his mother.
“Sorry you lost,” Lilla offered. Dino pulled out of the back driveway, avoiding the street in front of the school. For a moment, before they turned away, Joseph looked back, saw two police cars parked at the front entrance of the school.
“What is going on?” he screamed.
“It’s awright,” his dad said.
The front entrance to the school was ablaze in swirling silent sirens, shifting camera high beams.
“Stop the car, Da! Stop the car!” Road zoomed by beneath him as he opened the door, but he was ready to tumble. He had to see what was happening to Dink, but his mother lunged forward from behind, grabbed his hand, slammed the door shut.
“Jesus!” His father shouted, grabbing his son’s arm while steering with his left. Sophia shrieked. Joseph lunged closer to his father to get away from the door. He expecting a smack on the back of his head from his mother. It didn’t happen. Grandmama began to babble the rosary in Italian.
“Do you wanna kill yourself?” his father barked.
His mother tried quieting Sophia by showing her how to make handprints in the frosted windows. It wasn’t working.
His mother finally exhaled, then said, “Well, thank God we got out of that.”
Nobody spoke for three blocks until Mike called up, “Hey, I got a Colts banner. Look.” He wagged it up to the front seat. The felt edge tickled his ear until his mother swatted it away.
Grandmama Nicci and Aunt Lilla stayed the night, for support, for spells, to cook, to get in the way. As the boys knew with a small shred of joy, at least what used to be joy, this visit meant they got to sleep downstairs.
Joseph brought the team videotape Dink had given him weeks before. He would use the blank half to tape the news. He’d missed that night’s footage, wasn’t sure if he was relieved to have missed it.
Joseph set down the rules: “Volume down. I got the remote.” Mike agreed under the threat of a headlock.
After all the trips to the bathroom above them dwindled down to silence, Joseph lay on the living room sofa to tape his friends getting arrested. As he expected, it was the top story.
“Local police arrested three teammates of the alleged murder victim. Police would not reveal why they detained the team members, but sources say that the boys, aged eighteen, seventeen and fifteen, were at the scene of the Lambros boy’s death.”
A shot of Bennie, Hunter outside their homes, and Dink being led down the front steps of the school, which looked frightful under the harsh glare of the lights.
He tried to recall their warmth on him, compared to the cold video image, ended up crying in silence. With Mike once again sleeping nearby, it didn’t hurt so bad.
Inside the Peter Pan sleeping bag, a large green fuzzy alligator, his little brother turned over as he lay in its jaws.
Remembering Uncle Boring’s bottle his father got for Christmas, Joseph snuck into the kitchen, took a sip, then a gulp, then a chug.
DOG-PILING
NOOGIES
SNUGGIES
PARAMILITARY
The next night, their own private rituals were exposed, spelled out in terrific graphics. Their jokes were twisted into the terms of “a cult-like ritual” by one reporter. She was the one who got her hands on a catalog with Hunter’s Grim Reaper “NEXT!” T-shirt, among others.
Joseph couldn’t help but smirk at seeing noogies defined on the local news by a reporter, that same chubby Latino guy. He’d flipped to the other channels, watching three or four versions at once, flipped more channels, recording bits and pieces until his father yelled for him to stop.
“The atmosphere was tense, and as the forfeit in honor of Anthony Lambros came up, a hush fell over the crowd.”
A shot of the ref with the other kid, standing, dopey. A sick feeling slid through Joseph’s stomach. He felt a weird sense of disappointment when they cut away from the match to some guy sitting behind a desk in an office: “We had to wait until evidence was substantiated to make our arrests.”
Other repeated shots showed Bennie, Hunter, Dink led out, handcuffed, Dink with his varsity jacket over his head, Bennie and Hunter with their sweatshirt hoods up.
Cleshun talked nervously about how he’d taught his players “to respect other people’s rights and treat them with kindness and understanding.”
The reporter outside the school: “Prosecutors neither confirmed nor denied the rumor of a confession by another team member…”
A shot of Joey walking away in defeat, his face blurred out, electronically erased. He looked like an alien with a human body in a singlet, above his neck a cluster of square-shaped blurs. What remained of his face looked obscene. Just blocking him off like that made him look guilty. Anybody from school would know him.
“Oh, shit.” He dropped the remote.
“Joseph, watch your mouth.”
“…whose name is being withheld, since he is a minor. . .”
“Oh, triple shit.” He paced around the living room.
“I’m warning you!”
“…who may have been in the car that rammed the Lambros car the night of his death. . .”
“Whaddaya– Dad, whad’ they? Aw, shit.”
“Joseph Nicci, you shut your mouth!!”
“…but the court would not reveal more on the minor. In Little Falls, this is John Soto.”
“More on the minor? The hell with you, dickweed.”
“Joseph!” His mother’s face flushed, steamed red, brought him to pleading.
“Ma. They got me. I’m a dead man.”
“Siddown.”
He walked away from the television, pacing around the dining room, looking for something to grab. There were only plates, glasses, baskets, useless things he couldn’t hurl to absorb his rage. Everything seemed stupid, every bit of his home a reminder of how dumb life was, how things were just going to sit there while he was fading, not even there.
“Joey, calm down.”
“Siddown.”
“They got me.”
“Joseph, calm down.”
“Why don’t you eat something.”
“I’m not hungry.”
“Just. Sit. Down.”
He sat. One knee refused to stop tapping.
“Now. They are not gonna know that was you, and even if they did, they are under arrest now. They can’t hurt you. Awright?”
“Yeah, but what about everybody else? What about at school? What about Bennie’s parents, or Hunter’s?”
“They are not going to hurt you. I will not let them.”
He didn’t feel convinced, and his father didn’t look convincing. His father wore out any argument with a look, a glare that said, trust me.
He wanted to believe him. He always wanted to believe.
He didn’t hear Mike hovering outside his bedroom door. He felt him. Joseph darted to it, opened it, waited. But Mike didn’t flinch, merely gazing at his brother with a curious upward glance as he walked in.
“Did you see him?”
“Who?”
“You know.” Mike waited, then, like saying boo: “Anthony.”
“No, I didn’t. Leave me alone.” He started to shut the door, but Mike had scooted in. The interrogation wasn’t over.
“Was he all bloody?”
“No.” Joseph knew he was supposed to shut up about everything. But with Mike, it felt easy, as if they were discussing something gr
uesome but outside themselves.
He closed the door, put on some music, low so nobody else could hear, swore Mike to complete, utter silence. “And if you don’t–”
“Okay,” Mike said, as if he were preparing for a science project. They sat on opposite ends of the bed, cross-legged. They squared off, eye to eye.
“Bennie did it. Hunter threw a bottle that almost made him wreck. Dink was fighting with Hunter, and I was…Bennie like, was like strangling him, I think, in the car.”
“Did you see him dead?”
“No. You know he had asthma.”
“No.”
“You know what that is?”
“Yeah. When you don’t breathe good.”
“Close enough. So Anthony got scared and went off the road. He might have even had an attack. Maybe even Bennie was. . .no, I mean, no, it…But I seen that, he did that at the match in Paterson. He like passed out. Remember? I told you when that happened.”
“No. You don’t talk to me at all.”
“I’m sorry.”
“Okay. So why’d you do it?”
“Me?”
“No, yeah, alla youse.”
“Don’t say that. They don’t talk like that here.”
“All of you’all. Why, bro?”
“‘Cause we … the other guys were yelling things at him.”
“Why?”
“Well, Bennie I think is like a psycho, basically.”
“So why are you friends with him?”
“Because I am a total jerk.” Because Dink is, he started to say.
He didn’t want to choke up in front of Mike, so he forced a cough until it pushed the tears back. “Bennie’s got a car. He would drive us around, buy us beers. He has a fake ID, looks twenny-one.”
Mike understood. “How much can you drink?” he asked, as if conducting a survey.
A pang in his stomach echoed the memory of their binge. “Not as much as I think I can.”
“But…” Mike was bursting with questions. “But what happened?”
“I know, it was …Look, I was really sick. I passed out. I wasn’t even…I really don’t think he knew what he was doing but he was like beating up Anthony in his car and he like lost his breath and died.”
“Huh.” Mike looked at him, curious. “Are you gonna go to jail?”
“I dunno.”
“Dad says you won’t.”
“When did he say that?”
“I got ears. My room’s next to theirs.”
“Can you hear everything?”
“Except when they whisper, or when they’re bumping around.”
“Do they do that a lot?”
“Sometimes.”
“You know what they’re doing, doncha?”
“Oh, gross. Stop it.”
Mike paced aimlessly around his brother’s room, eyeing things, almost window-shopping for what he would claim if his big brother wound up in the slammer.
Joseph really didn’t care. It could go, all of it. Where he was going they don’t take luggage.
5
Miss Rita Pooley, Joseph’s assigned Case Worker for Family Court Case number 4567blablabla, had hair pulled back in that intricate braided style that made Joseph think she ought to be on a throne in Africa, being served wine in gold cups. Instead, she typed and talked from behind her desk, getting information and reports from Marie and Dino with what his mother would later describe in the car as “a great deal of authority.” In her presence, even his dad shut up.
Dino Nicci seemed relieved that Miss Pooley laid it down clear for them. “You just moved here. He’s squeaky clean, and from what St. Augustine tells me, a top athlete.”
He choked on a laugh.
“What you seem to be suffering from, Joe, is a lot of peer pressure from jumping into the wrong group of buddies, am I right?”
He would not be sent up the river, not even across the skyway to the Paterson Youth Authority, where–while his father and mother sued each other for custody–Dink was probably wearing his jeans.
“He’ll get a suspended sentence, most probably.”
It was the ‘probably’ that kept him up nights.
“Unless you do something again,” Miss Pooley stated very clearly. This woman would take no hooey.
“Straight up front; a swift negotiation to turn state’s evidence would almost assuredly relieve him of any duty such as community service, which I strongly recommend you start him on now as a show of faith.”
She tried to joke, smiled, but seemed distracted by the dozen other kids she had to see that day. Her office was neat but there were papers everywhere, files in stacks. She wore a jacket that looked like a man’s, only made different. Joseph didn’t know what it was about her, but something under her methodical behavior and calm eyes made him like her. She took to him immediately, especially when she told him he was a Person In Need of Supervision, or PINS.
Another choked blast. He was asked if he was okay, but when he explained his reason, she smiled. “You might have to show up for a few days, in one of the other boys’ cases, or trials, if it comes to that. But from what I hear, they are going to seek a plea, in um, one case.”
Joseph looked at his file on her desk, trying to read it upside down. His father’s knee, to his left, kept tapping.
“So, he’s gotta do what?” his dad insisted.
“Hold on.” She looked at the forms. “He might perhaps get a suspended sentence for conspiracy, since he waited a day to tell about the incident, but that could be excused because of his intoxication. I’d like to recommend an Ala–Teen group. It’s right in your area.”
Although his parents didn’t speak much, it seemed they understood. Joseph understood, too. They were not being punished for the perceived lack of control over their son, just made to feel that way. She suggested his parents go get a soda while Miss Pooley talked with Joseph alone.
“I’ll be getting the transcript of your sworn statement, but right now you need to tell me a few things, Joseph, things you may not be comfortable telling your parents, but I may tell them anyway.”
“So, their leaving is…?”
“Tell me about this posse, Benjamin and…”
“Bennie and Hunter and Dink.”
“Dink? That would be…” she looked at a piece of paper atop a very thick pile of papers. “…Donald Nicholas Khors?”
“Yeah.”
“Donnie Khors?”
“Uh, sometimes.” Joseph had a very strange feeling. He watched Miss Pooley fuss around with his file. “You know him?”
“We’ve crossed paths.”
So Dink wasn’t bullshitting.
“How did he get that nickname? Dink?”
“You don’t wanna know.”
“Okay.”
“Do you know…how is he?”
“I’m sorry, he’s not mine. But I can try to find out.” It seemed there was a moment where Joseph almost spilled everything about Dink, and Miss Pooley saw it, but tactfully put it aside. “Now, can we talk about the night of Anthony’s death?”
“What, like facts?”
“No; feelings.”
“You got a tape recorder in here or something?”
“No, why?”
“Cause I’m getting tired of telling this, y’know.”
The tears didn’t start up again, though. He didn’t need to repeat his attempts to cough, hold his mud. He felt thirsty, sleepy. Telling the first few times had drained him. The formality of the office, the hum of her computer and harsh lights, the buzz of other people outside her office lulled him, that and the fact that he hadn’t slept in two days.
This time he left out the part about Anthony’s hand. Every time he told it, that night got colder, as if it were a movie he heard while half-sleeping on the living room floor. Maybe someday he would convince himself of that.
She left Joseph in the room alone for a minute. Then he heard Miss Pooley talking with his parents, then they all returned. Something was up.<
br />
“What is it?”
His father sat beside him while Miss Pooley watched. It seemed to humiliate his father. Dino Nicci sat facing his son. “I’m only gonna ask you this once, because I know you are never going to lie to me about this kinda thing again, right?”
“Yes, sir.”
“Okay. Aside from the drinking, did you do any drugs with those guys?”
“No.”
“Any pot?”
“No.”
“Any supplements or pills or shoot anything?”
“No, no, no. I tole you.”
“Okay, okay, stay calm.” He patted his son’s back. “Miss, I’m sorry–”
“Pooley.”
“Pooley. Sorry, but I think, that, that is good enough for me.”
Miss Pooley sighed in a resigned way, filled out another form. “Unfortunately, it may not be good enough for Family Court, so what I’m suggesting, Joseph…” She stopped writing, gave him another one of those looks, “…is that you undergo a voluntary urinalysis to prove this.”
“A what?”
She explained what, then why. “They searched Bennie’s duffel bag and found steroids. And when they apprehended Donald, they found some marijuana at his home.”
“But, they never said anything about that.” His voice came out high and tinny, in a way the boy now trying to act like a man didn’t, or couldn’t understand could be very grating. “They never did any of that! Dink wasn’t the one who tried to run him down! Bennie did it! I tole you! Hunter was the one ‘at threw a bottle! Dink didn’t do anything! Where is he? Am I ever gonna be allowed to–”
“Joseph,” his mother warned.
“He never even said anything about that, I mean sure they acted funny, but Bennie’s the one, Bennie’s the one that–”
“Joe!” his father barked.
“Yes, sir.”
“Stop.”
Looks, glances all around. He felt his parents being silently checked by Miss Pooley. He saw how they felt more embarrassed by him, how they were being observed by Miss Pooley as a possible cause.
He was going to get it so bad when he got home.
“I’d like to meet with you again next week, Joseph, and one of your parents. You two can trade off. I know how crazy it is with three kids.”
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