“Mind if we talk a bit?” I asked.
“In a minute,” Ruthanne said. “I’m at a good part.”
“You mean a sex part?”
She slapped the book down beside her and glared at me. “Feeling lonely, huh? Maybe you should call Ronnie Mlezcko.”
“Shut up,” I said.
“Don’t tell me to shut up in my own bedroom.”
“Then don’t say stupid stuff.”
“Stupid? I’ll tell you what’s stupid, Ben. Hanging out with a degenerate like Ronnie Mlezcko, that’s stupid.”
“It isn’t your business who I hang out with.”
“It is when it’s a buncha future school shooters.”
“They aren’t like that.”
“Oh, I’m sorry, I meant future meth-heads. Future sexual sadist serial murderers. Ronnie Melzcko is a twenty-five-year-old retard who can’t get out of tenth grade.”
“He isn’t retarded.” I had no idea why I was defending Ronnie Mlezcko, a boy who pretty much tormented me each afternoon. “Sorry everybody isn’t as smart as you, Ruthanne. Sorry everybody can’t go to college!”
She eyed me. “I ain’t going to college. You think we have money for college?”
“College is free if you’re smart enough.”
“Who told you that?”
“Everybody knows that.”
“Who told you?”
I told Ruthanne about what Principal Winthrope had said, how I got dragged in there for doing a bad drawing and all she wanted to talk about was my sister. “Ruthanne this, Ruthanne that,” I said. “Tell your sister she can do anything she wants to do.”
“Barf!”
“What’s the matter?”
“I wish that bitch would get out of my face.”
“She said she was helping you.”
“Helping me? Don’t I have enough to worry about without worrying about college?”
“I don’t know. What do you worry about?”
“Don’t be a smartass.”
“I’m serious. It’s just school, right? You like school. Maybe you can be a banker.”
“I don’t want to be a banker.”
“What do you wanna be?”
“A pearl diver.”
“What?”
“A cosmonaut. A wind-turbine repairman.”
“Seriously?”
“You know the guy who wraps burned houses in blue tarps so the furniture doesn’t get wet? That’s what I wanna be.”
I could tell she was shitting me so I got up and went to my own bed. I didn’t know why she was being such a jerk about college. I would have been happy if Principal Winthrope took an interest in me. It was flattering. And plenty of people went to college. Bob Bilger went to college on the GI bill after Vietnam, and the actor Rick Zorn went someplace called Colby College, which must have been a pretty good college.
I couldn’t sleep that night, I was so steamed at Ruthanne, and in my anger and exhaustion I got a vision in the dark. It was of a tall, hollow-eyed man with skin so pale it was almost green. The moldy looking skin came off in flakes whenever he touched anything with his bony white hand. His hair barely stuck to his head, the skin there was so soft, so he was bald except for a sickly thin frizz. His eyes alone had a sharpness the rest of him didn’t. It was as though the eyes were artificial, or inorganic, like dark polished stones from the depths of the earth. His teeth, too, although yellow and rotten, were strong as elephant bones and sharp as little shovels.
Inspired, I pulled the bed sheet over my head and drew in a frenzy. Before I fell asleep I had drawn two guys getting their skulls cracked open by the lusty rotten teeth of this creature, the Sleeper, and another where a big strong Sleeper had ripped a man’s arms off and the man was staggering around with blood shooting out of the sockets. Last I drew a drawing where a man got his brain sucked out by a long stiff Sleeper tongue like the nozzle of a gas pump. The tongue was my own addition—no mention of a nozzle tongue in the Manifesto.
The boys were impressed. After Ronnie studied all three drawings, he stroked his chin as though in deep consideration of the vision of the Sleepers that my drawings put forth. It was true to his own vision but also a slight departure, an elaboration. Finally he said, “These are good.”
“Thank you,” I said.
“They show vision.”
“Thanks. That means a lot.”
“That other stuff, it was more jokey, but this—these—we should think about what they show us. The Sleepers, when they come, they’ll come fierce. I wonder if even guys like us will be able to fend ‘em off. We know our way around guns, sure, but what does it matter? The best we can hope for is to scrounge out a living at the expense of lesser humans until the Sleepers take total control. By then we may have proved our worth to them.”
“Hmm,” I said. It hadn’t occurred to me that Ronnie thought Sleepers were coming for real. I glanced quickly around the group, to gauge how seriously they took the Sleeper threat. Their expressions were cryptic. Red Dog spat on the ground.
“Maybe we should take this kid shooting,” Pete said, “to practice.”
Ronnie nodded.
We piled into Red Dog’s car. I was in the middle of the backseat, feeling nervous. It was the first time I had driven anywhere with them. Actually, it was the first time I had driven anywhere with someone I would call a kid, except for Carl, the guy who used to drive Ruthanne and me to school. But back then Carl had seemed like an adult to me.
Kyle was in front fiddling with the radio while Red Dog drove. He found a station playing a goofy old country song and left it.
Beside me Pete said, “Turn off that cracker shit,” so Kyle turned up the volume.
I was surprised Ronnie didn’t say anything. He hated country music, preferring metal and horrorcore, but he seemed to have his mind on something else. He was staring out the window at the billboards and gas stations. We were going pretty far, it seemed to me, but if we were gonna shoot off guns I guess it was good to be far away. I hadn’t ever shot a gun before. Demarcus had shot a rifle at a Christian camp and told me it was easy if you did it real fast and didn’t think too hard about it, but he’d kept closing his eyes when he pulled the trigger, he said, which the counselor said was bad for aiming. I made a note not to close my eyes. I knew these boys would be watching me, so I had to seem like I shot guns all the time and so practicing was a minor, though agreeable, imposition. I thought about how Rick Zorn shot guns in movies, from the hip, sliding over the hoods of cars.
We passed a big yellow billboard that said JESUS in block letters. The back of the billboard said COMING SOON!
We turned off the highway onto a road I hadn’t ever been on before. We passed a store called XXX Videos, then some trailers, but mostly it was trees. The trees were unkempt and covered in vines. Red Dog turned off the road onto a gravel path and we drove on that until we came to a bright green clearing. The clearing was so nice that it should have had straw-bales, but instead it had a row of rusty cars. It was like the start of a new junkyard. Red Dog parked at the end of the row of cars and we got out. Red Dog’s car didn’t look much different than the junk cars, honestly, and I got a weird flash in my mind that the other cars had belonged to kids like us who accidentally shot themselves then trudged off into the woods to die.
The boys began ceremoniously to open the trunk, inspect the rifle, fill it with ammunition, and crack open beers. Pete, smiling, handed me a sweaty golden can of Miller High Life. The can was body temperature.
I never had a beer before so I sipped it carefully, expecting the worst. It wasn’t too bad, though. The warmth made it go down easy.
“What do you think about that?” Pete asked.
“Not bad,” I said. “Kind of sweet, huh?”
“High Life has a sweet finish,” Red Dog offered. He was cleaning the barrel of the rifle with something that smelled like gasoline. Pete and I watched him. I expected him to elaborate on the sweetness of High Life, and whether or not this
was a desirable quality, but he didn’t.
“Fuck yeah,” Pete said, which gave some closure to the subject.
I wondered what we were going to shoot at until I noticed the billboard. I guess we were closer to the highway than I thought. The billboard showed the face of a man and some stars and stripes and the words, WHITEY CONNORS FOR COMPTROLLER. The name sounded familiar. The man, Whitey Connors, had a big smile on his face and floppy dark blond hair that was sort of twisted across his forehead in a stylish way. Stylish for kids, I mean. The hair was unbecoming on a man, and his whole face had a sort of fake quality. The eyes were too bright.
While Red Dog took aim I asked Pete who Whitey Connors was. I wondered why the name sounded familiar to me.
Pete, who was sitting on the hood of Red Dog’s car, twisted to holler, “Yo! Who’s Whitey Connors?”
Pete had hollered in the direction of Kyle, but it was Ronnie who answered. “He owns Bi-Cities.”
“What’s Bi-Cities?” Pete asked.
“The dump, dumbass.”
“I ain’t no dumbass.”
“He’s in the Manifesto!”
“I thought the city owned Bi-Cities,” I said, “or the county or something.”
“They used to, but now it’s private,” Ronnie said.
That sounded weird to me, but I would look it up a few days later and learn it was true. Bi-Cities Sanitation & Recycling was privately owned. Whitey Connors was CEO and Chairman of the Board. I also learned that the “Bi-Cities” were Komer and Haislip, which hadn’t occurred to me. Nobody called them that. Haislip wasn’t even a city anymore, technically, since the population had dipped under ten thousand. I wondered if Whitey Connors had coined the name himself, to sound bigtime.
Red Dog shot Whitey Connors right in the earlobe and everybody congratulated him on piercing the man’s ear. On his next shot he missed the face but hit the white part of the sign right next to it. The others razzed him, and he reluctantly handed the rifle to Pete, who made a show of taking aim real careful then missed entirely.
“Blam!” Pete said. “Got him good.”
“Got nothin’,” Red Dog said.
“I was aiming for his heart, homes, below that shit.” He slid his finger across his own throat. “Kill shot.”
Pete handed the rifle to me and stood next to me while I took aim. The rifle was heavier than I expected, and wobbled in my hands.
“Use the sight,” Pete said. “I go for the forehead, but you can aim wherever. It’s just for fun.”
I got the sight to where the shiny pupil of Whitey Connors’s left eye was looking back at me between the crosshairs. The eye was creepy. The sight magnified it so I could see that the white was too pure, without any of the veiny stuff real eyes have. It was like a cyborg’s eye. The trigger on the rifle was harder to squeeze than I expected, and I could hear Red Dog sniggering, and Kyle saying “he ain’t gonna shoot,” but I did shoot. The rifle boomed and jerked so hard I closed my eyes. When I opened my eyes again, to look through the sight, I was staring at a telephone pole fifty yards from the billboard. Got knows what I hit—not any part of Whitey Connors or his billboard.
“Not bad,” Pete said. He gave me a low five. “I think I saw it go in that tree next to his head. Closer than mine, anyway.”
“That was horrible,” Kyle said. He took the rifle from me. Kyle was the best shot, everybody agreed, and Pete and Red Dog cheered him on as he took aim. He shot Whitey Connors in the eyeball, quickly reloaded, then aimed at the dot over the i in “Whitey” and narrowly missed. He laughed, and everybody teased him. Everybody except Ronnie, that is. Ronnie hadn’t even watched. He was sitting on the trunk of a rusty car, staring into the distance. The rest of us looked at him. It was his turn.
Ronnie rose from the trunk and came towards us. He gruffly took the rifle from Kyle, but instead of aiming it at the billboard, he aimed it right at Kyle’s chest.
“Come on, Ronnie,” Kyle said. “Quit kidding around.”
“Who’s kidding,” Ronnie said. “If you’re willing to kill and go to prison for it, it doesn’t matter how good a shot you are, because you do it up close.”
Ronnie didn’t shoot, though. He lowered the rifle and handed it by the butt to Red Dog.
Chapter 5
BY THE TIME tenth grade came around, I didn’t have much use for school anymore. I was sixteen and feeling pretty old. Me and those boys usually knocked off school at lunch to go shooting or hang around a big empty strip mall where the Randy’s used to be. Randy’s was a defunct sporting goods store where there were still big dusty boxes in the back full of flat tennis balls and camp-stove fuel and these plastic toy bow-and-arrows we used for a game called manhunter. Manhunter was like hide-and-seek except everybody was hiding and seeking at the same time, and everybody had a plastic bow-and-arrow to shoot everybody else. If you got shot, you were out. It was scary because the Randy’s was dark and all the shelves were still there, like a maze, and also because the plastic bow-and-arrows hurt pretty bad even though they were toys. The boxes they came in said for ages twelve and up and never to shoot at other people with them. Ronnie made it even scarier by hiding in the shelves, curled into a ball, so when you passed by he could shoot you point-blank in the side of the head. One time he painted his face black to hide better, but the other guys made fun of him so he didn’t do it again. Another time I won by fashioning a makeshift atlatl from a yardstick. An atlatl is what Indians used before the bow-and-arrow. It’s like a stick that makes your arm longer so you can throw the arrow real far. An archeologist guy came to school and showed us how to do stuff the ancient Indian way, like grinding up little corncobs with a rock, which was pretty useless, but also the thing with the atlatl. I listened close and when it was my turn I threw the arrow a couple hundred yards at least. The archeologist guy said I was a natural, and did I have some Ocmoolga blood? I told him I did, but who knows. Maybe I could have been an Indian if it wasn’t for Trash Mountain. Anyway, I stood on top of a shelf with my atlatl and picked off the other boys one by one before they knew what hit them. Afterward Red Dog said atlatls weren’t legal, but Ronnie told him to stop being a pussy.
I loved playing manhunter, but the other guys mostly wanted to sit around drinking beer or Red Dog’s clear whiskey. I’d nurse one beer the whole time, and if they razzed me it was Ronnie who defended me. He said I was smart not to get “all drunk and stupid” like them. “We gotta be ready,” he said. He was always talking about being ready. The beer was okay, but I only pretended to sip the whiskey, and if they brought out a joint I didn’t smoke it, which suited them fine because weed was precious. It was Pete who usually got it, from his sister’s boyfriend, a guy called Milk Dog who sold it “Mexican style,” Pete said, “like that cartel shit.” Pete said Milk Dog once stabbed a guy who didn’t pay him. We asked who was the guy he stabbed, since we probably knew him, or of him, but Pete said the guy fled the country. “Milk Dog comes hard,” Pete said. “The guy probably be hiding out or some shit, like a monk.”
Hanging around those boys was a big change in my life, for better and for worse, but an even bigger change was coming.
Ruthanne had graduated high school in the spring and applied to college, but she didn’t apply in time to be admitted for the fall. I knew she did it late on purpose but she told Mom it was an accident and Mom believed her. Mom was kind of an idiot about college. One night Principal Winthrope called our apartment to speak directly to Ruthanne. Ruthanne paced around rolling her eyes while they talked.
Principal Winthope told Ruthanne that if she got good grades at a community college she could enroll at a four-year college the next semester.
“There ain’t no community college in Komer,” Ruthanne said. Whenever she talked about college, she used bad grammar on purpose. It was pretty stupid.
Principal Winthrope told Ruthanne there was a community college an hour away.
Ruthanne said she couldn’t get there because she couldn’t drive, on account of
her spine, even though her spine hardly bothered her anymore. Her doctor said the muscles had built up around it so it might not bother her again until she was old and gray. I knew what he said because I was there. Ruthanne could have gone to the DMV and gotten a driver’s license, but she didn’t want to. She wanted to sit at home. That was the whole problem. I wanted to go into Principal Winthrope’s office and tell her what a lazy bum Ruthanne was being, but I wasn’t at school enough to do it. Plus I was in hot water with most of my teachers so I might have gotten a lecture for my trouble.
“And it’s not like I have a goddamned car anyway,” Ruthanne told Principal Winthrope. “Who’s gonna drive me? You?”
At that point Principal Winthrope said something to Ruthanne that caused Ruthanne to hang up. I figured Principal Winthrope had snapped at her—Ruthanne had it coming—but it turned out to be something else. It came out over dinner that night. We were splitting a pot of macaroni with frozen peas in it. Mom and I were quiet because Ruthanne was still steaming and there wasn’t any talking to her in that condition.
“That Principal Winthrope has such a nerve,” Ruthanne said.
“Oh Ruthie,” Mom said, “she just wants what’s best for you.”
“What’s worst is more like it. You’ll never believe what she said. Of all the nerve.”
Neither of us asked what Principal Winthrope said. We wanted Ruthanne to calm down.
Ruthanne slapped her macaroni with the back of her spoon—splat, splat, splat—until she said, “Principal Winthrope said there was a better community college in the city. She said she knows that’s where Dad lives, and maybe I could live there with him. Can you believe that shit?”
“She meant well,” Mom said. “She doesn’t know your daddy.”
“Or his stupid girlfriend,” Ruthanne said.
Dad had a new girlfriend. This, more than anything, made the situation repellent to Ruthanne. Before, Ruthanne had got on with Dad better than any of us. They were similarly inclined to complain and make fun of things. I didn’t know why Ruthanne hated the girlfriend so much. Her name was Geraldine, and we hadn’t ever met her because we never visited Dad in the city (he always came to us), but Ruthanne was sure she was a bimbo. That her name was Geraldine made me wonder, though. It sounded like an old librarian’s name.
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