by Richard Cox
“Hot,” David said.
“Who won at football?”
No one said anything.
“Bobby’s team, right?”
“Fucking bullshit,” Bobby answered.
“Let it go, dude,” David said. “You lost. Get over it.”
“What? What did you say to me?”
“You heard me. Stop whining like a little baby.”
Awe silenced the room. A stunning challenge presented.
Bobby pushed himself up and walked to where David was sitting. He loomed over him, at least until David himself stood and met his friend eye to eye.
“If you don’t watch it,” Bobby said, “you’re gonna be the one whining like a baby.”
“Whatever, Bobby. You’re not our boss, all right? You’re—”
“I’m the president of this club.”
“Yeah, because no one was willing to stand up to you. Well, I’m standing now. Enough is enough.”
“Guys,” Jonathan said, “you—”
“I’ve never had a bone to pick with you,” Bobby said to David. “Why are you getting all high and mighty on me now?”
“You bully Jonathan all the time. You always want to decide what we do, and then today, when the football game wasn’t going your way—”
“That was fucking pussyball. I’m the starting quarterback for the McNiel Mustangs. Old High is already—”
“I threw fifteen touchdown passes, Bobby!”
“In fucking pussyball!”
“You’re just pissed because you’re supposed to be the hotshot jock, and I’m a better quarterback than—”
And Todd could sense it coming, could almost see Bobby’s arm jerk before it moved. He was beginning to understand that all of these things were destined to happen, and anyone who didn’t know this was forever doomed to interpret the world the way a man looking through a keyhole might interpret a room. Whoever was in charge enjoyed watching this predictable fight play out in front of them, because these partisan battles distracted the common man from the real mockery going on in broad daylight.
So when Bobby’s arm jerked and sent a fist toward David’s face, Todd knew David would dodge the punch fluidly. When Bobby bull-rushed his opponent, Todd understood both of them would end up on the ground. And he could already predict how the rest would turn out: Bobby would climb on top of David, David would kick him in the groin, and Bobby would collapse sideways and pretend to be in agony. When David paused to catch his breath, Bobby’s hand would reach out and fell him again. Bobby would stand and rear back to kick David in the head, but at the last moment he would think better of it and send his foot into the wall instead. At this point, predictably, Jonathan would begin to scold Bobby, who would grab Jonathan and pin him hard against the wall.
A head colliding with a wall should have been a loud, echoing boom, but instead the surface seemed to give way, sheetrock breaking like blocks of stale mozzarella, and before either of them could react to this, David was up again, reaching for Bobby. Soon all three boys were on the ground, or some combination of them were, and at one point Jonathan, pushed into the adjacent formal dining room by Bobby, arms flailing for balance, reached instinctively for the hanging chandelier, which pulled loose and crashed to the floor like a shattered window. The sound was sudden and irrevocable, and the only thing that could possibly follow it was silence, except for the tornadic breathing of three exhausted fighters.
Now there was a hole in the den wall roughly the size and shape of a football.
An elliptical galaxy of chandelier on the dining room floor.
“Holy shit,” said Bobby.
“You’re not kidding,” said David.
Jonathan burst out laughing. They all did. All except Adam, Todd noted.
And then silence again, as breathing returned to normal, as emotion cooled on their skin like sweat. Increments of time spooled out like fishing line, seconds maybe, or minutes. In that span of time Todd saw their relationships strengthening, perspectives coalescing, the five of them becoming more than the sum of their parts.
“I put something extra in the ice chest,” Bobby said later, “while the rest of you halflings stocked up on cookies.”
“Alcohol?” David asked.
Bobby nodded. Subtly, like an adult.
“You didn’t steal it from my mom’s cabinet, did you?” Jonathan asked. “She—”
“Relax, John-Boy. I brought it with me. Hid it under your bed when my dad and I came over.”
“Where’d you get it?” Todd heard himself ask.
“I’ve got friends in high school. They had someone buy it for me.”
Bobby reached deep into the ice and pulled out a tall bottle filled with amber-colored liquid.
“This is spiced rum,” he said. “We can mix it with our Mountain Dew.”
“What’s it taste like?” Jonathan asked.
“Sweet and spicy. Supposed to be a lot better than beer.”
“We need glasses,” Todd said.
Bobby smiled, reached into the cooler again, and retrieved a partial sleeve of blue Solo cups.
“So who’s game?”
They gathered into a circle on the floor, even Adam, and Bobby poured until the five of them were served. The drink was greenish brown, like the color of an algae-covered pond in the summer, and smelled medicinal. An idea occurred to Todd, a familiar image, something he’d seen before, perhaps in one of his dreams. He held his drink toward the center of their circle.
“Cheers,” he said.
The others just looked at him.
“We all hold them out,” Todd instructed. “We all touch our cups and say ‘Cheers.’”
The boys did so, awkwardly, and when Todd pulled the drink back to his mouth and sipped, so did everyone else.
“Wow,” David said. “That’s strong.”
“I like it,” Bobby countered.
Jonathan didn’t venture an opinion, but his contorted face could not be mistaken for pleasure.
Adam just smiled. A dream robot. A motion picture extra.
Todd sipped again, more boldly this time. So did Bobby. So did Jonathan.
“Is this what you call a cocktail party?” David asked, drinking a full swallow.
46
Jonathan was finishing his second drink, but Todd, David, and Bobby were on their third. Adam felt like a loser because he’d consumed only half of his first. The rest of them were taking full swallows now, and still he nursed his like an infant, suffering under the glare of their contempt for him.
“Look at that hole in the wall,” David said, smiling. “You tried to kick me in the head. You asshole.”
“I pulled up at the last second,” Bobby told him in an odd, apologetic voice. His slow enunciation was like those remedial kids who were not quite retarded. “I was pissed but I knew that was too much.”
“If that was my head—”
“But dude, check out what happened.”
Bobby stood up and attacked the wall like an NFL place kicker. His foot and ankle disappeared into it.
“Something’s wrong with the sheetrock,” Jonathan said. “It shouldn’t break that easily.”
“Maybe it got wet when the house was being built,” Adam said.
Jonathan approached the wall, turned sideways, and kicked like a Kung Fu fighter. His leg buried so far into the sheetrock that Adam was sure it had emerged on the other side.
“Oh, shit,” Jonathan squealed with delight. “I’m stuck.”
David offered to help by tearing sheetrock away in chunks. And of course pried out more than was necessary to free Jonathan’s leg. Bobby, still laughing, grabbed the chandelier and shoved it into the first hole he’d made.
“There,” he said. “Much better.”
Adam watched the senselessness of it all unfold before him, occasionally looking at Todd, whose eyes smiled endorsement. What they were doing was wrong. It was terrible. There would be consequences for this, he could already see it coming, the wrath of his parents, o
f the police. He was trying so hard to be a good boy, and things kept getting worse.
Somehow it was Todd’s fault. Maybe he hadn’t started the fight, maybe he hadn’t brought the alcohol . . . hell, he hadn’t even taken part in the vandalism of the house, but Adam still blamed Todd for everything. Would they even be here right now if he hadn’t joined their club? No, they wouldn’t. They’d be sitting at Jonathan’s house playing Atari or D&D like normal kids.
But nothing could be done about it now. Todd had manipulated them into this place, and Adam was too exhausted to resist anymore. He was sick of feeling alone. He pulled the cup to his lips and drank several swallows at once, ignoring the burn in his throat, in his stomach. He swallowed until the drink was gone.
“Thissa fucking hilarious,” Bobby slurred. “We could tear this place down.”
Bobby backed up several steps, like a bull, and charged sideways at the wall. His shoulder and torso buried several inches into it. Great chunks of crumbling sheetrock fell to the floor as he jerked himself back into the den. They all watched him, they all laughed, and even Adam felt himself smile. It was kind of funny, the wall, even though doing this was wrong and terrible for the people who owned the house. To help himself forget about them, Adam reached for the bottle of rum and poured himself another drink.
“Thassa way, dude!” Bobby said. He came over and clapped Adam on the shoulder. “That’s my man!”
“It’s like I told the guy on ABC,” Adam replied. “Danger is my business.”
“Jeff Spicoli!” said Jonathan. “That’s hysterical!”
Adam tilted the cup and drank more, swallow after swallow, and someone began chanting “Drink, drink, drink.” This one didn’t taste as strong as the first. He consumed the entire cup and topped it off with a tectonic burp.
“Hey, bud,” he cried. “Let’s party!”
They cheered for him and poured him another drink, so that he might catch up. But Adam could already feel the world drifting away, could sense his hold on reality slipping. The damage they had inflicted upon the house began to seem less dire. The concept of consequence, of personal cost, felt less important than earlier, than it ever had, and Adam wondered why he worried so much, why he couldn’t just let it all go, the guilt over his sister’s death, the screaming of Evelyn’s mother, the screaming of his own mother.
Bobby wasn’t finished with the house. His energy was hyperkinetic, its hold on him almost like possession. At some point he disappeared, and at some other, later point he reappeared with a wooden sword and battle axe from the fort, and gradually the den changed appearance, until you could see through a row of two-by-fours and into a small, adjacent bedroom. In that room was a window that faced the street, but no one really cared. The street was short, a dead end, and this was the last house on it. No one outside would know what was going on in here. Adam kept telling himself this. No one would know.
Okay, so Jesus would know, but He preached forgiveness above all else, and even through the haze Adam could see a point in the future when he would be terribly, terribly sorry for what he had done. But as long as they didn’t get caught, it would be okay. It was imperative they not leave behind any evidence.
No evidence and no one would know.
47
They were sitting in the master bedroom now because the walls in the den were gone. Late afternoon sunshine lit the room in citrus hues, and everyone but Bobby had vomited in the adjacent bathroom.
“We fucked up,” Todd told them.
Murmurs of general agreement took the place of coherent speech.
“We have to keep this to ourselves,” he added.
This was undeniable truth, self-evident, and required no concurrence whatsoever.
“Our fingerprints are all over this house. Our hair, our skin. We’ll never get it all out.”
Now they looked up, all of them.
“We can’t lift,” Adam said, and then stopped. “Leave, I mean. We can’t leave that kind of evidence. We’ve got to clean it up. We can’t get caught.”
“No shit, Sherlock,” Bobby said.
“We can’t clean it up,” Todd informed them. “Police have forensics.”
David nodded. “He’s right. I saw something on ‘60 Minutes’ once, about how the police proved this paperboy murdered some old lady when they found a microscopic fiber from his shirt in her hair.”
“No way,” Adam said.
“Wherever you go,” Todd explained, “you leave a trail of particles behind. There’s really only one way to get rid of it all.”
“How’s that?” asked Jonathan.
The answer was obvious, it had been there all along, hidden like clues within the fevered dreams.
“Burn it to the ground.”
48
Mild rejection sharpened to outright refusal as the bedroom darkened, as afternoon became evening. The alcohol loosened its grip on them, the fog lifted, and the true nature of their dilemma became clear. The evolution of their reasoning, Todd thought, was fascinating to hear.
“I don’t know what came over me,” Bobby wondered aloud.
“We were drunk,” Jonathan said.
“I knocked a hole in the wall before we drank. Same with the chandelier you pulled down.”
“You shoved me into the chandelier. I didn’t mean to pull it down.”
“I didn’t mean to kick a hole in the wall.”
“It doesn’t matter who meant to do what,” Todd said. “We’re here in this house, and when someone sees what we’ve done, they’ll call the cops. And those guys will come in with their fingerprint kits and forensic tools and start asking questions. It won’t take long for them to find us. Unless we get rid of the evidence.”
“We can’t burn the house down,” Jonathan said. “We can’t. That’s ridiculous.”
“The owners have insurance,” Todd told him.
“It’s still wrong. Totally destroying someone else’s . . . ”
But Jonathan trailed off, muted by the reality of what they had done. The enormity of it.
“What do you think will happen if someone finds out we did this?” Todd asked them.
“Probably they’d kick me off the football team,” Bobby said. “I can forget about college.”
“My dad would go crazy,” David added. “My mom would never forgive me.”
“Your mom?” Jonathan said. “What do you think mine would do?”
Everyone mumbled agreement.
“We can’t get caught,” Adam pleaded. “We can’t.”
“Then we have to get rid of the evidence,” Todd told them.
“Okay, but what if they figure out who burned the house down?” David asked. “Aren’t we going to be in a lot more trouble for that?”
“Sure,” Todd answered. “It’s a risk-reward decision. We can leave the house as is, virtually assuring we’ll get caught, or we can cover our tracks with a fire, which will make it very difficult for someone to pin it on us. But if they do—”
“If they do, we’re screwed,” Jonathan said.
“We’re fucked either way,” Bobby pointed out. “I mean, will it really be that much worse if we get caught for burning it down? We’re going to look like teenage criminals for tearing up the sheetrock, ripping down the chandelier. Hell, I even pissed on the wall in that other bedroom. At this point we’re going to look crazy no matter what we do.”
Todd nodded. “So do you think—?”
“I think we should burn it down,” Bobby said.
The others looked at him. They looked away.
“But I’m just one vote,” Bobby added. “I’m not trying to sway anyone else. You guys can say whatever you—”
“I don’t want to get caught,” Adam said. “I vote to burn it down, too.”
Todd knew then what they would do, because Bobby’s nudge toward a democratic decision meant one more vote could make it happen. But in the end it didn’t matter.
“Fuck it,” David said. “They’ve got insurance. I
t’s not going to hurt anyone.”
“Yeah,” Jonathan agreed. “If it’s not going to hurt anyone.”
They all looked at Todd then, and he knew it wasn’t his vote they were seeking, but direction. They wanted someone to tell them what to do next. He had led these boys where he wanted, exactly as planned, and it had been easier than expected.
The next step was to see them through to the actual deed.
From there, who knew?
49
That hammering sound in the room, the one he was afraid they would hear—it wasn’t a drum. It wasn’t the percussion of helicopter blades beating the air.
It was the sound of Joe Henreid’s heart.
There had been a frightening moment an hour or so ago when Bobby exploded out of the house and bounded toward the fort. At that point Joe had still been on the back porch, peering in through the sliding glass door. He was certain, absolutely, that Bobby had seen him as he jerked open the door and took off across the yard. But when he didn’t turn around—in fact he never even slowed down—Joe concluded Bobby had somehow missed him. Later, after the five of them had moved from the den into one of the bedrooms, Joe had snuck into the house and installed himself in the closet of an adjacent room. He listened as their energy gradually bled away, as their bizarre behavior subsided. For a while he wondered, honestly, whether something had happened to the boys, if perhaps they had gone crazy. There seemed to be no explanation for the way they had destroyed the interior of this empty house. But as their words drifted down the hallway, repentant, Joe realized they had been drinking. He didn’t know much about alcohol, except that when his parents drank it they sometimes got into the hot tub with their clothes off, and they always played music too loudly. Alcohol seemed to make people act differently than they otherwise would, but Joe would never have guessed it could make five normal kids turn into monsters.
Several times he had considered walking into the other room and announcing his presence. His plan was to catch them in the midst of their guilt and use it to blackmail them. But there were multiple problems with this scenario: 1) being a tattle-tale wasn’t cool, 2) even if they admitted him, they would always hate him, 3) if he told on them there would be no more club.