After the tornado, the mounting heat and the lack of electricity, Stevie couldn’t take his isolation for another second. His desire to garner favor from the Vanguard Lane Lords of Pain trumped his fear of getting a beat-down should he show his face.
He knew he would do anything to be included—anything at all.
“Get lost,” Diana Quarterman told nine-year-old Stevie when he approached the Lords of Pain with a figurative tail between his legs. Diana Quarterman was planning out a Capture the Flag strategy and everyone was listening to her with such zeal you would have thought she was the second coming.
“Please,” he begged her. “I’ll do anything. I’ll get the Street Kings’ flag. I promise.”
Laughter erupted around the little boy.
“They’ll bloody your lip,” said one.
“They’ll break your legs,” agreed another.
“Wussies can’t play with us,” sneered Isaac Bellamy.
Diane Quarterman hushed them all. “You do that,” she guffawed, “And you’re in.” Then she turned to rest of the Vanguard Lane Lords of Pain and said, “Agreed?”
They all did because they knew Stevie Deluca was screwed.
Like, light bulb screwed.
Meanwhile, on the other side of the strip of woods and the hill that separated Ridge Road from Vanguard Lane, a boy named Vinnie Balmoral was also plotting out a Capture the Flag strategy with the Ridge Road Street Kings.
The Street Kings had taken a double hit since the tornado and the power outage. The twins, Andy and Randy Ransom, went fishing on Cape Cod with their family for two weeks, and they were the Street Kings’ best runners.
Vinnie Balmoral knew he was going to have to make sure that their flag was hidden in a particularly difficult place—one that would be exceptionally troublesome to retrieve. After all, there was a lot riding on their game. Vinnie had struck a deal with the head of the Lords of Pain, Diana Quarterman, for the winning gang to have singular access to the Ding Dong cart for the entire week.
Being that there was no electricity and it was a zillion degrees outside, losing ice cream privileges would just plain suck.
As luck would have it, Vinnie had secret knowledge that no one else knew, and only because his mother’s cousin was a vet-tech at Doctor Marvin’s over in Bellingham where there was still electricity. Fury had his balls snipped off late the night before, and was so sedated, lying in the back of Old Man Fishman’s house, that anyone could get close.
While the rest of the Street Kings held their collective breathe for fear that Vinnie would lose an arm or something much worse, they waited for him to return from planting their team’s flag.
“Mission accomplished,” Vinnie Balmoral told them all when he finally came back with a huge smile on his face. Their red-bandana flag had been tied loosely around the sedated monster’s neck.
Back on Vanguard Lane, the Lords of Pain dangled their blue bandana on one of the leafy branches of old Mrs. Emmerson’s haunted tree. Then the dozen or so gang members solemnly waited for the Street Kings to appear in front of their mutually agreed upon starting point in front of Mrs. Berman’s house.
Stevie Deluca was sick with anticipation. The past few weeks had been unimaginably difficult. His former best friend, Isaac Bellamy, had supremely snubbed him, and his father, Mr. Deluca, was busy brewing a mid-life crisis and toying with the idea of attending a swinger’s party.
Stevie simply had to get into the Lords of Pain or he would go mad.
As Vinnie Balmoral and Diana Quarterman shook sweaty hands and together said, “One, two, three, go.” Stevie Deluca, small and unassuming, slipped into the shrubbery that surrounded Mrs. Berman’s house. He crouched low to the ground and scrambled along the cement foundation until he found himself in her backyard.
In front of him stood the hill, the strip of woods, and Ridge Road beyond. To his left was Diana Quarterman’s house. None of the Lords of Pain were allowed on her lawn because Mrs. Quarterman pitched a fit every time anyone set foot on her perfectly coiffed yard. To his right was his own house, then two more yards further was Old Man Fishman’s place.
Stevie crawled on his stomach while all around him he heard screaming as some of the younger members of his team were captured and others tried to tag them free. Stevie wasn’t concerned with any of that. All he was concerned with was finding the Street Kings’ flag and delivering it to Diana Quarterman.
He peered out from beneath the bushes, trying to locate the Street Kings’ red bandana, but it was nowhere to be seen. He crawled along the back of Mrs. Berman’s house to the end, quickly dashing between her house and his. As he dove into the bushes again, a sick and horrible thought flashed through his mind.
What if Vinnie Balmoral had hidden the Street Kings’ flag in Old Man Fishman’s yard?
What if?
No. Vinnie couldn’t have.
Still, what if?
On his stomach, Stevie crawled behind the shrubbery of his own house. There, he waited until no one was looking, then sprinted across the narrow expanse of lawn that separated the Delucas’ from the Bennets’.
Unfortunately, the Bennets had impeccable landscaping like everyone else on Vanguard Lane, but they also filled their gardens with dark stones. The intense sun up above superheated them, making the skin on his bare knees sizzle, and the palms of his hands burn against the hot rocks. Stevie, more determined than ever, buried the pain in the back of his mind and journeyed onward.
As Stevie Deluca crouched beneath an ornamental shrub at the corner of the Bennets’ house, his worst fears were realized. Fury, the beast that nightmares are made of, had his massive head on his massive paws, and the red bandana that was the property of the Ridge Road Street Kings was wrapped around his neck.
Stevie’s heart sunk to the very soles of his feet. He was doomed. How could he ever get the Street Kings flag now? It was around Fury’s neck, and Fury was pain.
Fury was death.
Fury was the only thing that stood between Stevie’s acceptance into the Lords of Pain, and a miserable summer.
He had to think. How was he going to get the Street Kings’ flag without getting his face chewed off? As the screams of children from both gangs ebbed and flowed around him, something in the depths of his brain crawled out and told him to look in his father’s basement where their second freezer stood. Before the tornado, his father had trekked over to Armorman’s Meat House in the North End to stock up.
Meat. That’s what Stevie could use to his advantage. Freezer meat.
The electricity had been off for almost five days. Stevie had been repeatedly lectured by his father on the rare occasions when he was noticed, not to open the freezer to let any of the cold air free. After five days without electricity, it hardly mattered because there probably wasn’t any cold air left inside.
Ten minutes and a couple close shaves later where he was sure he was going to get spotted and tagged out of the game, Stevie Deluca slipped into his house and scrambled down into the basement where the meat freezer stood, silent and dead because there was no electricity keeping it cool. Thankfully, the freezer was positioned under a window well, so Stevie could see what he was doing. At one point, a sneaker-shod leg, probably belonging to one of the Street Kings, appeared in the window well for a brief moment, causing Stevie to hold his breath, before disappearing again.
Without hesitating, Stevie grabbed the handle of the freezer and pulled. A stench, worthy of the lower levels of a funeral home, where all the cement floors have drains in the middle, wafted out. The meat was rotting. It had probably started rotting from the very first day the electricity had gone out.
Stevie didn’t care. He quickly grabbed two handfuls of steak wrapped in freezer paper, pushed the door closed, and mounted the basement stairs two at a time. Back outside and safely hidden beneath the shrubbery in the back of his house, Stevie Deluca unwrapped three steaks each as thick as an inch.
“Hey,” he heard a whisper from behind him. Stevie’s
heart jumped into his throat and fresh beads of sweat started dripping down his forehead. Creeping silently along the cement foundation of his house was his former best friend, Isaac Bellamy, who had gained entry into the Vanguard Lane Lords of Pain for the painfully easy stunt of stealing and dressing up in Mrs. Overton’s underwear.
Isaac Bellamy, the boy who had called him a ‘wussy-pussy’.
“You’re talking to me now?” whispered Stevie.
“What are you doing?” Isaac whispered back, eyeing the steaks in Stevie’s small hands and making connections in his head about what they might mean.
“Mind your own beeswax,” snapped Stevie. “Someone’s going to hear you.”
“No one’s going to hear me,” whispered Isaac as he continued staring at the steaks. Finally he said, “You know where the flag is, don’t you?”
“Maybe I do. Maybe I don’t,” said Stevie, his hands gripping the rotting meat as juices dribbled beneath his fingers.
Isaac licked his lips. “It’s with Fury, isn’t it? You’re going to use the steaks to lure him away.”
Stevie didn’t say anything. He didn’t have to. His silence was all the conformation that Isaac needed. Before Stevie even had a chance to pull away, Isaac was on top of him, grabbing for the steaks and punching poor Stevie Deluca several times in the stomach until the wind was knocked out of him, leaving him breathless and bruised.
Isaac Bellamy straddled the wussy-pussy, the steaks now in his grubby little hands, and smeared the crimson juices all over Stevie’s face and clothing, painting the little boy in meat. Then he punched Stevie once more in the face and dragged him by the collar along the back of the Deluca’s house, across the strip of grass to the Bennet’s hot-stoned gardens, and all the way to the ornamental bush where Stevie had crouched moments before and spied the Street Kings’ flag tied around Fury’s great, black neck.
“You’re bait,” Isaac sneered at Stevie, whose head was fuzzy from the latest punch, and whose face and clothing were dripping with rotted steak blood.
Isaac pulled Stevie along into Old Man Fishman’s backyard, a mounting terror growing in the boy’s meat-covered head, because he now smelled like food and food was what Fury ate.
“Let me go,” Stevie squealed, louder than he should have. He didn’t want to alert Fury to their presence. He didn’t want the Street Kings to know that the Lords of Pain were this close to their flag, but he didn’t want to be eaten either.
Fury, however, in a drug-induced stupor caused by his testicle-removing sedation, let out a long, low growl. It didn’t matter that the great dog didn’t see two boys in his territory, he saw six. It didn’t matter that he would never truly kill a human, even though it was fun to scare the little ones half to death. It didn’t even matter that one of them stunk so badly that his nostrils flared and his lips curled, exposing row after row of knife-like incisors.
The drugs in his sun-fried brain made the dog crazy mad.
Isaac Bellamy, his hand gripping Stevie Deluca’s collar, shoved the wussy-pussy forward, hoping that while the huge beast was ravaging the steak-covered boy, he’d be able to pull the red bandana from around its neck and be the savior of the day.
It’s funny how things never work out quite the way they’re planned. First, Old Man Fishman didn’t attach a chain to his dog’s collar that morning. Fury was recovering from being snipped. He wasn’t going anywhere. Second, little Stevie Deluca’s rotted meat perfume was enough to make even a monster like Fury turn away in disgust in favor of a better target.
So, while the giant dog lunged at Isaac Bellamy, biting over and over again in his narcotic haze, Stevie Deluca pulled the red bandana from around Fury’s neck, stuffed it in his pocket and ran, ignoring the awful screams at his back.
He ran and he ran, and he didn’t stop until he delivered the Street Kings’ flag to Diana Quarterman, amidst cheering children, all very much relieved that they didn’t have to give up the Ding Dong cart in the middle of a power outage and a heat wave.
No one noticed that Isaac Bellamy was nowhere to be seen.
No one noticed until it was much too late.
T is for Tommy
with Nothing to Lose
CAMP CROSSROADS.
Palmer, Massachusetts.
A place of happiness and joy. A place of beauty. A place of profound sorrow.
Tommy Burton, fourteen, is spending his first and probably last year at Camp Crossroads. He is currently skulking behind Bunk 8 in the fading light. Dinner is over and most of the other campers have gone down to the lake to roast marshmallows under the waxing moon. Tommy doesn’t want to go down to the lake and he certainly doesn’t want any marshmallows.
Tommy wants to stay behind and smoke a bone.
Tobias “Noddy” Epstein is behind Bunk 8 with Tommy, eagerly watching him lick the rolling paper and seal the joint like the expert he has become.
Noddy has earned his nickname because of a dystonia-like tremor he’s recently developed. Tommy keeps expecting Noddy to tip all the way forward like one of those plastic birds that rocks back and forth until it eventually dips its beak into a glass of water, but who is he to judge? They both have their own issues.
Noddy has just finished telling Tommy scathing gossip. Scathing and gross.
“You got to be shitting me,” Tommy says as his eyes grow wide. Even his surprise isn’t enough to keep him from lighting the joint and taking a deep drag. He holds the smoke in his lungs and waits for blessed relief to wash over his body.
“I swear it’s true,” Noddy tells him, his head bobbing back and forth. “Why would I make something like that up?” Noddy is Asian but his parents are white. They are both teachers over at the community college in Holyoke. Teachers are low-income earners; therefore, they’ve struggled to scrape up the money to send their son to Camp Crossroads this year.
Tommy’s lip curls. “That’s not even funny. Who would do something like that?”
Noddy shrugs as he reaches for the joint with one shaky hand. Even the cannabinoid-filled medication is not enough to lessen the tremoring side effects of whatever poison has been pumped into him for the past year and a half.
In another world, Tommy would feel sorry for Noddy, but he doesn’t. He reaches up, takes off his Red Sox Baseball cap and runs his fingers through invisible hair that’s no longer there. After all the chemo and radiation, it has fallen out.
Maybe Noddy should feel sorry for him.
“Have you told anybody yet?” Tommy asks his jittery friend.
“Nope,” Noddy says then hands back the joint. “Good shit. Is this that Charlotte’s Web stuff?”
Tommy ignores his question in favor of a more important issue. “How did you find out?” There are secrets and then there are SECRETS.
This is one big ass secret.
“I was getting my meds from Nurse Miller in the infirmary,” Noddy says. “I’ve been doubling up since last week. She makes me lie down on one of the cots in the back room for an hour after I’ve taken them in case I have to ralph.”
“And?” says Tommy, obviously not interested in the intricacies of Noddy’s inability to hold his lunch.
“And,” he says, “Danny Miller comes in to talk to his mom, whining about how much he hates it here.”
“So?” Tommy rolls his eyes. Everybody hates Camp Crossroads. It’s a terrible place. It’s a terrible name. “What did she say?”
Noddy takes a deep breath and looks right then left. “She tells him that he should be grateful that he’s at any camp at all because she doesn’t have the money for crap like camp. Staffer’s kids go for free. Then she jokes about how she could have left him home, locked in the basement, so he should be damn happy.”
Tommy shakes his head. Could it really be true? Remission cases are barely tolerated by the other campers at Camp Crossroads, but a normy? Danny Miller’s a freaking normy? The whole idea is so bizarre, so tilted sideways, that it simply has to be true. Mrs. Miller, the camp oncology nurse has b
rought her normy son to Crossroads because he can come for free.
For free.
Even at fourteen, Tommy already knows that everything comes down to money. He’s going to be dead before Christmas because his blue-collar family doesn’t have the dough for experimental drugs. He’s going to be dead before Christmas because of cash, plain and simple. Frankly, the only reason he’s at Crossroads at all is because the local Shriners took up a fund.
Tommy’s eyes begin to burn with fire. Mostly it’s the pot, but there’s anger there, too.
A lot.
“I’ll kill him,” he seethes as waves of rage pour out of him with such vigor that Noddy almost takes a step back, but he doesn’t.
Instead, Noddy takes the joint from Tommy’s hand, sucks on it again and says, “Okay.”
That single word momentarily shocks Tommy. “What do you mean, ‘okay’?” he snaps as the supreme indignation of it all still coils around his insides.
“Let’s kill him,” Noddy says, and pulls a small object out of his jeans pocket. He holds it out to Tommy. It’s a pocket knife, which is totally illegal at camp—even more illegal than what they are smoking.
“Shut the hell up,” says Tommy. “We’re not killing anybody.”
“Why not?” Noddy says. “What do we got to lose? We’re both dead before winter, anyways. Don’t you want to know what it feels like to gut a normy? I mean, don’t you just want to end one of them just because they get to live and we don’t?”
Whether it’s the pot or profound anger at being sick in the first place, the concept of murder enters Tommy’s cancer-ridden body. Noddy is right. Why not? What do they have to lose? Frankly it might even be a little fun.
“When?” Tommy says. “How?”
“Let me think about it,” Noddy tells him, then slowly slips away into the night, leaving Tommy alone with a brand new purpose.
The next day is sunny and warm. Tommy can’t even look at his breakfast. The thought of eating anything at all turns his stomach. Many of the other campers in the cafeteria are thinking roughly the same thing. Some have IV poles next to them. Others have sterile medication ports sticking out from under their t-shirts. Very few are laughing. Tommy rubs his hand along his stomach and feels the outline of bones beneath his skin. There was a time not too long ago when people called him pudgy. He’s not pudgy anymore. He’s more like Jack Skellington, the pumpkin king.
Little Killer A to Z Page 15