My father doesn’t have an Adam’s apple. Some men don’t. I think it has to do with how much testosterone you’re born with. Maybe that’s why I’m like I am. My father didn’t have enough testosterone in his little swimmers.
Yeah, that’s right. We’ll go with that.
The man across the street gulps down his beer, then leaves the can on his front stoop. He pulls his t-shirt out of his back pocket and runs it across his face then down over his torso. He does it slowly, and throws his head back to the sun.
I gulp and shove myself up against the wall behind the curtain. Does my father have those binoculars in his downstairs closet? I don’t know.
An hour later I am still standing behind the curtains, a fifteen-year-old peeping Tom, which is sort of funny, because that’s not my name. When I think that in my head, it makes me giggle a little. I toy with the idea of calling Melissa to tell her, but then I decide no.
This private show is just for me. He’s all mine.
The man seems to be taking his own sweet time making his lawn look perfect today. I watch as he wheels his lawn mower into the garage then straps on one of those gas-powered trimmers. He puts the leather harness right over his bare torso and clips the industrial belt in place.
I think I moan. I’m not sure.
Twenty more minutes and I hear the motor on his gas-powered trimmer sputter to a halt. He unclips the belt and heaves the harness off his back and drops the whole thing to the ground. Then he disappears into his garage and returns with a red gas can.
Oh, I think. He just needs some juice.
I watch as he hunkers down, his muscled legs flexing and his work boots bending in the middle, and slides the long nozzle into a hole in the trimmer. When he’s done, he takes a step back, pulls a pack of cigarettes from his back pocket and lights one. He just stands there, his head lightly tilted, and breathes in deeply.
I gulp again.
A car passes by and beeps. I see him lift his muscled arm and wave. As the car disappears down the end of the street, the man with the beard smiles and shakes his head, his palm resting on the back of his neck with the cigarette still between his fingers.
I’m not sure, but I think he just got checked out by whoever was driving the car. How weird. Who does that?
The man across the street straps on the harness again and slowly moves up and down the sides of his driveway. He swaggers as he goes, like Timmy Meloni saunters down the hallways at school, winking at anything with a pulse, including teachers. Melissa says he’s going to peak in high school.
With a swagger like that, would that be so bad?
Just when I think that the man across the street can’t possibly trim his lawn anymore, I see him turn around and look directly at me. I shrink against the wall. I know he can’t see me behind the curtain, but I still feel exposed. He stands there for almost thirty seconds before he starts walking down his driveway and across the street.
Crap. As he gets bigger and bigger I get smaller and smaller. What’s he going to do? What does he want? The last thing I see before he puts his work boot on our driveway is him smiling a little beneath his beard. I back away from the window and stand perfectly still.
Ten seconds later the doorbell rings. I don’t know what to do. He knows my parents aren’t home because they always leave the garage door open and both cars are gone. If he’s ringing our bell he’s ringing it for me. Suddenly, I begin to swell again, just a little.
“Um . . . hi,” I say as I open the door a crack.
“Hey there,” he says in a deep baritone voice that I can feel resonate inside my chest. “William, right?”
“Willy,” I say, but my voice cracks. God, I’m so lame. I practically start to drool as I stare at the man with the harness and belt, holding the lawn trimmer in his thick-fingered hands.
“Listen, I have to move a big planter out of my basement. It’s kind of heavy. Do you think you could lend a hand?” Before I even have a chance to let the stun of being this close to him wear off, he adds, “I got a ten in it for you.”
Good enough for me.
“Sure,” I say, barely opening up the door wide enough to slip my slender boy body outside.
“Garth,” he says in his deep voice as we walk back across the street. I follow behind him, my eyes gooping over his broad, sweaty shoulders, watching little drips of perspiration trickle down the crevice in the middle of his back.
“Huh?”
“I’m Garth,” he says and smiles.
Call me Lucky.
In his garage, Garth unclips the trimmer and leaves it next to the lawnmower. “It’s inside,” he says and looks directly at me. I think his eyes do a mental once over, but I’m not sure. I’m too nervous, and excited, and scared all at the same time. “Come on.”
I follow him through a door in the back of the garage. Inside, his house is a bit dark. I can smell a thousand things at once. Mostly it’s sweat, but there’s a musky odor I can’t quite trace. Maybe it’s dirty Garth laundry but I’m not sure. I don’t suppose I can ask if he has any used jock straps lying around. He seems like the kind of older guy who just might.
“The basement’s this way,” he says as he opens another door and flicks on a light. My heart starts beating faster and faster. “Don’t mind the mess,” he says. “I work out down here.”
As I slowly follow Garth down his basement steps, I can feel a shift in the air. Something’s been decided and I think I know what it is. I sigh a little too loudly but he doesn’t seem to notice. I watch as he moves in front of me, his bare torso slipping down beneath his jeans and the curve of his nice ass being more perfect than I could have ever seen through my father’s binoculars.
“It’s just over here,” he says as he moves through his basement toward a made-up cot.
Ohmygod, ohmygod, ohmygod.
Garth pushes the cot with his knee and it rolls out of the way a little. It’s in front of a workbench filled with all different tools.
Man tools. Garth’s tools.
“Right here,” he says and points to a big, ceramic planter sitting underneath the workbench.
My heart starts to race. I look at him and look at the cot, then look at him again. Ohmygod, ohmygod, ohmygod.
As Garth bends over in his tight jeans and reaches for the rim of the planter, I step forward and grab a long screwdriver lying next to his hammer. The handle is hefty. The Phillips head is shiny with grease.
My breath comes out long and ragged.
While he kneels down, his head perfectly positioned, I thrust the tool into his skull like a veteran and bury the shaft deep in his curly black hair until it bounces against a spongy wall.
I moan.
I’ve waited forever for this. Shoving that screwdriver into his head is the most amazing thing I’ve ever felt. I pull the tool back out, my breath husky and raspy as the floor beneath us turns red. Then I screw it in again and again, twisting and turning as indescribable pleasure fills every one of my pores.
Ohmygod, ohmygod, ohmygod, I think to myself, reveling in utter ecstasy.
This is really happening.
I never thought it would be like this.
I never thought it could feel . . . so . . . good.
X is for Xander
Who’s Covered in Spittle
THE BOY SPIT ON me for being a Jew.
It was 1975. I didn’t think things happened like that anymore, at least not in Massachusetts. I was used to everyone getting along. Middle class black families were moving into our neighborhood. People were being nicer to one another.
This boy wasn’t nice.
I had gone to the Meadowfield town library with Randy so we could pick out books for our English projects. We were both on our bikes. Randy’s father was rich, so Randy had a wicked cool ten-speed with lots of shifts and gears. My parents weren’t like Randy’s father. I had to ride my sister Sophie’s yellow hand-me-down. It was sort of girly and a little tall for me, but it was either that or walk, and I didn
’t want to walk.
I decided I was going to write my book report on psychic powers even though my mother thought I shouldn’t be drawing attention to myself. “Everyone’s doing their reports on that sort of stuff since Stephen King started writing those books,” I told her.
“You’re not everyone,” she said. “And no one likes a show-off.” Then she waved her hand in the air and the lamp in the corner turned on.
‘Pot . . . kettle’, I thought to myself, but she heard me anyway. I guess you could say there was an utter lack of privacy in my house.
“Writing a book on psychic powers is like cheating,” Sophie quipped while she practiced the piano. You couldn’t exactly call what she was doing ‘practicing’. She was already up to the Sonatinas after only playing for a week, so I could tell she was cheating, too. “Mom,” she called out even though my mother was sitting right there needlepointing a Jewish house blessing. “Xander’s cheating again.”
“Shut up,” I snapped, then glared at her harder than I should have and made her hit a whole bunch of wrong notes. “Go make out with your boyfriend in the downstairs closet. That’s what you do, isn’t it?” Her face turned beet red and she ran out of the room.
I wasn’t supposed to use my gifts to do stuff like that and I was immediately sorry.
“That wasn’t nice,” my mother scolded me. “And I already knew about Sophie and her boyfriend. No one likes a tattletale.”
My cheeks burned. Of course she already knew.
In the end I decided to write my book report on psychic powers anyway.
At the library, Randy and I watched the new Xerox machine for a while. We were fascinated. Someone would come up and put a nickel into the machine, lay their book on the glass top, close the cover, and press a button. A glowing, green light would appear and seconds later the machine would spit out a duplicate page.
It was like magic. Not the kind I was used to, but magic just the same.
We soon got bored with the Xerox machine, mostly because it was the same thing over and over again, so we hung out with Mike Steinberg and Larry Katz. Mike and Larry were in our English class, too, and rode the bus with us on Tuesdays and Thursdays to Hebrew School. They were as adept as we were at goofing off instead of picking out books for their projects.
Finally, I disappeared down one of the aisles and pulled out three volumes about telepathy and telekinesis and brought them up to the librarian, Mrs. Hugley.
She was raisin-old, with deep wrinkles that were so pronounced that she looked like she could hide food in them, and she never, ever smiled.
“You have a late fee, Mr. Cohen,” she said to me.
“What?”
“You have a late fee of three dollars and twenty-five cents for J.R.R. Tolkien’s ‘The Return of the King’.”
I stood uncomfortably on the other side of her desk. Mrs. Hugley just sat there with her fingers folded together, staring at me over her granny glasses with her mouth curved downward and her beady little eyes judging me in all sorts of ways.
I looked around. No one was too close to me—no one that mattered—so I leaned in and bored my eyes into hers. “No I don’t,” I said. “My mother paid that last week when she took out her Sydney Sheldon books.” Mrs. Hugley knew my mother was an avid reader. “Can you please check again? I’m sure the payment is written in your records.”
I waited, glancing around again to see if anyone had seen what I had done. Randy was stacks away, looking up books on Fiats. His father had one, and some day it was supposed to be his. Most of the other kids in the library were from the high school. They all just seemed big to me.
“Oh,” Mrs. Hugley said as she looked up from her Rolodex. Her eyes were a little dazed and buggy. “My mistake.” Then, like a robot, Mrs. Hugley told me that my mother paid the late fee last week when she took her Sidney Sheldon books out. She also commented on the fact that my mother was an avid reader.
I smiled and nodded. “So, can I have these three?” I asked as I handed her the psychic books and my library card.
“Yes, you may, Mr. Cohen,” Mrs. Hugley said. “You certainly may.”
Twenty minutes later, after Randy had taken out some books on sports cars and we turned down a cigarette from Michael Peters, an eighth grader who was hanging out by the bike racks and selling his father’s Marlboros for a dime a piece, we started peddling toward home.
The library was halfway across town. It stood right off the town green at the very end of Fitzwilliams Street. Fitzwilliams passed the cemetery, our middle school and the shopping center where Randy and I used to buy Super Elastic Bubble Plastic before someone decided it was bad for kids and took it off the shelves in the ‘80s.
Most of Fitzwilliams had sidewalks, but we weren’t supposed to ride on them with our bicycles. As we passed the huge, white church and the community house, we turned down the long stretch of road toward home.
“Are you going to see your father this weekend?” I asked him. Randy was the only kid I knew who had divorced parents. He got away with a lot because of that. He even used the ‘S’ word and the ‘F’ word in front of his mom. My mother would have floated me to the ceiling and left me there if I talked like that.
“Next weekend,” he said.
“Do you want to do something on Sunday?” I asked. We both went to temple on Saturday mornings then had a late lunch with our families. Sunday mornings was boring Hebrew School again, so Sunday afternoons was usually reserved for hanging out. It was late spring and our windbreakers ballooned up behind us as we rode our bicycles. “Maybe we can go catch pollywogs in the dingle or something?”
“Seriously?” he said, sounding a little annoyed. I liked Randy a lot, but sometimes he was just like that. “What are you, in fifth grade?”
I think I missed his sarcasm, because I said, “No. Sixth.”
“I don’t know,” he muttered. “Maybe.”
Across the street and down a little, a couple of high school guys were hanging out. They were dangerously close to the white fence in front of the cemetery crypt with the name ‘Bruno’ on it, named for the Bruno family that had been in town since the Mayflower. They were laughing and joking around. One turned and looked at the two of us and I immediately got nervous. Something was about to go south. I could feel it.
That’s when Randy opened up his big mouth and said the most juvenile thing. “Some people can be so loud.” No wonder he stayed back a year.
Immediately, the two high school boys stopped what they were doing and fanned out like they had planned it whether Randy had said something or not.
“Crap,” Randy yelped and sped up on his sleek ten-speed, easily widening the distance between himself and the big kids. Unfortunately, I wasn’t so lucky or fast. In seconds, they had crossed the road and pulled me by my windbreaker until I was forced to stop.
“What did you say, ass wipe?” one of them sneered. He had blond hair and a little scar underneath his eye. I didn’t know him. He was more like Sophie’s age.
“I . . . um . . .”
Way down at the end of the white cemetery fence Randy had stopped and was watching us. I could feel he was scared, but he was more relieved that I was the one who got caught instead of him.
How typical.
“What did you say?” the other boy snapped. He was shorter and broader than the blond one and had mean, piggy eyes. I swallowed hard.
“Loser,” the blond boy sneered. Then he said something that scared me so much I almost peed in my pants. “Empty your pockets.”
At first I thought he was kidding. This was Meadowfield. High school kids mugging middle school kids didn’t happen here.
The other boy laughed. “You heard him. Empty your pockets.” He balled up his fist and I knew he meant to use it. I wanted to make him stop, but Randy was watching and cars were driving by. Besides, there were two of them.
Reluctantly, I reached into one of my pockets and pulled out the first thing my fingers found.
“What
the hell is that?” he growled as he grabbed the black yarmulke out of my hand. The smooth, black satin slipped easily through my fingers. I always kept a yarmulke in my pocket for Hebrew School. If the boys didn’t have one to cover our heads, Mrs. Levine, the Hebrew School teacher, would yell at us.
“It’s . . . it’s a yarmulke,” I squeaked, painfully aware that I sounded like a four-year-old.
“What?” snapped the boy as he roughly crumpled the yarmulke into a ball in his meaty fist.
“What did he say?” sneered the blond boy.
“It’s a yarmulke,” I said again. “I have to wear it for Hebrew School.”
The boy who had balled up the yarmulke in his hand curled his lip in what I could only describe as disgust. “You a Jew?” he hissed and threw the little black piece of cloth at me. It hit me in the chest and slid to the ground.
“You’re a Jew?” repeated the blond boy. The next thing I knew, something wet was sliding down my cheek and the front of my windbreaker.
He had spit on me.
“Xander, are you all right?” I heard a familiar voice ask. It was Mrs. Gross, one of my mother’s best friends. They played Bridge together on Thursday afternoons. She had pulled up to the curb next to us in her new station wagon with the panel sides and the roof rack.
The two boys immediately backed away. “Forget him,” said the blond one. “We’ll mess him up some other time. Freaking Jew boy.” They crossed back over the street and began walking toward Randy, who was waiting on his bike at the end of the cemetery. He immediately turned and peddled away, leaving me with Mrs. Gross, a spit-covered windbreaker, and the crumpled yarmulke at my feet.
I reached down and grabbed the bit of cloth, kissed it as I was taught, and put it back into my pocket. I didn’t know if I was scared, angry, or both, but the last thing I wanted to do was to explain what happened to Mrs. Gross.
“You didn’t see me,” I said to her with purpose, just like I made Sophie mess up on the piano. “You’re mistaken.”
“Oh,” she said and looked me over a couple of times with that same glazed expression that Mrs. Hugley had when I made her forget that I had a late fee at the library. “I thought you were someone else.” She pressed a button inside her car and her window slid up. Then she pulled back onto the street and headed off toward the town green.
Little Killer A to Z Page 18