Rotten (9780545495899)

by Northrop, Michael

  “I don’t know,” I say, and loop the leash around my hand to tighten my grip.

  And then the dogs bow to each other. I’m not entirely sure which one bows first, but they’re both down there now. Their front legs are flat on the ground in front of them, and their heads are resting on them. JR’s butt is still a few feet in the air. The fur ball’s is, I don’t know, eight inches off the ground. Bowing is kind of redundant at that size.

  The lady lets out a delighted laugh. I let out a sigh of relief.

  “They like each other!” she squeals.

  “Yeah,” I say. “Come on, Johnny.”

  That went pretty well, but I don’t want to push it. I pull him away, and he doesn’t protest too much. His head turns and follows the little dog as we walk away. He looks back at it, up at me, and back at it again, as if to say: “What was that?!”

  “That’s a Pomeranian,” I say. “They’re kind of like fuzzy Chihuahuas. Or fancy rats.”

  We walk on for a while and I add: “Thanks for not eating it.”

  We go all the way to the pond and back. JR’s been inside all day and needs to burn off some energy. I’ve been in school all day and need to burn off some anger.

  When we get home, I see Mom’s car already in the driveway. She doesn’t usually get home until after five, so this is way early. I know immediately this isn’t going to be good.

  “Hey, Mom!” I call as I close the door.

  The door swings closed and the muzzle slaps against it from its perch on the inside handle, where Mom must’ve already seen it. I take the leash off JR, but he doesn’t scamper out into the living room like usual. He stands there with his mouth hanging open and a low noise coming from the back of his throat. Then he takes a few slow steps forward, and I realize there’s someone else here.

  “Oh crap!” says Greg, skidding to a halt at the edge of the kitchen.

  I grab for JR’s collar, but he doesn’t go for Greg, just drops his butt down, raises his head, and starts snapping off those sharp, angry barks again.

  “SHHHHH!” I say, giving his collar a good tug. “Shut it!

  “He’s just saying hello!” I shout to Greg over the noise, but what I’m thinking is: Didn’t we already go through this? “You surprised him.”

  “I surprised him?” shouts Greg. “Did you see me jump?”

  I think it’s true, though, because JR is already calming down. I give his collar another tug and he lets out a few last barks.

  “Can I?” says Greg, gesturing toward the refrigerator.

  “Sure,” I say, digging my hand in deeper under JR’s collar. But as soon as Greg opens the fridge, JR loses interest in him and focuses on the open door. He understands it has some connection to food, but I think he’s still trying to work out the mechanics of it all. Greg grabs a can of Mom’s Diet Coke and swings the door closed again. JR looks from the soda to the door and back again, the wheels turning in his head.

  “I didn’t see your car,” I say. I turn around and look out the window, as if I could possibly have missed such a glaring example of late-stage American capitalism.

  “I’m parked downtown,” he says. “Thought I’d walk it. Been sitting in court all day. Really technical case. Lots of expert witnesses, very boring. The defense rests, if you know what I mean.”

  Uncle Greg always talks really fast when he’s been in court.

  “OK,” I say, “so why are you here?”

  He’s looking at JR, who’s watching him drink the soda.

  “Oh,” he says, lowering the can. “Oh yeah. Dog’s much better this time.”

  “Yeah, he’s getting a lot better. Why are you here?”

  I can practically see him switching gears, going from uncle to lawyer. I’ve seen that before, but there’s something else. Mom appears in the doorway. She doesn’t mention the muzzle, even though she must know I just walked JR without it. “Hey, Jimmer,” she says.

  Her voice is so sad, and Greg is here and in lawyer mode….

  “What’s going on?” I say. “Did someone die or something?”

  I must know, though, because I look down and realize I’m standing in between them and JR. It’s like I’m trying to shield him from something, or from them.

  “Something turned up in discovery,” says Greg.

  “What?”

  “Why don’t you come sit down?” says Mom.

  “Why don’t you tell me right here?”

  She exchanges a look with Greg. He takes a sip of Diet Coke and nods. “I’ll show you,” he says.

  We head into the living room. JR splits off and heads for his spot.

  “Induction papers for the shelter,” says Greg. “Place where you got this guy.”

  He points the soda can at JR.

  “So?” I say.

  “Well, apparently he was kind of a handful, is all.”

  “Let me see,” I say.

  The papers are on the table. It’s just a few pages, and the words are a little fuzzy. It’s a printout of a scan of a fax or something like that. I skim it quickly and it doesn’t take me long to find the problem.

  “What do they know?” I say. “What’s ‘potentially dangerous’ anyway? A stick is potentially dangerous. A bar of soap, a toaster.”

  “Yeah, well, the thing is, coming from them, that’s basically official,” says Greg.

  “What’d he do,” I say, “bite the vet?”

  “Or the guys who removed him, or both, or tried to anyway.”

  “Well, wouldn’t you?” I say. “You’ve been chained to a tree and treated like crap your whole life and here come a bunch of strangers grabbing you and sticking you with needles or whatever? What’s he supposed to do?”

  I’m getting really upset now, and JR must sense it, because he starts barking again.

  “Sit down, OK?” says Mom.

  “OK,” I say, though it’s possible she’s talking to JR.

  “Want some of my Coke?” says Greg.

  “No,” I say. “I don’t drink diet, or backwash.”

  “The thing is,” says Mom. “I kind of already got him off death row.”

  “Great job,” I say, but she ignores it.

  “It’s just that by the time I saw him, he was already, you know, him. He was so sweet looking. And you’d just been, well, you were where you were, and I thought, I don’t know … I thought that he’d be good for you, and maybe you’d be good for him, and you could both get new starts.”

  “Yeah, right,” I say. What a joke. Clean starts are a frickin’ myth. His past has followed him just like mine has. And then something else occurs to me.

  “You knew this was going to happen,” I say. “You knew they’d find out.”

  “I was afraid they would, yes,” she says.

  “What about you?” I say, turning on Greg so fast, I catch him mid-gulp.

  Kkuh-kuh, he coughs. He wipes his mouth with the back of his hand and says, “Nope. She didn’t tell me, either.”

  “If I told him, he’d have to tell them,” she says.

  “And it’s not like I’m her brother or doing this as a favor or anything,” he says.

  I look over at JR, spread-eagled in the corner. His head is on the floor but his eyes are following us.

  “But they know now?” I say.

  “Yep,” says Greg. “As one-eight-hundred types go, their lawyer isn’t bad.”

  “So what does it mean?” I say.

  “It isn’t good,” says Greg. “That’s kind of, I mean, it’s three strikes. It’s gonna cost more, for sure, and the insurance company will try to use this to pay less of the more, if you know what I’m saying. They may try to get out of it entirely.”

  “What about for JR?”

  “Well,” says Greg. “That’s pretty much it.”

  “What do you mean, ‘it’?”

  “I mean that’s it,” he says. “That’s all she wrote.”

  “But he’s …” I start. “There was just … a Pomeranian … and plus, with M
ars, it was …”

  They listen to me sputter out half thoughts, and the looks on their faces are more sympathetic than I can take.

  “He won’t feel anything,” says Mom. “And it’s better now than before. He just would’ve died alone.”

  I have no intention of having this conversation with her.

  “How long?” I say.

  “It’s quick,” says Greg. “Just like going to sleep.”

  He has no idea how long it takes me to get to sleep, and that’s not what I mean anyway. “How long do we have?”

  “Not long,” says Greg, “if we do it. More if we wait for them, drag our feet. It’s not going to change anything, though. You don’t come off death row twice.”

  I stand up and leave. JR is probably watching me, maybe even following me, but I can’t look back right now or I’m going to lose it. I slam the door behind me and stomp around the front yard for a few minutes. My phone’s in my pocket and I take it out and make the call. Rudy answers on the third ring.

  “Something bad happened,” I say, instead of hello. “We’re going to have to do something bad, too.”

  He doesn’t respond right away. I figure he’s thinking it over, but then I recognize the faint sound of chewing. He gulps it down and answers.

  “You called the right guy.”

  It’s easy for Rudy and me to cut school on Wednesday since Rudy’s my ride there anyway. It’s just a question of what turns you do and don’t make after that. We head straight for the nearest Dunkin’ Donuts, but the nearest DD is not all that near. It’s located between Stanton and Brantley in an area that probably has a name but that we call Stantley. It’s the perfect place for a covert operation.

  It’s midmorning and the place is hopping with coffee addicts. “I’m ’a get some Munchkins,” Rudy says as we shuffle toward the front of the line.

  “Munchkins?” I say. “What are you, four? Man up and get some donuts.”

  “No way,” he says. “Look. They’re having a sale.”

  He points to a sign for a back-to-school sale on Munchkins. It has a bunch of Munchkins with little faces riding a cartoon school bus.

  “When they say, ‘back-to-school,’ they mean like kindergarten, first grade,” I tell him, but he cannot be reasoned with and orders a dozen, along with a coffee.

  “Milk and sugar?” says the lady, whose name tag says KIMITHA.

  “Light and sweet,” he says.

  He pauses and I’m wondering, Is he going to say it? And then he does: “Like me.”

  “You’re a loser,” I say behind him, but I’m glad he’s feeling so relaxed. We’re on the verge of doing something risky and maybe dangerous. There’s really nothing in it for him, but he’s treating the whole thing like some big prank that we’re both in on.

  No Munchkins for me. I order my chocolate-frosted donuts like a man, dammit, and it’s not my fault if they give me the ones with pink sprinkles. I didn’t think Kimitha would do that to me. Maybe I shouldn’t have ordered my coffee light and sweet, too.

  We don’t have much trouble finding a little two-person table, since most of these people are getting their stuff to go. And really, what could possibly go wrong trying to drink hot coffee and eat a jelly donut while driving too fast to work?

  We plunk our stuff down and look both ways, in case anyone here is trying to spy on us. The coast is clear, and we are now officially ready to plan.

  “Got any ideas?” I say.

  “Nah,” he says. “You?”

  “Nothing good.”

  We start in on our food. Then we try again while we wait for our coffee to cool down a little more. I start with the general mission statement: “The basic thing is, we need to force Mars to do what he said he was going to do anyway. Really, we’re just cashing a check he’s already written so —” I take another bite of my donut.

  “I’d never take a check from Mars,” says Rudy. “Can you imagine? He’s never going to have viable credit.”

  I laugh with my mouth full and a tiny fleck of donut shoots off to my left. I’m never really sure if Rudy says things like that to make fun of his parents or because he’s been corrupted by all the secondhand realty he’s exposed to. I’m not sure he knows, either.

  “You know what I mean,” I say. “But we really need to motivate him this time, because he’ll need to really work on his parents. Or, we can try to work on them, but that’s trickier.”

  “And when you say, ‘work on’ …”

  “You know, get something on him,” I say.

  “And when you say, ‘get something on him’ …”

  “What are you, wearing a wire?”

  He laughs just as he’s taking another trial sip of his coffee and sprays some out the side of his mouth.

  “Nah,” I say. “No cop is that bad at drinking coffee. Anyway, what I mean is, well, blackmail is kind of a loaded word but …”

  “But blackmail.”

  “Yeah,” I say. “Or extortion? Is that better? Maybe not.”

  “We could plant something on him,” says Rudy.

  “Dude, this is Mars we’re talking about. He’s probably got something on him right now.”

  “Good point. So what do we do, like, a citizen’s arrest?”

  “I’m not sure we’re the right citizens for that.”

  “Pictures, maybe?”

  “Maybe,” I say. “But of what?”

  “This is harder than I thought,” he says.

  “Yeah, really.”

  Our coffee is cooler now, so we spend some time drinking it, looking out the window, and thinking. Or at least the first two of those, because I’m drawing a blank.

  “We could beat the crap out of him,” says Rudy, after a few minutes.

  “We should do that anyway,” I say. “Not sure how it helps in court, though.”

  “We can just be like, ‘But, Your Honor, he’s a total jerk.’”

  We drink the rest of our coffee. This stuff is kind of growing on me.

  “You know,” I say, “he’s probably at school now.”

  Rudy doesn’t understand at first, and then he does. “What about his folks?”

  “I think they have jobs, right?”

  “Yeah, maybe.”

  “Yeah, you know, like his dad’s at the meth lab and his mom’s obviously on the stroll.”

  “Yeah,” says Rudy, already sitting back and getting ready to stand up. “He probably has all kinds of stuff in his room. The whole place to ourselves, lots of potential.”

  “Yeah,” I say, gathering up my stuff. “You know on TV how you see people get busted for growing a bunch of marijuana in their garden or whatever?”

  “Yeah?”

  “Total DiMartino thing to do.”

  “Totally.”

  “Your phone take pictures?”

  “Yeah, good ones.”

  “Mine, too. This is going to be perfect. If we find something like that, it’s not even blackmail. It’s like, ‘You drop the lawsuit or we’re going to the police.’ It’s just a trade.”

  “It’s the American way,” says Rudy, nodding.

  And just like that, we head off.

  “So basically we’re on a reconnaissance mission,” says Rudy as he pushes through the doors.

  “Yeah, it’s an intelligence-gathering operation,” I say as we step out into the parking lot. Say what you want about our lack of details or clear objectives, but we definitely have the lingo down.

  Step one is easy: We just drive around for a while. In the Fiesta, driving slowly is a given, which is perfect. We need to give everyone time to clear out of the DiMartino family residence, which we’ve more or less convinced ourselves is one of the region’s major pot farms, meth labs, and/or porn distributors.

  It occurs to me at some point that we should probably be more nervous about this than we are, but we’ve got too much going for us: caffeine, sugar, and camera phones, mostly.

  This reconnaissance mission begins, as the best ones d
o, at thirty-one miles per hour with a bad muffler.

  “We should probably … not … park so close,” I say, as diplomatically as possible.

  “Yeah,” says Rudy. “You’re probably right.”

  The car backfires a few seconds later, just missing its cue. Rudy eases us up onto the grass on the side of the road.

  “No one will notice it here, right?” he says as we get out and quietly close our doors. The car is dark green and a few spots of brown rust give it a vaguely camo effect.

  “Nah,” I say. “It kind of blends.”

  We walk along the side of the road to Mars’s house.

  “We probably should’ve parked at my place and gone the back way,” I say.

  “Probably,” says Rudy.

  A car flies by, going about seventy the other way, and we both duck our heads. It’s not that strategic to be out here because we are both pretty obviously “of school age.” We’re both dressed generically, in jeans and sneakers. Rudy is wearing the sort of plain black shirt that I had no idea he even owned, and I am wearing a dark blue T-shirt, the kind with the pocket on the front. As long as we keep our heads down, “two teens in jeans” is not going to narrow the search down much.

  We reach the edge of the yard and go into a low crouch. Without even thinking about it, we automatically channel every war movie we’ve ever seen. We are going to take this bunker! Failure is not an option!

  “No cars,” whispers Rudy.

  “Nice.”

  “Try the door?”

  “Too obvious. Window.”

  We slip around the side of the house. We’re less soldier now, more ninja. We look around the backyard but don’t see any vast fields of marijuana or meth lab–looking shacks. There’s an upside-down kiddie pool and an old four-wheeler that has only three wheels, but neither of those are crimes.

  “Huh,” says Rudy.

  “Huh,” I say. “Let’s try his room.”

  Mars’s room has one window, and it’s propped up with a removable screen.

  “I’ll lift the window,” I whisper, putting my hand on the frame. “You grab it.”

  “Got it,” says Rudy.

  I think he means he’s got the screen instead of the idea, and I push the window up. “Don’t let it —” I whisper, but the screen has already dropped into the room. It makes a loud, tinny clatter on the floor.