by Jaime Clarke
“Yeah,” Q said, “before finals.”
“His family didn’t go on vacation,” Smurf said. “Figs was in the hospital.”
Q, the future husband of a swimsuit model, stopped rifling through his duffel bag and looked at Smurf. Once this tidbit had sunk in, Smurf continued: “Remember that night, the weekend before Figs’s absence? Summer Griffith’s party in McCormack Ranch Park?”
Q shrugged.
“Well,” Smurf started, “remember I went with Assburn? And we turned out to be the only other juniors there besides Hands and Figs? Some sort of senior party. They’d expelled a couple of sophomores with a garden hose before we got there. So anyway, Assburn and I decided to bail and hit the Hump and a couple of other spots. But I forgot my hat—you know the one, the orange fisherman’s hat that I got in Mazatlán; some senior chick snatched it, and I let her, thinking I’d get it later. So anyway, Assburn started the car and I went after my hat. I don’t find the chick anywhere and start floating between the rooms upstairs and downstairs. No luck. Finally I go out the sliding glass door to the backyard and see the hat bouncing behind this hedge in the back part of the yard, this immense cow-pasture thing. I asked someone on the patio if they knew the name of the girl who was wearing the orange hat, and she said, ‘What girl?’ So I pointed out the spot of orange in the hedges, and the girl said, ‘What orange?’ ‘Never mind,’ I said, and moseyed in the direction of my hat. As I step closer, I hear some noises, some grunting and some smacking, and so I’m having second thoughts, but I’m caught in this no-man’s-land where everyone who is looking can see me and there’s no way to turn around without acting like a complete doofus. So I slow up, trying to figure an escape, when Hands comes from the hedges. ‘Hey, Smurf,’ he says as he passes me. But it’s not the usual Hands, you know? He’s looking at the ground, and walking fast, not cool like he normally does. I said hey back and figured it’s cool to go and get my hat, which at this point I didn’t really care about, but, you know.” Q shrugged again. “So guess what I saw when I reached the girl who had my hat?”
“I heard this already,” Q said. “Robert Samuels told me. He told me not to say anything, though.”
“What did he tell you?”
“It’s too stupid to repeat.” Q went back to sifting through his duffel.
“Samuels doesn’t know shit.” Q knew Smurf was dying to tell him, but Q didn’t want to be baited into asking. He knew Smurf well enough to know that if he was patient, Smurf would blurt it out. “What did he tell you?”
“He told me what happened. I’m telling you, it’s too stupid.”
“Yeah, but what did he say? Did he tell you about Figs?”
Samuels had told him the same story he’d told a half dozen of us, that Hands had banged the senior chick while Figs watched, masturbating. Q was sure Smurf knew the story, thereby knowing the real reason Figs had taken a week off, too embarrassed to face everyone. But the story had died in its sails when Hands denied it.
“Did he tell you about Figs?” Smurf asked again.
“Hands said it didn’t happen,” Q said.
“Bullshit,” Smurf said. “I saw it.”
“You saw it?”
“Was standing right there when it started. I walked in and Figs was smoking pot with some of the seniors, maybe seven dudes and a couple of chicks. They thought I was the cops when I busted through the hedge”—Smurf grinned at this—“but Figs said, ‘He’s cool,’ and they went about their business.”
“Why are you retelling me this story?”
“I’m trying to tell you the real story, dude. You’re not listening.”
“I’m listening.”
“So I was talking to this girl about how I needed my hat back when Figs and a couple of the other guys started wrestling around. But I see that they aren’t wrestling at all. The seniors are beating the shit out of Figs.”
“Why?”
“Don’t know.”
“What did Hands do?”
“That’s what I’m saying.”
“What?”
“He didn’t do anything. He walked away.”
Q looked at Smurf doubtfully.
“Honest Injun,” Smurf said, crossing himself.
The story agitated Q. “Go to your own house, why don’t you?”
A look of resignation came over Smurf and he drifted toward the door.
“Leave the magazine.”
He tossed the magazine on Q’s bed and made for the front door.
Down the street, Assburn and Roger settled into their rooms. Assburn, who would plunge to his death in a frozen lake somewhere just this side of the Canadian border, was unhappy about living with Roger but knew there was nothing he could do about it. Recently, Roger had taken to Assburn, inviting him over to his house after school “for some target practice.” Roger had ambushed Assburn with the invitation, catching him in front of the gymnasium so that Assburn wasn’t ready with an excuse. Truth was, Assburn had nothing to do and nowhere to go. Roger was delighted when he nodded yes.
After an artillery stop at Roger’s house, a two-story colonial set behind a fence of oleander (“reinforced with chain link and barbed wire,” Roger told him), they made for the shooting range, where Roger’s father, Colonel Dixon, was well into his rounds. Assburn admitted that he didn’t know much about guns—he’d once shot a Mountain Dew can with a .22 at his uncle’s ranch back in Minnesota—but Roger, who would later be absent without leave in Iraq, reassured him, “We’ve got something for you.”
Silence blew through Roger’s open-air Jeep on the long ride to the shooting range. It always amazed Assburn that something like the shooting range could exist right outside of Phoenix and he’d never heard of it. He’d felt the same way when he learned that the wedding-cake structure off the I-17 was a castle with underground passages, dating back to the early 1900s. Phoenix seemed to Assburn to be something of an archaeological dig: On the surface it looked like sun and sky and palm trees and glass skyscrapers and desert, bereft of history, like a movie set, but for anyone willing to dig and sift through the sand, odd artifacts and buried history emerged, presenting themselves as dramatically as the Ben Avery Shooting Range.
“Ever shoot clay?” Roger asked.
Assburn shook his head.
“That’s okay, my father’s over at the targets, anyway,” Roger said, unloading the rifles and a box of pistols.
The colonel scarcely registered Assburn’s presence as he and Roger set up at the aluminum TV trays provided for the shooters. The riflemen—there were no women—laid their weapons down on the metal tables as their targets were retrieved and replaced by men in yellow vests. Roger put his hand on Assburn’s wrist as Assburn went to unzip the case on the rifle Roger had handed to him in the parking lot. “Wait until it’s clear,” Roger whispered, looking at his father. The colonel pretended to be looking off in the distance at his new target.
“All clear!” one of the yellow vests yelled, and Roger let up on Assburn’s wrist.
In the span of an hour and a half, Assburn shot an artillery of rifles: a Remington Sporting 28; a Beretta 687 Silver Pigeon II; a Browning A-Bolt that knocked him back, almost knocking him over, soliciting the only remark the colonel made that afternoon—“Should’ve brought the old Winchester I gave you for your tenth birthday,” he said to Roger, chuckling. Assburn’s shoulder ached as he tried to hold his arm steady for the box of Ruger Old Army revolvers Roger opened. Conversation among the shooters was rhythmic, fit in the space between the claps and cracks of rifle fire, but Assburn didn’t understand what the shooters meant by things like “sporting recoil pad” and “bore size.” His targets were consistently cleaner than Roger’s or the colonel’s.
By the next morning, Assburn had a hard time believing the previous afternoon had even happened, and Roger passed Assburn wordlessly in the hallway and Assburn mentioned it to no one.
Assburn parted the blinds in his room with his fingers, watching Q as he broached the ma
n-made lake, shielding his eyes while peering out at the landscape. He watched the last of the Randolph Mothers’ Guild arrive, parking their cars around the community center. His master plan had been to offer to room with Q if no one else did, but he hadn’t counted on the absent fellows. He almost volunteered anyway, but the prospect of Q protesting in front of everyone kept Assburn silent.
The year leading up to Garden Lakes had not gone the way he had figured. Toward the end of his sophomore year, a scrape he had with a senior he’d sold a radar detector to—the senior accused Assburn of trying to resell him his own radar detector, and Assburn didn’t know for sure that the senior was mistaken—had led Assburn to the realization that everyone on campus thought he was a lowlife criminal. He’d started his B and E exercises out of boredom and, bolstered by the demand side of the equation, out of a sense of fulfillment. As Assburn punched out a panel of glass in an Arcadia door or ripped out a bedroom screen, he kept his clients’ needs in mind, covetous of the looks on their faces when he surprised them with just what they were looking for. But after the senior split Assburn’s lip in the parking lot of Lenny’s Burger shop while some of his other customers looked on, Assburn desperately wanted to change his image. He knew he could quit thieving; his paranoia about being caught had risen in recent months. He imagined his clients would be able to satisfy their need for discount electronics, jewelry, and guns in the parking lots of any of the public high schools, or through any number of other small-time dealers Assburn had met in his underworldly travels. The more he turned the idea over, the surer he was of his decision. And so when, the first week of junior year, two seniors asked him if he had any women’s diamond rings, he announced to them that he was out. The seniors tried to shake him down, accusing him of holding out, but Assburn held fast. He hoped his classmates noticed.
Word did travel that Assburn was out of the game, but it traveled slowly; and the number of Assburn’s customers was small compared with the overall student body, so while his customers quit asking him for goods, the perception that Assburn was a juvenile delinquent followed him wherever he went. To his credit, he didn’t revert to his old ways. He believed people would come around, if not soon, then by graduation, which was Assburn’s personal goal.
A step toward that goal was returning the presidential signing pen that he’d stolen from Q’s father.
Since Randolph formed the outermost boundary of our existence, Assburn didn’t consider the (possibly legal) punishment Senator Quinn could’ve inflicted on him. Assburn’s only concern was with Q, and how to return the pen without incurring Q’s wrath, or exposure to his peers or to the administration.
Various plans had developed during Assburn’s guardianship of the pen. The first and most obvious solution was to break back into Q’s house during school and replace the pen in the senator’s study. But Assburn couldn’t reconcile getting caught returning something. In the past, he’d been prepared to go down if caught in the act of procuring; he knew an arrest would in all likelihood result in some community service and a parole officer and little else, and he’d relished the idea of the hero or cult status he would achieve if arrested. These thoughts had left him, however, by his junior year, displaced by an aspiration to be thought of as an equal member of his class.
Another plan was to mail the pen back, wearing gloves while assembling the package, careful not to lick the stamps. Assburn had scoped out a mailbox near Biltmore Fashion Park, miles from his house, where he spent one afternoon a month wandering the Sharper Image while his mother had her hair and nails done. But to mail back the pen would correct only part of the problem; Q would continue to disparage Assburn even if the pen magically turned up in the mail.
Assburn knew that he was going to have to return the pen personally. On several occasions, he fastened the pen against his leg with a thick rubber band, but the opportunity to approach Q never presented itself. Assburn found himself walking down Q’s street, slowing in front of the gates to his house, hoping Q would see him and call out. But the only one who ever called out to Assburn was the landscaper, a Hispanic who waved at Assburn from his riding lawn mower. Assburn flirted with planting the pen on the landscaper, like they did in the movies, but his multiple trips to Dauphine Street made him reconsider. No doubt one of the neighbors, or their security cameras, could ID him, if it came to that.
Finally the right situation appeared, and Assburn was glad that he’d waited. When he saw his name a few lines above Q’s on the roster of Garden Lakes fellows, his hopes surged. Even if Q made noise about the pen, it would only be in front of a limited audience, and during the summer, which would permit the incident—if there was to be an incident—to cool before the start of their senior year.
Assburn removed the pen from his duffel bag. He’d wrapped it in paper towels, sealing it in a Ziploc freezer bag. He stowed the package under the mattress, bouncing on the bed to be sure the bulge was undetectable. Downstairs, Mr. Hancock’s voice boomed about the ten-degree savings that ceiling fans afforded, cautioning the boys not to be late to dinner.
The smells from the kitchen filled the hallway: roasted chicken, and dill-seasoned potatoes, and steamed vegetables, and lemon tuna steaks, and rice and beans, and pies—blueberry and lemon and hot apple, begging to be topped with a globe of ice cream or sherbet. The double glass doors at either end of the hallway that bisected the community center sealed us in with the olfactory splendor.
One half of the community center was further divided into two equal rooms—a classroom and a chapel, the rectangle windows of the classroom overlooking the inner loop. The right side of the center held the cafeteria-grade kitchen and pantry, which took up the back fourth of the building nearest the loading dock. The kitchen was well ventilated by the two screen doors, one off the hallway and one on the south side of the building. In the afternoon, scents emanating from the kitchen were known to bring famished desert vermin.
The kitchen was cleverly segregated by a portable wall easily managed by four to six underclassmen. When positioned properly, the wall left about four feet on either side. Placement was dependent upon the event; for the dances at the Singles’ Retreat, it was pressed up against the outer kitchen counter (where breakfast and lunch were served); for dinners such as the Randolph Mothers’ Guild dinner with Mr. McCloud, the dividing wall was angled diagonally, so the servers—the Randolph mothers—flashed in a dizzy blur from behind the wall like cohosts on a game show.
Mr. Hancock and Mr. Malagon accompanied Mr. McCloud at the large, round, white-linen-draped table in the center of the room. The remaining places were set, and consequently the fellows filled the other tables up quickly to avoid having to sit with the faculty and Mr. McCloud, so quickly that disparate dinner parties arose, the diners making furtive glances at the door to mark what luckless soul would wander in not knowing his dinner was to be ruined by the repetition of “Yes, sir” and “No, sir.”
We were to be disappointed, though. Mr. Hancock and Mr. Malagon dined with Mr. McCloud, whose arm shook imperceptibly as he brought the tortilla soup to his lips. Some years older than the portrait of his likeness that hung in McCloud Hall, he appeared haggard. It seemed that Mr. Hancock and Mr. Malagon had trouble sustaining him in conversation. We realized that Mr. McCloud was barely cognizant of his surroundings, and so we openly gaped at him. We’d never known anyone who had been to prison, and as we scarfed down the delicious entrées ostensibly prepared (everyone knew the dinner was catered) by the mothers of boys whom, since they were underclassmen, we would never truly know, our youth lent us a superiority toward Mr. McCloud, whom we’d joke about later.
The white sun gleamed through the curtained windows, showing no signs of evening. Dessert was served, unleashing a symphony of silver spoons clinking against china plates, such props disappearing with the caterers after the dinner, along with all traces of the opposite sex, their perfumes and hair sprays lingering as some of us took down the dining room and swung the movable wall against its stationary b
rethren, permitting easy access to the stainless steel counter with its cutouts for hot dishes, a board game missing its pieces, awaiting the blitz of the breakfast crowd.
After dinner, we settled into our houses. Mr. Malagon called some of us out to the sidewalk, inviting us to beat him at a game of beanbag, a wastebasket from his residence standing in for the beanbag board, with its coffee-can crown and slope of polished wood, that Mr. Malagon kept in his classroom. “All or nothing,” Mr. Malagon said, arcing four beanbags one after another into the wastebasket from thirty feet. Our sweat-stained clothes began to dry as the sun finally dropped behind the horizon. The catering truck roared away from the community center, its cough fading until all of Garden Lakes was still. The streetlights buzzed and a purple pulse of light shone above the street. It would be another few minutes before the lights would fully engage, and for a moment, there was both nothing to see and nothing to hear except the plop of denim squares weighted with navy beans falling into a plastic wastebasket.
Mr. Hancock strolled leisurely down the street toward us, and everyone except Mr. Malagon and Roger quit tossing beanbags. Some filtered off toward their residences, feigning tiredness or eagerness to get a fresh start for the day ahead. Mr. Hancock reached the beanbaggers, stopping a few feet from the wastebasket as Roger concentrated on his last throw, his first attempts strewn like dead rodents along the sidewalk. Roger moved his arm back and forth, as if weighing his payload, then let the beanbag fly with a flick of his wrist that caused it to sail right of the wastebasket.
“Damn,” Roger said, forgetting about Mr. Hancock.
“What’s that, Mr. Dixon?” Mr. Hancock bellowed.
Roger looked up from the playing field, startled. He narrowed his eyes as Mr. Hancock continued toward him. Mr. Malagon stepped between them and collected the beanbags and wastebasket. The rest of us dispersed, saluting one another good night and joshing one another about checking for rattlesnakes before jumping into bed, a scare that was more effective with the sophomores than the fellows, since we knew Garden Lakes was fumigated prior to the fellowship program, the perimeter secured with pesticides and herbicides. Most of us had come upon snakes in our lifetime, though, either hiking Squaw Peak or stalking golf balls in the rough, and so we had learned at an early age that there was very little that would deter a rattlesnake from going wherever it wanted to go.