Rebel Angels

by James Michael Rice

  Rick and Lori were mingling with their classmates, discussing old times, both properly drunk for the occasion. Every now and then they would step away from the party and return to the dunes to check on Lou. On their third trip they finally coaxed the boy into returning to Mike's car, where he quietly slept off the rest of the night.

  Eleven o'clock fell in a New York minute.

  That was when the argument had started.

  Lori, who was tired, drunk, and extremely unreasonable, suddenly remembered her twelve o'clock curfew. Afraid of being late, and even more afraid of what her mother and father would do if they found out she'd been drinking, she insisted it was time to make like a tree and leave.

  Rick was drunk, not stupid. He knew they were in no condition to drive. He assured her they would leave just as soon as the both of them had sobered up a bit. They had been dating one another exclusively for eight months, and they had never even come close to having an argument. He never saw it coming.

  Staring at his reflection on the pond, Rick couldn't recall how their discussion had become heated so quickly. Nor could he remember who raised whose voice first, or how long the whole thing lasted. In the end those things didn't matter, anyway. What he did remember, perhaps too well, was how the argument had ended.

  “Asshole,” Lori had muttered under her breath. There it was, the A-bomb. Her clear brown eyes looked glazed and bloodshot behind the long blonde curls of her hair. At that precise moment the discussion was severed, with such neatness it had stunned him, with that one sharp word:

  Asshole!

  Rick could hardly believe his ears. Did she just say what I think she said? he'd wondered. Not Lori; she never spoke that way.

  Meanwhile, down by the water, Max Kendall and the Potheads were still performing a wasted rendition of Crazy Train.

  Several yards away, where the cars were parked on the edge of the sand, a stereo was pumping out a hip-hop tune that had inspired a dozen or more people to start dancing by firelight. Between these sounds there were muffled conversations, drunken cheers, and crazed, unbridled laughter. In the distance, someone was doing a keg-stand.

  Amidst the cacophony of the party no one heard Lori's final words, save for Rick. Nobody would ever know how she had left him. That painful memory was his and his alone.

  With sparks shooting from her eyes, Lori stared at him for several seconds, as if daring him to reply. Then she turned and walked away, as if none of it really mattered anyway. She had not looked back.

  It tore him up to remember her that way. It wasn't like Lori to act belligerent (he'd only heard her swear on one occasion, and that was when she'd found out she was getting a C instead of a B in Calculus). It was the alcohol talking, of course. Not her. He could not blame her. Even now, two months later and just a razor's edge away from suicide, he could not blame her.

  At any other time he would have swallowed his pride and followed her, but after watching her disappear into a nearby crowd, he eventually wandered back into the party. It was their big night, their Big Senior Bash, and it had seemed so damn important at the time.

  About an hour later, as he neared the twilight of sobriety, Rick began to search the party for his estranged girlfriend. After grilling a few of his classmates, he arrived at the conclusion that Lori had found someone to drive her home, because her mother's car was gone and no one had seen her for a long time. This conclusion seemed only logical to Rick, since she'd been so concerned about making her curfew. The fact that she had bailed without telling him made him angry, but he trusted her judgment. She was a good girl. A smart girl. She wouldn't have taken a ride with someone she didn't trust.

  In an effort to cheer him up, Max conned him into drinking a few more beers…then a few more shots. Before Rick knew it, the night was over, and the first pink fingers of dawn were reaching out across the ocean.

  The next and last thing Rick remembered was squeezing into the back of Kevin Chapman's mother's caravan with a bunch of kids who reeked of marijuana. He'd already forgotten about the argument, and his only sensible thought—his only thought at all—was to try and get home before his Dad woke up to go to work.

  Rick could not remember the ride home, or how he had managed to find his way into his bedroom, but that was where he found himself next. He was still sleeping when the phone rang, and still half-asleep when he answered it.

  “The-there wuh-was an accident, Ri-Rick!” a shrill, hysterical voice wailed into his ear. “MY BABY! OH, GOD, MY BAYBEEEE!”

  The sheer volume of the voice shocked him awake, and he sprang from his bed in a panic. Standing in the middle of his room with the phone pressed to his ear, he could not remember how he'd gotten there. He was fully clothed, had a mouth that tasted as if he had eaten a bar of soap, and his room was spinning around him like a Tilt-A-Whirl from hell.

  Something bad had happened the night before, but he had only the vaguest sense as to what that might have been. He only knew that it had to do with Lori, and that thought made him nervous because he had a peculiar feeling that she was mad at him for some reason.

  Then he remembered why he had awoken. The telephone...he had answered the telephone, and he was still holding it in his hand. He held the receiver away from his ear and looked at it in horror, as if it were some repulsive little creature that had somehow crawled into his hand while he was sleeping. From the other end of the line, a voice continued to sob incoherently. Not just any voice. A familiar voice.

  It was Lori Shawnessy's mother.

  His knuckles turned white as he clenched the phone, slowly bringing it back to his ear. Mrs. Shawnessy was still rambling on in a voice that was hardly decipherable, though her words would haunt him to the grave. Lori's car was found in Futawam, several miles away from the Hevven/Futawam border, twisted around a telephone pole and, “GAWWWD! OOOHH, GAWWWWD! MY LORIIII!”

  was dead. Dead. DEAD.

  Remembering that morning, above all else Rick could not forget the pain in Mrs. Shawnessy's voice, or the guilt he'd felt at that moment. In his mind, it was his fault. Lori was dead, and he had let her die. It was at that moment, that painful surreal moment on the phone, when the order and regularity of Rick Hunter's life had vanished like a ghost. It was also at that moment that his life had plunged into a great, dark well of despair and he knew, as well as his loved ones knew, that if he didn't manage to pull himself out in a hurry, he would surely drown.

  Now here he was again, standing where he had stood so many times before, searching for the answers to the infinite questions that used to keep him awake at night. But so much had happened since those simple, carefree days, that those questions didn't bother him anymore.

  And the answers didn't matter.

  ~Three~

  Mankind’s greatest enemy is time, thought Lou Swart, as he waited for his friend, and the night, to arrive. Because time wants us to suffer.

  At the tender age of fourteen, Lou Swart was no closer to understanding his life (or life itself, for that matter) than he was at the age of ten. The answers he wanted were nowhere to be found. And much to his horror, as he neared fifteen, those answers seemed farther away than ever.

  What's the meaning of life? Why do we live? Why do we die? Why was it that Mike and his friends always insisted on treating him like a kid? He was almost fifteen now, damn them, and that was old enough to be treated as an adult, wasn't it? What's the point in going to school, and busting your ass at a job everyday, and getting married, and growing old, when none of it amounts to shit when you die? Tell me, God, Lou begged silently. Tell me: Why?

  Sitting in his gloomy corner, struggling to concentrate on the text of the Video Game Weekly magazine that lay open before him, the boy trembled with disgust. Was it possible that he was the only soul on earth who had ever wondered about such things? Lou thought it unlikely, although it certainly appeared that way sometimes. None of his friends seemed too concerned about their roles in the world. They knew who they were. But who the hell am I? Lou wondered.
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  Frustrated, he took a few deep breaths and attempted to return to the article he had been reading, but the dark typeface stared up at him like hieroglyphics, and he suddenly found himself unable to translate a word. Even in the soft glow of the Coleman lantern, which rested on the table in front of him, it was getting too dark outside to see anything but the pictures. Anyway, the cheat codes for Monster Hunter 2 didn't seem all that interesting anymore.

  “Just remember, whatever you do, don't say anything that'll remind him of Lori,” Mike Swart said from nowhere in his fatherly voice, bending over to pick up a Hustler from a stack of magazines on the floor. With a fresh can of beer in one hand and the magazine in the other, he flopped his lean body onto the tattered brown couch, kicked up his feet, and waited for his little brother to respond.

  From the small, decrepit table across the room, Lou nodded and shifted uneasily in his chair. He lowered his red, white, and blue New England Patriots hat to conceal his eyes. “I'm not friggin’ stupid,” he muttered after a time.

  Mike sighed, but did not look up. “You know that's not what I meant.”

  “Whatever. He's my friend, too, you know.”

  Since the funeral, the Swart brothers and their friends had been reluctant to talk about Lori Shawnessy. Her very name had become something close to a sacred incantation, as if saying it would somehow breathe unholy life into her charred and battered corpse. Lou thought about her often enough, and that bothered him tremendously, to think of her as though she were still alive. But to casually speak her name out loud? Well, that just didn't seem appropriate. Of course, he wouldn't tell Mike how he felt about this. Just as he wouldn't tell anyone how he'd gotten the chills just now, at the mere mention of her name. Because nothing ever really seemed to bother Mike. Nothing at all. Why should anything bother Mike, the patron saint of Hevven High?

  Watching Lou squirm in his seat, Mike raised his head and said, “I miss her, too.”

  Lou blinked and swallowed hard, fighting back tears. Sitting at the table, ankles crossed beneath his chair, he looked even younger than his age. In white Reeboks, a saggy pair of Hilfiger Jeans, and a dark gray Old Navy T-shirt that was much too large for his thin, shapeless frame, he looked incredibly frail and defenseless.

  Poor kid, Mike thought, his eyes returning to the magazine. He's taking this harder than I thought. Maybe I should've had a talk with him, right after the accident, before the funeral. Maybe that would’ve helped some.

  Watching his older brother through the corners of his eyes, Lou was all too aware of their differences. Lou was five-six, 128 pounds, mostly skin on bones. Mike, who was three years his senior, was one inch shy of six feet, 180 pounds, mostly lean muscle. While Lou still had the blotchy, acne-prone skin of a teenager, Mike's complexion was glowing and smooth, and rarely revealed a blemish of any kind. Lou had cow-licked black hair and shit-brown eyes; Mike's hair was wavy and honey-brown, and his deep-set eyes were a calm, curious gray.

  But what it really boiled down to, in Lou's mind, was this: Girls adored his older brother. Mike was good-looking, intelligent, and charismatic (Lou didn't know what that last word meant, but he'd heard somebody say it once, in reference to Mike, and he knew it was probably a good thing.) Of course, it didn't hurt that Mike had been the star quarterback and captain of the Rebels, and had almost single-handedly led them to a victory in the division championship. He had a rocket for an arm, and the accuracy of a laser-guided missile. He could run with the best of them, and pass on the go. But more importantly, he had poise. On the field, his presence had been so strong that the opposing team's fans often found themselves cheering for him. He was a leader. A warrior. A goddamn hero in the pocket.

  Mike snapped the tab off his beer, the slender muscles in his chest and arms twitching beneath his plain white T-shirt, and drank greedily. Then he held up the Hustler by its dog-eared cover, letting gravity pull the centerfold down, revealing Miss July and all her naked, airbrushed beauty. He whistled softly in admiration.

  So much for a pleasant evening, Lou thought bitterly. I'm too scrawny to play football, too young to buy alcohol, and too ugly to find a girl. And still a virgin, he reminded himself. Yes, almost fifteen and still a virgin. Some friggin' life I have! His eyes began to water. He chewed his lip. He wanted to scream. Eventually, he went to the cooler and grabbed himself a beer.

  Mike felt sorry for his little brother. He barely remembered what it was like to be fourteen, to have nothing more serious than girls and pimples to fret over, although he vaguely remembered that girls and clear skin were rather high priorities for that age. Sure. Right up there with expensive sneakers, video games, and an MTV haircut. Strange, Mike thought, how time sneaks by, transforming the present into the past. Here he was, doing the same thing in the same place—only now he was a high school graduate with the world left to conquer—and where the hell did the years run off to?

  The interior of the shack hadn't changed much since they’d last been there, before the accident. A thin layer of dust was the only sign of their neglect. The wooden paneled walls were mostly bare, save for the Budweiser mirror at the foot of the couch and the tri-level shelf above the table, on which there rested an assortment of empty liquor bottles, a candle, a tattered copy of Stephen King's The Stand, and an ancient Sears radio. A brown carpet covered the floor; it was dark enough to hide most of Max Kendall's cigarette burns, although it had become almost spaghetti-like along the edges where the threads had come undone. There was even a window, just above the couch. The glass was dirty, the screen was rusted, and it was a bitch to open, but the window allowed some sunlight and fresh air to enter without letting in the bugs. While the shack was far from being a palace by the sea it was their special place, their hangout, their home away from home.

  More importantly, it didn't belong to their parents, it didn't belong to their teachers, and it didn't belong to the Hevven Police, who had it in for just about everyone under the age of thirty. And even though the Swart brothers and their friends had stolen the wood from a new construction site on Vernon Street, the finished product was theirs.

  They were the ones who had dragged the wood from the site to the forest; they were the ones who had sweated, day in and day out, for nearly a week before it was finished; they were the ones who had hammered their thumbs and stepped on nails and itched with poison ivy for weeks thereafter. Truth be told, they had taken pleasure in every laborious moment, for when all was said and done they had finally found something they could call their own. And regardless of the fact that it reeked of stale beer, cigarettes, and Max's shitty weed, they were damn proud of their accomplishment.

  “Where the hell is he?” Lou asked himself out loud, lifting up his Patriots hat in order to scratch his head.

  “Huh?” Mike looked up, confused.

  “Hunter,” Lou sighed, pausing to sip his beer. “Are you sure he's coming?”

  “That's what he told me on the phone,” Mike answered calmly. “I asked if he wanted a ride, but he said he'd meet us out here instead. He's probably on his way.”

  “Do you think he'll be okay?” asked Lou. “What if he...you know—”

  —Tries to kill himself? Lou was going to say, except he could not bring himself to utter those words. It occurred to him that his choice of words would not have been entirely accurate, anyway. The more accurate way of phrasing that question would have been: What if he tries to kill himself again?

  “I wouldn't worry. Rick's a tough shit. He'll be fine.”

  A high-pitched silence rang through Lou's ears. The somehow ghastly sound of absolutely nothing happening. Lou thought about trying not to think about Lori, staring at the text of Video Game Weekly until his vision blurred and his temples throbbed. Mike sipped his beer, leafed through the magazine, and somehow managed to light a cigarette without missing a beat.

  They waited as the longest ten minutes in history ticked by.

  Time is torturing me, Lou thought. It toys with us, speeding up when you want
it to slow down, stopping when all you want in the world is for it to move a little faster. Time wants us to suffer.

  Lou looked down at the magazine on the table, slapped it shut. “You wanna listen to some music?” he asked. He would have said anything to disturb the stillness, because the stillness was sure as hell disturbing him.

  “Sure,” Mike murmured, not looking up. “If you can find a decent station.”

  Lou leaned forward, switched on the battered radio, and was greeted by static. Fumbling the dial, he quickly found the local college station. A Pink Floyd song crackled through the speakers. Lou looked across the room to get his brother’s approval, and saw that Mike had already begun to tap his foot against the arm of the couch.

  Lou turned up the volume, and the shack reverberated with the woeful conversations of electric-acoustic guitars. The name of the song was Wish You Were Here; the boys knew it well.

  Absently singing along with the radio, Mike grabbed another Hustler and began to thumb through it.

  Lou slumped back into his chair, watching the dust churn in the rusty sunlight that shone through the open window. Drawn by the soft glow of their lantern, a large moth flitted against the outside screen—once, twice, three times—and spun away into the twilight. Full dark was on its way.

  Where the hell is Rick? Lou wondered, and he chased that thought down with the rest of his beer.

  ~Four~

  “Fuckin-A!”

  Fuck was—and had always been, for as long as anyone could remember—Maximus Kendall's favorite and most frequently used word.

  Max reached a sweaty hand across the cluttered kitchen table, knocking over an empty can of Old Milwaukee, and turned up the volume on the Sony radio that rested on the windowsill. Bobbing his head to the beat of a Limp Bizkit song, he settled back into his chair. Resting his elbows on the table, he began to sprinkle marijuana flakes onto a rolling paper, cursing under his breath, something about the lingering heat. Despite the fact that it was still 70-degrees outside, he was dressed in his usual attire: faded blue jeans, a white Mighty Mighty Bosstones T-shirt with the sleeves cut off, and his trademark black motorcycle jacket.