by Sam Munson
It was seven a.m. when I arrived. David Cash, who remains the most muscular human being I have ever met, was already waiting on the sofa, wearing a short-sleeved T-shirt, pollen yellow, which hid his sculptural build, but veins and tendons cabled his forearms. He was the one who had introduced me to Noel. A kid from Kennedy. He graduated at the end of my freshman year, from the G&T Program, and entered the world of business. He now presides over all Noel’s transactions. I watched him kick a guy’s ass once: that same crackhead/junkie/general bum Stokey, who had been hassling us for a beer as we drank on Noel’s stoop one night last summer. David struck him without any anger, exerting zero effort, a painter’s squint in his eye as he placed his blows. “What up,” David observed as I walked in. His voice, not at all as deep as you’d expect from his chest, which is the size of a concert hall, is nonetheless steel-steady. “Come on,” chirped Noel, “less do dis.” I made for the basement door. He gestured me on down, into the usual mineral stink of damp concrete.
Do you know how weird it is to be in the bedroom of someone who has nothing else in there other than a bed? No books, no art, not even porn magazines, not even dirty laundry or food cartons or whatever, not even filth. Noel’s room is like a monk’s cell, bare and clean. It’s huge, too. One of the biggest single rooms I’ve ever seen. It runs the whole length and breadth of his house, front to back. Which makes the emptiness even weirder. There’re even some subrooms in the back, doored off. And a big drain in the floor. It was once a workshop, I think. Noel’s installed soundproofing, these white baffles, all along the walls and ceiling, which, combined with the concrete floor, make for heavy, cottony, dead acoustics. The air always feels stifling. The only human object there, other than the bed, is a small blackboard hung on a rusty steel hook protruding between two of the baffling sheets. When I asked him, around the time we first met, what the soundproofing and the blackboard were for, he shouted, “Dawgfightin, niggaaaa!” I laughed, but stopped when I saw he was serious. David later confirmed that Noel was telling the truth, although I had never been invited to any of the matches. I didn’t know whether to feel relieved or insulted by this.
Noel sleeps with no sheets or comforter. How depressing is that? He has a safe hidden in the box spring the mattress sits on, which in turn rests directly on the floor, right in the cold the concrete sends up in waves. He has to lift the mattress to make any transaction. And I have to help. He won’t ask, either; he just loses his breath and gets red, then dead-pale, and then I join in. It’s in my interest, after all. Which is how it went that morning. “Man, I be out of shaaaaape, niggaaaa!” His usual crowed response. As though there could be some misunderstanding about the level of his fitness that required public correction.
Now he thumb-riffled the stack of money I’d brought. He never counted, in front of me, at least. He’s indulgent about protocol, as though the worries of a businessman are beneath him: “Shit sound right.” Does it? To the manner born, I guess. I knew David would feed it through their money counter later. He never let anything pass with such flippancy. Which undercut the expansiveness of Noel’s gesture. That’s how it goes with the two of them, though. He handed me my purchase, crammed into a cheap brown canvas tote. Noel puts his weed in a tote 90 percent of the time. They’re his signature, or whatever. Although a pretty lame one, in my opinion. I have no idea where he acquires them. From his mother’s charity work, maybe. This one said SIDNEY MEMORIAL HOSPITAL JUVENILE CANCER DRIVE on the side. There was a drawing of a bug-eyed lamb. I waited behind him as he struggled up the stairs. I figured I had less than five minutes to make my excuses before he launched into one of his fantasies. So I tipped David a nod and told Noel that I had to go. He grinned and poked two fingers into my chest. “Nuh-uh, you gotsta give me a ride uptown. I gotsta go see my moms and shit.” He does this, at odd moments. Reminds you, I mean, that he’s kind of one level up from you. But, like I said, why not exercise power if you have it? I almost objected: I’ll be late for school. How would that have sounded, putting off a weed wholesaler with that excuse? I’d take the blame anyway, if we got searched or anything. Which he knew, of course. He’s one of these amateur-of-the-law guys. He’s the one who told me that having three small bags of weed gets you a much worse prison sentence than one large one, because it proves intent to distribute. As we got into my car, he cautioned me, “A smart muhfuh like you ain’t need to be told what happens if the beast search this shit. So drive real reasonable. Ya heard?”
That fat shithead! You had to admire him. He was wearing this subtle torturer’s grin as he warned me. And I knew, I knew he was fucking with me, but it worked all the same. (So much for the ameliorative power of the rational mind!) And so we started off, keeping a schoolteacher’s pace. Weak sunlight hit everything at the wrong angle. There wasn’t much traffic. Noel caught me wiping nervous sweat from my neck: “Shit, dude. Ain’t nothing.” The brick of weed I had stuffed under my seat. The whole trip, as I kept darting glances around for I don’t know what, some manifestation of malign authority, he was unfolding a sexual tale, involved and impossible to believe. “Damn,” I interjected at the appropriate times, and even whistled once. I remember nothing of this story except that he kept repeating, “And dat ass! Like a muhfuh shelf! Shit!” After Noel’s narrated climax (he spoke with the embarrassing fluency produced by long inner rehearsals) we drove west to Foxhall Road (you can imagine what kind of people live there, just from the name) and then on into Palisades, where his mother lives.
The morning traffic had just started, and I was able to miss the worst of it. Every asshole in the world comes to D.C. in the morning, to work at some government job. It’s the only industry we have, and everyone involved in it is miserable. So the traffic is just terrible, physically and spiritually. Noel and I were driving away from the nexus of it. We were okay. You know the kind of morning I’m talking about. The air was weightless, like my limbs and head. The pink light exaggerated the innocence of house-fronts and lawns. When I’d parked, he sneezed—as if on purpose, flinging an oystery gob of mucus out to cling to his upper lip. He wiped it off with his hand, then reconsidered. “Shit. You godda muhfuh Kleenex?” I pointed at the glove box, which he opened. And into his hummocky lap slid Kevin’s school file. Yes, I’d been keeping it in my car. So what! So nothing had come of it yet, so what. It was evidence of an exploit. And exploits are valuable in themselves. Noel has this stupid pennant, anyway. On his wall. From Chandler. It’s up over his couch, on the dirty wall, a white-and-red pennant. By far the cleanest thing in his house. No pictures, no posters, nothing but barren, grime-feathered paint—and then that retarded pennant. It’s blindingly visible. As though it meant something. As though he played on any of the Chandler teams. Hockey! Cross-country! Lacrosse! Dressage! As though he even gave a shit! Chandler kicked him out for selling porn he stole from the general store in Blue Knock to his classmates. I’ve never asked him why he keeps the pennant pinned up there. But that’s how everyone is. You can’t refute it. Everyone holding on to the cheap tokens of their past.
“The fuck is this shit?” Noel asked, reading the name on the thumb-grimy index tab. “A’ight, Kevin Broadus, shit. I know who did that boy. You ain’t got no tissues, man. And why you got this anyway.”
I was shocked to notice the calm suffusing me. At his revelation, I mean.
“What do you mean, you like know? Like you know who killed him?”
“Man, I ain’t say I know.” This apparent self-contradiction stumped me. “And shit, man,” he continued, “why you all askin’ up in my face?” Sometimes he fumbles his lingo. Such performances are hard to maintain, I guess.
“Dude, I’m not like trying to be intrusive or anything.” I almost mumbled this. Out of fucking … deference. Amazing, right? His audible, moanlike breathing filled my car.
“Intrusive. Shit. Man, ain’t you wanna know any more?”
“But like I thought you said you didn’t know.”
“Man, ain’t you listen? I ain’t s
ay I knew. I say I heard. Ya heard?” We go through this a lot, back-and-forths, bickering sessions. He thinks it’s how you talk to your friends. He used the same methods with the guys who hung around his house. Although not David, who had kind of a zero-tolerance policy for dialectical nonsense. With the sense of being done a great service, I asked him again what he had heard. Phrasing it correctly this time.
So he told me. “This dude Mike, Short Mike. Mike Lorriner. He out of, uh, Severn, some redneck shit like that.” Severn is a meaningless town somewhere in Maryland, the worst state.
“Short Mike. So like what’s his like deal,” I twittered. Noel inspected his still lightly besnotted hand and cleaned it with a fold of his vast shirt. His clothes are like bales of sailcloth. He’s by far the fattest person I’ve ever spoken to.
“His deal? Muhfuh, you a cop? Why you care? Shit, son. Why you even wanna know?” Another stumper. How to answer this? With a weak-ass piece of obfuscation.
“I knew him. Kevin, I mean. Pretty well, actually.” This didn’t fly with Noel, who brapped out a laugh.
“You don’t know anyone like him. Do you expect me to believe that? You hardly ever even come to my house, Addison.” His accent abated here, for some reason, but he recovered himself. “Knew him. Shit. A’ight den, I’ll tell you. White people be crazy, though, son.” So he explained to me what he knew. That he’d heard from someone that this dude Short Mike had shot Kevin for insulting him at a party, and that he’d shot the others to dispose of witnesses and to make the cops think it was a random killing. “Thass all I heard, man. All of it.”
I didn’t believe him, on principle. How can you believe a guy who spends fifteen minutes lying to you about fucking? He’d used the shelf simile about some other notional girl’s ass before. I remembered the little-boy’s gesture he used to indicate it: stroking a new football or something. But I couldn’t call him out for lying about Kevin, any more than I could for his other lies. What would have been the point? I mean, I was the one toting around some dead kid’s permanent record. I was the weirdo. Also I had my commercial interests to think of. So smiles and sage nods all around! I shook Noel’s hand again, in the complicated, flowing way he demanded: lock, reconfigure, unlock, touch fists. His mother’s house loomed huge and cream-colored behind the gate barring the drive from public access. A tall, thin woman (presumably his mother, the former Mrs. Eliot Bradley) was crunching across the gravel in pinpoint black heels, calling out, “Noel? Noel?” She was wearing a smoke-gray suit, and her face had that leathery tan. You know: the color of a boat shoe, maybe a little lighter. Looked about as durable. “Shit, that’s my moms. Peace, son.” Noel initiated the process of hefting himself out of my car, his cherry-red shirt billowing beautifully. I took off as their gate creaked inward, terrified—for some inexplicable reason—that his tanned and oblivious mother would see me. They were embracing as I drove away, Noel twice as wide as Mrs. Bradley, and their awkward double figure dwindled in my rearview mirror. For all the harshness he’s been subjected to by his parents, Noel does not hold them accountable. He speaks of his mother and even his father with genuine—if shy—love and respect. He knows all the particulars of his father’s business dealings and his mother’s fund-raising efforts. I never once heard him make a single ironic remark about either. Which is kind of astonishing.
V.
THE FIRST NOTABLE THING that happened when I got to school: a fight with Alex Faustner about the correct meaning of the phrase begs the question. Which she had misused seven times in a single English class. Mr. Vanderleun backed her up, and we had to go to the dictionary, and then because I was right Mr. Vanderleun got all purple and hush-voiced, and his stump waggled in fury, and by the time the whole thing was over the period had ended. For which I got an invisible wave of gratitude from everybody. Then came the assembly, which we were all looking forward to, because it would eat up another hour of class time. We were seniors, after all. And this was precisely why the admonitions from our teachers started coming. They had noticed a restlessness, a lack of initiative, a certain aloofness on our parts, and they wanted to remind us that, despite being seniors, WE WERE STILL PART OF THE KENNEDY COMMUNITY. It wasn’t phrased so explicitly. It never is, at Kennedy. We just got a general sense that our teachers were pissed, but also that they were too … what … spineless, I guess, to crack down on us. These admonitions against our laziness came compressed into the form of another college-preparedness assembly, which my entire class was forced to attend, a throng of unfamiliar black and brown faces. The G&T kids sat in their own row. It was in the back. No one paid attention to this obvious hideous fact. Our classes were held on the fourth floor, the highest floor, and thus it took us longer to get to the auditorium than anyone else. That’s why we had our own row, right? Nothing to see there.
A whole field of heads swept downward to the stage, where an aluminum stand offered the microphone to nothing. My pager kept vibrating. Digger felt it—she was resting her knee against mine, as she sometimes did in assemblies, and she gave me a knock with her sharp patella, without looking at me, as though to say, Quite the entrepreneur. I should mention here that public displays of affection—and this is bizarre, when you consider all the other shenanigans that pass without comment at Kennedy—public displays of affection bring with them downpours and cloudbursts of administrative trouble. So knee-to-knee contact was about all you could get away with. I know for a fact that Brent Academy does not have similar rules. You can see the students making out through the fence if you walk by at lunch, sitting or lying on their eternal-looking emerald lawn, goddamn Daisies and Toms (the second book ever assigned at Kennedy that provided me with any pleasure). This assembly took place Friday morning, in the hopes, I suppose, of ruining our weekend by inflaming our wretched consciences. As Dr. Karlstadt explained the nature of our still-meaningful relations to the school—“We are all Tigers!” emphasized by a subsequent moment of lull, as though she expected a spontaneous unitary cheer to rise—I ran through the state of my finances over and over in my head, until it was time to leave. Did you know that you can fit, on average, about thirty-four hundred dollars into a standard shoe box? At least when you use the currencies popular among high school students.
“What are you smirking about,” Digger asked as we trudged up the stairs, lagging behind the pack of our fellow achievers, staring at the flesh-colored marble floor.
“I’m not smirking.” She bodychecked me, and I caught a scrap of her scent, her burnt-leaf scent.
“Nope, you were smirking.” And here she made her idiot face: eyes crossed, crimson tongue limp in the corner of her mouth.
“No, like that was like my thinking face.”
“Like your money face,” she said through a sudden bright smile. And with no further communication the crowd parted and we followed our dividing streams, she into French and me into Latin, and the slablike doors closed and the class-starting noise—you can’t call it a bell—buzzed over the PA.
I tried to think about her knee against mine as Ms. Erlacher launched into a furious denunciation of the class’s performance on the last test—nice thematic continuance there, you administrative assholes! Although I myself had scored a ninety-seven, I was included in her indictment. But even setting aside Ms. Erlacher’s explosion, this was quite a memorable day in Latin class, for me. This was the day Virginia Werfell completely fucked up. Virginia, a girl famous for boning two guys at the same time, just blanked when Ms. Erlacher asked her to translate fifteen lines from the start of book two of the Aeneid, beginning with Infandum, regina, iubes renovare dolorem. This is how Aeneas opens his tale of the sack of Troy, in response to a request from Dido, the queen of Carthage. The line means, “O queen, you command me to know again pain beyond words.” Infandum is kind of a horrible concept: it indicates something so beyond comprehension it cannot be expressed: in (not) + fandum (to be spoken). And that’s the first word of Aeneas’s story! Which is kind of ironic, I guess, because he then goes on about
the fall of his city at considerable length. A weird way to begin, right? It suggests that maybe underneath all the talking there really is some intractable, inexpressible misery.
Needless to say, not only did Virginia fail to mention any of this, which is hugely important stuff in the context of the book, she couldn’t even come up with even a basic translation of it. She just stuttered and uhhed and ummed, like some dribbling retard. Ms. Erlacher started looking pissed off. So I stood up, my eyes closed and covered with my left hand, to show I wasn’t even using the book, and ran through what Virgil was saying (not neglecting to point out the startling fact that Aeneas calls his city’s defense against the Greek assault the supremum laborem of Troy, which means both the “worst travail” and the “supreme work”) and even went beyond the fifteenth line. Why stop at the appointed boundary, right? I got all the way to the part about the once-magnificent isle of Tenedos now being a dangerous, wasted harbor before Ms. Erlacher started repeating, “Addison. Addison. Addison, I didn’t call on you. Addison. Addison.” She just went on like that, I kept going, and all these nervous titters fluttered around in my private, eyes-covered darkness. I took pity, though, and stopped talking, and uncovered and opened my eyes. Virginia went back to stammering. Class continued. At the end, as I was walking out, someone called, “Addison. Addison. Addison.” I couldn’t tell if this was meant to mock me or Ms. Erlacher or what. So I did not turn around.