The November Criminals: A Novel

by Sam Munson

  Postering, after all, is one of those skills that you learn only if you’re involved in some stupid group activity. Putting on a play. Or advertising some political protest or whatever. A lot of the kids in G&T do this, put up political flyers that they get secondhand from older siblings. Or in some cases from Mr. Vanderleun, who believes himself to be a real inspirer of youth, and wants to bring our social consciences to new and passionate life. The art of postering was alien to me, because I’d never participated in anything, play or protest. And if Mr. Vanderleun ever gave me flyers to hand out, I would have dumped them in the trash. Not that he trusted me. He gave them to his in-class henchpeople, foremost among them Alex Faustner. As a result, I was über-terrible at it, when I started. I see that now. I did not understand what I was doing. When you poster, you’re asking the Great Anonymous for help. The fervency has to be like sublimated. Not that it’s praying. Not that I pray.

  I’ve thought about it. Praying, I mean. But what’s the point? What you want to happen never happens anyway, by definition. And the one thing I’d ever wanted badly enough to pray for—that my mother not be dead, I mean—well, according to my cursory readings on the subject, you’re not even supposed to ask for that. For the past to be different. Some Catholic theologians even say that God Himself cannot change the past. Which is one of the paradoxes inherent in the idea of omnipotence, I guess. Or just part of the natural comedy of our higher aspirations. Mr. Dwight, my religion teacher, is the one who told me about that theory of omnipotence. He’s actually been everything from a Buddhist to a Trappist monk. So I have a weird respect for his opinion. Although I think that if the God of the Jews wanted to change the past, he could. For all the ambivalence about him in the Bible and stuff, you kind of have to believe in his limitless power. Which is maybe why the Jews get shit on by history so much. In compensation.

  You’re getting off topic again, Addison! That’s no way to behave! Sorry. Once I cooled down, once I lost the postering habits of a fervent Stalinist, I started using our city’s public transportation systems. Which in D.C. comprise buses and subways. You can get anywhere by subway or bus. You just have to use the two in conjunction with each other, because the subway is built on the same plan as the streets: axial lines crossing uneven concentric rings. So you miss a lot of fertile ground if you stick to the subways. But if you use the buses, you can get by. I bought student monthly passes, these demure pink cards. They give you the same color if you’re a senior citizen, I think. The subways in D.C. are constructed, city lore claims, to withstand nuclear attacks. I doubt this is true. You can trace the blackened rust-bloomed courses of leaks from the street, rain runoff. Sometimes, in the grates over the railside fluorescents, moss and tendriled plants even sprout from fallen seeds, watered from above and lit from below. The stations themselves have high, soaring ceilings paneled in pressed concrete, the damp odor of which permeates the still air. Subaqueous whitish light makes everyone look lost and unhappy there, and weak. The trains stink of tatty fabric and usually of urine or dog. You have to feed your ticket into a thick-lipped reader twice: there’s no standard fare; it’s calculated by distance. The employees hide in dark aquaria, irregular polygons of glass, and if you go up to ask them anything you can see the blind glow of the security monitors, and sometimes even a walleyed version of yourself bent to the metal mouthpiece in supplication. Ochre hexagonal tiles. Ochre bulwarks. Long waits. Officious and ineffectual cops: wavers-back from the platform edge and bike ticketers. Misery. And indifferent, bureaucratic malice.

  Our buses are fine, though. Blue and white, tinted with the free-floating gray filth of cities, yes, but still blue and white. Kind of noble colors. Hard to say why. A lot of graffiti scratched into the Plexiglas windows. Kids use chunks of concrete or razor blades to do this. Not so many obscenities. Just the announcement of names, an understandable desire. Some of the buses are old, dating back to when you could smoke on public transport. Before black people were allowed to sit at the front. Some of them are newer, but they’re still uncomfortable and ridiculous-looking. Always late, too, and the drivers are surly exiles from the human race. I started developing eye-meeting relationships with some of them, despite this. I never learned their names, so I made up designations: Doctor Shortcakes, Fat-ass McGee, Madame Sassy, the King of Comedy. The King of Comedy was this crumple-faced old man with a shrub of white hair, who mumbled incomprehensible jokes and monologues into his mike the whole ride. There and back. He drove the M2 on weekday afternoons and evenings. “Mama lama hama namahamanownow wamalamanow.” Then the digital voice system, sexless and happy to assist, would announce the stop, and the King would go back to orating. “Nah teya damalamanamanow!” I think he was close to retirement.

  Despite the problematic means, you can get anywhere. And I did. I just went blindly, getting off after a random number of stops and, with supreme coolness, postering a neighborhood. I got some looks, I’ll admit. But being young deflected most of those. Nobody really cares, if you look like you’re under eighteen, which I definitely do. Even in a for-shit pseudocity you can find facelessness. I did this before and after school, and on the weekends, so I saw neighborhoods at their most vulnerable, full of sleepy, irritable people or relaxed and happy ones. Once, at the edge of a crowded shopping plaza, I even saw David Cash, and we locked eyes. But he turned away with a visible smirk of disgust. Didn’t even faze me. The weight in my backpack of the posters still to hang comforted me. I put up my quota—getting one on a barbershop window, which I asked the barber guy if it was okay, something I’d ordinarily feel too awkward to do. I was proud of that one. It was goldenrod, and it stood out like a petal in the midst of all the city colors, brick and asphalt. Like it was natural.

  Every day I did this. I should have said that before, but I thought it deserved its own space. Because it was such an undertaking. And it had zero returns. I did not get a single page about it. Maybe people thought it was suspicious because I’d put a pager number, which has certain connotations. Every time I saw an unfamiliar number march across the dented strip of my grayish screen, I got this queasy heartsickness. But they only ever wanted to arrange a time to buy weed. I consented, lips cold with disappointment. The thing about selling more drugs is that word tends to get around that you have more, and it can actually increase the demand. There’s some stupid economics term for this, I have no doubt. But economics is an elective at Kennedy, and I opted to take religion. Our economics teacher, Ms. Mehta, is as wide as she is tall. Which maybe is why I didn’t take economics. Nonetheless: that’s the choice. So I have no idea what the correct term is. I only have my practical firsthand knowledge, which, if you lack proper credentials, is worthless. Otherwise I’d be able to write a book. About stupidity. About how to get no results.

  This failed to change my ambitions. I just kept on with the procedure: make copies, hang them up, wait. Isn’t that someone’s definition of insanity? To do the same thing over and over while expecting different results? You kind of get a picture of a guy in a straitjacket bashing his forehead into a white-padded wall, or someone picking up every scrap of tinfoil they see outside, or someone counting out loud, all the time, and waiting for the moment of their redemption. What I was doing bears a family resemblance to those activities. I can admit that now. I remember the day my second clutch of posters ran out, because the bus I was on broke down, not far from my neighborhood. I’d made five hundred copies, in vivid colors—violet, sky, and grass—and included Kevin’s picture. The one from the yearbook, the one Digger had given me, that showed Kevin poised with his enormous saxophone. It came out fuzzed and somehow more tragic-looking. But it added a heretofore missing human element to the posters. Which would make responses more likely, I figured. It was evening, green and purple. It gets that way here in the late fall, the light, I mean, these lurid colors. I’d done a good afternoon’s work. My legs burned. And then the bus, with a flatulent, mephitic, mechanical grunt, jarred itself to a halt and we all jerked forward in our seats,
releasing a unitary cry of consternation. We were on Connecticut Avenue, near the Maryland border. Pretty close to the Camelot, actually. The King of Comedy was driving. He sounded delighted to explain our trouble: “Hamanowlamanownowmamanow!”

  After this rhythmic and vowel-heavy announcement, I stood and walked to the front, where he cranked the door lever with a decisive and memorable motion of his forearm, and I trotted off of Connecticut, onto one of the residential streets, tree-lined and hard to tell from my own, though the houses were bigger and in better shape. Some of them had those fake gas lamps out by the curb, extending metal arms from which hung the numbers of the address. Each number on its own armorial plate. Some had beards of ivy hiding their cross-timbers. It was that universal hour of warm interior light among the bourgeoisie. You could see families at dinner, or on separate floors. I heard a kid practicing drums with incompetent vigor. And I kept on walking into the dusk. I’d recognized the street: McKinley, named after the first president to use the telephone for campaigning and the sole one to be assassinated by an anarchist. My bag was light. Kevin’s file, a pack of smokes, and nothing else. A sudden, stupid happiness settled on me. McKinley Street was familiar to me, though I had not set foot on this block of it before. Why the familiarity, you ask? Because of a certain house on this street: 3549. I was just leaving the 3400 block now, the street signs informed me, and my throat was thick with giddy joy. It was an omen. Proof that I was doing the right thing. That all my (so far) fruitless drag-assing through the streets of my shithole of a hometown had meaning and purpose. Do you know who once lived at 3549 McKinley? Do I even need to tell you?

  His parents, I now assumed, panting like a hound, were still there. So let me introduce them a bit. Because you’re only going to get a fleeting glimpse of them in what follows. Stanford Broadus, Kevin’s father, was born in Grimshawes, North Carolina, in 1948. He studied at the Franklin Institute, an historically African American college—how pretentious is that an! Thanks, Archer B. Sexton, you goddamn motherfucker!—graduating with a master’s in public administration. His mother, Ellen Maskelyne, graduated from Antioch College in 1964, and then from Columbia Law School in 1967, after which she was employed by Godwin Howe—an historically African American firm. Who was copyediting you, Archer B. Sexton, you cocksucker! The Broaduses have been D.C. residents since 1970. Kevin, their only child, was born in the spring of 1981. (March 19, according to the article.) Kevin’s legacy as a student at John F. Kennedy Senior High School is perhaps best expressed in the words of Conrad Vanderleun, an English teacher in the Gifted and Talented Program there: “Kevin was a strong and quiet presence, though blessed with a genuine musicality, a strong rhythm. He’ll be remembered and missed.” Can you believe a human being would write that way? Our species is a disgusting one. Though you’ve determined that already from observing me.

  Five minutes’ walk and I was there. Not a kid in the street. My cigarette tasted sweeter than normal. Or more complicated. It hurt my lungs more than usual too, which I welcomed. The wind, just barely, worked over the stripped branches. Ten or so yards away from the house, I stopped walking. I could see even from a distance 3549 was largish, with those unbearable, sad green shutters, like leaves of a useless plant, and a trained yew hedge around the front, flashing its poisonous flame-orange berries. A brick walk, of which each brick looked dusted. But all these undeniable facts interested me much less than the tall, paunched figure I watched emerge from the front door and climb into a dark blue sedan, whose engine sputtered to life. Kevin’s father, going about some trivial evening task. I almost puked from happiness. The car passed my way, and I caught one frame of Mr. Broadus in the driver’s seat. His face was calm, empty. Faint music, a piano, wafted out of his car, despite the closed windows. The car made the corner and chuffed away, taking the undertone of music with it. I ground out my smoke and kept trotting and panting, my feet lighter than ever. I was about to lose contact with the pavement. Just a few more paces, and I arrived at the first lip of the brick walk. Couldn’t go forward, at least not for a long minute. I watched a light traveling in the house from window to window, a dutiful servant. The blue aura of television wavered in an upper bedroom. My breath tasted of smoke and leaves, of some burning. Sweat rilled down my rib cage, tickling me. I swear to fucking God I could feel every hair on my scalp and forearms.

  The brick walk gleamed in the streetlight. I didn’t know how long it would be before Mr. Broadus returned. But I had to act. I had no plan, just this ungovernable tide of impulse. And before I could stop myself I’d dashed to the front door and thumbed the brass handle. The door was unlocked. I guess I’d been subconsciously counting on this. In Kevin’s neighborhood many don’t lock their doors. A fact Noel pointed out to me once. I hadn’t even thought of entering the house, at first. I hadn’t even wanted to. Now I was fumbling with the door, conspicuous as a government. A stripped finger of elm branch kept scraping the roof slate. It was the last thing I heard before I crossed the threshold. The house, inside … holy fuck! The air warm and heavy. The intoxicating scent of floor polish, and some common but unidentified spice. Doilies, looking leprous as always. And glass-fronted cabinets. One of which contained thirty-one (yes, I counted; what else did I have to do?) porcelain parrots of varied color and size. All that was missing was a table of votive candles, to add the waxy scent of holiness. I wandered on tiptoe around the living room, fingering the openwork lace of the doilies, pressing my palms against the parrot cabinet. There was a grandfather clock as tall as I am next to the kitchen entrance, at the rear of the room. It needed winding. Seemed to have been in disrepair long enough for its counterweights to be cowled with grime, which I fingered off in streaks. Nose-breathing the whole time. Sounding like some obscene phone caller, I have no doubt.

  I didn’t notice the whistling, for at least the initial moments of my trespassing. Mrs. Broadus was whistling to herself upstairs. She was good at it. A full tone, a steady breath. I picked out the melody with not too much effort. The opening aria, the theme, of the Goldberg Variations. Don’t think I’m some kind of classical music expert, just because I cite the Goldberg Variations so casually. I’m not. I don’t know anything about music, as I’ve said. It’s just that my father puts his record of the piece on our stereo a lot. And you have to admit it’s fairly goddamn memorable: a geometrical ascent of some mountain into the purest, liveliest solitude, some meadow where all human imperfection is gone. I love it. I hate it. It makes me clench my fists and jaw and curl my toes with tension.

  It was calling me upstairs. I decided that it was a sign, beckoning me upstairs. Moving was tricky. Staircases are loud, in movies and other situations where someone is trying to sneak around. In real life, too. I risked it, though. I couldn’t stop myself. As I climbed, taking these arched, agonized, careful steps, Kevin’s face at every age stared out of the pictures on the wall, ascending with me. All set in uniform black frames. He’d been even plumper as a child, with that fat-kid shine of jollity and fear in his eyes. Then he started resembling anyone (and everyone) else going through adolescence. He had the same chubby solid build his whole life. He looked capable of enduring anything. He got his glasses young. At eight or nine, these huge ones that made his round face even younger. He had a grin in that photo, with a missing tooth, a grin betraying no awareness of anything. And despite his submersion in the generality of adolescence, he had not lost this original childish smile as he aged. That’s rare. I can’t smile the way I did as a child. Being able to demonstrates some tremendous inner reserve.

  The pictures stopped when Kevin was seventeen. At the top of the stairs. Where I paused as well. No idea of where to go next. Luckily it was decided for me. A floorboard whined beneath my sole. The decorous whistle stopped and Mrs. Broadus called out, “Hello? Hello?” I held my breath and crouched. And a second later the whistling started again, taking up at the precise place she had stopped the recitation, and I tiptoed back downstairs. I couldn’t go forward. I just couldn’t bear it. I
sneaked back down into the Broadus’s orderly, crammed living room, and then into their kitchen.

  What I saw then made my stomach lurch. Not that what I saw was fucked-up. Just sort of nerdy in the way that parents overly concerned with decorating schemes are. It made me sick, though, because it was so domestic and well-executed. A sign of the life I was invading, I guess. It would have been totally impossible in my own house. They had decorated the whole room, with what looked like tremendous and painstaking effort, using fruit-themed objects. A clock in the shape of an orange, with a slice cut out from it between eleven and midnight. Alternating columns of pineapples and bunches of grapes stenciled on the walls. Pot holders the color of black cherries. Napkins emblazoned with nippled peaches piled up in the glass-fronted cabinets, next to dishes painted with images of papayas. Salt and pepper shakers shaped like red and green apples. Curtains printed with waterfalls of chemically yellow lemons. Every goddamn thing. And then I noticed—I swear this is true—a figurine about nine inches high, one of those hideous racist caricatures of black people, in a jockey outfit, embracing with both arms a huge, wet-looking watermelon standing on its end next to the spice rack. I fingered the manikin’s lumpy skull and stroked the melon in unbelief: ceramic, with a small dimpled handle on the upper end. A cookie jar, filled almost to the brim with gingersnaps. In retrospect, it kind of makes sense. I mean, like Digger and her nickname. A way of offering a preemptive fuck you to anyone with bad intentions. At the time, though, I was stunned. And amused, in a horrified way. Why would they have this? I thought, and smothered a laugh. Then I whispered, “I’m sorry, I’m sorry.” Out loud. To the dead, spiced air. My paltry voice disgusted me.