by Jess Walter
“Jousting?” Everson asked, and was immediately sorry.
We passed twice without touching, just holding our crutches out in front of us, but Pete was becoming impatient, and the third time Everson caught me in the shoulder with the rubber stopper on the bottom of his crutch. The impact spun me sideways and my front tire slammed into his back tire and we were both thrown onto our knees and elbows, instantly skinned, our bikes collapsed in a heap of spokes and gears.
“Motherfuck,” Pete said reverentially. The next day we shoplifted cigarettes and sunflower seeds and looked at dirty magazines. On and on the summer seemed destined to go, an ever-descending spiral. We drank bottles of sweet red wine that Pete liberated from a neighbor and took pills that Pete said were speed, although, again, the only thing I remember feeling was slightly sick and edgy. We broke into a garage and stole gasoline, which we proceeded to sniff until we were dizzy and sick. We used the rest of the gas to start fires, and burned things that Pete had stolen: purses and clothes and toys. We engaged in all of this behavior with no sense of fun or purpose—other than fighting off Pete Decker’s boredom, but that was enough. We feared Pete’s boredom far more than we feared being caught stealing or drunk.
“I’m bored,” Pete said one day, after he’d been out of juvie for about two weeks. “Let’s do something.” We sat in the draw between the rabbit hills, in the thick weeds, smoking one of Everson’s joints. He and I exchanged a worried glance, but Pete just stood up and wandered away and Everson and I sighed with relief.
The next morning, something felt different in my house. I wandered around the house, scratching my head, trying to put my finger on it. My parents didn’t seem to notice it, nor did my sisters or my brother. They went about their business, Dad getting ready for work at the cement plant, pulling on his coveralls and packing his aluminum lunch pail, Mom folding clothes, my brother and sisters eating their cereal in front of the TV. Dad couldn’t find his wallet and he stormed around a little bit, but finally he just headed off for work without it, kissing my mom and ruffling my hair, like I was still a little kid. Then it hit me. I ran back into my bedroom. Something was different in my room. The top of my dresser was clean. The top of my dresser where I kept my baseball cards. I looked behind the dresser, knowing that four hundred baseball cards were not going to fall back there. I checked the drawers and under my bed, and asked Ben if he’d taken them. He looked up from his Count Chocula cereal, a spot of milk on his lower lip, and then shook his head and turned away from me to the TV.
Pete. Pete Decker had broken into my house and stolen my father’s wallet and taken my baseball cards. He could have killed us or taken one of my little sisters away or…there was no telling the damage he could’ve caused, and there was nothing I could do. I went outside and threw a baseball against our front porch, grinding my teeth together.
“Hey, queer.”
I turned to see Pete standing in the street, Everson at his side, looking sheepish. They were both dressed in several layers of clothing, heavy winter coats and hats, making them appear to be bloated. It was already almost eighty degrees, and yet they stood there under heaps of heavy clothing, as if they were preparing for the final assault on Everest. I even forgot my stolen baseball cards for a minute, venturing toward them. “What—”
Pete held out a handgun. “You comin’?”
I must’ve looked horrified, because Pete laughed—giggled, almost. “Change your shorts, junior. It’s a BB gun.” And to prove it he turned and shot my neighbor’s German shepherd in the ass, sending it yelping around their yard. “Get dressed.”
“Where’d you get the guns?” I asked.
“Found ’em,” Pete said, and he smiled at me, a smile as cruel as that particular arrangement of lips and teeth can be made to appear.
Mom looked in on me as I put on sweatshirts and extra pants and my heaviest coat. “What are you doing, Clark?”
“Nothing.”
“But why are you dressing like that?”
I shot her a glare. “I’m not doing anything, Mom.”
She stared as if she didn’t know me. I went outside, and Pete and Everson began walking before I reached them, and together we headed down the street, bulked up in our winter clothes like the sons of some fat gunslinger. Pete tossed me the BB pistol he’d shown me; Everson was carrying one just like it, an air-powered gun that fired one BB at a time, in a slow arc that you could see from behind the gun. For his part, Pete had a more dangerous weapon, a rifle that shot pellets that gained speed by being pumped as many times as a bony pair of arms could pump.
Pete seemed giddy with the dangers that lay ahead as we walked across the rabbit hills and toward the river. “Fuckers ain’t gonna know what hit ’em.” He walked a few feet ahead of us and my fist kept tightening around the air pistol, watching his back, thinking about my baseball cards, about Pete roaming our house while we slept. I imagined the BB going into the back of his neck, then rolling him over and firing over and over into his face. Finally we reached the spot where Pete hid his stolen beer, marked with a two-by-four stuck in the ground, and Pete went into the woods and returned with three welding masks. He gave one to each of us and we put them on, lowering the green glass visors over our faces. We walked toward the river like valiant white trash, like knights of the end table, knights of the TV tray, knights of the white ghetto.
As we walked, Everson leaned in toward me and whispered, with dread, “We’re fighting Woodbridge. And some of his friends.” But I could only imagine killing Pete.
“Here’s what we do,” Pete said as we entered the rail yard above the river. “We pin ’em down in a gunfight, and while you guys keep ’em down, I’m gonna circle around and ambush the motherfuckers from behind. Got it?” He began pumping his rifle, bringing his arms together in a scissor motion until he strained against all the air pressure he’d built up in his gun. “You mother-fuckin’ got it?”
We nodded and kept walking. We heard them before we saw them. We had come down a hill onto the flats overlooking the river. They were in a stand of trees just on the other side of an old gravel pit at a bend in the river. Pete lowered his welding shield over his face. Then Everson lowered his. I tightened the strap on my forehead and lowered my shield. We ducked down. It was quiet: the only noises were the babbling river and my own breathing behind the dark-tinted welding mask.
We crept up on the stand of trees, Pete in the lead, Everson and I behind him. My hands were shaking and sweaty, the stand of trees suddenly empty.
“Crap,” Pete said, and almost as soon as he said it I felt a shot, like a bee sting on my hip. The air was filled with the popping of air guns. They had outflanked our plan to outflank them.
“Get down!” Pete yelled, and we did, diving for cover in the stand of trees that Woodbridge and his army had just evacuated. I remember seeing Pete dive forward, roll, and shoot back over his shoulder, the pneumatic thuck of his pellet gun. I fired too, a higher, popping sound, blindly aiming into the brush just above the river, where the shot had come from.
Pete yelled and Everson and I looked over, frightened, but he wasn’t hurt, just excited, pumping his gun and firing into the brush. “Come on, motherfuckers! Come on, Vietcong pussies!” Even through two shirts and a heavy coat my side hurt where I’d been shot, and I could feel a welt forming.
Everson and I pressed ourselves to the ground and fired over our heads as quickly as our single-shot BB pistols would allow us, pulling the trigger, then releasing the hammer and pushing it into place, firing again. Throwing the BBs would have been as effective. After a few minutes Pete slapped me on the shoulder, pointed with two fingers, ran his hand along his neck, gestured with his eyes, and ran away. Apparently our counterattack was beginning. I watched as he ran serpentine, bent at the waist until he disappeared into the brush along the river. We kept firing until we realized no one was shooting back. For a moment it was quiet.
Everson lay next to me, breathing as heavily as I must have been.
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br /> “Do we keep shooting, or what?” I asked.
He just shrugged. “It hurts,” he said, and he lifted his sleeves to show me a purplish bruise on the inside of his forearm.
“Yeah,” I said. We lay there on our stomachs, listening to the river.
Next to me, Everson fumbled in his coat pocket. I figured he was going to produce a joint; Pete got mad at him now if he was ever without dope. Instead he pulled out my George Hendrick baseball card, which had been folded in half.
I just stared at him.
“Pete sold ’em to me.”
“All of ’em?” I asked. I took the ruined card from him.
Everson nodded. “This morning. He came to my house and said I had to give him twenty bucks for all of ’em.”
“Were they all like this?”
“Burned or crinkled up or folded like that. I’m sorry, man. He’s an asshole.”
From the brush along the river we heard a few pops and we tensed, then a voice from far off: “Where are you guys?” Everson and I both started. It sounded like Pete.
“Were we supposed to follow him?” I asked.
“I don’t know,” Everson said.
There were a few more pops from down near the river. “Come on, you pussies!”
My side ached where I’d been shot. I looked over my shoulder, wondering if we could just run home.
But Everson pulled his shield back down over his face, and I did the same. I swallowed and stood, and Everson and I began running toward the river, our footfalls sounding like air rifle shots. I spun my head from side to side trying to find Woodbridge and the seventh-grade goons he stood with at the bus stop, but there was no one.
“Come on, you pussies!” Pete yelled again. His voice was coming from a draw along the riverbank that Everson and I were approaching. I tried to picture Woodbridge and his guys down there in the draw, with Pete pinned down between them. I imagined Everson and me bursting into their camp—which looked in my mind like a machine gun nest from one of those black-and-white war movies my dad watched—and spraying Woodbridge’s army with BB’s. But in my mind it was Pete I would be shooting, firing over and over into his sinewy body, my baseball cards falling from his pockets.
When we reached the top of the draw, we could see what had happened. Pete was at the bottom of a short depression, pinned down by Woodbridge and his friends on the far end of the draw. From the lip of the draw, I could see Pete’s back, as he pressed himself into the ground, and I could see Woodbridge’s guys at the other end, their air guns now trained on Everson and me. There were three quick pops, like the first popcorn in an air popper, and on my left Everson yelled “Ow!” and fell. I watched him go down as something zipped past my head, but I kept running, my breath heavy behind the welding mask. Somehow none of the shots hit me, and I just kept running toward Pete, my air gun now trained on his back, my teeth clenched.
Woodbridge and his guys fired another volley, and I heard one of the shots ping off the welding shield. Finally I dipped into the depression where Pete was hiding, and they couldn’t hit me anymore. I lifted the mask away from my face and stared down on Pete, who cowered there before me. I was amazed at how small he looked from this angle, realized for the first time, maybe, that Pete was just a kid like us, same skin and bones and lean muscle. I was five feet from him when he spun around suddenly, deep fear in his eyes, his pellet rifle pointed at my face.
It felt like someone hit me with a bottle or a baseball bat. My head snapped back and I dropped to the sand. I reached up to cover my face. Something warm and gooey mashed between my fingers. I wondered what could have been in the bottle that I’d been hit with. I tried to open my eyes, but there was a rush of pain and everything went a dark purple and that color was my pain for just a minute, so that I could see how badly this hurt and it was a pain that I could hear, too, a scream that came from deeper than my voice box, deeper than my lungs, and I was surprised to hear it sounded like my voice. I screamed until my air was all gone.
I could hear Pete’s voice, too: “Oh fuck!”
I was rolling around on the ground, both hands covering my left eye. The world seemed to expand into this purple and then contract, all of the pain and blood and everything pulling back into the socket of my left eye.
I pried my right eye open and blearily looked up to see Pete running away, climbing the bank of the draw. He was pulling Everson with him.
“Wait,” I said quietly, but they were gone.
There was no noise except the trickling river at my side. I began to cry. That brought more of the purplish pain, and I felt like throwing up. My hands were covered with blood now, and I pulled them away and the blood ran down my face and pooled in the sand. I put my hands back on my face, thinking maybe I could hold my eye in its socket. I lay there a few minutes, moaning and trying to figure out the sinewy things I felt against my fingers.
I stood and fell back into the sand, the pain seeking out new levels. I got back up and began walking. I made it a few steps and sat down in the sand again. I got to my knees and threw up. That’s when I fell back in the sand, beaten. I couldn’t do it. My first thought that wasn’t pain was that they would name an award for me, as they had done with Woodbridge’s dead brother. I hoped Ben would fare better without me than Woodbridge had without his older brother.
I lay back in the sand and cried, suddenly picturing my mother standing on our porch, wondering where I was. “Here I am!” I yelled, and the salty tears boiled in my mangled eye. Then I just started yelling and crying, scratching around in the sand, panicking, I guess. I don’t know how long I yelled and cried but finally I felt a hand on my chest, patting me, reassuring me, and at first I thought it was my mom, but then I realized that Everson had come back. Of course he had.
“It’s okay,” Everson said.
I opened my right eye and stared into the black-rimmed glasses of Eli Boyle.
“It’s okay,” Eli said again. “I called for help.” And he held my hand.
The lady smiled; for the gallantries of a one-eyed man are still gallantries.
—Voltaire, “The One-Eyed Porter”
III
CRIMINALS ARE NOT EARLY RISERS
1 | CAROLINE, GO HOME
Caroline, go home.” Her sergeant interrupts her midstream, although she wasn’t getting any closer to explaining why she’s let some loon waste the last five hours confessing, or how, at three o’clock Saturday morning, he’s still at it, hunched over his second legal pad and his fourth cup of coffee, no end in sight.
“Just go home,” her sergeant, Chris Spivey, says again from the other side of the phone. “Get your nut a bed somewhere. We’ll roust him Monday morning and he can tell us all about how the aliens probed his ass.” Spivey is the first sergeant she’s worked for who is younger than she is; at first she found this merely disconcerting, but now he seems like any other boss, officious and rigid, and apparently none too thrilled about getting a phone call at three in the morning. “Caroline, I won’t authorize overtime for this.”
“I didn’t call for overtime,” she says. “But what if there’s something here?”
“Lock him up. Commit him. Shoot him. I don’t care. Just go home.”
She sighs and looks back through the window at the Loon. He turns the legal pad over and begins writing on the back of the page, in a small and controlled cursive, the way she’s seen delusional people write in the margins of phone books and on countertops. “Okay,” she says into the phone.
“What’s the matter with you, anyway?” he asks. “Where’s your head these days?”
A fair question, that.
She’s been checked out, barely functioning, coming to work and sitting at her desk, taking hours to fill out the simplest reports, forgetting phone numbers and names. It’s no better at home, where she sits down on the couch and forgets to take off her coat, or sits at the kitchen table, or surfs the Internet until dawn, bidding on things she doesn’t need in online auctions: parasols and turnta
ble needles, laser printers and fishing lures. Two nights ago she played chess in a chat room. She hates chess.
Where’s your head?
The last few months have felt like someone else’s life: surprised at her own behavior, watching silently over her own shoulder, wondering when she started liking bourbon, why she doesn’t shower on the weekends anymore, when she started playing chess. It’s a symptom of depression, maybe, this feeling of detachment from oneself. Sometimes she retraces her steps, examines the last five months for the moment she began drifting—her mother’s death, her boyfriend moving out, the retirement of her best friend and the man she quietly pined away for, her former sergeant, Alan Dupree.
But she came through all of those things. No, this started later, after Caroline interrupted a guy who was about to murder a young hooker—a whisper of a girl named Rae-Lynn Pierce. At some point it dawned on Caroline that in fifteen years as a police officer, this girl, Rae-Lynn, was the only person she’d ever really saved. Maybe there were potential victims of criminals that she arrested, people whose lives were better off because of Caroline’s actions, but those were abstractions, shadows. They were certainly not real people that she could point to and name. Rae-Lynn Pierce was real, and she was alive because of Caroline.
That’s why, if she had to pick the moment when everything finally went to shit, when she lost focus and found herself dreaming of giving up, it would have to be the day three months ago when she heard that Rae-Lynn was dead, from an untreated case of hepatitis. Six weeks. That’s how much time Caroline had given Rae-Lynn Pierce.
After that, Caroline began to lose interest. But it was more than a professional crisis; it was as if she had walked for fifteen years, only to find herself at the gorge of middle age, alone. She began to think of it as exactly that sort of transaction—fifteen years of her life for six weeks of an addict’s fuckups. She fell asleep in meetings, stared out from her desk, let cases stagnate. Spivey moved her to nights, and her depression got worse, more isolated, darker.