Guy Langman, Crime Scene Procrastinator

by Josh Berk

  Hairston’s address is easy enough to find—right there in the phone book. I sort of knew whereabouts it was anyway—a neighborhood you can walk to from mine—not that I’ve ever ventured over there. No one did, really. I’m feeling sort of bad for old Penis-Head, which is the wrong frame of mind to begin a manly confrontation. I walk over there, slowly cruising up and down the wide streets, past the beautiful lawns and enormous houses. How can so much weird shit go down in a place like this?

  I get to Hairston’s place and no, it doesn’t have a sign out front announcing it as “Danforth Manor” or “Casa de Penis-Head,” but it really is a mansion with a gate out front and everything. Why would Hairston steal? Is he really a drug addict? My stomach sinks. What if he already sold the coins for drug money? Or for whatever type of money? The coins could be gone. Gone. Gone. Gone. Every link to my father feels sacred. I can’t stand the idea of losing any of it … Plus, given the sad state of the Langman finances, that could be my college tuition right there. (Yeah, yeah, I’m getting around to applying. Don’t tell Anoop, though. He might wet himself.)

  To get past the gate, you have to ring a buzzer. I press the small silver button and after a few seconds recognize the sleepy voice coming out of a speaker. It’s like being at a fast-food restaurant. “Hello,” he says.

  “Yeah, I’ll have a cheeseburger and a seasoned curly fries,” I say. I can’t help it. It really feels like a drive-thru.

  “Piss off,” he says.

  “Dude, it’s Guy Langman!” I yell, before he can break the connection. He probably thinks I’m some kid playing a prank.

  “I know,” he says. “There’s a camera. I can see who it is. That’s why I said ‘Piss off.’ ”

  “What did I ever do to you?” I yell. When I pictured this conversation going down, I didn’t picture it being an argument with a drive-thru speaker and a hidden camera.

  “I don’t know,” he says after a long while. Then he adds, “What do you want?”

  “Can I come in?” I ask.

  “Are you alone?”

  “Yes,” I say, feeling sort of creeped out that he asked. “Just me. Left the troops back at the barracks.”

  He doesn’t say anything, but I hear a soft click and the gate swings open. I make my way up the long, winding path to the front door, which also softly clicks open before I even have to open it.

  “Sweet system,” I say, as Hairston meets me in the foyer. “Doors open themselves, hidden cameras, not bad.”

  He shrugs. “Makes my parents feel safe leaving me here, I guess. Since they’re never home.”

  “Away on business again?” I ask.

  “Yeah,” he says.

  “Cool, cool.”

  It is then that I notice the gun.

  This changes things somewhat. I’m about to confront Hairston with a crime. I’m prepared, if necessary, to go to the level of fisticuffs. But a shootout is not something I bargained for. Hairston sees me seeing the gun. It’s a long old shotgun or something, sitting on a small table at the bottom of the stairs.

  “You know, some of the rumors about me are true,” he says.

  “You really are an arms dealer?”

  “No, not that,” he says. “That’s just one of my dad’s toys. You know rich men and their collections.”

  “Well, please don’t shoot me!” I say. I try to make it a joke, but really, I’m scared. It turns out that I’m scared for good reason. Hairston reaches for the gun and I leap into action. I grab him sort of awkwardly by the shoulders and he elbows me in the stomach. It hurts and I grunt, but I don’t let go. I adjust my grip and end up securing him in a side headlock. I elbow him in the ear somehow.

  “Let go of me!” he shrieks.

  “No way. Not until you put down the gun.”

  “Never!” he says.

  I twist his head harder, and am able to kick the gun out of his hand while still holding him in a headlock. The gun clatters to the floor, echoing on the hardwood. I chuck him across the room and dive for the gun. I grab it and point it at Hairston.

  “Oh my God, Hairston. You really were going to kill me.”

  “Dude, it’s a two-hundred-year-old musket,” he says, rubbing his ear. “I don’t even think it works. It doesn’t even have bullets, or musket balls or whatever. And it takes forever to load. How did we even win the Revolutionary War?”

  “Um, I really am not sure?” I say. Still, I keep the gun pointed at him. “But I’m guessing you know why I’m here. Speaking of old men and their collections.”

  “Yeah,” he says.

  “Why did you steal my coins?”

  Silence. Then he sighs.

  “I knew I shouldn’t have gone to that stupid Forensics Squad,” he says. “Terrible idea for a thief to let someone get their prints on file.”

  I repeat the question. I still have the gun pointed at him, even though I know it doesn’t work.

  “Put the gun down,” he says. He gives me a totally blank look. He’s good, I’ll give him that much. A real stone-faced Penis-Head.

  “You’ll explain all this to me?” I say.

  “Sure,” he says. “Fine. I’m sorry. I really am. I have this problem … I don’t know why I take things. I don’t need the money. Dr. Waters says it’s just a power thing.”

  “Hey, you go to Dr. Waters too?” I ask.

  “You go there?”

  “Yeah. My mom made me go after my dad died. Dr. Waters is okay. I don’t love it or anything.”

  “Yeah, Dr. Waters is okay. I think she’s right about the power thing. I feel so powerless or whatever in most of my life that I do this to control the situation. The more difficult the theft, the more I’m drawn toward it. I’ve started picking pockets too. I’m weirdly good at it. Dr. Waters says it’s a bad sign that I’m stealing from people. Funny thing is, one time I did it right in her office. I stole some North Berry Ridge kid’s wallet right in her waiting room. Her secretary caught me, though, and I had to give it back …”

  I jump up. “Voilà!”

  “Don’t check your wallet, Guy, I didn’t take it, I promise.”

  “No,” I say. “It’s not that. Was the North Berry Ridge kid Toby Weingarten?”

  “Who?”

  “That’s the kid who, uh, killed himself at the golf course when we were doing our forensics project.”

  “Oh yeah, now that you mention it, his face did look familiar when I saw it on the news … Yeah, I think it was him.”

  “I know.”

  “I didn’t kill him, though, if that’s what people are saying.”

  “I know that,” I say.

  “I totally remember it now. I don’t think he even noticed that I took his wallet until the secretary pointed it out. She made me give it back, but I had already emptied the contents into my pocket. No one even noticed. I’m good.”

  “He was pretty messed up. And you are a really good thief.”

  “Thank you, thank you. Now I just need to work on finding a less, you know, illegal skill set.”

  “You’ll get there, Hairston. I never thought I’d be good at anything, and look at me—tracking down killers, identifying whorls, dusting for prints …”

  “Except, you know, there weren’t really any killers. Kind of a weird mystery.”

  “Right, well … you know, life itself is a mystery sometimes. It’s up to all of us to solve it.”

  “You’re deep, Guy Langman,” he says. “Is that from your sad journal?”

  “No. Shut up.”

  “So I’ll go get the coins. I have them upstairs.”

  “You still want Lisa Baker?” I ask, feeling generous.

  “You’ve moved on from analog to digital porn?” he asks.

  “Hairston, I’ve moved on from analog porn to reality porn,” I say.

  “Wait, what? You’ve become a porn star?”

  “No, I mean, she’s just, it’s that, I mean—we haven’t even held hands yet. I don’t know why I said that. It sounded a lot les
s gross in my head. Forget it. I just mean, there might be a girl I like. A real girl. Born in recent decades, not a seventy-year-old lady who took her top off for money amidst articles about Norman Thomas, world’s worst presidential candidate. Nothing against Lisa Baker, of course.”

  “You read the articles?”

  “Totally. Some good stuff in there. I totally know the best places to ski in Europe now. You know, in 1966. Now if we only had skis.”

  “And a time machine.”

  “Ha-ha. You’re all right, Hairston. You’re all right.” I realize that this is a strange thing to say to a dude with whom I so recently had fisticuffs, but he’s okay.

  He comes back down in a second and my heart soars as I see the old cigar box. “So listen, Guy, I’m really sorry. Thanks for not calling the police or anything.”

  “No problem, Hair-Bear. Just, you know, keep seeing Dr. Waters. Tell that Slippery Rock diploma and the fish that GL says howdy.”

  “You don’t think you’ll be going back?”

  “You know, Hair-Bear, I don’t think I will. Fifth stage, here I come …”

  “What is the fifth stage, a bar or something like that?”

  “Something like that, Hair. Something like that.”

  CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT

  Maureen, TK, and I are at my house again. Just hanging out. Anoop and Raquel are off drinking double-tall soy lattes or whatever. Forensics Squad is over, disbanded. Soon the school year will be over too. Then summer vacation and—oh man—senior year.

  “I am really bummed, though,” I say. I’m filling them in on how I confronted Hairston to get my coins back. I’m showing TK the headlock. It’s pretty fierce. I leave out the part about the Lisa Baker mag. No need exactly to bring that up.

  “It did go okay,” I say. “Only bummer is that I didn’t get a chance to deliver an action-hero zinger. I have lots of good lines ready.”

  “Oh, I know you do,” Maureen says.

  “You should have met him in Zant’s room—you could have gone with, ‘There’s something fishy going on here,’ ” TK says.

  “I already used that one earlier. Like eight times.”

  “Looks like you’re a fish out of water?” he suggests.

  “Meh,” I say. But then I get excited about something. I had been trying to figure out what kind of music I really like, inspired by Maureen’s making fun of me. I had done some searching online and came across a band called the Dead Milkmen who I clicked on just because the name is funny. They had a song called “Swordfish!” The lyric is “I believe in swordfish” for some absurd reason.

  “How about if I said, ‘I believe in swordfish,’ like the Dead Milkmen song?” I say.

  “You know about the Dead Milkmen?” Maureen says, cocking an eyebrow, obviously impressed.

  “Yeah!” I say. “I’ve been, you know, trying to find myself or whatever.”

  “Let me know what you find,” she says, and punches me in the arm. But then she adds, “Most people aren’t going to know who the Dead Milkmen are, so I don’t know if it really counts as a quality quip. Count me as impressed, though.”

  “Yeah,” I say.

  “Hey, maybe,” Maureen says, getting really excited, “you could have pretended like you were at a restaurant and said: ‘Waiter, I’ll have the fish!’ And then stabbed him and added, ‘The swordfish.’ ”

  I laughed. “Yeah! That could work.”

  “I’m going to get going,” TK says. “Let you two have some time together.”

  “Why would we want that?” I say, suddenly nervous.

  TK rolls his eyes. “Someday, that Guy becomes a man. And someday that Guy takes your hand,” he says.

  “Omigod, you read those?!” she says. “I’m so embarrassed!”

  “Don’t be,” I say.

  “You read it too?” she says, blushing hard. “It’s so emo.”

  “They’re on the Internet, Maureen. Not exactly a secret,” TK says.

  “They are sweet. I’ve been doing some writing lately too, you know,” I say.

  “Will you share it with me?” she asks.

  “I will,” I say. “I will.”

  Well, damn, it’s all on the table now. TK bids us adieu. I’m alone with Maureen. Um, what to do now? I break out my notebook. It’s not black ink on black paper. Nothing that dramatic. Just regular pen and paper. I show her the stuff I had written about my dad, even the embarrassing parts, which is pretty much all of it. The book started out as a collection of things Dad said, then became a biography, then it’s just my sad journal. It is weird, sitting there in the room with her, watching her read that notebook. It is like letting someone into my brain. It feels wrong, but right at the same time, if that makes any sense. She reads in silence for a long, long time.

  “We need to burn this,” she says.

  “That bad?” I ask.

  “No! Not bad at all! You are a good writer, Guy, really good.”

  “So good that it, my only written work, needs to be incinerated?”

  “It would be the perfect gesture. We burn it and pour the ashes over his grave.”

  “Um, is this some sort of weird Goth thing?”

  “It’s a human thing, turd. It will be the perfect way to say good-bye.”

  “I’m not sure I want to say good-bye.”

  “You need to say good-bye. You need to realize that the pain you feel is real and that the only way to go on living is to go on living.”

  “Hey, that sounds like something Dad would have said.”

  “You need to stop worrying about everything he ever said and instead think about the way he lived his life. And you need to realize that some of his advice was incredibly dumb.”

  “Hey!” I protest. It’s true, though. “And he was really a jerk to my brother,” I say. “I’ll tell you about him sometime …”

  “I’d like that,” she says.

  I pause. I pause for a long time, trying to hold the space of sixteen years, of sixty years, of a lifetime, in just a few moments. Maybe it is time to put some of this behind me. Maybe it’s okay to admit that Dad pissed me off sometimes. His sick game, pretending to be dead. And it’s definitely wrong how he treated Jacques. And maybe it’s wrong the way Mom never let herself grieve. Maybe it’s all wrong. Maybe …

  “You’re saying I need to forget the book?”

  “Forget the book, Guy,” she says. “Not because it’s not good, because it is! But forget the book and go on with life. It’s what he would have wanted.”

  “It’s what he would have wanted.”

  Neither of us has a car, and this doesn’t seem like the kind of mission we could ask moms or friends to drive us to. So we walk. It is a long walk. At first we talk. She asks me about Raquel, totally smoothly working it into the conversation. “Who cares?” I say. Anoop and Raquel are a thing, or whatever. And maybe it’ll work out for them. I wish him the best of luck.

  Maureen and I reach the narrow shoulder of the busy main road through Berry Ridge, making it so I have to walk behind her. Single file like kindergartners on a field trip. It makes it hard to hold hands. Is that something that I want? Yes. It also makes it hard to talk. There is much to say, but somehow the silence feels comfortable too. Not that it is exactly silent. The constant grind of engine noise and the whir of passing cars fills my brain, but it still feels like I am on a mission up a mountain. Revelation is where you find it, my friends. That’s a Guy Langman original.

  We reach Berry Ridge Cemetery. It is bright and green and sunny. Flowers and beautiful displays. You could almost forget this is a place where dead bodies are stacked beneath the ground. I show Maureen the plot where Dad is buried. It feels so strange to be there in this private place with someone else. It is like letting a friend watch you go to the bathroom for the first time. I need to work on my metaphors, clearly.

  “There it is,” I say.

  “Why doesn’t he have an inscription on his gravestone?” she asks.

  “He never wanted
one.”

  “Really?”

  “His will said he didn’t need one. I never really knew why. But when I was in his room the other day, looking for golfing clothes, I think I found the reason.”

  “Really?”

  “Yeah.” I reach into my pocket. I had been carrying the piece of paper with me at all times. I read it to Maureen: “ ‘I do not need a statue. I do not need a biography written of me. I do not need plaques hung on walls or words written in stone. The world will remember me well enough when I’m gone. Because I had sons.’ ” I start to cry. “Thanks, Dad,” I say. I wipe my eyes. “Sorry. That’s weird. I don’t know. I talk to him sometimes.”

  “No, that’s really sweet,” she says, and takes my hand. Her hand is hot, and a little wet. But I like it. It feels right.

  “Maybe I should tell Jacques about this. Maybe it would make him feel better,” I say.

  “That’s really sweet of you.”

  “He’s a pretty cool guy. I’d like for you to meet him. He made fun of Anoop’s coffee.”

  “That earns him points in my book.”

  “Want to take the bus into the city someday?”

  “I’d like that.”

  It feels like she wants me to say more, but somehow nothing more needs to be said. There is silence. Our little ritual happens in silence. I take the papers, the handwritten pages of my book, and set them on the ground. She takes a lighter out of her pocket. She hands it to me so that I may do the honors. I light the corner and … I’m not sure what I feel. All that work! But it does seem right. Very right. It burns, the smoke pluming upward to the sky like a hand waving good-bye.

  “Good-bye,” I say.

  “Do you talk to him a lot?” she asks.

  “Yeah. All the time. And this is really weird. Sometimes he talks back. He even gives me crime-solving advice.”