Voice of our Shadow

by Jonathan Carroll

  "Who did?"

  "The little fuck over there by the door. The orange sweater."

  "A jerk, huh?"

  I wouldn't look up. I wanted to close my eyes, but I didn't. I saw the lower half of Hanley push through his entourage and walk toward me. He grabbed my ear and pulled it up next to his mouth.

  "You called me a jerk?"

  "Leave the kid alone, Hanley."

  Still holding me tight, Bobby told the janitor to fuck off.

  "I asked you a question, scumbag. I'm a jerk?"

  "You're not supposed to smoke in the gym. Ow!"

  "Says who, scumbag? Who's going to stop me?"

  Silence. People moved around us. I was so scared and ashamed. I had no guts. Everyone in the world was looking at me. No one knew who I was, but that made no difference. Whoever I was, I was a chickenshit. Hanley was slowly tearing my ear off. I was sure I could hear little things coming apart in there: muscles from bone, soft little membranes and hairs like the thinnest spiderwebs . . . His friends stood around us in a semicircle, delighted to be part of the scene.

  "Listen to me, scumbag." He stepped forward and planted his heel on top of my sneaker. He shoved down on it; I yelped as the pain soared up through my body. I started to cry. "Scumbag's crying now. Why're you crying?"

  Where was Vince? Where was my father? My brother? My brother – ha! Even then, in the midst of that scene, I knew if Ross had been around he would've laughed himself sick.

  "Hey, Bobby, Madeleine's waiting for you."

  I looked directly at him for the first time. He was much shorter than I'd thought. Who was Madeleine? Was he going to go away now?

  "Look, scummy, don't you ever let me see you around here again, understand? 'Cause if I do, I'm going to cut your fuckin' eyes out with this." He pulled a beer opener out of his pocket and pressed it hard against my nose. I remember how warm it was. I nodded as best I could, and he shoved me away. I cracked my head on a bleacher and went down like a stone in water. When I looked up again the whole gang of them was gone.

  For months afterward I skulked around school like a haunted shadow. When I crept into the building in the morning, I checked every corridor, every classroom, every bathroom before I went in or out, just in case he was there. I knew the chances of his ever being in the elementary school were remote, but I wasn't about to tempt fate.

  I told no one about it, especially not Ross. At night I sometimes dreamed I was running as fast as I could on a soft rubber road chased by a gigantic dancing beer opener.

  Nothing ever happened, so by the time Ross and Bobby teamed up a year later, I felt only a sharp cut of fear when I saw them together for the first time.

  The final indignity was that when Bobby came over to our house for the first time he didn't even recognize me. When Ross said by way of introduction, "That's my shitty little brother," Bobby only smiled and said, "How're you doin', man?"

  How was I doing? I wanted to tell him . . . No, I wanted to demand that he recognize me. Me, scumbag, the one he'd scared so badly for huge months of my life.

  But I didn't. Later I got up the guts to remind him of that first meeting. He snapped his fingers as if he'd forgotten to buy shoelaces. "Yeah, sure, I thought I knew your face." And that was all.

  Naturally the longer he hung around with Ross, the more I liked him. He was very funny and had a kind of sensitivity that enabled him, like my brother, to see right through to a person's strengths and weaknesses. He used this ability to his own benefit about ninety percent of the time, but once in a while he did something so extraordinarily nice you were knocked for a loop.

  Just before my thirteenth birthday the three of us were in a stationery store and I wistfully mentioned how much I wanted a certain model of the aircraft carrier Forrestal they had on the shelves. When my big day arrived, Bobby came over to the house and handed me the model, gift-wrapped. "Shit, man, did you ever try to steal something that big? It's fucking hard!" I made the model more carefully than any other. I showed it to him only after I'd spent hours painting and sanding it to perfection. He nodded appreciatively and told Ross I knew what I was doing. That year Ross's present to me was a small rubber doll of a woman in a bathing suit whose breasts popped out from behind the suit whenever you squeezed her stomach.

  I think Hanley originally liked my brother because Ross was very smart. School was easy for him, and he often ended up doing Bobby's homework for him, although the latter was a grade ahead.

  However, I'm not trying to say that was the only reason for their friendship. When he felt like it, my brother not only could charm the birds out of the trees but could make anyone in the world laugh. He wasn't a clown, but among his many gifts was an acute sensitivity to your likes and dislikes, as well as the ability to send you howling. Since Hanley was the undisputed king of the high school, Ross cased the scene before making his move. He decided to become the older boy's court jester. He wasn't tough like the others in the gang, but he was damned shrewd! After only a short time there were a million punks in town who wanted to beat Ross to smithereens, but they left him alone because they all knew he was safely under Bobby's dangerous wing.

  In a different environment who knows what might have happened to the two of them. Both Bobby and Ross had an йlan, the magician's touch; that special rare ability to turn cruelty into pink handkerchiefs and kindness into thin air.

  The two of them palled around more and more, but my parents didn't mind because Bobby was quiet and courteous when he came over for dinner. Also, he appeared to be having a very good effect. At home, Ross wasn't half as nasty or selfish as he had been. He didn't go out of his way to be friendly or helpful, but there were faint glimmerings that he might have turned a corner and was heading in some kind of right direction.

  The night before Ross died, Bobby slept over at our house. Ross was very excited because he had been given a twelve-gauge shotgun for his birthday a few days before. My father loved to shoot trap and skeet and had promised to teach us the sport when we reached sixteen.

  Bobby had guns of his own, but this one was a beauty he could appreciate. They allowed me to stay in the room with them that evening, even when Ross pulled out the new dirty magazines he'd stolen from the candy store. They smoked almost a full pack of cigarettes and spent the hours talking about the girls at school, different kinds of cars, what Bobby would do when he graduated.

  I slept on a hassock that opened out into a bed. Ross let me do that, too. Hours later, I jerked awake when I felt something thick and warm and gooey on my face. Both of them were standing by my bed, and in the dim light I saw Ross tipping a bottle of something over me. I opened my mouth to protest and tasted the heavy sweetness of maple syrup. By that time it was all over me. There was nothing I could do but get up and bump my way out of the room, followed by their pleased laughter. I washed out my pajama top in the sink as best I could, so that my mother would never know about it. Then I took a long shower in the dark.

  When I awoke the next day, I felt feverish and uncomfortable. The strong morning sunlight poured through the windows and over me like an extra, unnecessary blanket.

  After I brushed my teeth, I went to Ross's room and knocked on the door. When there was no answer I cautiously pushed it open. There were wooden bunk beds in both our rooms. I saw Ross hanging over the edge of the top one, busily talking to Bobby, who was lying on his back with his hands behind his head.

  "What do you want, asshole? More syrup?"

  Bobby fanned a fly away from his nose and yawned. Last night's joke was last night, and now it was time for something new.

  "You know, Ross, if you could sneak that shotgun out of the house, we could go down to the river and pick off a few seagulls. I hate those fucking birds."

  We lived half a mile from a river. It was a place where you went in the summer when there was nothing else to do, or if you were lucky enough to have convinced a girl to go "swimming" there with you. Since the water was so brown and polluted, you never swam – as soo
n as you got your towels down on the beach you started necking.

  To get to the water you had to cross railroad tracks. You did it carefully and stepped ridiculously high over anything that looked even vaguely suspicious: down there somewhere on the ground was the third rail and you knew that if you ever so much as touched it you would be instantly electrocuted.

  Bobby and Ross had been down to the tracks before with guns. In fact, Ross was the only other member of the gang who'd had the "guts" to shoot at passing cattle cars with one of Bobby's many rifles. They were never caught.

  My parents went shopping that morning, so there was no problem taking the gun out of the house. Ross slid it back into its cardboard box, and that was that for camouflage. They allowed me to tag along on the threat that if I said anything about it afterward they'd boil me in oil.

  When we got down to the tracks Bobby told Ross to get the gun out – he wanted to take a couple of shots. I could see Ross wanted to shoot first; a peeved, mean look swept across his face. But it was gone in an instant. He handed the gun over, along with a bunch of red and brassy-gold shells he had stuffed in his back pocket. The only thing he had left was the empty box; he threw that at me.

  The sun was hot, and I peeled off my T-shirt. When it was halfway over my head, I heard the pof of the first shot and an instantaneous crash of glass somewhere.

  "Holy shit, Bobby! You think you hit the station?" Ross's voice was high and scared.

  "I'll be fucked if I know, man." He reloaded and shot off in another direction. I put my hands over my ears and looked at the ground. I was already petrified, and things had just begun.

  "Ross, baby, this is one honey of a gun. I can tell already. Let's go, man."

  We walked twelve or fifteen feet apart. Bobby, Ross, then me. That's very important, as you'll see in a moment. Bobby held the shotgun down at his side, barrel toward the ground. I saw it out of the corner of my eye. It was dull blue and the railroad tracks under our feet were hot silver as we stepped gingerly over them. The light everywhere burned my eyes and made me squint. I wished to God I was home. What were they going to do now? What would happen if they were in the mood for something unnecessary and vicious, like shooting at cattle as they moved slowly by in those slatted red and brown freight cars, already on their way to the slaughterhouse? I hated the gun, I hated my great fear, I hated my brother and his friend. But they would never, ever know that.

  We were moving at the same pace, our legs lifting and falling at the same time. Then Ross stumbled on something and fell straight forward. I heard an angry buzz like an outboard motor, the gravel skittering away from under my brother's sneaker. His shoulder touched the third rail, and his head twisted around on his neck. There was a loud hum, a sharp hiss and snap. His face twisted up and up and up into an impossible, irretrievable smile.

  3

  Why am I lying? Why am I already leaving out a part of this story that is so necessary? What difference does it make now? All right. Before I go on, here's a piece of the puzzle I've been hiding behind my back.

  Bobby had an older sister named Lee. At eighteen she was the most stunning girl you'd ever want to see. By the time Ross and Bobby became close friends, she had been out of school for a few years, but people still talked about her because she was really incredible.

  She'd been captain of the cheerleaders, a member of the Pep Club and the Gourmet Club. I knew all of this by heart because Ross had a high school yearbook from when she graduated, and as is so often the case with the prettiest girl in school, it seemed as if her face was on every other page: cartwheeling, being crowned Prom Queen, smiling magnificently at us from behind an armload of books. How many times had I devoured those pictures? Hundreds? A thousand? A lot.

  What I didn't understand until later was that part of her special aura came from pure sensuality. I didn't know if she was "fast," because my only authority on her was my brother, who contended he'd had her a million times, but even the most innocent of those pictures gave off an aroma of sexiness as strong as the smell of fresh baked bread.

  Ross's birthday present when I turned twelve was to teach me how to masturbate. Part of the gift was a three-month-old copy of Gent magazine, but from the first I could only climax if I thought of real women. The zeppelin breasts and sex-crazed expressions of those pinup girls scared me more than turned me on. No, my idea of sexual frenzy was the photograph of Lee Hanley doing a jump cheer at a football game that had somehow caught a delicious smidgen of her underpants while she was in mid-flight.

  Let me say, though, that I'd fallen in love with her long before I learned to play with myself, so the first time I used her as my fantasy woman I felt rotten, because I knew I'd somehow let her down, regardless of the fact I'd never said two words to her. But that guilt was short-lived, because my twelve-year-old penis was anxious to get on with business, so I continued to ravish her picture with my hungry eyes and myself with a jumpy hand.

  Sometimes I'd get completely carried away, and looking at the ceiling as I felt my body blast off into the stratosphere, I'd start to call her name again and again. Lee Hanley! Oh! Leeee! Although I tried to waltz myself around only when I was sure no one else was home, I made the mistake of not checking one afternoon, and that oversight was disastrous.

  Bermuda shorts down at my knees, the school yearbook Propped comfortably on my chest, I had started singing my Lee song when the door suddenly flew open and Ross appeared.

  "I caught you! Lee Hanley, huh? You're jerking off to Lee Hanley? Boy, wait'll Bobby hears this! He's going to chop you into hamburger. Hey, what've you got there? That's my yearbook! Gimme that!" He snatched it out of my hand and looked at the picture. "Jeez, wait'll I tell Bobby, man. Shit, I'd hate to be you." His face was pure triumph.

  From that moment on, the taunts and torture began and didn't end for more than a year. That night I pulled down the bedspread and found a photograph taped to my pillow: a mutilated body on a battlefield with a soldier looking at it indifferently. In blood-red ink the soldier was labeled Bobby, and I was the corpse.

  A lot of that sort of thing went on, but the most frightening moments were when Ross would casually say to Bobby, "Want to know what my brother does, Bobby? Wait'll you hear this one, the little pig!" Looking straight at me, a gleam smeared across his face, he'd pause for millenniums, making me wish I was either in Sumatra or dead, or both. Inevitably he'd finish by saying, "He picks his nose," or something equally mean and true, but nothing compared to "it," and I could breathe easily again.

  It ran in cycles; at times I was hopeful he'd forgotten. But like a bat flying through the window, it would suddenly be there again, right on you, days or weeks later, and he'd have me squirming and twisting at the drop of his hat. When we were alone he would tell me what a sludge I was to jerk off to a friend's sister. He was as convincing as any angry, unforgiving priest.

  Probably because the torment increased, the image of Lee Hanley's underpants became the sexiest thing in the world, and they became my one and only fantasy. I masturbated at all times of the day; my high point was probably the time I came while sitting perfectly still at a junior high school assembly where a Cherokee Indian demonstrated tribal war dances.

  I was a fool. I gave Ross my allowance, did his chores for him, brought him snacks at the snap of his fingers. Once, I even realized that what I'd been doing was a kind of compliment to Lee, but when I tried explaining that to Ross, he closed his eyes and flicked his wrist at me as if I were a fly on his hand.

  What really happened the day he died was this: as we were crossing the railroad tracks together, Ross's anger flared at Bobby for having taken his shotgun away. Halfway to the other platform, he casually asked his friend how many times a week he beat off.

  "I don't know. Every day, I guess. That is, if I'm not gettin' any from some chick. Why? How 'bout you?"

  My brother's voice went up a notch. "About the same. Do you ever think of anyone when you do it?"

  My face tightened, and I almost
stopped moving.

  "Sure, what do you think I do, count to a hundred? What's with you, Ross? You gone pervert or something?"

  "Naah, I was just thinking. Do you know who Joe thinks about when he does it?"

  "Joey? You beating your meat already, boy? Shame! You know how old I was when I first started doing it? About three!" He laughed.

  I could only look at my feet. I knew it was coming; Ross was about to open the door on my blackest secret and there was nothing I could do about it.

  "Okay, so spill it. Who do you think about, Joe? Suzanne Pleshette?"

  Before Ross could answer, a high train whistle hooted frighteningly down the track. At that moment I did something I'd never done before. Shouting "No!" I shoved Ross as hard as I could. So help me God, I was so afraid of what he was going to say I'd totally forgotten where we were.

  "Holy shit, Ross, a train's coming!" Without looking our way, Bobby charged ahead toward the other side of the tracks. My brother fell. I stood still and watched. Yes.

  4

  I was so shocked by what had happened I couldn't say anything. A few days later I was too afraid to speak.

  Conveniently, as far as people were concerned (including Bobby, who testified that the sound of the train whistle must have scared Ross into stumbling), it was simply a tragic accident.

  My mother went mad. A week after the funeral she stood at the bottom of the staircase and started screaming incoherently to my dead brother to get up and go to school. She had to be institutionalized. I began shaking and was put on heavy doses of tranquilizer, which made me feel as if I were floating in blue space.

  When they decided to keep my mother in the hospital, my father took me to dinner. Neither of us ate anything. Halfway through the meal he pushed the plates aside and took hold of both my hands.

  "Joe, son, it's going to be just you and me for a while now, and we've got some tough times ahead of us."

  I nodded and was for the first time on the brink of telling him everything, every bit of it. Then he looked at me, and I saw big clear tears on his face.