by Neil Smith
Diners seated at the long tables in the cafeteria stop their chatting and lend the do-gooder their ears, a rare sight because diners usually pay no heed to special announcements (just like the students at Helen Keller).
“The do-good council assures you that the cowardly attack on a local townie a few days ago was not random. It targeted one specific boy. Some of you fear that a crazed murderer is on the loose. Our information tells us otherwise.”
A redheaded boy waves his knife and fork and shouts, “I confess! I did it! I’m the murderer!” He pretends to knife the girl sitting beside him. Many diners erupt in laughter. As I scan the tables, though, I see a boy who is not laughing. It is Benny Baggarly. He is staring into his bowl of stew.
“So feel free to circulate after dark,” the do-gooder goes on. “But remember that anyone caught out after midnight will face detention. Thank you.”
I push my sunglasses up the bridge of my nose, grab some napkins, and hurry out of the cafeteria to bike back to our hideout.
I must tell Johnny about our mistake. Charles Lindblom is an old boy; he is not Gunboy.
I accept a share of the responsibility for what happened because I warned Johnny that Gunboy was approaching when Czar emerged fuming from the shadows. Had I kept quiet, Johnny might not have mistaken Czar for Gunboy. Yet Johnny is convinced that Czar is Gunboy. My roommate claims he is now sleeping “like a damn baby log,” but he is lying: I hear him moaning in his sleep. We take turns sleeping on a lumpy old couch in the janitor’s office; every other night, one of us sleeps on the floor atop throw pillows.
My own insomnia is worse than ever. Last night I even went out after curfew. A flashlight in hand, I returned to the scene of the crime. I climbed back into the jungle gym and sat in that makeshift jail for more than an hour. I had brought along a box cutter from our hideout and used it to make nicks up and down my arms and legs. While I did this, I thought about you, Mother and Father. How I missed your simple chats about banal things like the most effective blue shampoo to treat dandruff. How I wished I could portal back to America to see you, if only for a moment. Yet I knew from the beginning that Czar and the haunters were frauds. I knew they would not help me travel back to 222 Hill Drive.
I felt very alone in that jungle gym. I did not cry, but I did sigh deeply.
“Don’t cry.” That was what Johnny whispered to me in seventh grade after I was singled out in the hallway and battered by the fists of Kevin Stein, Fred Winchester, and Jermaine Tucker. As I lay on the floor stinging from the attack, Johnny Henzel kneeled by my side and told me not to cry. “It only makes it worse,” he said.
I repeated these lines to Johnny on our first night in the janitor’s office. He was crouched naked in the large, rust-stained sink set up at the back of the room. He was crying because he had Czar’s blood all over his face and hair. “Get it off me! Boo, get it off!” We did not have shampoo, only a cake of soap, so I used it to lather his hair and clean his face. I believe we were both in shock. As a result, I was able to touch another person without the repulsion I usually felt. All the while, he wept soundlessly.
As I scrubbed my nails into his scalp, he shivered even though the water was hot. I filled a pail with water and poured it over his head to rinse off the soap.
“I had no choice. I had to do it,” he said. Soap had gone into his eyes, and he rubbed them fiercely. “The same as when you have to shoot a horse when it breaks a leg.”
“A horse?”
“What Gunboy has is worse than a broken leg.” He tapped his fingers against his temple. “He has a broken brain.”
Johnny’s bloody clothes lay beside the sink. I thought about scrubbing them, but instead I shoved them in a garbage bin. As for the rock-filled flashlight, I emptied it and wiped the canister with paper napkins.
A beach towel decorated with cartoon lobsters hung on a hook on the wall. I wrapped the towel around Johnny and helped him climb out of the sink. He slipped on a puddle of water and almost fell, but I caught him. I held him up, and he gave me a glance that said, You’re stronger than you look.
But I did not feel strong. I felt as though my brain were also broken.
The janitor’s office is furnished sparsely, with the ratty couch and five wobbly school chairs fitted with desktops the size of a painter’s palette. In one corner stands a stack of cardboard boxes filled with a hodgepodge of forgotten supplies. In these Johnny and I found the baseball cap, sunglasses, box cutter, and Hardy Boys novel. I was in fact looking for clothing because I no longer had a change of clothes with me and Johnny did not have many clothes with him either. On my second night here, after the Marcy closed, I went upstairs to the boys’ locker room and looked for clothing left behind in the lockers. The pickings were slim for a boy as slim as I (ha-ha). I am swimming in the cutoff shorts and shirt I found. No matter. I will make do.
Few people ever come down to the basement of the Marcy. When they do, they usually just use the restroom at the foot of the stairs, and they do not wander into the other rooms farther down the hall. There is little reason to, since the rooms are stocked with castoffs.
On the evening when Johnny first abandoned us, he discovered the janitor’s office while exploring the center after it closed. He broke into the Marcy by shimmying through an unlocked basement window. His aim, he said, was to find a place where nobody could attack him in his sleep. By “nobody,” he meant Gunboy.
When I return from the cafeteria with our supper, I slip through the same window and drop to the floor. I go down the hall to the janitor’s office, where Johnny is in the gym clothes I found for him in the locker room. He is doing military push-ups on the concrete floor. He claps his hands between push-ups. His T-shirt is sweaty, and his onion smell stinks up the room.
I tell him his efforts are for naught. “Our bodies do not change. The muscle and fat we come here with are the muscle and fat we have forevermore.”
“That’s not fair,” he says, winded.
“Afterlife ain’t fair,” I reply. This is something Esther always says.
I set out our supper on the floor, using paper towels as place mats. I even arrange a place setting for Rover because Johnny likes to drop a spoonful of food on a coaster for his pet roach to nibble on.
“His voice is growing stronger,” he tells me as he feeds Rover. “I hear words every now and again. Today I heard the word ‘suicide.’ ”
“Suicide?”
“It sounded like a girl’s voice. I bet it’s Willa talking about leaping off the Deborah.”
I have never heard a peep from that creature.
I worry about Johnny’s mental state.
He notices the scabs on my arms and legs. “Did you get in a fight with a pocketknife?”
“A box cutter,” I say. “It is a scab-healing experiment.”
He shakes his head; now it is he who is worried about my mental state. Then he asks for an update on Gunboy. I tell him Czar is stable and little has changed since yesterday. Johnny guesses that Gunboy will live for another month before succumbing to his injuries. “After all,” he says, “I passed after five weeks in a coma.”
“You two are treading the same path?”
Johnny runs a finger along the wings of his death’s head as the roach feeds. “We have lots in common, Gunboy and me,” he says.
“What exactly?”
“Hot tempers. We’re both angry b*stards.”
I think back to Helen Keller and Sandpits. I do not remember Johnny being hot-tempered. I picture him seated peacefully in a corner of the library as he drew in his sketch pad. I recall him running serenely on the outdoor track that circled the football field. Everybody liked Johnny. From what I recall, our classmates did not seem to mock or bully him or try to pummel him to death in murderball as they did with me.
After Johnny and I finish supper, I rinse our plastic containers and utensils in the sink and wipe them dry with the lobster towel. Then I turn to Johnny, who is playing jacks on the floor with an
old set he found in a box of junk.
I do not say, “I have something important to tell you” (he will realize it is important). I do not say, “You had better sit down” (he is already sitting) or “Hold on to your hat” (he has on a baseball cap). I just say, “Czar is forty-six years old.”
Johnny misses the ball while trying to grab five jacks at once. He glances up. “What do you mean, forty-six?”
“He is an old boy. He came here decades ago.”
He frowns and spits out, “Don’t f*ck with me.”
“Why would I f*ck with you? I make it a lifelong habit never to f*ck with anybody at any time.”
I sit with him and his jacks. I explain about a group of visitors who came to see Czar just before I left the infirmary today. They talked about his skills as a magician and the shows he had put on. He would saw his assistant in half, free himself from tricky knots, and hypnotize audience members so they would crow like roosters and hop like bunnies. The shows these people talked about took place years before.
From my pocket, I pull out the patient information sheet I stole from the infirmary. I hand it to Johnny, and he reads aloud Czar’s date of passing: “July eleventh, nineteen thirty-three.” Then he glances up. “It says here he was trampled by a horse in Nevada.”
He closes his eyes, puts down the clipboard, and rubs his temples as though his brain is also breaking.
I say nothing more. I wait. I think of injured horses put out of their misery with a bullet to the brain. Minutes click by. From out of the corner of my eye, I see Rover beetling across the far wall.
“Johnny,” I finally say, “are you hunky-dory?”
His eyes blink open. “I know what must have happened, Boo,” he says, his voice more gravelly than usual. “In September, this Czar kid traveled to Hoffman Estates on a haunting. He broke into somebody’s house, stole a gun, and then went hunting for thirteen-year-olds.”
Oh, Zig in heaven help us all.
“You do not really believe that, do you?” I ask.
He looks vexed. “It’s totally possible!” he insists. “Maybe he even killed other kids during other hauntings. Maybe we aren’t the only ones! We should contact the gommers, get them involved in an investigation. We might find other victims.”
I sigh and say, “Czar is the victim, Johnny.”
He holds up a hand and barks, “Don’t!” Then he leaps up and throws open the door to our hideout. Usually he creeps down the hall to avoid making noise and attracting attention, but this time he runs. I go after him. He passes the restroom and takes the stairs two at a time to the lobby. When I reach it myself, he is already hurrying down a hall to the basketball court. The Marcy is still open, and townies are milling around. I head to the court, and when I arrive, Johnny is climbing an inner staircase to the indoor track built along the circumference of the space. Up on the track, he starts running, not simply jogging, but sprinting at top speed. Around and around he goes. Nobody else is up there. A few boys are practicing shots on the court. I leave him alone. I sit on a bench and wait for the speed demon to come down.
As I watch Johnny, I toy with the idea of leaving him here and biking home to Eleven. Maybe Thelma is back at the Frank and Joe; she will know what to do. I no longer care who killed me or why, and honestly I do not think I ever really did. I prefer investigating something less grisly—for instance, how flashlights work without batteries. That is the only kind of mystery I want to solve.
A half hour later, a do-gooder comes onto the basketball court with a bullhorn. “Closing in ten minutes,” he calls out. “Wrap it up, folks.”
The boys on the court head to the locker room to shower and change. They punch one another on the shoulder. They call one another “Scrotum.” They laugh affably. They are part of a world Johnny used to live in. He needs to go back to that world. When he finally stops jogging and comes down from the suspended track, I have a suggestion. I almost plead with him: “Let’s forget all about Gunboy, Johnny. Tomorrow morning, we can bike back to the Frank and Joe and start over again. We can get jobs. I can work for Curios, and you can teach life-drawing classes. Let’s pretend we died of different causes. Me from a heart defect and you from—I don’t know—a nut allergy.”
My own suggestion surprises me: I do not often pretend. You will recall, Mother and Father, that as a young child I pretended briefly to be evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins, but then I decided playacting was dishonest.
Johnny’s face is drawn. Around his head he is wearing a terry-cloth sweatband he must have found discarded on the track. “A nut allergy,” he says, winded. He looks at me as though I am a nut.
I clarify: “Anaphylactic shock.”
He stares at me a moment. “Oh, okay,” he finally mumbles. Then he leaves the basketball court and heads to a drinking fountain in the lobby.
I am taken aback: I was ready for him to scold me for giving up. “Well, good, then,” I call out. “Very good.” I catch up to him. I put up my dukes and punch him lightly on the shoulder when he straightens up from the fountain.
Instead of going down to the basement, he heads out the front door of the Marcy. I follow him around the side of the building. He lies in the grass and stares at the darkening sky.
I remind Johnny of the day of his skitching accident back in Hoffman Estates, when he looked at the clouds awestruck. He scrunches his forehead. “Oh, yeah, I sort of remember that.”
“You said you saw something beautiful, Johnny. What was it?”
“Beats me.”
I lie beside him and look skyward. Pinpricks of stars dot the sky. Soon I must begin mapping them.
“Maybe I was talking about heaven,” Johnny says. “The beauty awaiting us here.”
I turn toward him in the grass. “Really?”
He turns toward me. A single tear drips from his eye and across the bridge of his nose. “No,” he says. Then he barks a laugh and I emit several ha-ha’s. Zig knows what we are laughing about.
After the Marcy closes, we slip through the basement window and head back to the janitor’s office. For our last night here, Johnny wants to play board games. “Like normal kids do,” he says. The other day, he found a box filled with games like Don’t Spill the Beans, Monopoly, Operation, and The Partridge Family Game. Clue is also among the stash, but we will not play it because, as you might imagine, Mother and Father, we are in no mood for Professor Plum bludgeoning Mr. Boddy in the billiard room with a candlestick.
Johnny reads the rules for Operation. Using tweezers, the players must act as surgeons and remove comical body parts—Adam’s apple, funny bone, charley horse, spare ribs, broken heart—from a chap named Cavity Sam. In Sam’s brain is a plastic ice-cream cone, alluding to brain freeze, the pain that people feel when they eat ice cream too fast.
“There is no such thing as brain damage in heaven, so Czar’s brain is sure to heal fully,” I tell Johnny. “Did you know certain townies have lost fingers and toes and their digits have completely grown back? Like the limbs of salamanders.”
Johnny looks up from the instructions. “Don’t you hack off one of your baby toes to see how long it takes to grow back,” he warns.
I must admit the idea has crossed my mind.
“Czar will recover and we will accept our punishment,” I continue. “Thelma will help us so we are treated fairly. We may have to clean toilets for months on end, but so be it.” Maybe, as a result, I will learn more about the true nature of Town’s plumbing system.
“We should apologize to Czar,” I say. “It was a case of mistaken identity, like in the Hardy Boys novel The Missing Chums” (another book found in our hideout).
“Please, Boo, let’s not talk about that guy tonight,” Johnny mutters without looking up from the instructions. “What an idiotic game,” he then says, throwing the instructions aside.
Instead of Operation, we play Monopoly. Johnny is the terrier; I am the wheelbarrow. Rover scampers across the board like a third game piece. At one point, Johnny
holds up a Get Out of Jail Free card. Drawn on it is a cartoon fellow dressed in prison stripes. “I should hang on to this,” Johnny says with a smirk.
He talks very little. He looks sad and confused even when he buys Boardwalk. We are both tired, too bushed to focus on buying railroads, hotels, and utilities, so we do not finish the game. We decide to go to bed.
Johnny puts Rover in its camper, but without the lid on so the roach can roam around at night if it wishes.
Before bed, I bathe in the big sink: I soap my hair and pour a pail of water over my head. I dry off on the lobster towel. It is my turn to sleep on the couch, but I offer it to Johnny, claiming I prefer the throw pillows on the floor. I fear that his nightmares may revisit him tonight. He might sleep more restfully on the couch.
After we turn off the lights, Johnny says, “Know any lullabies, Boo?”
I do not have Thelma’s voice, but I take a shot at the Cole Porter standard “Friendship,” a song that states that, in the closest friendships, people combine their individual qualities and strengths to form a “blendship.” I recall that you sometimes sang this song as a duo, Mother and Father, to entertain patrons at Clippers. I sing a slower, more melancholy version than you did. In the dark, my voice sounds more tuneful and, dare I say, more angelic than I remember it from before my passing. Perhaps to offset a lower intelligence quotient, Zig tweaked my singing voice.
When I finish singing, Johnny says sleepily, “Blendship?”
“It’s a portmanteau,” I say.
“A poor man’s toe?”
“No, a portmanteau. It means a word that combines two different words. In this case, the two are ‘blend’ and ‘friendship.’ In French, portmanteau actually means a coatrack, but in English, it also refers to a kind of suitcase with two—”
“Boo.”
“Yes, Johnny?”
“Please shut up.”