Gentlemen

by Michael Northrop

  “All right, then, go on back to class. You can send Mr. Malloy in now.”

  “You’re up,” I said to Mixer out in the office.

  “Great,” he said, and he was looking at me close, trying to figure out if I’d been raked over the coals. I was going to say something to him, but everyone in the office was looking at us, so we just low-fived as we passed.

  When I got back to class, Dantley didn’t even look at me. On the plus side, first period was almost over. When we got to English, Haberman wasn’t there. Our usual English sub, Ms. Yanoff, was up at the board scratching away.

  It was weird because, in a way, I was disappointed. I was waiting for Haberman to say the one thing that would let me know he’d done it or the one thing that would let me know he hadn’t. This was getting serious, and I wanted to know. I mean, he probably wasn’t going to say something like that anyway, but he definitely wasn’t going to say it if he wasn’t there. On the other hand, I wasn’t sure I had the energy for Haberman’s crap after the morning I’d had.

  But the first thing I thought when I saw Yanoff up there wasn’t either of those things. It was this: Maybe Haberman is burying the body. And also: Pretty convenient that the day Throckmorton shows up, Haberman’s nowhere in sight. I mean, him not being there didn’t give us any new evidence one way or the other about Tommy, but it definitely made you think. After two days, a body’d be starting to turn, and it would be time to get rid of it, maybe some lime and a shallow grave, like on TV.

  Part of me wanted to run down to see if Throckmorton was still around, because I didn’t want to take the chance that Haberman might get away with it. But another part of me was like: What kind of an idiot would bury a body in the middle of a sunny day? Plus, Haberman wasn’t exactly the iron man of teaching attendance.

  So anyway, like I said, him not being there didn’t necessarily mean anything, but it gave you some extra room to operate, if you were thinking along those lines already. What’s the phrase, enough rope to hang yourself with?

  10

  So that’s where we were. We had questions, the police had questions, the school had questions, everyone had frickin’ questions. No one seemed to have any answers. The only thing everyone agreed on was this: Tommy was missing. Throckmorton being there kind of made it official.

  Him being gone, it changed things for Mixer, Bones, and me. You could just sort of feel it. It’s like if you take one leg off a chair: You can still sit down, but you have to work a lot harder to find your balance and not fall on your butt.

  I probably haven’t done a very good job of explaining this, but Tommy sort of held us together. I mean, first of all, he was new blood. That can be pretty important when you’ve been hanging out with the same few people since you were little. He also sort of balanced us out. It’s like he had some of the same qualities as each of us. Like he was sort of a scrapper, like Bones, and he was sort of clever, like Mixer. And he was sort of, well, I don’t know, whatever the hell I am. I always thought we had a lot in common, anyway.

  And I know I’ve said how he was maybe a little nicer than the rest of us, but he was plenty tough, too. Like he was the one who taught us how to chew tobacco. Or he tried to, anyway.

  All four of us were over in North Cambria last summer, because I mean, it’s not like it’s frickin’ Times Square, but there are a few things to do there. Like there’s a McDonald’s and some batting cages. Anyway, it was crazy hot that day. I guess it was late June, early July. We’d been hanging out in the little town park, the one with the ball field. We were under the big wooden whatever-the-hell-it-is, the thing with the rope grid you can climb up to get to the platform. We were mainly there for the shade, just standing around under the platform, leaning against the posts with our feet in the cool sand.

  That’s when Tommy told us that he had some Skoal. Mixer was like, “No way,” but Tommy was like, “Yuh-huh,” and he looked both ways and reached into the back pocket of his jeans.

  As soon as he looked both ways like that, I knew he really had it. He pulled a round green container out of his pocket. The word BANDITS was printed on the top, and the A had a little red bandanna painted on it. It was brand-new and he sort of fumbled with it, trying to figure out the best way to break the seal.

  I’d never had chewing tobacco before, and it was pretty clear that Tommy hadn’t, either. He hadn’t even opened the thing until we were all there, and that right there tells you something about him. While he was trying to pop the top without spilling it all over the place, Bones was saying how chewing tobacco was pretty cool and packed a nice little buzz and how Skoal was like the best kind.

  Bones didn’t actually say he’d done it before, but that was definitely the implication, you know? That made what happened even funnier.

  Anyway, we heard the thing pop open, and I started making lame little jokes. I think I was a little nervous, which is funny because I’d done stuff way worse than chaw. Chaw’s weird, though. It made me think of the villains in western movies, like spitting into the bucket from ten feet away.

  “All right,” I said. “If we’re going to do this, we need like cowboy names. I’m Shane.”

  That might sound a little babyish or whatever, but we were just a bunch of kids under a glorified jungle gym in the summer. We were like a month past being freshmen. And that’s how Tommy became Buster and Mixer became Wyatt. Bones insisted on Masterson. I have no idea what ass he pulled that one out of, but it did sound kind of cowboyish.

  I was like, “Masterson?”

  And Bones was like, “Yeah. Don’t wear it out.”

  I looked over at “Buster” and he started handing out the Skoal. It came in these gauzy little packets, prewrapped or whatever. That was good because I didn’t want to deal with loose tobacco, like when a cigarette split. He handed us one each, but Bones said, “Keep it comin’,” and he handed him a second one.

  The only times I’d ever seen people chewing tobacco in real life was a few of the town softball games and things like that. I was trying to remember how to go about it, like how much to take, how to hold it, where to put it. I just held it in my palm.

  “In between the cheek and the gums, ladies,” said Bones, still acting like a big shot.

  I raised the thing up to my nose for a quick sniff, and it had this minty thing going on. Individually wrapped, mintflavored…The whole thing seemed much less rough than I’d thought it’d be. But I still didn’t put it in my mouth right away. I looked around and the others were still holding theirs, too.

  No surprise, Bones went first. I guess he was showing off, because he put one in each side of his mouth, like the cotton rolls they put in your cheeks at the dentist. Now, I didn’t know much about chewing tobacco, but I was pretty sure that was the wrong way to go about it. That’s when I knew Bones hadn’t done this before, either. He’d just heard more about it.

  He stuck one in the right side and one in the left. He just stuck his fingers in there like he was picking his teeth. For a second I could see his teeth and his gums, and then the tobacco was in and he was wiping his hand on his shorts. The rest of us held our Bandits in our fingers. We were getting ready to join in, but first we were going to watch and see what happened with Masterson there.

  He gave us this puffy-cheeked, chipmunk smile, then sputtered something out. I think he was trying to say, “Double dip,” but he never got through it. He coughed on the juice and then just froze. His smile disappeared and all of a sudden he had this horrified look on his face. It took me a second to figure out what was wrong: The lump was gone from his left cheek. He’d swallowed one of the packets.

  He let out a few short sounds, somewhere between choking and coughing, and then he just started hurling. The first few bursts of vomit came out while he was standing, but by the third, he was on his knees. He was kneeling down in the sand and spewing puke a good two feet in front of him. As skinny as he was, Bones always did like a big breakfast.

  We all took a few steps back, and I d
ropped my tobacco in the sand like it had bitten me. If it was just normal puking, we would’ve started laughing right away, but this was some intense wretching. You could tell it was painful, and even when it was over, he was still down there dry heaving. His mouth was hanging open like a cat trying to cough up a hairball. So we held it in.

  “Jesus,” said Mixer.

  “Aw, man,” said Tommy.

  The smell of puke was really strong. If I didn’t get out of there, I was going to boot, too, no tobacco required. I couldn’t just leave him there, though.

  “Damn, man,” I said. “You OK?”

  He looked up, wiping his mouth with his forearm. It was quiet for a second. Bones spat a few times into the sand and then said, “Damn.”

  “Dammit, Masterson,” said Mixer. “That’s a waste of good tobacco!”

  “Naw,” said Bones, a little smile creeping onto his face. “That stuff sucked.”

  We laughed, but Bones wasn’t off the hook yet. He’d tried to big-time us by double-dipping and then ended up swallowing one of them. We were going to bust his ass, and he knew it. We waited for him to get to his feet, and then we got the hell out of Pukesylvania.

  After a while, we walked over to the McDonald’s. We put our trays down on the table—just fries and a Coke for Bones, thank you—and it was like a firing line. Enough time had passed and he was feeling well enough and this is where we were going to start cutting into him.

  And, I mean, we could’ve ridden Bones for forever about that, just ragged him mercilessly. But just when we were getting started, Tommy was like, “Same thing happened to Peter J, first time he tried it. Seriously, I saw it.”

  Peter J was Peter Janklow. He was two years ahead of us in school and seriously, unquestionably cool. He was so cool that the idea that he’d puked his guts out on chaw made it seem like maybe that was the cool thing to do. It was serious cover for Bones.

  Tommy didn’t have to say that. First of all, I don’t even think it was true. But he did, and it sort of let Bones off the hook. Anyway, that was Tommy. And that’s what I meant about how he kind of held us together, because Mixer and me, we really would’ve ripped into Bones. We probably would’ve gone too far, and he probably would’ve knocked one of us out. Just like that, we wouldn’t have been such good friends anymore.

  11

  I made it into the library for study hall, but there was a big fat nothing in my inbox. I really thought Jenny #2 might’ve written back by now. It’d been like three days. But when I saw that she hadn’t, I was like, Well, maybe she’s just not going to. Actually, it was more like I sort of knew she wasn’t going to, and seeing that empty inbox just made it a little harder to pretend I didn’t know that, if any of that makes sense.

  It was just like I knew the message was pretty bad when I wrote it—I wrote it out in pen beforehand and just typed it in the library—but then I was sitting there, trying to convince myself to hit Send and it was like, Yeah, that’s a pretty good message, you know, if you read it the right way. I’ll just let you see it, and you can decide for yourself:

  Hi, Jenny!

  This probably seems like a weird message, but I think it’s only weird by real-world standards. Online it’s totally normal. OK, no, it’s weird here, too. This is Mike, you know, from the lake this summer. (If it helps your memory, I am the one who wore the old Sox cap. It’s like my trademark. Also, I am from Soudley and go to Tattawa.)

  Anyway, I was out riding my bike and went past the lake the other day, and I sort of remembered how much fun we had that one day (August 2). So anyway, I thought I’d check out your profile. So, you know, hi! I am going to send you a friend request now. I hope you are having a good year!

  (I think this is the right Jenny, because of your name and town and stuff. And also because of the kind of music you say you like. If this isn’t you, I’m sorry.)

  Mike

  So that’s what I sent on Monday. I know it’s not perfect, but it was the best I could do. I read that and I think: friendly, you know, nice. But I could see where a girl could read that and think: stalker. I checked her profile and she hadn’t logged on again since Tuesday. I thought about it. Maybe she just hadn’t had time.

  I went straight home after school. Between Throckmorton, Jenny #2 not writing, and me picturing Haberman out in the woods somewhere with a shovel, it had been a truly crappy day. I was pissed off, stressed out, and tired. I didn’t like long phone calls, but I figured I’d have some to make later. I watched some TV and just chilled for a while. Then I headed out to the house in the woods to clear my head and fill my lungs. I’d scored half a pack of Camels for four bucks from Max. He’d pulled up a seat at lunch when we’d been huddling together going over what Throckmorton asked, and what we said, and just sort of sifting through the information. Bones and Max both said they didn’t say squat.

  Max was like, “I didn’t give him anything,” like he was being real hard. And I couldn’t let that one go, so I was like, “Max, dude, you don’t know anything about it in the first place.” And having Max there was a pain anyway, because I didn’t want to ask about Haberman with him there. If he heard that, it would be all over the school in like a day, not Haberman killed Tommy but Mike thinks Haberman killed Tommy, even though I wasn’t exactly convinced of that, but just me raising the possibility would be enough.

  But again, Bones said he didn’t say anything, said he was in there for like two minutes, and I believe that. I’d seen Bones wall himself up before, just rolling his eyes, shrugging his shoulders, and maybe giving a yes or a no if really pushed. Mixer said he didn’t say much, but he answered the family question and mentioned Manchester, too. As near as we could tell, we’d told Throckmorton the same stuff about both, which made sense, since we pretty much knew the same stuff about both. I was like, “Anything else?” And Mixer was like, “Not really.”

  After that, when Max was talking to Bones about something, I gave Mixer a look like, Really, dude, anything else? And he looked back at me and shook his head no, and he knew what I meant. Like I said, we’ve known each other for a long time. We started riding bikes together in the cemetery when we were like eight. (The cemetery’s a good place to ride bikes, because there’s no traffic and the residents are real quiet.)

  So it turned out what Max’d been talking to Bones about was half a pack of Camels that he’d scrounged up somewhere. He wanted four bucks for them and Bones didn’t have it. Normally, I’d give him a chance to haggle him down, but I was like, Screw it, I really want some smokes, and I bought them on the spot.

  It might sound lame, but cigarettes are hard for me to come by on a day-to-day basis. You’ve got to be nineteen to buy them in this godforsaken state. Soudley’s a small town, and not only did everyone behind a counter know me, they like had always known me, remembered me from when I was saving up my allowance to buy candy bars. They knew my mom, knew my aunts and uncles. I didn’t have a license or a car, didn’t have an older brother.

  Mixer and me had tried to make some inroads with this group of seniors who were always smoking out behind the school, but that’d been a disaster. They charged crazy prices, and I think that after our little attempts to get on their good side they were actually charging us more than the others. We couldn’t do that, point of pride, you know? Mixer was good at swiping things, but the powers that be were even better at keeping the smokes behind the counter. And Mixer definitely preferred doing his thing in the wide-open spaces out front.

  Joey, who used to be cool, wouldn’t buy them for Mixer. It’s sort of funny, because he’d buy him beer but not smokes. He said they’d kill us slowly. That seemed fair enough to me. Everything else is slow when you’re fifteen and living in this armpit of a town, so why shouldn’t death be slow and come with a little buzz and a good taste?

  Pot and pills were even more expensive. There’d been some pretty big busts just in the year and a half since I’d been at the Tits, and prices had gone way up. The Staties had a dog, which hardly seemed
fair. It was a beagle named Snoopy, which was pretty much the perfect name for him, if you think about it. I’m not even sure if he was named after the cartoon or his approach to the job.

  They brought that little fleabag into our class in eighth grade at Soudley for like a sort of show-and-tell/public-service-announcement type thing. It was pretty funny, because while everyone else was crowding around to pet him, and his tail was going like a thousand miles an hour, there was that little group of Stantz and those guys hanging way back in the classroom, afraid Snoopy’d get a whiff of their denim jackets.

  Anyway, like I said, prices were up. You’d need a job or a big-time allowance. No one wanted to trade with Mixer. I’d heard you could score that stuff at parties once you were a junior or senior and had your license, but I wasn’t and I didn’t, so that kind of quality high was pretty rare in my life. And huffing, man, that was nasty. I remember coughing into my hand once, and when I looked down, my hand was covered with tiny orange dots from the spray paint. I was coughing paint! That was the last time I did that.

  Basically, whether it was the cost, the dog, not wanting to exhale in color, or the fact that there were already kids who were much more into drugs than we’d ever be, that stuff really wasn’t our scene. Most of the time, chasing smokes and whatever alcohol we could get our hands on was enough. So when half a pack of Humpies—that’s what we called Camels—is three feet and four bucks away from me, it’s the kind of opportunity I’ll go ahead and take.

  Bones came sniffing around my locker later, and I gave him two, so we were cool. And I gave Mixer two for the beers on Tuesday, which didn’t leave me much for my four bucks, but what are you gonna do? That was how our economy worked. It was like we were in prison, which is kind of ironic, if you think about it.