by Ty Roth
Soon they were inspecting his car. The girls crawled inside and began fidgeting with the radio station, until one slid out of the driver’s side, holding Shelly.
“What’s this?” she said.
“That’s our friend,” Gordon answered with a smirk and a quick glance in my direction.
“Whatchu mean your friend?” The others stopped making their imaginary upgrades to Gordon’s car and began to gather around the girl holding the urn. The whole thing was making me increasingly uncomfortable, but Gordon didn’t seem a bit bothered. Actually, he looked amused.
“Those are her ashes,” he said.
“Ashes? What ashes? She dead?” Her voice rose at least an octave as she reached the end of her verbless questions, and once again Shelly was airborne. It was as if a creepy bomb were about to explode. Bodies catapulted in all directions among the sound of half-terrified, half-hysterical laughter and cries of horror, except for Gordon, who effortlessly caught Shelly before she mixed her dust with the dirt. That would have been an abomination; Shelly hated dirt. She’d been a complete slob, but that had been an organizational issue, not an elemental one.
My spell of incredulity and Gordon’s amusement were broken when, still standing on the porch, I saw in my peripheral vision the familiar navy blue of an Ogontz Police car turn onto my street from Maple, one block west.
“Cops,” I warned matter-of-factly. The presence of the police was certainly no oddity on my street. My neighbors’ ears had been finely conditioned to that word; it commanded their attention and put an immediate end to the levity. The Ogontz PD patrolled my end of town with near-obsessive diligence, so I had no need for unnecessary concern regarding my and Gordon’s outlaw status; although, Gordon’s face showed a small degree of unfamiliar alarm.
It’s hard to say who’s the greater cause of the high crime rate on the east end. Are the omnipresent cops a justifiable and necessary response to criminal behavior, or is the criminal behavior simply a spiteful and equally justifiable “fuck you” to the cops and their assumed necessity, a sort of self-fulfilling prophecy?
By the cop car’s leisurely speed, I knew Gordon and I had yet to be targeted; there was no APB out on us. It was a cruising pace, not a pursuit; however, a well-dressed white kid with a BMW surrounded by neighborhood kids would most certainly raise the hackles of even the most novice of officers.
Gordon nonchalantly dropped the joint he cupped in his hand and ground it into my scraggly lawn.
“Marks,” T spit the name out.
Patrolman Marks had been the bane of my neighbors’ existence since the moment they’d been born, and he would go on in his sheriff of Nottingham way until the day he finally started collecting on his patrolman’s pension, a day that couldn’t come soon enough as far as my incessantly hassled neighbors were concerned. Sadly, they also knew that another Officer Marks would be coming up the ranks to fill his racist shoes.
Marks pulled to the curb, shifted into park, and turned on his overhead flashers just to be a dick. He leaned toward and spoke through the open passenger-side window. “There a problem here, boys? You know there’s a loitering law.”
He referred to a law that limited the number and length of time that juveniles, unattended by adults, could gather in public places. The law had been passed in the fifties, long before the mall to the south of town had been built, when downtown Ogontz had still been a thriving business and shopping district. The law had been passed by the urging of merchants, whose storefronts had been being inundated by penniless teenagers just hanging out but supposedly scaring away potential paying customers. Today, that law was used primarily by cops pulling a shift on the east end. There wasn’t a store in the sixteen-block area. The police claimed to be disrupting drug deals and gang activity, but all they were really doing was harassing people and furthering the alienation of the black community.
“I live here, Officer. These are my friends,” I called from the porch.
“Uh-huh,” he said, nearly choking on his skepticism before dismissing me. “How about you?” He was talking to Gordon.
“Me?” Gordon touched his chest with both hands.
“Yeah, you and your Beamer. Don’t see your kind around here unless your party planning came up a little short and you need to make an immediate”—he hesitated, then said—“purchase” as he took a long toke from an imaginary joint.
“Purchase, Officer? Why, I have no idea what you’re talking about. I’m just visiting a few friends, soaking up a little of the local color, if you know what I mean.” He gave Marks a quick wink and made a subtle nod toward the girls.
I stared in disbelief. In an instant, Marks believed that he and Gordon were on the same team. The interrogation was over. He waved Gordon to the squad car.
“You know what they say,” Marks began in a hushed voice. “Once you go black, you never go back.” He laughed at his own cleverness.
“Yeah, but it’s all pink inside,” Gordon said, tapping the roof of the Crown Victoria, signaling it was time for Marks to move on, which he did, but not before doing that dorky thing of pointing to his own eyes and then at T and his friends in my yard.
“What’d he say?” one of the girls asked.
“Nothing. Don’t worry about him,” Gordon said. “He’s an asshole.”
Gordon looked to me on the porch. The temporary diversion had ended, and an earnest look had returned to his face. “Keats, we need to go.”
He was right. It was only a matter of time before Shelly’s disappearance would be discovered. Her father would know exactly who took her, and Claire could identify the car we were driving. Whenever the inevitable call came out over the radio, even Officer Marks would be able to do the simple math and pin us to an exact place and time with a fairly good fix on the direction we were heading.
“We need a different car,” I said.
“Absolutely,” Gordon agreed. “Any ideas?”
“Hold on,” I said before disappearing into the house. Within minutes I was reversing out of our detached one-car garage in the back of the house. I was sitting behind the leather-covered steering wheel of a black ’78 Trans Am with a gold eagle, wings spread, emblazoned on the hood, my dad’s onetime prized possession. Inconspicuous it wasn’t, but it didn’t need to be. The cops and Shelly’s father would be looking for a black BMW.
“Genius,” Gordon muttered. “Fucking genius.”
Without a word, a warning, or a worry, Gordon tossed his keys to T, who, with as many others as could fit, was out the driveway and into the slowly descending Ogontz night, playing the wild goose.
Inside the Trannie and heading toward Gordon’s once again, I pointed toward the fuel gauge, where the red needle was nearly flatlined.
“No problem,” Gordon said. “We’re running on karma.”
“Right,” I said, and actually believed it.
I asked him, “How’d you know those guys?”
In typical Gordon fashion, he answered, “Just do.”
We left it at that.
6
For Gordon, the month after his expulsion from the Rood began the summer of Manfred. His debut novel made the “Must-Read” lists of several national magazines and was picked as one of USA Today’s Hot Summer Reads for Young Adults. Reporters from a variety of teen-oriented magazines and websites interviewed Gordon and featured his photograph in their articles. His stock quip was “I awoke one morning and found myself famous.”
Gordon spent much of those months driving with Catherine from one bookstore to the next for signings and meets and greets. She was the mother of all cock blocks; Catherine intercepted or fished from his pockets every phone number slipped to him by members of his largely female fan base.
In the fall, Catherine enrolled him for his sophomore year at Trinity Catholic, a school primarily populated by the children of Ogontz’s shrinking middle class, who were desperate to avoid the blacks and Hispanics now constituting the majority of students in the Ogontz public school system
. At Trinity, based upon his filial heritage, Acedia address, and burgeoning celebrity, Gordon was immediately welcomed as a member of the noblesse oblige.
I’m sure that secretly Catherine was relieved by the reduction in tuition costs afforded by Gordon’s departure from the Rood. The cost of maintaining two children in private boarding schools had depleted her cash reserves and she had nearly exhausted the generosity of her parents, who actually still blamed her for the demise of her marriage and, therefore, her current financial shortfall. As a result of her divorce settlement, she’d received substantial shares in the Byron Boatyards. However, consumers’ discretionary spending on luxury purchases is often the first to be cut in tough economic times; therefore, her dividends fluctuated wildly. Lately, cash flow had been tight. Despite Catherine’s legitimate legal access to his earnings, Gordon maintained tight control over the advance he’d received for Manfred, and since his homecoming, he had taken to intellectually bullying his emotionally fragile mother, and saw no good reason why he, as a minor, should be expected to reduce her financial responsibility to raise and educate him.
After his termination from the Rood, Gordon possessed even less regard for formalized schools and the fascists who administer them. To his mind, he’d done nothing wrong; each so-called offense had been victimless. Caroline? Mrs. Guiccioli? He’d liberated them. He’d given them what they wanted. If anything, he was the victim.
Therefore, Gordon was relatively indifferent to his enrollment at Trinity. He would never conform his intellectual or existential pursuits to their narrow-minded curriculums or reading lists, anyway. His interest was piqued, however, by a photograph in a full-color Trinity brochure, which his mother left conspicuously open on the island in the kitchen, of a fully extended swimmer diving off starting blocks. Beneath the photograph the caption read “Twelve State Swimming Championships!” Browsing a list of extracurricular sports offered at Trinity, Gordon was disappointed to find lacrosse absent, but he was impressed by their athletic success in general and was especially intrigued by the swim program. His aquatic prowess was entirely natural and, even worse, unheralded. Despite his stubborn independence and aversion to authority, Gordon wondered what he might accomplish as a swimmer if he only had a little coaching.
When she heard the news of Gordon’s enrollment, Shelly was nothing short of euphoric. She had attended Trinity’s schools since kindergarten. Her father was a product of the school himself and a staunch supporter of All Saints, tithing ten percent of his income to the church since his first paper route; however, despite her father’s wealth and standing in the community, or maybe because of it, she had never fit in with the other kids at Trinity. She’d always been picked on, always been alienated, nicknamed Psycho Shelly.
Though bright, Shelly had the focus of a gnat, and was almost entirely uneducable. She hated the indoors; her attention was always directed out the classroom window, and like Gordon, she had little respect for or fear of authority. She could have been the poster child for ADHD, if she could have sat still long enough for the photograph. Having grown up in the relative isolation of Acedia, with only the equally eccentric Byron children as playmates, Shelly was already socially dysfunctional when she was thrown into the survival-of-the-fittest world of elementary school.
She did herself no favors, however, when in first grade she liberated the class gerbil, Brownie; or, when in second grade she convinced her classmates of the implausibility of Santa Claus; or, when in third grade she was caught with a consecrated communion host under a microscope, searching for evidence of the transubstantiation; or, when in fourth grade she temporarily earned the nickname Lorax by climbing a tree in a field adjacent to the playground and refusing to come down because it had been marked for removal for the expansion of the jungle gym; or, when in the fifth grade she became a proselytizing vegan; or, when in the sixth grade she shamelessly explained the process of tampon insertion (complete with visual aids) to a group of mortified boys; or, when in the seventh grade she was thrown into the boys’ locker room after gym class by some of the “cool” girls, and she laughed at all the tiny peckers; or, when in the eighth grade she attempted to form a FLAG (Friends of Lesbians and Gays) Club; or, when as a freshman she contributed an article to the school literary magazine critical of the “obscene expenditures” earmarked by the school for the state powerhouse football program and the award-winning cheerleading and dance squads in comparison with the paltry amount spent in support of Trinity’s service organizations or in the actual “feeding of the hungry, clothing of the naked, or housing of the homeless.”
But now, with Gordon about to join her at Trinity, she wouldn’t be so alone—or so she thought.
* * *
The truth turned out to be that Gordon had little time for Shelly, her causes, or her peculiarities once he stormed into Trinity. A summertime friendship in the relative anonymity of Acedia was one thing. The real world was something else. It didn’t take him long to understand that an affiliation with Shelly would keep his hands out from under more skirts and from inside more blouses than he cared to miss, for he was immediately impressed by the Amazonian bodies of the daughters of Ogontz’s plebeian class, and he longed to sample as many as possible.
By the first day of school, Gordon had earned his driver’s permit, which, by Ohio law, enabled him to operate a car at fifteen, as long as he was accompanied by an adult licensed driver. With Catherine’s promise to make the subsequent monthly car payments herself, he used part of his advance to make a down payment to lease a black Hummer H3, in which he pulled into the student parking lot at the nearby All Saints Catholic Church.
According to Shelly, he made his mother slouch in the backseat under cover of the tinted windows in order to save him the embarrassment of her accompaniment. She waited until well past the opening eight a.m. bell to climb into the front seat and drive home, only to return to the same location before the final bell at three, or at whatever time Gordon assigned, when she would resume her crouched position in the backseat. This routine they continued until Gordon earned his actual license on his sixteenth birthday in January. I don’t know why she tolerated it. Something about Gordon made women want to please him, protect him, save him, and, in general, do for him. If you could have bottled Gordon’s charisma, you could have made a fortune doing creepy late-night infomercials in between the even sadder ones for Girls Gone Wild and for male “enhancement” pills.
You know, it’s ironic. Shelly’s mother killed herself before Shelly’s baptism and left her in the care of a disinterested father, yet Shelly loved her. My mother couldn’t put her smokes down long enough to make me a toasted cheese sandwich, yet I loved her. There was nothing Gordon’s mother wouldn’t do for the boy who’d grown into the spitting image of the man who’d nearly destroyed her, yet Gordon loathed her very being. I don’t know. Just saying.
Gordon’s body rocked the school-mandated white polo shirt with the Trinity crest and the khaki uniform pants like they had never before been rocked. Word of his enrollment had preceded him. Even I, then the lowliest of freshmen, had overheard the news of his arrival. On the first day of school, I stood, rising to tiptoe and peering between bodies, to get a peek as packs of his less-than-peers parted from his path and then re-formed in his wake as he entered the building and walked the main hallway of Trinity in search of the guidance office and his schedule of classes. The girls parted their lips and dropped their chins while the boys either did the same or clenched their fists according to their respective unconsciously inspired first desires.
“Jesus” was the ambiguous reaction of one unidentified voice nearby.
Gordon was especially surprised and disappointed by the rampant homogeneity of the male members of Ogontz’s chapter of the Benedict Youth. The school uniforms certainly contributed to their sameness, but it was more than that. There had been a dress code at the Rood, but the boys had been somehow able to rebel and to resist the school’s attempt to dehumanize, whitewash, and control th
em, primarily through constant, even if ineffectual, complaints and small bits of civil disobedience: low-hanging ties, untucked shirts, sockless feet, and hair grown beyond the established parameters. All petty but clear “fuck you’s” directed at the administration and the slavery of institutionalized conformity. The mannequins of Trinity, however, appeared happily anesthetized, except for Shelly, of course, who Gordon passed in the main hall that first day. She was wearing a black “Save the Planet” T-shirt over her white blouse, an offense for which she was summarily sent to the office by her homeroom teacher.
Trinity was a jock factory, one that would have done cold war East Germany proud. Ironically, a large percentage of Ogontz’s population are descendents of German immigrants, who came too late to the American party and were forced to leapfrog the already immigrant-saturated East Coast and settle in Ohio in order to pursue their dreams of New World prosperity. Every parent in the four-county area, Catholic or not, sent his or her child to Trinity—if the parent had even the slightest hope that his or her son or daughter had college athletic scholarship potential.
The halls were yearly stocked with long, lean, broad-shouldered, and graceful demigods. To the contrary, most of the kids at the Rood had been rather anemic, bookish, and soft—absolute pussies by comparison with these Warriors, which just so happened to be the name of Trinity’s sports teams. Gordon must have immediately determined that it would be impossible to impress these roboteens by mere physicality; nor could they be intimidated by intellectualism. For they were the most unquestioning party-line-swallowing irony-deprived adult-pleasing collection of kiss-asses Gordon could have ever imagined, and their Teflon-coated psyches were angst resistant and oblivious to both his superior erudition and his sarcasm.
The purchase of the Hummer, however, had been a stroke of accidental genius. He would soon discover that the lever that would move these lumps of clay and undo many a button, zipper, and Velcro strap was good old-fashioned American materialism and class envy.