Twelve

by Nick McDonell

  Chapter Twenty-Five

  WHITE MIKE AND Lionel watch the girl hurry away.

  “We’ll be seeing that one again soon,” says Lionel.

  “You seen my cousin?” White Mike asks.

  “Who?” Lionel is thumbing the cash.

  “You know, Charlie. He put us together. Goes to college now. Still deals.”

  Lionel thinks back to the feathers flying up in front of his eyes as the parka exploded under Charlie’s face. The other kid flashes through his mind too, down on the pavement.

  “Oh, yeah.”

  “If you see him, tell him I’m looking for him.”

  “Yeah.” Lionel peaces himself out and walks off quickly, to go back uptown and get stoned.

  “Fucking guy,” White Mike is muttering under his breath as he catches a cab.

  Where is Charlie? Charlie has been on White Mike’s mind a lot recently. He grew up with the kid, after all. Charlie is his cousin. His father’s sister is Charlie’s mother. But she and her husband were all fucked up. Way too much money, in the gossip columns all the time, party-party-party, and it was houses in Tuscany and chartered boats off Bali. Their family is much wealthier than White Mike’s father. For most of Charlie’s life, it was either live with the nannies or live with White Mike. So Charlie just used his parents’ house when he wanted to throw a party or something. He kept that address, but he really lived with White Mike. They were almost the same age and looked like brothers; people used to mistake them for twins. The big difference between them was that Charlie was a very bad student, or just didn’t care, or both, and was sent away to a bad boarding school in eighth grade. It made him grow up faster, in a funny way.

  White Mike always looked forward to Charlie’s return during vacations: it always brought interesting adventures and eventually tutorials in drug dealing. When Charlie came back home this time, though, he was different. Maybe it was the new school, or maybe it was just that he was doing more drugs than usual— college didn’t stop that—but he had been distant. Like his mind was on something. He went off without White Mike for basically the whole vacation; doing what, White Mike couldn’t guess. So the hell with Charlie. The whole deal is making White Mike cranky.

  Chapter Twenty-Six

  JESSICA STRUTS DOWN Fifth Avenue, anticipating, her high, shapely ass swinging and hair flying, beautiful in the light streaming through the sky at the tail end of dusk. She takes her purple Discman out of her bag and puts on the headphones, the kind that wrap around the back of your neck. She is listening to a mix a boy made for her. Jessica walks on, hand in her pocket, fondling the tiny Baggies.

  Chapter Twenty-Seven

  “WHY DON’T YOU do drugs? You deal ’em; why don’t you do ’em?” asked Hunter as he handed White Mike the bong disguised as a highlighter that he bought in a smoke shop downtown.

  White Mike looked at it and handed it back. “I don’t know. I just never had the urge to.”

  “Not even to try?”

  “No.”

  Chapter Twenty-Eight

  WHITE MIKE IS thinking about Charlie again. About the time when, as usual, his cousin’s parents were out of town and he wanted to cut school and fly down to Florida. It wasn’t even spring break, but Charlie and a couple of buddies were going to stay in some resort in Key West and get shitfaced and laid all the time.

  Charlie routinely took thousands of dollars from the checking account his father kept to run the house. His father knew this, of course, but kept putting more money in. There was no lack of it. This time, for some reason, there wasn’t enough money to cover the plane tickets.

  But Charlie really wanted to take the trip, and his mother had some expensive jewelry, so he went into the safe in her dressing room and took this one necklace and pawned it to a jewelry guy he found who had a kind of storefront shop over on Ninth Avenue in the Fifties. Charlie pawned the necklace for twelve grand. While Charlie was at the shop, he saw that the place discreetly traded in guns too. He told all his buddies, and so the place became the place where you could get guns. The shop was called Angela’s Pawn shop, though no one knew any Angela. So kids would go in and ask to see the guns sometimes, but never buy them. Except for Charlie. He was really proud of the gun he bought there.

  The next day Charlie was on the plane (first class) with his boys listening to Nelly on his Discman . . .

  Can I make it?

  Damn right

  I he on the next flight

  Paying cash

  First class

  Sittin’ next to Vanna White

  . . . when his mother came back from France and became hysterical after realizing that her necklace was missing. She called the insurance company and fired the maid and hired a private investigator. By the time Charlie got back from Florida, a police report had been filed, and an insurance claim for $175,000 was about to go through. It was at this point that White Mike explained to Charlie how serious this was and talked him into telling his mother what he had done. That was a scene, but in the end Charlie told his mother where the jewelry was, and she went and got it back, and they all wound up being investigated for insurance fraud. Charlie was sent briefly to some boot camp in Montana for bad rich kids. He learned to ride horses there.

  Charlie said he loved the gun because of how shiny it was when it fit in your hand. It was like pointing lightning. White Mike took the little silver gun in his hand and sighted along the barrel, aiming it at Charlie’s head. White Mike told Charlie that he didn’t like the gun, and handed it back, and they didn’t talk about that anymore. Instead, they talked about cowboys. The way they wore their guns slung low, with the holsters open and the trigger guards cut away so that when the bad guy arrived at high noon, you could pull your iron before he could, and in the end he would fall to the ground and you would still be standing. And Charlie said it was really about how fast you pulled your gun, and White Mike said, No, Charlie, it’s really about pulling the trigger.

  Chapter Twenty-Nine

  TOBIAS HAS A Saturday meeting at his agency. Tobias has been a part-time model since getting discovered on the beach in East Hampton when he was eleven. His father wants him to go to Princeton, but Tobias wants to be a full-time model after high school. No way will he get into Princeton anyway, but father keeps saying he’ll take care of it. Whatever.

  Tobias remembers the first time he saw himself on the side of a bus in a Guess jeans ad. The utter euphoria, the elation, of seeing the lady at the bus stop double-take between him and the ad. Tobias was hooked. And at the shoots there were hands touching his head and face and body, styling, primping, caressing; he loved every minute of it. Being posed by the photographer and hearing the click of the shutter, and then, however long later, taking the picture and cropping and gluing it with surgical care in his leather-bound scrapbook with his initials embossed in gold on the spine. Tobias has been thinking that he might want to get a tattoo of his initials embossed in gold on his own spine, a couple inches above his ass, at his center of gravity.

  When he gets to the waiting room, there is a beautiful girl sitting in one of the chairs. This is not surprising—she is, of course, a model. Tobias thinks how much he would like to sleep with this particular girl.

  Chapter Thirty

  HER NAME IS Molly.

  Molly is sixteen. She wears her jeans baggy over her thin legs, ankles crossed all the way at the bottom of those legs, so far from her head, the low-top black Nikes over sockless feet. Her brown hair is tied up, and her glasses rest on the tip of her nose, freckled and perhaps sharper than fashionable, but an undeniably exquisite asset to her face. Thin eyebrows react subtly as she reads, furrowing, caterpillaring, and cocking above her liquid eyes. The gray turtleneck sweater hangs loose over her obviously curvy torso. Little bits of fluff and strands of wool catch the sunlight as bands of it come through the blinds, more white than yellow, and crisscross her chest and the tip of her chin. She is reading Ragtime by E. L. Doctorow, and she likes it very much.

 
; Tobias has never read Ragtime. He has read the latest issue of Maxim, however, and has learned several things from it. First, how to make a Lava lamp. Second, that to get a girl in bed, you shouldn’t act interested. Or rather, you should act interested but not too interested. Keep ’em guessing. Tobias couldn’t keep a paper bag guessing, and Molly, by all rights, should not have been interested in him. But Tobias is handsome, and Molly is a little confused.

  Molly’s parents come from the land of crazy people. Or maybe the land of assholes. Molly was in a health class at her school one day, and the teacher was talking about the importance of role models. Molly, uncharacteristically, raised her hand. She was by nature a quiet girl. She asked the teacher: “Okay, but what happens when the people who are supposed to be role models are jerks’?”

  The teacher replied: “I don’t think I understand the question.”

  Molly thought: No kidding.

  The spring break of her eighth-grade year, the beautiful Molly went on a trip with her crazy parents to visit with some of her father’s friends who had rented a compound on Scotsman’s Cay in the Bahamas. Molly doesn’t remember how they were all connected, but there were several families and lots of kids. The second oldest was a boy named Mike whose mother was sick and didn’t come. Molly had a crush on him, but she knew nothing would ever come of it because he was, like, a family friend and that never worked.

  The thing that made the trip bad for Molly, though, was not an unrequited crush. It was that her father said he had some sort of infection on his thigh so he couldn’t go snorkeling. He would just hang around the house all day, making phone calls and waiting for everyone to get back so he could drink his wine with them. The truth was that he was a bad athlete and a bad swimmer and didn’t want to go on any adventures where people would see that. So he would drop hints about his pain, and go on and on about how sorry he was that he was missing out on so much.

  White Mike noticed how she felt and told her to concentrate on what she saw underwater. He said it worked for him, so it would work for her too.

  Chapter Thirty-One

  TOBIAS MAKES CONVERSATION with Molly. He seems like a kid from the other crowd. A kid who gets fucked up and goes to those open houses that Molly always hears stories about afterward. He is sort of glamorous, even. Tobias tells her about his recent trek through Chinatown, and how he got some new pets—a tank of piranhas. Molly listens and tells him she likes fish and animals and has a sheepdog named Thomas—which is not true. She doesn’t want him to figure her out. She tries to be a little different. She puts down Ragtime so he can’t see the cover.

  They talk about how hard it is to be a model until Tobias gets called inside. She gets called in before he’s out, but after her meeting, he is there waiting for her.

  “I thought if you were still here, you might want to come and see the piranhas.”

  “Sure,” Molly says. Here we go.

  Tobias has been keeping his flesh-eating icythiopods at Claude’s house, to Claude’s delight. They are living in a neon-lit phosphorescent-blue aquarium above the bed in the guest bedroom with the drums on the fifth floor, across from Claude’s room and the balcony. Molly is wary of her surroundings. She is certainly not intimidated by the splendor of the house, but her apartment is pretty small by comparison. Everyone is wealthy, but there are gradations.

  Tobias turns off the lights, and the aquarium glows blue.

  Molly hears the sounds of professional wrestling. Claude is watching television in his bedroom across the hall. The faux violence is rendered in astonishing digital clarity on the flat-screen television hanging on the wall like a painting. That room is in the dark too, and when Tobias and Molly step in to say hello, Claude swivels his head and squints angrily at the light coming through the door. Tobias introduces Molly. Claude doesn’t mute the wrestling and has nothing to say, so after the introduction, Tobias takes Molly back to the piranha room. He has seen Claude’s weirdness before. Molly is silent.

  Tobias asks her if she wants to see something cool. She says yeah. He says to wait here. He goes down to the kitchen and opens the refrigerator. He removes a half-eaten rotisserie-cooked chicken, flaky and dull golden and cold, the bones protruding. He brings it back upstairs and tells Molly to watch this. He drops the chicken into the tank and presses the timer button on his digital watch.

  One: the fish rip at the flesh, and there is no blood, but the organic matter is shredded, and some rises to the surface as the fish dart at the main body.

  Two: hunks of the meat seemingly disappear, and Molly starts as one of the fish rams the chicken corpse violently into the glass.

  Three: the meat is gone, and the bones float around the tank trailing bits of vestigial chicken flesh.

  “Cool, huh?”

  “Yeah, uh, wow.”

  Molly says she has to leave. Tobias says come to the big open house in two days, for New Year’s Eve. Molly has no plans for New Year’s Eve. She has never been to an open house. She says she will come, thinking she can get out of it anytime. She realizes that the whole time she has been with Tobias, she hasn’t really said anything. On her way out, she does say hi to Chris, whose peach-fuzzed jaw drops when he sees her in his house.

  Chapter Thirty-Two

  THE FORENSIC TESTS have identified the blood on Hunter’s clothing. It is Nana’s.

  In the holding cell, Hunter is playing Friday night over and over in his head. He is trying to remember an alibi, some proof of where he was. The receipt for his doughnuts has the time printed on it, but it was hours too late. But what kind of a murderer goes and buys jelly doughnuts four hours after he kills? Probably all of them, thinks Hunter. None of that matters.

  There was that one thing last night, though. Hunter remembers the old con man. Some old guy with crooked teeth and a ragged suit. He was tall, actually, huge, four or five inches taller than Hunter. And he leaned down right into Hunter’s face and said something about a hospital and his friend and coffee and could Hunter give him just a couple dollars right now. Hunter asked if the money was for a cab to the hospital, and it was then that the man started crying. This giant, crazy old man with a scruffy face and crooked teeth started crying and repeating Two dollars, two dollars, two dollars, sometimes speaking English and sometimes some other language. More crying. It reminded Hunter of his father.

  Chapter Thirty-Three

  EVERYONE SAID White Mike looked handsome in the dark suit he wore to his mother’s funeral. He didn’t care. There was a wig on his mother’s corpse, which made him angry. Wigs weren’t real, and he wanted real. He would have rather seen her for the last time with her head bald.

  Chapter Thirty-Four

  CHRIS IS ANNOYED at having to come downstairs and sign for everything when the UPS truck arrives. He was watching TV. The delivery guys have about ten boxes, and he tells them to put them in the wrapping room, down the hall from the front door and to the left. He misses the look they give him when he says wrapping room. It is there that Chris’s mother keeps gifts, and the necessary tape and ribbons and paper.

  When the delivery guys are gone, Chris takes a steak knife from the kitchen and opens one of the boxes and pulls out a smaller box and opens it. It is a brass bell, flawlessly cast and with names engraved on it:

  Jeff and Trina

  Happy New Year

  Chris holds it by the handle and flicks his wrist. A high clear note rings out in the silence of the house.

  He looks through the boxes and finds more bells of different sizes with other people’s names engraved on them. He comes to the realization that his mother’s better friends, the people she is more interested in having as friends, get the bigger bells. He pulls out a big one and rings it with the smaller one and hears the deeper tones echo through the house. He can hold only one in each hand, but he takes out a dozen of them and lines them up on the wrapping table, then starts picking them up and playing them two at a time until he is in a frenzy and the big house is ringing with the sound of bells. And th
en his arms are tired and he lets the last note ring out and when it fades away finally, after a minute or two (for they are well-made bells), Chris heads upstairs to the television to kill the hours before he has to go to a cocktail party at his aunt’s house with his brother. It is one of their obligations, instead of taking out the garbage, maybe.

  Chapter Thirty-Five

  WHITE MIKE WAS a thinker, his teachers said. This is what he was thinking as he watched his mother’s coffin being lowered into the ground.

  You will not be remembered if you die now. You will be buried and mourned by a few, and what more can you ask for. But you feel so tremendously alone, because you fear that your blood is not strong or good and your friends are few and embattled too. But so what. That is the answer. So what so what so what so what so what so what so what. The world will spiral out from underneath you, and you will find nothing to hold on to because you are either too smart or too dumb to find God, and because what the fuck will Camus ever do for you? Just ideas. You are not an artist, you will not leave something behind. Maybe you are angry only because the way out is through love and you are horny and lonely. And she’s dead, of course. Maybe this is the way it is for everybody, only you are weaker, or less lucky, or have seen something they all have not. You have seen that before you lies a great stretch of road, and it is windswept or blasted by the hot sun or covered in snow, or it is dirt or concrete or shrouded in darkness or bright and clear so you have to squint, but no matter what, it is utterly empty.