Twelve

by Nick McDonell

  White Mike did not start skateboarding, but he thought that even if he didn’t get that out of seeing the skaters, he got the place out of it. And that dome and stage became one of his favorite places in the city, and he went there all the time, even at night. He knew that it was twenty of his strides across the stage, and that when he walked those steps, his overcoat billowed to the outside because the dome caught the wind and turned it around.

  Chapter Sixty-Eight

  JAIL ISN’T AS bad as Hunter thought it was going to be. For one thing, he had ID on him, so he spent more than the first day in the local precinct holding cell and didn’t have to go downtown till later. And it wasn’t so bad even down there. No one really paid any attention to him. In fact, he was struck by the carelessness from cops and criminals alike. He guessed it was a slow day. He did a lot of thinking while he was in the cell, because he figured push-ups were clichéd and he didn’t want to look like a fool. He tried to remember all the things he had ever memorized for school, but all he could really call up was the beginning of the Aeneid in Latin, Arma virumque cano, I sing of arms and the man. He thought that was appropriate.

  Not that he wasn’t scared sometimes. But Hunter knew he hadn’t killed anybody, and knowing you’re innocent is a strong thing in an enclosed space.

  Hunter is thinking how much he’d like to talk to someone. White Mike would be best, but almost anybody would do. Or maybe not. Maybe he never wants to talk to anybody again, ever.

  At some point in the afternoon, an officer shows up and takes him to another room where a lawyer he has never met before introduces himself. The lawyer has Hunter’s father on the phone.

  “So I guess Andrew’s father found you?”

  “Yes, Hunter, he’s been very helpful, and it was so good of him to track us down. We left you our itinerary, you know.”

  “I know.”

  Silence.

  “Yes. In any case, I’ll be flying out first thing in the morning, as I said. It’s the best I can do. Jesus, who could ever expect anything like this.”

  “I know.”

  “I’m sorry this is all taking so long.”

  There is another pause on the phone. He’s the dad, let him figure it out, thinks Hunter. Let him know what to say next.

  “How are you feeling?”

  Hunter shakes his head and closes his eyes.

  “Pretty shitty, Dad.”

  Chapter Sixty-Nine

  MATT MCCULLOCH HANGS up the phone, exhausted. His wife was already asleep with her pills before he even made the call. He made sure of that, didn’t want to have to listen to her. He mixes another gin and tonic and looks out to the beach. He supposes his son is scared.

  He remembers what happened to him when he was Hunter’s age, and how scared he was then. He had been drinking heavily then too, but he remembers the whole thing. He was a junior in high school, boarding school for him. Also in the winter, but just before the holiday break. The parents would come up and see the boys sing a concert before the end of the term. They would sing carols and church songs. “Hallelujah Amen” as arranged by Handel, and things like that. And in his first two years, when he was really happy to be getting out of school, he would be up there singing and it would all click and hallelujahs would be raining down in song and filling the big auditorium, and he would get into singing, it made him feel good, because hell, you know it was Christmas and the whole student body couldn’t be totally pissed and cynical.

  But that third year, Matt had been drinking and horsing around the day before the concert, when classes were sort of over. There was a lot of snow on the ground, and he and some of the other guys had this idea that it would be fun to make a bonfire in the woods, just a little ways from their dorm but still out of sight. And so that night, hours after they had snuck out and were good and drunk, they started this bonfire, and it lit up the clearing, and the snow reflected the jumping flames up onto the red faces of the boys as they whooped with glee at their fire, and started singing “Hallelujah Amen” as a drinking song, and danced around the fire, hopping around in that weird half-light of the eastern winter as the wind picked up and blew a bunch of the sparks through the air, and the sparks landed on two of the boys and their jackets caught fire.

  One of the boys was Matt McCulloch. His sleeve caught fire, and he saw the same happen to the other boy, but he just shoved his arm in the snow and watched the other boy run into the woods. Matt McCulloch had always been scared of the woods.

  The other boy was drunk and took a second to realize he was on fire, and in the chorus of amen amen hallelujah amen he was sort of lost, and when he ran off into the woods no one really noticed but Matt, and as the boys all hit the fun loud part of king of kings, forever, and ever, and lord of lords, that kid’s jacket melted onto his skin and he passed out from shock; and in the woods, about forty feet from Matt and the other boys, the flames devoured all his clothing and much of his skin, and his corpse lay naked but for the melted vestiges of his parka, in the fresh, clean, cold snow of the New England forest.

  And so Matt McCulloch remembers being in trouble as a teenager, even though he was never in any real trouble. No one found out that Matt had known the kid never came in that night. Matt McCulloch vomited the next morning when the lad was discovered, but everyone attributed it to a big heart. None of the boys involved were kicked out of school, there were too many. But someone had to take the blame, there had to be action, because this was a distinguished old institution, so one of the deans was fired, and he moved to Colorado and taught at a public school, and the kids in his English classes there had an awful lot more homework than usual. Matt McCulloch and the others felt guilty for a relatively long time, or at least until they left the school and went on their way, sometimes haunted by all of this and sometimes not.

  Chapter Seventy

  EVERYBODY TOOK ETHICS in the eleventh grade. It was a requirement. Why, White Mike wondered. White Mike was always bored in his ethics class, but he faked it and was sailing through with an A until the day’s topic was organized religion: discrimination, belief, freedom, all that. White Mike slumped back in his chair and listened as his peers tried to articulate their thoughts about how they liked the moral values of Christianity but still thought religion was the opium of the masses. The black girl in the class, on scholarship, started talking about how she went to church every Sunday and sang, and how there was a sense of community. White Mike was in a bad mood. He raised his hand, and everyone looked at him, because whenever he talked, it was something different.

  “The problem is that religion is just a cop-out. So is community. It’s just out of loneliness, you know, something to hold on to when you can’t do it yourself. It’s for weak people. Strength in adhering to values? No, it’s not.” The black girl looked close to tears. The teacher was trying to interrupt, but White Mike wasn’t stopping. He looked the teacher right in the eye. Look what I’m about to do.

  “Because really, when you get down on your knees on the pew, you’re just giving God a blow job.”

  “Get out, Mike,” said the teacher, pointing to the door. “Just get out.”

  Chapter Seventy-One

  WHITE MIKE KNOWS there will be no skateboarders at night in the winter, but when he calls this kid Andrew back, he tells him to meet at the amphitheater in the park where the skaters go. White Mike gets there early and stands on the stage and looks around at the benches and the snow, still unbroken in places, reflecting blue and white from the light of streetlamps.

  White Mike sees the kid coming from a long way off, looking all around, over his shoulder and everything. White Mike rolls his eyes at the kid’s approach. Why did I tell the kid to meet me here, wonders White Mike. It’s like the damn movies. Except it’s a fifty. Right.

  Andrew thinks, Damn, this is a drug deal when he sees the tall pale guy in the dark overcoat standing in the shadows of the theater.

  “Hello.” Andrew can’t think of anything else to say.

  “Hi.”
White Mike has never had a kid say hello before.

  “Umm, well, here you go.” Andrew hands over the money.

  White Mike looks in the kid’s eyes. “You’re not going to do this ever again, are you?”

  “I hope not. No offense or anything.”

  “You might not even be the one smoking this, right?”

  “No, probably.” Andrew hadn’t expected the dealer to be so talkative.

  “But since you’re not about to be a regular, you want to tell me something?”

  “Should we be just standing around here like this?”

  “It’s fine. But we can walk. I know you want to go. But you can walk with me out of the park. Andrew, right?”

  “I guess.” They start walking.

  “Why the weed?”

  “A girl I know wanted it, so I’m sort of picking it up for her.”

  “She shouldn’t smoke it if she’s not brave enough to buy it.”

  “I don’t know.”

  “If that’s enough for you, then good, I guess.”

  “What?”

  “Well, your life is about girls.”

  “No, it’s not.”

  “You’re out buying weed for one.”

  “Yeah, but there’s more.”

  “What?”

  “Well, everything. New Year’s Eve tomorrow.”

  “So?”

  “I don’t know what the fuck you’re talking about—” Andrew stops short and reminds himself, You’re talking to a drug dealer.

  White Mike shoves his hands in his pockets and doesn’t say anything.

  A light snow begins falling as they turn out of the park at Seventy-second Street. The flakes are very white in the air, falling through the light of the lamps, and the soft sound that comes with snow descends.

  “Good luck with the girl.”

  “Yeah. Thanks for the weed.”

  “Anytime.”

  “Good luck to you too, I guess, in dealing or whatever. I hope it works out.”

  White Mike turns downtown, and Andrew watches the snowflakes pile on the shoulders of his overcoat as he walks away.

  That must be the wackest drug dealer ever, thinks Andrew.

  Chapter Seventy-Two

  WHITE MIKE WENT to Times Square the previous New Year’s Eve. It was what he expected, a huge drunken confluence of humanity, hookers and crooks and fools from the bridges and tunnels and, of course, teenage drug dealers. White Mike arrived in Midtown on the late side, so he couldn’t get anywhere near Times Square itself. The mass of bodies extended blocks and blocks in every direction. White Mike wondered if Dick Clark somehow soaked up all this energy from doing it year after year and that was what made him look maybe forty years younger than he actually was. Anyway, there was an energy. White Mike liked it. He liked moving through the crowds alone, sneaking through the police barricades and watching everything flow by around him.

  The crowd extended up to Central Park South, and White Mike climbed a tree on the park side and sat in it looking down Seventh Avenue and could just make out Times Square. It wasn’t snowing, but the cold was blistering, and White Mike wished for a second that he smoked, because he bet it would have made him warmer.

  When the ball dropped, the crowd below went wild and White Mike watched everybody make out. It was cold, but White Mike liked it in the tree, so he stayed there for a long time and watched the crowd disperse in all the different directions. When he came down and started walking home, the city was still wired, and there were crowds of people in the park, and in front of the dome where the skaters came, there were a lot of people dancing. On the stage was some terrible salsa band with a thumping techno beat and lights flashing on the dancers. The crowd was young and old, everybody drunk and dancing in the freezing cold. White Mike was almost tempted to dance but didn’t and kept walking. When he got over to Fifth Avenue, he decided against going home and headed back downtown. It was very bright, and there were still crowds moving across the city like small storms.

  Outside an expensive restaurant, White Mike saw a lady with a lined face and knit gloves biting her thumb and crying. She looked terrified and reminded White Mike of the refugees he had seen on CNN. Her hair was pulled back, but wisps of it were flying loose, and her scrunched-up face was so terrible and haunting that White Mike looked at her twice. He realized that she was whimpering and biting her way through the glove, and he thought that her thumb must be getting all mangled. Next to her, two couples in evening clothes were walking into the restaurant.

  White Mike turned back into the crowds of people. He wanted to be far away. Just way the fuck gone from this whole city. This place where people chewed off their own hands while the people next to them sipped champagne in tuxedos.

  Get hold of yourself, he thought. Don’t be an asshole.

  Chapter Seventy-Three

  ON THE WAY home from selling to Andrew, White Mike is thinking about loneliness. He is feeling the change in his pocket. The streets are almost empty, but there is always someone out. Because there are millions of people here.

  How many is a million, thinks White Mike. What are there millions of? People. Pigeons. Pennies. Everybody knows what a penny dropped from the top of the Empire State Building can do. So if it started to rain pennies, millions of pennies, and these tiny bronze disks were streaking to the earth, catching the sunlight, the bronze rain would explode into the pavement and leave craters and you would run for cover. And there you would be, hiding under some overhang with everyone else who has run for cover, pressed in against the other bodies taking shelter. If it started raining money.

  White Mike didn’t spend much time down at the restaurants with his dad anymore. It just wasn’t worth it to go there and pretend to work, because the work his father put him to was so easy that White Mike finished it in no time. And what was the point? To learn the business? His dad never noticed when he left, just so long as White Mike had dinner with him every once in a while, usually in an Italian restaurant a few blocks from home. And White Mike never asked for spending money, so that wasn’t a problem. And the restaurants were always there, so he was busy that way if he needed to be.

  A month ago, White Mike’s father told him that instead of going to work, they should do something else, spend some time together. Doing what, his father didn’t say. White Mike got up at ten and his father got up at twelve, and by the time his father was ready to go out, it was one. They didn’t talk much at lunch, except for his father running down some problems with one of the restaurants. They got back home around three-thirty, and then the phone rang and White Mike’s father took the call in his room.

  White Mike heard the sibilant S’s through the door as his father spoke on the phone with his girlfriend. It was quiet, but the hissing sound carried through the apartment. White Mike knew his father wouldn’t come out of his room, so he sat with his back against the opposite wall and his feet touching the closed door. He sat and listened to his father but not the words, just the sound through the door, like gas escaping some fractured mechanism. White Mike wondered what his father had to talk about for so long, because as he sat there, the sun, which was casting short white squares of light from the windows, dropped low, and the light lengthened and faded, and White Mike watched it creep to his leg and spill over onto his knees and pass him completely and continue up the floor. And it was just so fucking lonely, the light lengthening and darkening. When he heard the click of the receiver, White Mike got up quickly and went to his room, where he kept checking his beeper, hoping for a call.

  White Mike’s father apologized later for the phone call, but he knew his son would understand, and you know, Mike, how it is with women.

  Chapter Seventy-Four

  ON THE TWENTIETH floor at Eighty-first and Third Avenue, Molly leans her head out the window way up there in the sky and looks toward the park, halfway across town. She has taken out her contact lenses, so the sharp headlights of the cars are out of focus and the street appears to her a great river
of lights, shimmering circles of yellow and red, obscuring the shapes of the cars and the edges of the building and all the people. The circles speed past beneath her, and the sounds of the street and the horns rise from them, but way up there in the sky, without her glasses on or her contacts in, the movement of the lights is so smooth that the sharp sounds seem disjointed, not to fit with anything.

  Molly wears clothing very well, though she never picks it out in advance. But tonight she is trying on different outfits for the next night, and ten minutes after she has begun, she looks in the mirror and sees herself trying on a short black skirt and a tank top and jutting her hips out to the side. She double-takes in the mirror, furrows her eyebrows, and yells at the reflection, “I am not a tank-top girl! I am not, I am not,” and she rips off all her clothing and tosses the tank top out the window and stands there naked and cold. She sticks her head out the window to see where the garment has landed. It is in the trees, twenty stories down. Molly gets into bed and sleeps naked.

  Part V

  New Years Eve

  Chapter Seventy-Five

  WHITE MIKE DIDN’T do drugs, but Hunter did once in a while. The most important time was one night last December. Hunter told White Mike what he was going to do, and White Mike said he was a fool, but Hunter was determined, so White Mike was of course going to watch out for him. They started at Ninety-sixth Street on Park, looking all the way down to the MetLife Building at the bottom, beyond all the lights on the trees. They started late so the street would be deserted. It was a Sunday night, with a full moon, and it was really very bright outside, with the lights and the moon and everything. And then Hunter started tripping out, which was the plan, and White Mike started walking him down the divider in the middle of Park Avenue, weaving him among the lighted trees and stopping him whenever cars raced by.