The Coming Storm

by Paul Russell

  “So what’s in there anyway?” Patrick coaxed.

  “Yeah, Gary, let’s see the money shot,” added Tim, his hand busy at his inner thigh. Gary had worked them all into a palpable excitement. Even Noah felt, if not stirred, then at least—and in spite of himself—interested.

  Gary teased the shoe box’s lid open an inch or so, then closed it back. He was reckless and a bully, which were no doubt virtues on a soccer field. He held his more sensible friends in the big rough palm of his hand.

  “Here I am,” he narrated, comfortably back in his own voice, “walking along, minding my own business, and guess what? I hear this loud thump and I look over, not five feet away…” With a flourish he slid the lid fully off, and tilted the shoe box so they could all see its contents. A pigeon lay snugly inside, its body limp, his pink eye still wide open and staring.

  “No way,” Tim said.

  “The fucking thing just dive-bombed right out of the sky. Thunk. Dead as a doornail. Missed me by that much.”

  “I can’t believe you went back and got it,” Kevin said. “A motherfucking dead bird. That’s really fucked.”

  “Don’t worry, I’ve got plans for this guy. Don’t you think he looks rather gay—I mean, for a pigeon? I can tell he wants to go party with his little friend. The two of them are going to have just a gay old time of it tonight.”

  Tim, apparently, was hesitating. “Not a good idea,” he cautioned. “He’ll know we did it. I don’t want my ass fried over a stupid pet trick.”

  “Ten bucks he won’t say a word about it.” Noah pretended to reread, with immense concentration, the stupid story he’d written. The two friends bet on nearly everything: test scores, ball games, even whether this song or that one would play first on the radio.

  “Fifty,” Tim said grimly.

  Gary looked pained. “Oh man, you know I don’t have fifty bucks.”

  “Twenty, then. Since you’re so sure you’re going to win.”

  “Go for it, Gary,” Patrick said.

  “Okay then, twenty,” Gary said. The power Gary had over his friends, especially Tim, who was usually pretty smart about things, interested Noah a great deal. How was it that he felt so completely immune? Gary was a handsome guy, funny in his way, but clearly this was one seriously disturbed dude; either his friends didn’t notice or secretly they liked that about him, his manic ability to go right to the edge without any fear of the consequences. He’d been expelled from his last school, though no one on this end of things seemed to know what for.

  “Everybody heard that, right?” Gary said. “Twenty smackeroos. Noah,” he called out. “Did you hear? You going to be my witness?”

  “Yeah, yeah, I heard,” Noah told him. He made a point of concentrating on his spiral notebook, the hectic words on the page. The stupid steamroller rolled over and over the stupid old woman, crushing her bones. His lack of talent made him sick.

  “Mr. Fatwa, here we come,” Gary said in a comical, high-pitched voice as he lifted the limp pigeon from the box.

  “Oh man,” Kevin said. “That’s really fucked.”

  The bird’s shimmery head lolled to one side. Gary regarded his trophy. “God, it’s an ugly motherfucker,” he judged. “Well, one ugly-ass bird deserves another. Come on, dudes. Let’s do it.”

  Holding the pigeon in mock-flight before him and buzzing softly between his lips, Gary shuffled from the room, Kevin and Patrick in close attendance, Tim rolling his eyes at Noah but bringing up the rear nonetheless.

  Noah rolled off his bed, stashed the pages of his story in the Read This and Die folder, and went to the open door. He could see them gathered, down the hall, in front of the Fatwa’s room. A burst of stifled laughter, a giggle.

  “Hey, I know,” Gary said in a stage whisper. “Somebody get some string.” Then, more loudly, loud enough to be heard through a closed door, “Hey, Noah, you got any string in your room?”

  Noah didn’t say anything; regretting he’d even set foot in the corridor, he held his palms out to communicate neutrality. Businesslike, Tim turned and stalked back to the room. He moved past Noah without acknowledging him, as if embarrassed, and Noah, standing aside to let him past, felt suddenly sorry for his roommate, who rifled noisily through his desk drawer, finally pulling out a ball of jute; then he overturned onto his desktop a water glass filled with miscellaneous items—paper clips, rubber bands, pencils, the thumbtack he wanted.

  Seeing him provisioned, Gary gave a thumbs-up from down by the Fatwa’s door. From his vantage Noah watched the four boys huddle close over the bird, Gary quickly forming a noose and sliding it over the neck. Then, to a flurry of giggles and “shhs,” he pressed the thumbtack into the door’s soft wood and leaped back. His friends high-fived one another jubilantly. The pigeon dangled from the door.

  Noah felt a sharp, mean stab of pleasure—not at the dirty deed, though there was a strange, vicious excitement in that. Maybe the Fatwa was a mystery, and Tracy Parker too, but Gary Marks was way too obsessed with faggots, Noah thought with cruel satisfaction, to be anything but a faggot himself.

  He waited, heart racing, for the hunter who was coming through the trackless woods, a bestubbled man with weird, bright eyes and a beak like a bird’s. He wore a red hunter’s cap and carried a shotgun, and yelping beagles ran before him, frothing with excitement, fanning out over the ridge. Someone had tied him down to that boulder; he couldn’t free himself, and after a few moments he didn’t even try. He just waited patiently, full of excitement himself, for the dogs that would tear him to pieces, the hunter who would shoot him full of holes. It never hurt. It just felt odd, the way your stomach did on the roller coaster at Six Flags. The waterfall made a noise like the mockingbird that sometimes perched outside the dorm window, a warbling song that kept twisting back on itself, a never-ending loop, and it seemed to him that maybe the water was being recycled too, there was a pump at the bottom that brought it back to the top so that it could pour over the lip of the falls once more.

  Beneath his thighs the sheets were warm and wet. Fuck, Noah breathed soundlessly. He’d gone and done it again. This was supposed to happen when you were a kid, a flaw you were supposed to outgrow; instead, unfairly, in his adolescence he’d grown into it.

  Fortunately, Tim was a heavy sleeper. His steady, resolute breathing hung on the verge of a snore. More than anything Noah dreaded waking his roommate during one of his middle-of-the-night tasks, and though that terminal embarrassment hadn’t yet happened, one of these nights it was bound to. Easing himself from bed, moving stealthily in the dark, he stripped off his shorts, then carefully peeled back the soaked sheets and wadded them into the special hamper he kept in his closet. He took off the plastic undersheet, replaced it with a fresh one, spread new sheets out over it.

  He could never sleep after one his accidents. Pulling on a clean pair of gym shorts and T-shirt, he padded barefoot down the hall to the bathroom, pausing at the Fatwa’s closed door to note that the pigeon had disappeared without a trace. Despite telling himself he was entirely innocent, he nonetheless felt remorse at the thought of the Fatwa behind that door, listening to his tormentors do their work, then in the quiet aftermath slipping out to survey the damage. What rage or loneliness or fear had the Fatwa felt as he carried the pigeon to the trash can, or outdoors to dump it under a bush, or wherever he’d quietly disposed of it?

  The dorm was utterly still but Noah’s nerves were dancing. And of course his bladder was empty. Still, for several minutes he stood in quiet misery before a cold urinal, breathing in its sweet reek of disinfectant. Behind him were three toilet stalls. A hint of something dreadful tickled along his spine. He stuffed himself back in his gym shorts and slowly turned around. Two of the doors were swung wide open, but the middle one was shut. He took five soundless steps till he stood before it, then taking a deep breath, he briskly shoved it open.

  Nothing. Empty.

  CAUTION: THE FATWA LIMBO DANCES warned the grafitti etched above the toilet paper disp
enser.

  Why did he feel so unhappy, freaked out in the middle of the night? It was more than just pissing his bed, more than just the sorry stuff with the Fatwa, though the perfect thought occurred to him: when he got back to his room, the pigeon would be hanging from his and Tim’s door. He trod the corridor slowly, lengthening out the suspense of not knowing, wondering if perhaps it would more than anything else relieve him to see the dead bird justly returned to its perpetrators. But nothing like that, alas or fortunately, had happened; there was only the half-torn Star Fleet Academy decal that had been on the door when they moved in, and the rarely used yellow message pad, its short red pencil dangling from a string.

  In the room’s dark, shored up by Tim’s adamant snoring, he managed to find his sneakers without crashing into anything. He pulled on a sour-smelling sweatshirt. Slipping out the dorm’s emergency door—its alarm, unbeknownst to the dorm adviser, deactivated since the first week of school—he stood on the steps and breathed in the cool night air. Track was supposedly his sport, since they all had to have a sport at the Forge, but he was the worst member of the team by far—it was a joke he was so bad—and Coach Smith usually didn’t care when he missed as long as he had an excuse. He’d been smart enough to make a photocopy of the note Tracy had written for him one day, so he could copy the handwriting. He felt a little guilty taking advantage like that, but there were several times when his ability to do a passable forgery of Tracy’s signature had already come in handy.

  He ran leisurely, taking long springing steps and enjoying a kind of weightlessness. Street lamps lit his way along the path that ringed Sunrise Lake. Otherwise the campus was dark, its buildings abandoned to slumber. He hated the Forge, its rules and monotony, the losers who went there, himself included—though to be honest, he didn’t hate it any more than he’d hated every other school he’d ever been at. It was just school in general he hated, the way it made him feel stupid and desperate. I could run away from all this, he thought, just go and never come back. The literal possibility made him smile.

  Though he wouldn’t get away with it at fifteen any more than he had at eleven or twelve or thirteen at that school in Massachusetts he’d hated so much. He could flee to the steppes of Central Asia and still his dad would track him down, lift him up like an errant chess piece, put him back in his correct place on the board. Then the game would go on as if exactly nothing had happened. Believe me, I have my ways, was his dad’s chilling phrase—not about tracking anybody down; rather, some business he was trying to do in some tenth-rate African country nobody else wanted to touch with a ten-foot pole. That much a twelve-year-old Noah had taken in as he stood in the door, sorry now about barging into a living room he’d thought was empty, his dad shooting him that glance that said, Why not make yourself scarce, buddy? His dad’s golf partner A. J. was sitting on the sofa and laughing but trying not to show it because the African guy, for all his broad smile, was looking pretty miserable—and Noah had gone around for days after trying out that phrase, Believe me, I have my ways, mouthing it a dozen times in an hour but never quite getting his dad’s dry, careful way of saying it, so cool unless you thought it was directed at you, and then it might be seriously scary.

  At night the campus was rife with the secret life of animals after dark: deer, skunk, raccoons, possums. In the woods on the other side of the lake an owl hooted richly, on the lookout for small victims below. Noah liked running in the midst of all those fleet-footed rogues and scavengers of the dark; he felt a satisfying burn in his thighs, his calves, the healing pump of endorphins to his brain. Up ahead, in the wedge of light beneath one of the street lamps, he saw a figure, probably the old security guard who made his ineffectual rounds at night. As Noah slowed his stride, prepared to veer off into the dark, a surprising creature came bounding his way.

  “Hey Betsy,” he said. “It’s me.” Out of breath, he stood his ground as she clamored at his waist with her front paws.

  “Oh, now I see,” Tracy said. Silhouetted against the light, he held Betsy by a leash he’d let unspool as far as it would go. “You two arranged this little tryst beforehand. I wondered why she was so urgent to go out.”

  “I told you not to bring him along,” Noah chided the uncomprehending animal who continued, ecstatically, to dance around him. The in-love-with-Betsy routine, begun as a joke but now settled into habit, felt a little weird, though if Tracy was into it he supposed he’d go along as well. He felt strangely nervous to have run into his teacher like this, and even Tracy seemed a little concerned.

  “But seriously,” he asked Noah, “are you supposed to be out so late? Or did you decide to run away from school?”

  Noah laughed; if only Tracy Parker knew. “I thought I’d run away from myself,” he said.

  “Now that’s funny. What a beautiful night for it,” Tracy told him.

  But did Tracy even guess how beautiful it was? Only if you’d burned a forest down could you truly tell how full to the brim a night sluicing among the trees could be. Then Noah’s body tugged him back to the fact of himself and he rubbed at a sharp little ache that had sprung up in his left calf. “Actually, I couldn’t sleep,” he said, conscious of the momentary flicker of Tracy’s interested gaze in the direction of his leg, the fleeting animal satisfaction of having been noticed. “I was trying to tire myself out,” he added.

  Tracy seemed to consider that. “Don’t let me keep you,” he said, turning his briefly strayed attention back to Betsy, who was noisily foraging something in the leaves by the side of the path.

  So that was how easily his teacher dismissed him, as if he were nothing special after all. A bitter pang flared in Noah: maybe he should just leave the inscrutable Tracy Parker to walk his damn dog in peace.

  “Or you want to walk with me?” Tracy went on, casually erasing that flare as easily as he’d provoked it. “I was going to make a circle around the lake.” He spoke as if there was nothing out of the ordinary about them running into each other like this, but maybe that was how he lived. Maybe he seized whatever came his way, Noah thought, like his dad’s pal A. J., the jail time he’d spent for some trouble or other, and when he got out he’d said, “Watch me. I’m gonna grab this fucking life by the balls and not let go.” That was down in South Carolina; he’d taken them flounder fishing in his boat. After only three months of freedom his tan was already leathery and deep, his smile triumphant. There was a mad invisible bull raging inside him, bucking and snorting and stamping to get out. He’d taken Noah aside and said, “Buddy, let me tell you, this is exactly what we’ve got.” Indicating the horizon with a broad sweep of his arm. “So use it. Use it all up.”

  That magnificent desperation: the hungry, proud, remorseless animal. Was Tracy Parker like that as well?

  With his teacher he walked in silence, whether awkward or comfortable Noah just couldn’t tell. He tried hard to listen for the animal inside Tracy but couldn’t hear a thing. Either there was nothing there, which was spooky, or if there was anything, it was crouched down, lying in wait. Figuring he was already trespassing, he decided to take a chance. “Hey Tracy,” he said. His voice sounded shrill and unconvincing, but he wanted to see the animal, if only to glimpse it through the thicket. “Did you freak about that package I gave you last week?”

  He knew he was a jerk for asking, but Tracy didn’t say anything. Perhaps he’d completely forgotten already. Perhaps someone like Noah Lathrop III made no impression at all. If he picked up a phone this instant and called A. J., his dad’s interesting and momentarily interested friend would no doubt say, “Who?” Under the right circumstances even his own dad might say that to a son who bore his name’s legacy so stumblingly through the world.

  “Did I freak?” Tracy said at last—slowly, like he was thinking it over. “No,” he answered himself, drawing out the “o.” “I was just…well, curious, is all.”

  Noah had no aptitude for thinking strategically. All the tests he’d ever taken had told him that. Like a rat in a maze, he
threw himself headlong down this passage or that, crashing abruptly into dead ends, returning endlessly to the same point of no return. Once again he struck out blindly.

  “Curious about what?” he asked.

  “Well,” Tracy said, “I’m just not used to being interrogated. Especially by a roll of toilet paper.”

  Noah hadn’t considered that. At the time, he’d somehow thought the toilet-paper aspect was a good idea—more humorous than anything else. But then he’d had lots of good ideas that turned out to be fucking terrible.

  “There wasn’t nothing else to write on,” he apologized lamely. “Sorry if you got offended.”

  “I wasn’t offended,” Tracy said mildly. “Not at all. I was interested.”

  Did he wish Tracy had a little of A. J.’s crazy bull raging inside? But his teacher was so careful, so temperate. Perhaps there was no wild and risky thing in the world he wanted more than anything else. Perhaps he was just the nice, concerned adult he pretended to be. Cut to the chase, Noah thought. Otherwise they’d walk and talk all night.

  “So when are you gonna answer my questions?” he asked bluntly.

  Tracy stopped on the path and turned to him. Once again, as if whatever might get said could be so illuminating, they stood in an island of light thrown down by the street lamps. “The answers,” he said, smiling so handsomely that Noah thought, Be careful, I could come to hate you, “the answers are yes, no, yes, no, yes, yes, and maybe. Now what do you really want to ask me?”