I went to the back of the room, through the mists of the showers, the graveyard smell of dirty socks and greasy jockstraps digging up into my nostrils like fingers. There, pushed up against the mildewed tile walls, just inside the shower was the fat kid I’d spoken briefly with in Geometry class: Nathaniel Campusky, a.k.a. Than Campusky.
He stood there naked, his eyes open wide with practiced fear, his gym shorts pulled down around his ankles, his tee shirt tossed on the slippery floor. The only modesty allowed him was an athletic supporter. Four naked boys, clutching their white towels, twisting them into rat-tails, surrounded him.
One of those boys had a switchblade, circling Than’s right nipple with the blade.
This was Charlie Urquart, a junior.
He and his cronies had pinned Than in that position.
Charlie drew a thin red line of blood across Than’s chest, between his nipples like connect-the-dots. “You put Raquel to shame,” Charlie laughed, while Than continued to oink. “What do you think? You think maybe Campusky’s tits are bigger than Alison’s? What do you take, Campustule, a forty-four-triple-E?”
“He’s gonna squirt milk in a second, remember that movie about the giant tit?” one of the other boys said.
“You my two-ton-fun-bun, Porky?” Charlie asked.
Before Than could answer, I said, “Leave him alone, assholes.” Charlie turned around for a second, looked right through me as if I was not there.
Then he smacked Than across his chest. “It’s a rite of passage, Campustule, isn’t that right? You’ve got to be branded by my blade.” Then he turned back to me. “Every boy in this school gets branded. Even you, geek.”
“Listen,” I said, “just because your life is shit doesn’t mean you have to make everybody else live it.”
Charlie drew the blade back in. The other boys grinned stupidly, and followed Charlie as he stepped back out of the shower area into the locker room.
But before Charlie was completely out of sight, he glanced back at me again, as if he were mentally taking a picture of me to keep for future reference. I knew then that he owed me one for that, because Charlie Urquart was not the kind of guy to get back at you on your time. He had his own schedule, he liked his revenge cold, when you didn’t expect it.
Maybe when you’d forgotten he owed you one.
11
“So, Chandler,” Charlie said, lifting the smoldering joint, “you want a drag?”
Peter held up his beer bottle. “Already got this, thanks.”
“Pretty neat fight, huh?” Than asked nervously; his jowls trembled.
“Yeah, it’s cool.” Charlie inhaled the sweet smoke. His eyes were bloodshot and became glazed over as he held his breath, and then exhaled the smoke. “But all these wetbacks standing around—doesn’t it make you feel like putting in a call to Immigration or something?”
“That’s a good one,” Campusky chortled. “Yeah, that’s a real good one, Charlie.”
Urquart did not take his eyes off Peter.
“You think it’s funny, Chandler?”
“Not half as funny as you are,” Peter said.
“I think you’re funny, Chandler, I think you’re a regular laugh riot.”
“I’m glad I can provide you with entertainment.” And Peter wondered drunkenly, Did I really just say that?
“You and me, Chandler, we’re like those dogs down there, it looks like we’re at each other’s throats, out for blood, but really, we’re just playing a game.”
“A game?”
“Yeah, that’s right, you know, boys will be boys, dogs will be dogs.”
“God,” Than said drunkenly, “this reminds me of this show I saw on Tuesday where this guy—”
“Shut your face or I’m gonna have to break it, Campustule,” Charlie said.
Than belched.
Charlie stepped closer to Peter, just a few inches from his face. Peter could smell his own breath, thrown back to him through the marijuana smoke that Charlie exhaled.
Charlie stepped forward.
Peter moved back.
Charlie took another step forward, and as if in a dance, Peter went back another step.
“We’re missing the fight,” Charlie said. “Don’t you want to see how it turns out?”
From behind him, Peter heard the dogs, growling and pounding against each other in the Wash.
Below him.
Charlie took another step.
Close again to Peter.
Peter’s head began to spin with the beer, the stars and the world spun with him. He did not step backward.
Charlie said, “You sure you don’t want to puff on this?” He held out the joint to Peter.
Behind and beneath Peter, the sound of snapping steel jaws, barking, gnashing teeth.
Charlie reached out and tapped lightly on Peter’s shoulders. Then he drew something from his jacket pocket. Steel shone in the feeble light. “Don’t you think it’s about time I branded you, Chandler?”
The switchblade popped out, inches from Peter’s neck.
“I could cut your heart out with this, boy,” Charlie whispered, “and stuff it down your throat while you die.”
“Shit!” Peter cried out. “You’re psycho, Urquart.”
Stepping back, Peter Chandler fell down the side of the Wash.
CHAPTER NINE
Valley of the Fallen
1
Peter rolled onto his back, and then sat up. His side hurt, and something was wrong with his right ankle. He looked up to the lights around the Wash, and then down again, hearing the growling of the dogs. He guessed that the dark dog had smelled the blood on his elbows and his right knee. Lammie, the midnight-black pit bull who was the victor and had managed to sustain no wounds, smelled his blood from as far away as she was—the opposite end of the Wash, closer to the highway. She growled, raising up onto her haunches to sit and sniff the air; then on all fours as she moved toward him, her head bobbing toward the ground to sniff, growling between sniffs.
The dog looked like a demon from the wrong side of the tracks in Hell.
On his knees, his shirt ripped, his right ankle aching and swelling for all he knew, Peter let out a cry for help that came out of his mouth in a gasp of wind. His throat was desert-dry; he had no voice in him. He tried to stand, but his ankle hurt so much he fell down again before he’d even risen; started to crawl back to the wall of sand and gravel that rose up to form a side of the Wash.
Above him, Peter heard these two men laughing drunkenly, still betting on the fight. The one that was about to occur between the fallen kid and the pit bull. Jesus, they’re betting against me.
Than, with that half-moon grin cutting across his round pudgy face, his jowls starting to flap like a lizard’s dewlap in its mating ritual, shouted something unintelligible down at him. Charlie Urquart, stoned out of his mind, was laughing with his buddies.
And the dog was getting closer; its thick saliva dribbled down its throat; it was hungry and flush with its recent victory.
Peter finally found his voice: “Get me the fuck outta here!” He crawled like a crab, but with every movement, his ankle felt like it was on fire—he screamed on the inside as well as the outside of his body.
Then the sound of a gunshot, nearby.
The men up on the rim of the Wash scattered, shouting curses, dropping their liquor bottles, dragging their women and their dogs off with them, even the bloodied silver dog in the Wash that hadn’t moved from the place where it lay bleeding—a big, muscular guy leaped down into the Wash and grabbed his loser dog while one of his buddies drove their Jeep over the road, down into the gulley beside him. The silver-white dog groaned, and the muscleman threw the wounded animal in the back of the Jeep and hopped in himself while the vehicle continued moving slowly down the Wash. Peter looked up to the edge of the Wash—all he could see was the red lights of retreating trucks, even Charlie Urquart’s Mustang coughing up dust as it sped out to the highway, even Than Campusky had vanis
hed—that wimp.
The other pit bull, Lammie, watched the rim of the Wash.
Dead silence after the gunshot, after the Jeeps and trucks and broken down redneckmobiles hightailed it for the road.
Then, the crunching of gravel as someone—no, two people—approached.
They stepped into the light from the flood lamps that bedecked the outer walls of the Garden of Eden.
A guy who looked like he was eighteen with a long, brooding face, dark shadows beneath his eyebrows, and a clump of prematurely gray hair on his scarecrow head, glared down into the Wash. In spite of his slender frame, he seemed hulking, dominant, as if he imagined himself to be an impenetrable fortress dressed in human skin. He was closed, locked, unreadable, unfathomable. His dark gaze was terrible, his shadow eyes fixed on the dog. A handgun trembled in his hand; he crushed his white-knuckled fist around it as if to keep it still, to keep it from shooting again. A puff of smoke lingered about the gun’s barrel.
Then a girl sidled up next to him, practically bumping him with her hips, a tall, slender redheaded woman, actually, and she was pretty. Younger and older at the same time. Her hips, pressed against the man’s, were perfectly curved horseshoes, her breasts small and high, her shoulders slung back in invitation. Her tight jeans hugging her hips, her blouse sheer like a diaphanous curtain partially blown back by a breeze. She was the kind of woman who inspired countless adolescent wet dreams.
Her hair, like fire, cooled by something in her face, a void there in her eyes looking to be filled. She looked like a woman waiting for inspiration.
The man said, “Lammie. Come.”
The pit bull moved to the edge of the Wash, hunkering down, shivering as if she’d been sprayed with ice water.
The man with the gun said, “Fuck him for stealing her like this.”
The woman said, “You’ll get your money.”
Then she noticed Peter, shining a flashlight his direction. “You hurt, boy?”‘
Peter kept looking back to the gun in the man’s hand.
“Sloan,” she said, “he may be hurt. We should do something.”
The man called Sloan grinned, turning his attention away from the dog. He shook the gun in his hand, pointing it at Peter.
He said, “Maybe we should put the boy out of his misery.”
2
Sloan and his girlfriend introduced themselves as they helped him into the truck, his ankle hurting. Wendy examined it.
“It’s only bruised,” she said. “And bleeding. If you’d sprained it, it would be a balloon.” She massaged it with her warm fingers, and Peter soon forgot about any pain. Peter sat between them in the truck, and she massaged; Sloan smoked a cigarette and turned back to pet his dog through the sliding glass window between the front of the truck and the back.
“The Grubman’s bound to come along after that shot,” he said, referring to the local policeman named Chip Grubb but known universally as the Grubman. Sloan passed his cigarette to Peter, who took a lungful and then passed it to Wendy.
Almost scared and almost thrilled, Peter said: “I’ve never smoked that stuff before,” waiting for the thrill of getting high to come over him.
“What? Camels?” Sloan said, and Peter felt stupid: of course, it was just plain tobacco.
Wendy stopped massaging his foot as she smoked the cigarette; she kept glancing in the side mirror, looking back; Sloan passed a beer over; Peter drank it and felt terrified to be with these people and happy that at last he had found some escape from the abyss of summer.
Wendy was the first to see the flashing red lights of the police car as it turned off the highway onto the gravel. “You were right about Grubman,” she said. Her face was a shadowy silhouette. The smell in the truck was stale beer and cigarette ash; empty cans knocked each other on the floor. In the back of the track, the black dog barked, and when Sloan turned to say something to Wendy, his breath was whiskey and beer.
Sloan said, “It’s that prick, all right.”
“Just gonna sit here?” she said. For Peter, it was like sitting between two rednecks, their accents Southwestern and emphasizing every other word as if not comprehending their own speech. Than had been right—white trash city.
Sloan flipped off his truck’s lights. He turned the key in the ignition. “Beer’s under the seat, boy.”
Taking the orders Peter reached down and brought out a tall can of Pabst Blue Ribbon. It was warm and sweaty. He popped the tab and took a swig. It tasted like spit; it tasted great.
“Gonna wait ‘til he’s right on my ass,” Sloan said “Gimme a beer, boy.”
“You only live once,” Wendy whispered, looking back at the slowly approaching police car. Wendy was getting tense—she slid her left hand down Peter’s right arm from his elbow to his wrist. Her fingernails felt like they were digging into his flesh. She turned and whispered something specifically to him; her breath was almost unbearably sweet, like orange blossoms: “He’s like this”; but her words were less important than the fact that while her fingers dug into his pulse, she knew what effect she was having on him. He felt it. She knew that just her touch had aroused him. Even her painful touch.
Sloan heaved his foot against the accelerator. The truck sped down the dark Wash, blindly, chased by flashing red lights and the smell of beer and orange blossoms all around, and those fingernails digging into Peter’s wrist. Sloan turned up his cassette of Bruce Springsteen’s The Wild, The Innocent, and the E Street Shuffle, and Peter Chandler felt like he was on the wildest ride in the world.
3
“You was shittin’ bricks back there,” Sloan said to him a half-hour later.
The cop had given up the chase as Sloan pulled into an arroyo, turning the engine off. The truck smelled like burnt rubber and grease. They watched the police car spraying dust as it drove on, swerving around, turning back up to Highway 4. Peter’s heart was beating fast. He was drunk and embarrassed, and there was nothing but darkness like a deep cave around the truck. How many Blue Ribbon cans had he finished off? Six? Seven? After the truck’s motor died, he had somehow been transported to the bed of the vehicle. Sloan and Wendy glanced back at him.
Peter’s mind blurred like a frost-covered window. He saw things, but they didn’t quite register on his brain: Where was he? Who were these people? Had he been drinking? Was he getting sick? Would his dad kill him when he returned home? He was in a truck with two strangers, a pit bull, and a handgun. He might as well have crossed into another dimension, this was so far removed from the suburbanity of his life. This was outlaw country.
Somewhere in that night, Sloan said to him, “You ever kill anyone, kid?”
“Huh?” Peter asked.
“Nothin’. Forget it.”
The moonless but clear night spread out like a thick army of ants, it went on forever in constant motion, jittery stars between the blackness—like his insides, jostling, quivering, and empty. Drunk, he saw mosquitoes where there were none, he felt his teeth with his tongue, it felt like they would drop out of his mouth. Sloan’s Ford pickup had searched out the rocks and bumps of the wavy desert landscape, and with each lurch of the truck, a corresponding leap threatened to erupt from his stomach. They had traveled across a lunar territory, craters abounding, accompanied by a silence as if the world had ended.
Lammie, the monster dog who had promised Peter a flesh-rending death down in that Wash, a demon from Nitro Hell, now lay, subdued, in its collapsible wire cage, as friendly as any dopey puppy, perhaps goofier. She whimpered. When he glanced at the dog, between sips of beer, she wagged her tail and grinned—if a dog can grin, if a pit bull fresh from its gladiatorial bloodfest can grin like a nerdy kid who has just discovered love or chocolate or dirty jokes. She now looked like the lovable pup from the “Our Gang” comedies. When he petted her, he found that her stomach seemed full—her nipples hanging down. He was about to say, “Hey, I think your dog’s pregnant,” but when he opened his mouth, a series of hiccups interrupted his words.
Then Peter vomited over the truck’s side, ralphing as Campusky would say, ralphing his guts out; then he was standing beside the truck in a cold sweat, listening to coyotes.
And then, who knows how many drunken moments later, he watched the shadows of this redneck couple thrust against each other while he listened to the radio playing, a country singer was singing about bad times and bad women. Before he passed out—thinking, You’re just like your old man, born to be a drunk and a derelict and amount to nothing, the dog licking his hand—Peter was about to say something aloud when he heard the shadows whisper obscenities and grunt and moan. The moonless night filled with the yips of jealous coyotes.
4
That night, for the first time in two years, Peter Chandler did not have the nightmare in which his father beat his mother to death.
Instead, it was Peter himself who was raising his bloodied fists over his mother’s face.
CHAPTER TEN
Morning Rituals
1
Mornings always began with darkness.
In Nitro, within a trailer, Wendy Swan stirred in her sleep, her eyes moist with tears.
The sound of the dog’s whining awoke her.
Her eyes opened suddenly, as if shocked from sleep.
She had been dreaming about that other woman again, the face in profile, the anger flashing in the eyes, the head turning, bearing down...
Nights Towns: Three Novels, a Box Set Page 37