Sacrifice

by James, Russell

  “Book ‘em, Danno,” Marc said. He gave his shoulder a rub. Danny didn’t get the Hawaii Five-O reference, but he liked that “Danno” sounded like the yogurt.

  “You’re going to be late,” his mother said. She was a tiny woman with a big perm and a voice sharp as razor wire. “What’s wrong with you?”

  I don’t know, Ma, he thought. I was struck by lightning last night and my four hours of sleep seem like fifteen minutes.

  “Nothing,” he said instead. He plucked a slice of toast from a plate in the center of the table.

  His mother glared from the kitchen. “So you can’t use a plate like a civilized person?”

  “I’m using Albert’s method,” Marc said and pointed at his younger brother.

  His mother shrieked as she spied her youngest’s mess. Albert kept smiling.

  Mark checked the clock. He was late. The bus was due in a few minutes. He scooped a pile of books from a chair and headed for the door.

  His mother looked up from sponging Albert’s placemat. “That’s all you have to say to your mother in the morning? And get your lunch by the door. You’ll starve all day with no breakfast.”

  “Thanks, Ma,” Marc sighed. He grabbed a small brown paper bag from the end table at the front door. No need to check it. PB&J and a piece of fruit past its prime. The end-of-week usual.

  Marc completely understood why his father spent thirteen hours a day out of the house. His overprotective mother was grating on her best days. Marc tried to cut her some slack. He wouldn’t want to take care of three kids, especially one barely past diapers and one who would always need special care.

  The morning sun crested the tree tops and promised a glorious, early summer day. Bus brakes squealed one block over and Marc broke into a jog. A little pump of adrenaline hit. He wasn’t psyched about school, but the ride there, for once, would be interesting. His bus passed by the water tower. He wondered how good their work would look in the daylight.

  These last days of Senior Year were going to be great.

  Chapter Eleven

  Imposing Jesse Whitman High was miles from the old village of Sagebrook, built in the ’60s amidst the spreading subdivisions around the old village’s edge. It was two stories split across three wings with a faux Colonial courthouse style clock tower at the main entrance. Thirty-two hundred students walked its halls each day. The town had spared no expense in the variety of sports fields behind the school. Even lacrosse was represented.

  The town fathers had searched quite extensively for a suitable candidate to honor with the name of this flagship school. But despite over two hundred years of local history, no one of any stature had ever left Sagebrook and done great things. They eventually latched on to Jesse Whitman, eldest brother of Long Island native poet Walt Whitman. Local mythology said that Jesse, who Walt described as a “seafaring man,” had shipped out on cargo ships from the Sagebrook port, back when it was a shipbuilding center in the 1840s. Walt’s name already adorned several Long Island schools, so Sagebrook was happy to hurriedly declare his brother Jesse to be one of their own and enshrine his memory above the new high school’s columns. It took only a week after the dedication to have it brought to light that Walt had committed dear Jesse to an insane asylum later in his life, his condition rumored to be the result of untreated syphilis. The “Jesse” was quickly pried from the front of the building, but not from the memories of the townsfolk. The name had stuck.

  Ken pulled his Nova into the high school parking lot. A row of busses disgorged arriving students at the front of the building. He could spot Dave’s hulking Vista Cruiser from across the lot. He pulled into an adjacent spot. Dave sat on the hood, leaning back against the windshield, eyes closed behind his wire rim glasses. Jeff and Paul stood by the hood. Jeff wore his backup, dry Mets cap. Bob leaned against a door. He somehow managed to drink his coffee without dropping the lit cigarette from the corner of his mouth.

  “Losers,” Ken said as a greeting.

  “High praise from the king loser himself,” Dave answered. His head didn’t move. Ken gave the group a once-over.

  “No one seems to have had their ass chewed off, so I guess everyone got home without too much screaming from the parents,” Ken said.

  “That lightning absolutely fried my walkie-talkie,” Jeff said. “Everyone feel okay?”

  The boys looked at each other, waiting for the first acknowledgement.

  “Well, I’ve got a fucking headache the size of New Jersey,” Bob said.

  “Same here,” Jeff said. Paul nodded.

  “Nothing else?” Ken asked.

  “Expecting something?” Dave asked. “X-ray vision? Spider webs shooting out of your wrists?”

  “You’re a jackass,” Ken said. “It’s a laugh a minute for the guy who was in the grounded car.”

  Marc came running up from where the bus had dropped him off. His books nearly bounced out of his hands.

  “When are you going to ditch the bus and buy a car?” Paul asked him.

  “When your mother stops charging me so much to do her,” Marc replied. He turned to the rest of the group. “Guys, it’s going to be all over school! The bus drove by the water tower, and I may have called a few people’s attention to the logo update. The crowd went wild!”

  Smiles broke out all around the group.

  “Another job well done,” Bob said. He tapped a few cigarette ashes onto Dave’s glasses. Dave flicked his arm away. “A tribute to the Dirty Half Dozen.”

  “And no harm done,” Paul said.

  Ken had to disagree. No parents got involved, for sure. But that dream he had last night made him think some kind of harm was done.

  The warning bell for first period sounded. All but Bob moved toward the school.

  “That bell was your invitation,” Jeff said to him.

  Bob lit another cigarette. “I haven’t been on time yet this year. I sure as shit ain’t gonna start with a few days of classes left.”

  Chapter Twelve

  Mrs. Carrollton droned through fourth period Spanish before a class of vacant faces. The class and the instructor had settled into the scholastic equivalent of trench warfare. She didn’t probe their lines in a search for understanding, and they sent no patrols her way that might expose the reassigned gym teacher’s shallow Spanish knowledge. With only days until the final, everyone wanted the truce to hold. Muchas gracias.

  Jeff watched the clock continuously for the glacial last five minutes of class. The bell rang and Mrs. Carrollton stopped mid-sentence, like she was cut off by a timed buzzer in a game show. The class broke for the door.

  Jeff went straight for the third row of lockers in the hall. Between fourth and fifth periods was when he and Katy Traina both went from class in the northwest second floor to class in the southwest first. They didn’t share any classes together this year, so the ten minutes between was the best together time they could manage.

  Jeff rounded the corner and she was there at her locker. Katy’s long black hair cascaded around her shoulders and shone like silk. She had a thin, tomboy body, but her big brown eyes and ready smile always said she was all girl. Specifically, she had been Jeff’s girl these past two years. Playboy Paul liked to regularly discard cards and draw new ones. Jeff had found a great hand and stood pat.

  Jeff came up behind her and slipped an arm around her waist. She closed her eyes and grinned. She slammed her locker shut.

  “Oh, oh,” she deadpanned. “Help, I’m being accosted by a strange man.”

  “It only gets worse,” Jeff said. He spun her around and gave her a kiss. A little blush rose into the freckled cheeks Jeff swore were her cutest feature. Jeff’s senior ring hung around her neck on a short chain. She grabbed his hand, and they melted into the chaotic flow of students.

  “I picked out my dress,” she said.

  “Your dress?”

  She gave his chest a pound with her books. “My prom dress, idiot. Olivia and I went down to Macy’s yesterday. It’s perfect!
” She spun in front of him and he jerked to a stop. Another kid bumped into him from behind. She bored into him with those big brown beauties. “You reserved your tux, right?”

  “All taken care of,” Jeff said. He and Paul had done fittings over the weekend. The powder blue color wasn’t what he’d pick, but if it was what Katy wanted, he’d look like a wad of cotton candy and like it.

  Katy searched his face. “You look tired.”

  “Really?”

  “What were you up to last night?” she said.

  Jeff cringed inside. The Half Dozen’s escapades weren’t something he shared with Katy. When he was around her he could at least pretend to be a more mature person than he was. He pulled her back into the flow of traffic.

  “Did you sneak out with your friends to do something stupid?” she asked.

  “How broadly do you define ‘stupid’?”

  “You know all your dumb pranks are going to come back and haunt you someday.”

  “It’s all harmless stuff.”

  “Like gift wrapping the principal’s car in contact paper?”

  “Exactly,” Jeff said. “A victimless crime.”

  They stopped in front of Katy’s next class.

  “Well, if some stupid stunt you pull gets you grounded,” she warned, “and we miss the prom, you’ll be paying for it forever.”

  “I stand forewarned,” Jeff said.

  Katy smiled and gave him a kiss. “Taking me home after school?”

  “The long, scenic route.”

  “I need to get home and go to work!” Katy’s parents owned the Venetian, a restaurant with meatballs whose mere memory made your mouth water.

  “You won’t be late. I know better than to cross your mother.”

  Katy practically danced into class and Jeff headed for History. He might have looked tired, but he felt filled with boundless energy. The Half Dozen had scored big at the water tower. Whitman High was just a few days and a few finals away from being done forever. He was taking the girl of his dreams to the Senior Prom and, providing he nailed his finals, the two of them were off to SUNY Albany in the fall to start college together. When life had this kind of upward trajectory, it was impossible to be pessimistic. He was certain the next few weeks would be the best of his life.

  Chapter Thirteen

  1980

  Two weeks after the lightning strike.

  Cars drove far too fast by the Sagebrook Village Green. The road around the former sheep-grazing common had been designed for the horse and buggy traffic of its day. The sharp curves carried twenty mile per hour warning signs that went unheeded. In desperation, the town council had put in a crosswalk from the commons to the stores across the street, complete with an on-demand stop light pedestrians could use at the push of the big silver button on the pole. Advocates of children’s safety shouted down those decrying the ugly intrusion of modern technology into the eighteenth-century surroundings.

  The village green was about two acres of gently sloping grass with a few stray maples scattered around. The wet spring weather had yielded grass of the richest green this year. A string of clapboard vintage shops hemmed the east edge of the green: the post office, a butcher, a hardware store, a stationer. These small stores with bay windows and hand-painted signs survived the big-box onslaught through the kindness and insularity of the Sagebrook locals.

  The Village Green Inn bordered the north end of the green. Currently a bed and breakfast, the inn had been in continuous operation since after the Revolution, a rest stop on the way to Eastern Long Island. There were a string of small, wood-frame cottages and a Victorian era main dining building used now for receptions and celebrations.

  Old homes, with steep roofs and wood-shingle siding, some dating from the 1700s, lined the street on the west side of the green. A few blocks to the south were the old grist mill and the pond. A half mile to the north was a small harbor that opened onto Long Island Sound. It was as if in the midst of suburban Long Island, someone had dropped in a New England hamlet.

  Josie Mulfetta blew bubbles at the bright, Sunday afternoon sun. She stuck the little wand into the plastic container and pulled it out covered in a soapy sheen. Then she blew through the circle at the end of the wand, and a trail of bubbles flew away on the breeze. Each carried its own faint, purplish, psychedelic gloss. Josie hadn’t seen anything more enthralling in her four years of life.

  Josie had long blonde hair that reached down to the waist of her pint-sized, knock-off Sassoon jeans. Her feet stuck just a bit over the edge of last year’s flip flops.

  Her mother lay next to her on the old, scratchy, wool blanket recently demoted to picnic duties. Through oversized sunglasses she studied a romance paperback that had a couple in Renaissance garb kissing on the cover. She had on shorts and a tank top to start nurturing her summer tan.

  “Mommy, look at all the bubbles,” Josie said. She exhaled a long string towards her mother. They floated over in a loose formation. One larger bubble descended and tapped her mother’s glasses for a slimy explosion.

  “Josie!” her mother said. “I told you about those bubbles!” She made a sweeping motion with her hand. “Go over there to blow those.”

  There were a few other people scattered around the green this afternoon. Two teens tossed a Frisbee. A woman walked her poodle on a short leash. Several couples shared picnic lunches. Josie held her wand over her head and ran across the green. Bubbles streamed out behind her and she laughed. She thought if she made a bubble big enough, she could float away on it.

  “Josie!” someone called from the edge of the green.

  Josie saw a little boy with a brilliant smile. He wore a purple shirt (her favorite color), blue jeans and PF Flyers sneakers. His eyes were strange, green with a reddish hue around the edges, but her focus went elsewhere before that detail concerned her. The boy carried a tennis racquet-sized bubble wand in his hand. With a flick of the wrist he made a bubble the size of a soccer ball. It hovered in the air and then burst into dozens of smaller bubbles like a Fourth of July firework.

  “Pretty!” Josie said. Mother’s admonitions about not talking to strangers were forgotten in the face of something so amazing. She trotted towards the boy.

  He gave the wand a spin, and a spiral of multicolored bubbles rose through the air. Josie broke into a run.

  At the far edge of the green, a red, late-model Mustang Mach I sped away from a stoplight with a screech. It closed on the crosswalk.

  The laughing boy trotted to the edge of the road, a trail of bubbles behind him. “It’s yours, Josie,” he said. His voice sounded sweet as syrup on pancakes. “Come get it, and it’s yours to keep.”

  Josie stopped seeing the boy or the rest of the world around her. All she saw were the bubbles, entrancing markers leading her forward, obliterating all details from the world around her. No grass, no trees, no approaching roar of the Mustang’s exhaust. There was just a trail of shiny silver spheres leading her to something wonderful.

  The boy dashed across the road. He twirled the wand like a baton and left a vapor trail of floating soap.

  Josie sprinted. Bubbles burst against her face like giggles as she crossed from the cool green grass to the hot, hard pavement.

  A warning shout came from the green. Brakes squealed. The Mustang’s rear drifted right as the driver swerved to miss the girl that darted in front of him. The car swept sideways across the sidewalk. A sickening, hollow thump echoed as Josie’s head slammed against the passenger door. She rolled under the car and out the other side.

  A scream rose from the green. The wail’s pitch rose to a height only one person could sustain—a mother who had just lost her child.

  Chapter Fourteen

  Ken Scott saw it all.

  He and Jeff went down to the green Sunday afternoon to kill some time. Jeff had parked his older white Pinto close by. He’d invested more than the car was worth in a killer sound system and a CB radio. Most of every paycheck from his after school job at Radio Sha
ck went straight into the vehicle, and he loathed allowing her to be parked unattended. It also wasn’t wise to stray too far from a car parked at a Village parking meter. They had a tendency to expire early, and parking tickets were a Sagebrook Constable specialty.

  The Sagebrook Constable was a holdover from the 1800s, the first law enforcement the area had. The town council vigorously resisted incorporating them into the county force, despite the cost savings and the puny jurisdiction the constables had been reduced to. The availability of a private police force was too good a thing to give up. Their main mission was parking tickets around the green and muscle at the town council meetings.

  The two boys planned on splitting their time between tossing a Frisbee and seeing what girls might be sunning themselves. As they flung the plastic disk across the green, Ken had the downhill view of the green and the crosswalk to the stores across the street. As Jeff ran to retrieve a toss that had sailed well over his head, Ken saw the little girl with the blonde hair running across the green to a man near the street.

  The man was short and thin. His narrow nose came to an upturned point, and his eyes were just a shade too wide apart. His pronounced jaw finished in a deep cleft.

  His clothes were even more bizarre. Shapeless deerskin moccasins tied around his calves. A brown buckskin leather vest covered green pants and an open tan shirt. He wore a hat like a Colonial tri-corner, but with the rear two corners barely extended from the hat, as if the design had been streamlined.

  All of this was overshadowed by his horrible injuries. The skin on his face hung in shreds, like he’d been dragged through jagged rocks. Despite the damage, the man’s green eyes sparkled with life, and he flashed the oncoming girl a crooked smile through his mangled lips.

  The scene gave Ken a coal-mine deep sense of dread.

  The returned Frisbee broke his concentration as it hit him in the chest with a thump.

  “Nice catch, spaz,” Jeff said.