by M. O. Walsh
“Implicated?”
Trina hit the screen two more times. “There it goes,” she said. She then knelt down and picked up a small red rock the size of a quarter. Jacob thought she might throw it off into the bayou or maybe try to peck his brain out with it, he had no idea, but instead he watched her rub her thumb over it several times, like someone does a worrying stone, and put it in her mouth.
This was the second time he’d seen her do this. The first was at his brother Toby’s burial, two months ago, where Trina stood in the back and spoke to no one. Then, when people were saying their final good-byes at the casket, before they shut and lowered it into the dirt, Jacob saw Trina bend and take a small stone from the ground and close it in her fist. She then walked up to Toby’s casket, waiting her place in line like everyone else, and, when she got to him, slowly placed the rock inside of her mouth. Jacob had no idea what to make of it, although he now realized that this was the beginning of everything between them, because, as Trina turned to leave, she approached Jacob for the first time in her life. She and Toby hadn’t been dating long, if that’s what you could call it, she’d only been at Deerfield Catholic a few months, and had never even seemed to notice Jacob before. But, on this day, she grabbed Jacob’s hand and squeezed a piece of paper into his palm that he would later find out was her phone number. She then looked him in the eye without tears or remorse but, rather, with some indiscernible conviction and said, only, “This is not over.”
And how Jacob wished, at that time, that his brother’s life was not over.
This scene remained one of Jacob’s only clear memories of the funeral, which his subconscious was trying desperately, he knew, to blur. And again today, just as she had then, Trina closed her eyes, breathed deeply through her nose, and moved the rock over to the side of her mouth like a lozenge. Jacob stared at her.
“Normal,” he said.
“Let’s walk,” she told him. “Not much time before the dickheads arrive.”
Trina took off down the path toward town and Jacob noticed that, in the few minutes since school had ended, she’d somehow altered her uniform to look as if the whole ensemble was now of her choosing. She’d pulled down the top of her jumper to hang off her hips like looping belts, untucked her shirt over the skirt of it, and rolled her socks down in a sloppy and uneven way. Her hair, pulled back at school, was nearly jet black and hung long enough to hit the middle of her back. It looked thick and waxy and so unwashed that it didn’t seem to move with her.
The only alteration Jacob had made to his uniform was to pull a ball cap down tight over his head on his way through the parking lot. This was his favorite cap, one he’d ordered from a company in Japan, a black-on-black snap-back with a highly stylized picture of Latios, his favorite Pokémon, on the front of it. Latios was a sleek and flying monster with Psychic energy who Jacob admired. He could do some serious damage, especially in his evolved EX forms, but since many of his attacks required a flip of heads on a coin to work, he also required fate to be on your side. To win with Latios you had to be both determined and a bit lucky, which Jacob felt was truer to life than other attacks you might use. And, although most boys of sixteen would never dare to rock out Pokémon attire in public—the men of Deerfield normally wore LSU or Saints gear, maybe camouflaged Salt Life or PFG shirts as if a football game or fishing trip might break out at any second—Jacob’s hat was so obscure and advanced, so beyond the Pikachu bullshit you saw on kids’ backpacks, that most people had no idea what it was about.
And Jacob liked Pokémon. He wasn’t ashamed of that. He was no Johnny-come-lately, either. He didn’t give a damn about the stupid app people played on their phones, walking around looking for monsters that weren’t really there. No, Jacob was into the card game, the real deal, the outrageously strategic, deeply complicated, and crystallized stuff. It was like chess in technicolor, and he enjoyed this. He was good at it, too; had destroyed all the local competition when kids still outwardly played, and had gone on to compete in a regional tournament in New Orleans last year, which his father said seemed fair, considering how many baseball tournaments and football games they’d traveled to for his brother. And maybe, Jacob wondered in the quiet moments when people are prone to wonder, the fact that he was good at this meant something. Maybe he wasn’t totally useless. So, wearing the hat made Jacob feel protected, both a little bit taller and a little more hidden at the same time, and that is the best thing a hat can do for a man.
Up ahead, he watched Trina sling her backpack around to the front and stash her phone. She then took the rock from her mouth, pocketed it, and pulled out and lit a cigarette in one well-rehearsed motion. She blew the smoke up toward the branches, and hers would be, Jacob knew, only the first of many trails of smoke and vapor to waft along the path that next hour.
The trail they were now on ran from Deerfield Catholic to the town square and was called the Crane Lane, as legend had it a boy had once spotted a red crane standing in the shallow waters of Bayou Ibis, which it ran alongside. This was decades ago, before the school had even been built, and the path was made by birding enthusiasts who tromped all over Deerfield after reading about this story in the paper. Red cranes did not exist, of course, and none were ever seen again, but people have a habit, Jacob understood, of too often believing everything that they read.
These days the path served as a convenient place for underaged kids to smoke cigarettes and chew tobacco and, Jacob now realized, quite possibly be mauled by the opposite sex on their way home from school. The trail was crisscrossed by oak and cypress roots, canopied in leaves and hanging moss nearly all year long. On the weekends, married couples and families took the place over, making picnics in small clearings by the water, casting a line in for bream or catfish, and watching out for the family of gators that liked to lounge on the opposite bank. It was a peaceful place between eight and three p.m. every day and that’s what Jacob was hoping to enjoy. If not peace, then at least solitude.
He’d done his best to get off campus without seeing anyone, especially Trina. He left as soon as the bell rang, hustling through the parking lot with his head down as other boys hurled footballs and lifted girls onto the tailgates of their trucks, which was a scene Jacob loathed. Ever since his brother’s death, Jacob felt especially insulted by the merriment that followed the three-o’clock bell. The way his classmates had originally acted sad around him, almost deferential to his presence, evaporated in less than a month and Jacob wasn’t sure if this quick recovery was more a reflection on him or on his brother. Did they really miss Toby the way they said they did at the funeral? Were their lives forever changed by his accident, which Trina claimed was not one at all? Or were they, as Trina also claimed, just completely full of shit? Jacob wasn’t sure. If he had to guess, he would say that their renewed sense of joy sprung from the fact that they no longer felt the need to behave in any particular way around Jacob because, just as it had been before his brother’s death, they hardly even knew he was there.
The only person who always knew where he was appeared to be Trina. He’d no idea how she had beaten him to the woods, no idea if he would rather walk with her or stay and wait for the dickheads to arrive, so he just stood there, mainly wondering why a person would put a rock in their mouth.
“You see that log?” Trina called to him, a good twenty yards away. She gestured over to a fallen and hollowed oak by the water. “Remember that one,” she said. “It’ll be a pickup point.”
Jacob reluctantly walked over, where she stood pointing at the log with her cigarette. “Pickup for what?” he asked.
“You will know at the appropriate time,” she said. “It’s not long now.” She swung her bag back around and opened it up. “You want a cigarette?” she asked. “They taste terrible.”
“You should go into advertising,” Jacob said. “You’ve got a knack.”
“I try,” she said.
“Why the hell did you buy them, then?”
“I didn’t buy them. I lifted them out of somebody’s car when I was doing a little recon for us last night.” She pulled out a long and thin pack of Benson & Hedges. “I didn’t even know they still made these things.”
“I don’t smoke,” Jacob said. “But thank you for offering me something you despise.”
“My pleasure,” she said, and looked him in the eye. “I mean it.”
Beyond the bend in the trail behind them, they could already hear voices. Kids laughing and likely pushing on one another, some playing music on their phones. Jacob got the sense that he and Trina could stand right there, so outcast were they in the high school world together, that the flow of kids would move right past them as river water does a great stone. Part of him wanted to try this, to see if anyone even saw him, or if they might run right into him, knock him over, like he was not worth the effort to move. He was in a dark mental place these days and he recognized this. But, sometimes, the thing to do in a dark place is tape the curtains shut and see if it can get any darker. So, he decided to stand there.
“What are your opinions,” Trina asked him, “on breaking and entering?”
Jacob thought about this. He smiled.
“I think, in a certain context,” he said, “that entering sounds like fun.”
“Oh, look,” Trina said, and grabbed his wrist. “He is a virgin after all.”
She tugged him toward town and walked quickly.
“What we need is a way to get materials,” Trina said. “As you are aware, we are both under seventeen, so buying things without parental consent can be tricky. What I’m thinking, though, is that people have most of what we need just lying around their houses.”
As they spoke, a group of four guys turned the corner behind them. They were on bikes and going fast, asses up off the seats, and, when they passed them, Chuck Haydel reached out and grabbed Jacob’s hat off his head. The blow was so unexpected that Jacob said nothing, just leaned over and put his hands to his ears.
“Nice hat, dipshit,” Chuck yelled, and was beyond their reach before Jacob could react. When he stood back up, his heart was pounding, adrenaline thumping from embarrassment or anger or any one of the million ready-made outrages that teenagers have access to and he balled his hands into fists. If he could, he would evolve himself into Latios right there, take off like a jet, and burn him to bits with a Psychic Blast. Destroy him completely. But he could not.
So, instead, he did nothing.
Trina put her cigarette on the ground and grabbed his chin. “Hey,” she said. “Whenever you think you want out of this, I want you to think about Chuck Haydel. That fucker who just stole your hat. He was with your brother that night. You know that, don’t you? He was feeding him drinks. Making him drink. The things those assholes did,” she said, and stared at Jacob a long time. “Somebody needs to be held responsible.”
Jacob spat on the ground. He felt like his face was on fire, his ears bright red, his head throbbing. And he did have fantasies about the type of justice one found not only in card games and RPGs but in movies, too, of course he did. There were things to do with a person like Chuck and he thought of them often, but he did not give Trina the satisfaction of hearing him say it. But he also didn’t like hearing about the night his brother died. It made him angry in so many ways. The fact that he was not there with him, that he didn’t know what really happened. Everyone but Trina had the same story about Toby that night, framed by the two cohesive facts Jacob did know: Drunk driving. DOA. So, what else could have happened to make Trina so angry at everyone? To blame them? She’d given him only hints and Jacob couldn’t stand not knowing. He felt this anger trying again to overtake him and rubbed his palms together to calm down.
“New question,” Trina said. “Do you know the motivation behind ninety percent of car break-ins in Louisiana?”
“What the hell are you talking about?” Jacob said.
“I’m asking you a simple question,” she said, “to prove my theory that we live on fertile ground. Just answer, yes or no. Do you know the motivation behind ninety percent of car break-ins in Louisiana?”
“No,” he said. “And I really don’t care.”
“It’s guns,” Trina told him. “People are looking for guns. Ergo, we live on fertile ground.”
“Ergo,” Jacob said, “I’m going home.”
“Wait,” Trina said, “I’ve been meaning to ask: Your dad’s the mayor, right? Key to the town and all that? I was wondering. You think he has blueprints of the school?”
“I don’t know,” Jacob said. “Why the hell does it matter?”
Trina looked at him in a way so inscrutable that Jacob didn’t know if she would yell at him or kiss him again. Nor did he know which one of these he wanted. Instead, though, she only said, “Hiding places, J. I think what we need are hiding places.”
Trina was right, Jacob thought. A hiding place was exactly what he needed. A place to get away from her, from this town, from his life. But Jacob had decided that he was done agreeing with anything Trina said, and so he did not.
“I think what you need,” Jacob told her, “is to get real.”
“Why, Jacob?” she said and glared at him. “Do I look flippant to you?”
“I don’t know what you look like,” he said.
“Good,” Trina told him. “Maybe that’s the way I want it.”
Jacob said nothing and started again up the path. Trina followed him until they got to the mouth of the trail that opened near the town square. People were moving about in the world they now approached, going in and out of shops, gassing up their trucks and pushing strollers. Men set up scaffolding alongside Annie’s Chicken and Biscuits, where they were pressure-washing the brick front. On the far side of the street, another group of men were building a set of bleachers. The town was alive in a way it hadn’t been before in Jacob’s memory, all excited about the bicentennial, and yet he felt none of this enthusiasm. In a clump of high grass near the bayou, however, he saw his hat, which Chuck had apparently tried to sling into the water. He walked over and picked it up.
“Are you just going to let him get away with that?” Trina asked him. “Just let those fuckers do what they want? You think Toby would let him do that to you?”
And here again, another mention of Toby, as if she had known him better than he had. Jacob couldn’t stand it. He slapped his hat against his thigh and allowed his temper, which he normally kept hidden from everyone, to unfold all over Trina. “Listen,” he said. “You don’t know a damn thing about my brother. What, you let him fuck you? Congratulations, Trina. He did that to a lot of girls. So, stop acting like you’re all special, okay? And if you think he was so great then why weren’t you in the car with him that night? Y’all went together, right? If he was so fucked up, why’d you let him drive? Why weren’t you with him?”
Trina looked up at Jacob. She cocked her head.
“What are you saying?” she asked. “You wish I was dead, too?”
Jacob looked at the ground. “That’s not what I’m saying.”
“Maybe I am,” she told him. “Maybe I’m a ghost.”
“Look,” Jacob said. “I’m just tired of everybody acting like they know things that I don’t. I was his brother. Nobody knew him better than me. And so I’m starting to think that everything you’re saying is bullshit. Whatever you think happened, and whatever sort of revenge you have planned, jumping those guys, beating the shit out of them, count me out. The whole thing is stupid. I’m sorry I ever called you. I’m sorry I even entertained it. But I’m done with all this. If you know something that I don’t, either tell me straight up or leave me the hell alone.”
Jacob expected to feel a tremendous relief upon saying this but instead heard a car honking at them from the square. He looked up to see a blue Toyota pickup pulling o
ver to the side of the road. Trina ignored this and walked closer to Jacob. He was hoping that he’d hurt her with what he’d said, was hoping this might be the end of them, but she looked totally unfazed. She got right up in his face. “You want to know something I know that you don’t?” she said.
Before he could reply Trina reached up and kissed him again, her tongue deep and fast in his mouth as if she were trying to make him gag. She then pulled away and said, “You not only look like him, Jacob. You taste just like him, too.”
She poked him hard in the chest.
“And for me,” Trina said, “that’s a problem.”
Then she turned and walked away.
Jacob looked up to see Father Pete in the blue Toyota, the school priest, who was now calling to Trina through the window. Jacob nodded at him, embarrassed, and Trina climbed into his truck without saying so much as good-bye.
After this, Jacob walked the few blocks to his house, where he found his father, the town mayor, trying to lasso a television with a rope.
6
Level on the Level
By the time the three-o’clock bell rang, Douglas Hubbard felt like a much older person than he’d been that morning. He was technically, of course, about eight hours older, but he had the sensation that years had gone by. Decades, maybe, and difficult ones. It was as if he’d gone to work that morning as Jailhouse Rock Elvis and emerged Las Vegas Elvis. He was not alone in this feeling. All across America, at that very hour, teachers poked their heads from dank school buildings like ancient turtles from their shells. They shaded their eyes with notebooks and binders, jingled heavy sets of keys in their pockets, and looked, as a group, generally confused as to how the sun was still out, how the day could possibly be so long. This confusion made them drop their favorite travel mugs and neoprene water bottles in the parking lot, where they watched them roll beneath cars and realized they would have to get on their hands and knees in front of students to retrieve them because these cups were some of the most expensive items they owned. Would this be the day’s final indignity? they wondered. It was unlikely. Yet all they knew for sure, these teachers, was that their palms hurt on the asphalt, their backs were sore from standing, their voices hoarse from talking, and they felt well beyond their years. All of this, Douglas understood, was because teachers are well beyond their years.