Stunts, page 26
“No.”
“Especially this year?”
“Especially this year.”
“Then?”
“He’s weighing the odds of getting killed,” Blue explained. “Death comes not easy to a man of his sensitivity.”
Corky dropped his hands. “What? We talking about Linholm?”
“Mickie,” Rita said, as her lips were touched with bile.
“Ah.” Corky leaned back. His expression was thoughtful. “So, no big deal. We deal her in.”
“Like hell,” Blue said. “No offense, Brian, but she—”
“Yeah,” he said.
She’s not one of us.
And she wasn’t. Never would be. And he wished Rita wouldn’t keep looking at him. Sideways, as if she didn’t want to look him straight in the eyes.
“All right,” Corky said. “So look, all you have to do is give me the key—”
“No!”
Corky shrugged. “No sweat. You just let us in, right? You don’t even have to stick around, you don’t want to. We’re in, the place is redecorated, the picture taken, we’re out in less than an hour. No lights. Who’s to know?” He stared. “I don’t get it, Oakland. You never punked out on us before.”
He knew what they were thinking: Mickie had him square by the balls and wasn’t letting go. Ring through the nose. Crook her little finger and he’d come running like a pet dog. Leash time. Promise him a treat if he does his little trick.
There was a hot dog on his plate; he poked it with a thumb.
Rita gripped his upper arm, gently. “You don’t have to if you don’t want to, you know. We can find another way in. Corky just doesn’t want to work any harder than he has to.”
He looked at the hand, then up into her eyes. Big eyes. Dark. Saying nothing at all that he could read. When he looked over to Blue, Blue quickly popped another fry into his mouth and whistled tunelessly around it.
“I’m getting suckered, right?”
Rita squeezed. “Right.”
“You’ll die first before telling.”
“I swear,” Corky declared, crossing his heart, and his eyes.
“Homework for the rest of the semester?”
“You’re pushing it, Oakland,” Blue said.
Brian feigned thoughtfulness, a finger tapping his cheek, humming low under his breath, staring at the ceiling, at the mob by the counter, twisting to look at the heads above the tops of the other booths.
Rita jammed a knuckle into his leg, just above the knee.
“Hey!”
She stuck out her tongue, then grabbed her soda and began to drink. But not before he saw the flare of red on her cheeks.
“Well,” he said, “it seems to me that I ought to know more about the party of which I am to be a party of, if I’m going to join the party.”
Corky chuckled and shook his head.
Blue, a french fry dangling like a cigarette from the corner of his mouth, leaned over. “Seems that our flunk-bound friend here—”
“Damnit, Cross, lay off!”
“—has managed to collect a few things that, he claims, belong to a certain bleach-head typist in the front office.”
“True,” Corky said solemnly.
“These certain items of, shall we say, an extremely personal nature, will be strategically placed about the environs of the school in order that a clean-up in the morning cannot be accomplished before the population of said school returns to its academic pursuits and receives the full impact of said exhibit. We do believe, because of the nature of these extremely personal items, that a certain dictator will achieve a new orbit in intra-student relations.”
Brian stared at him.
Corky rubbed his hands.
Rita leaned her head close to his and said, “Translation: Corky has some of McCarthy’s underwear—it has her name on them, he won’t say where he got them—and Linholm will shit a brick when he finds out everybody knows he’s been screwing her.”
Brian stared at her.
Corky laughed loudly.
Blue ate his last fry and nodded.
“Miss McCarthy?”
“Sure,” Rita said. She leaned away from him in surprise. “Didn’t you know?”
“He really is …” He waved his hands.
“Jesus, Brian,” Corky said in disgust. “Where the hell have you been all your life?”
Brian inhaled slowly, exhaled quickly. “Damn.” He shook his head. “Damn.” He watched Rita nod, then looked up. “Oh damn.”
Greta stood at the booth. June was right behind her. “Move over,” she said to Corky, “there’s no place to sit in this goddamn place.”
Greta rolled her eyes and slid in next to Rita, complaining about the traffic on Tyler, hell because of a trailer truck that jackknifed on the edge of town.
“It’s worth your life just to cross the street anymore,” she said, reaching for Corky’s drink.
Rita shifted again, and Brian did his best not to feel her leg against his, smell the powder, or look at Blue, who, he saw from the corner of his eye, was suddenly most interested in the cardboard witch and cat.
“What’s up?” June said brightly.
“The stock market,” Corky answered.
“Very funny. I forgot to laugh.” She nodded to Rita, smiled at Brian. “So, you gonna marry Mickie or what?”
4
There were only two coach seats left on an evening flight to JFK. Not together. They’d arrive shortly after midnight, East Coast time. Evan bought them, and walked arm-in-arm with Addie through the crowded terminal. He didn’t bother to check for Paul; there were too many people, too much noise, too much movement; it was difficult enough just maneuvering through all the luggage carts and around outbound tourists laden with bags and children. Instead, he concentrated on the jitters playing in his stomach. A comfort he hadn’t expected—it meant his worry about flying had already kicked in.
They ate and tasted nothing at a snack bar in the main concourse, browsed listlessly through a bookstore, the duty-free gift shop, sat on contoured plastic chairs and stared at the flags and banners hanging from the high ceiling, at the pilots and flight attendants rushing to and from their planes, at the occasional policeman strolling along the carpeted flooring.
They said little.
There was nothing left to say.
He walked again, to stretch his legs, changed some pounds to dollars, and paused by a coin-operated television bolted at an angle to a chair. The old man watching it muttered obscenities at it until he noticed Evan.
“Damn IRA,” he said, nodding to the tiny screen.
Evan leaned over to see more clearly, automatically shaking his head at the smoking ruins of someone’s house. The roof was gone in front, hoses and firemen trampling over the lawn and through the hedging.
Then he straightened.
The reporter, microphone in hand, pulled a constable into the picture for a comment.
It was Sergeant Ludden.
The ruined house was Evan’s.
5
John sat in his rocking chair.
Beside it, on the floor on the right, bits of fur and bone.
He could smell nothing but the pine the breeze brought through the open window.
A station wagon pulled up at the curb, its color stolen by the twilight. A long-legged woman in tennis shorts slid out. As she hurried up the walk toward the porch, he recognized her, and sneered. Tressa Galiano, come to mooch another one of the old bitch’s stupid recipes. The next thing you knew, the old bitch would open a restaurant and there’d be no peace left in the neighborhood. He shifted. Grunted. Had half a mind to go down there while Galiano was inside and touch that damned car. Touch it, follow it, and see what the hell would happen. But he didn’t move. Only thought about it, and the thought made him smile, and rock.
Soon enough.
Soon enough.
He flexed his hands.
That redheaded piece of lard, Blue Cross, had been over earlier, shooting baskets with Brian. John had heard them talking, and hadn’t felt so good since he’d gone hunting the night before.
A stunt. At the high school. Halloween night.
No. No sense touching that fat-assed Galiano’s car when he could do so much more.
Kids, he thought.
Goddamn kids.
Then he reached down to his left and pulled the squealing rabbit up by its ears.
6
“… flotation device under your seat …”
Evan paid no attention to the barely visible screen at the head of the cabin section, where a flight attendant smiled her way through the ways he couldn’t possibly survive a crash in the North Atlantic. He never listened. He’d flown enough times to have memorized the speech, and had been through enough bouts of terrifying rough weather to realize, at last, that it didn’t make any difference.
God’s will.
Coincidental bad luck.
The result was the same.
Instead, he tried to settle himself for the nearly seven-hour flight. Addie had gotten a window seat four rows ahead of him; he, on the aisle, had nothing to lean his head against, and he knew he’d have one hell of a stiff neck by the time they arrived in New York.
The smell of plastic, jet fuel, the attendant’s perfume when she walked by, checking to be sure all seatbelts were fastened, the fear from the woman sitting behind him, chattering nervously with her husband, sour milk from a baby who had just thrown up all over her father’s suit.
The engines bellowed, whined, bellowed again.
When the airliner pulled away from its docking space, he stared at the back of Addie’s head, trying to force her to look around so he could smile, wink, do something to let her know they were going to be all right. But she already had a pillow propped between her and the window.
The baby screamed.
The wife asked her husband how long the flight was.
The airliner turned toward the runway, and he stared at the terminal, at the windows glaring in the setting sun.
No waiting.
The airplane took off without missing a beat.
Evan closed his eyes and instantly fell asleep.
In his dream it was snowing, and coming toward him, a bloodstained wolf.
IX
IN THE SHADOW OF THE WOLF
Thirty-Three
“So this is America.”
Evan, too bone-weary to answer, only shrugged as Addie turned from the motel window and pushed her hair away from her eyes with both hands. It was clearly an effort; she didn’t smile. And when she sighed more like a groan, rubbed the back of her neck, she looked as if she hadn’t slept for over a week. He had no doubt at all that he looked the same.
“I suppose,” she added, “I ought to be counting my blessings.”
The flight had been a horror: constant turbulence over the Atlantic only added to his dreams, finally waking him into a storm that brought on the “no smoking/fasten seat belt” signs, sending the airliner into steep dives and laboring climbs that threatened to wrench his stomach loose. Something crashed to the floor in one of the forward galleys. A child wept, another cried softly. The woman sitting behind him muttered prayers for an hour. The engines whined, roared, struggled for purchase, and during a sharp leftward bank, an overhead compartment snapped open, spilling briefcases and overcoats into the aisle.
He had stared out the window, seeing nothing but the night and half-expecting to see Paul there, prancing and laughing on the wing.
And afterward, when it was done, the praying and weeping over, the plane trembled the rest of the way to North America, where they had circled for nearly an hour just below Boston because of a thunderstorm that had stalled above Long Island. A vicious landing that should have crumpled the undercarriage. Two hours getting through customs, surly inspectors taking out their late-shift, bad-weather blues on passengers too shaken to protest. Renting a car had taken another hour, and by the time they reached the Patriot Motor Lodge just outside Port Richmond, they had had quite enough of anything, and anyone, that moved.
Addie threw back the coverlet, the blanket, and sat with her back to him. “Do not touch me,” she said. “I am not in the mood to be seduced.”
He grunted.
An apologetic smile over her shoulder while she pulled off her shoes.
Not, he agreed silently, the most romantic place in the world.
The second-story room was small, and made smaller by two double beds, a long dresser, and a television set bolted to its own chrome stand which, in turn, was bolted to the floor.
The heating unit beneath the window grumbled.
The walls were papered a faintly fading red and white, the carpet was worn of its color, the draperies were a brilliant blue and white, three bland prints over the beds depicted General Washington moving his army through New Jersey during the early days of the Revolution.
Addie stood, stretched, and stripped to her underwear. “Do you know,” she said, looking to the clock radio on the stand between the beds, “that it’s damn near dawn?” She knelt on the mattress. “I feel dead.”
“I think I am dead. I’m just too stupid to know it.”
A look: are we .… will we be all right?
He nodded: how can we not be? He’s not here, he’s over there.
Her head lowered, she slowly fell onto her side and dragged the covers over her. “Get some sleep,” she muttered into the pillow. “But don’t wake me until I wake up. Jet lag be damned, I’ve had it.”
His shoes and socks already off, his belt undone, his shirt unbuttoned. He moved to the wall switch by the door and turned off the lights. Then he pulled the corner of the drape aside and looked out.
The Patriot was a courtyard motel, better days long gone, just busy enough not to get worse; the rooms ranged around a pool ringed by a stained concrete apron, second-floor access from a narrow concrete balcony. Parking was in the rear. Straight ahead he could see over the brick wall that fronted the highway, the door in its right-hand corner already bolted shut against the night. Light blurred as a mist dropped from unseen clouds. Traffic. A horn. Even in here the faint smell of gasoline and diesel fuel. Stores, gas stations, shabby offices, empty lots; and beyond them, just one block away, was the southern end of Port Richmond.
He was home, and he didn’t feel like it.
Too much had happened too quickly. No time for thought, no time to figure out what he would do when he returned.
It was Friday.
Weekend in Port Richmond.
When Addie snored lightly, he realized he had never felt so lonely. So disconnected.
Exhaustion was part of it. The run, the flight, the hassles with bureaucracy just to get a simple car—his temper had gone the way of his patience the moment he’d stepped into the terminal. Too many emotions abruptly severed at the base when he’d stumbled into the room and closed the door behind him.
And anxiety. Now that he was here, what was he going to do? He needed funds, he needed work, and he needed someplace to stay.
Christ, he wouldn’t even be able to get back into his own house without wrangling.
He yawned and let the drapes fall to.
He felt his way across the room and got into bed.
“Good night, Addie,” he said softly.
At least, he thought to her, we’re safe, for a change.
Thirty-Four
1
Brian had the dream again.
Glass; guns; knives; acid; chains and a razor-tipped whip.
Eric Linholm hadn’t stood a chance.
Blood speckled the gymnasium walls, crawled in rivulets along the hardwood floor, ran in winding streams down the high windowpanes, stained his hands and dried under his nails, splattered onto his lips and he shivered when he licked them.
Screaming.
Begging.
All of it in silence while Shane Bishop looked on from his post at the iron door. Rusted iron. Blood rust.
When at last the nightmare ended, he sat up in his bed, panting with exertion.
And excitement.
This time he didn’t make it to the bathroom before he threw up.
2
“I mean,” he said later, sitting at the breakfast table in the kitchen, an untouched bowl of cereal before him, “I was actually having a good time, you know what I mean?” He shuddered and rubbed his arms.
“Not surprising,” said Lyanna Gough, still wrapped in a Day-Glo dragon bathrobe and holding a cup of coffee. There was still an hour to go before any of them had to be at school. The furnace rumbled; fragments of morning frost on the window over the sink. “There are days when I wish I could do the same thing.” A slip of ginger hair drooped over her forehead. She blew up; it fell back. “Not in dreams, though, I can tell you that.”
“Lyanna,” Shirley Atkins cautioned. She stood at the sink, slender in jeans and sweater, sweatband around her short hair, cheeks flushed from her run around the block.
“Hey, I don’t care,” the pudgy woman answered. Her voice was hoarse, almost masculine. “The kid thinks we all love the bastard?” She grinned. “Pardon my French.”
Brian grinned back. “I won’t tell, if that’s what you’re worried about.”
Miss Atkins turned with a glass of water, leaned back against the stainless-steel sink. “That’s not it at all,” she said over the rim of the glass. Pale eyes serious; dark eyebrows lowered. “It’s what we in the profession call an indiscretion.”
“Bullshit,” the art teacher muttered.
Miss Atkins grunted and drank, put the glass behind her without looking, and said, “It’s like Brian here telling us what stunt his class is planning for tomorrow, you see.”
“Hey,” he said.
The history teacher held up a palm. “Now don’t get excited, Brian. I’m not going to pump you for information, and I’m certainly not going to tell you not to do it. I don’t even want a hint. Because,” she said, shaking her finger to make the point, “that would be an indiscretion. You see?”
“Bullshit,” Miss Gough muttered again.
Brian didn’t see. It was no secret that there were still a handful of teachers left who continued to fight the principal’s autocratic changes every step of the way; it was also no secret that the fighting, which had resulted in faculty and staff purges three years in a row, had ultimately cost Mr. Kendal his job. But not before a long, loud, and very public battle which had, so far this year, sent Linholm’s tactics underground.
