Gentlemen (4 page)

Mixer had been quiet this whole time. That's sort of what kept me from being too worried about it. Mixer was good at reading people, when they were likely to lose it, where that line was. Like I said, it was almost a game to him, and he could read Bones as well as anyone. I sort of figured, if anything was really going to happen, Mixer'd speak up. And he was speaking up now.

“Hey, Bones,” he said. “Got any plans this summer?”

That must've seemed like a weird comment to Haberman, like totally random and out of the blue. There's a phrase for things like that: non-something, non-sensical, maybe? Anyway, Mixer had a point. He was telling him, in so many words, you do anything out here, anything at all, and you fail English. You fail English, and you go to summer school. Bones looked at him for a second, the anger was still in his eyes, but then he got it. He let his head roll back and around, like someone had just taken the spine out of his neck. He shook out his shoulders a little. He was making a show of calming down, letting us know it took some real effort.

Like I said before, Bones was Humpty Dumpty sitting on the wall when it came to English. He always kind of struggled in school, even when he had normal teachers, so Haberman was a nightmare, with all his mind games. At this point,
Bones could practically taste that F, and F is the first letter in summer school at best or repeating at worst, and he'd had enough of that.

“You read me?” said Mixer.

Bones let his head drop back down. He looked over at Mixer and nodded.

“Yeah, well, we're going to have to dump ‘er out, whatever it is,” said Bones, his voice more or less back to normal.

“I would certainly appreciate that,” Haberman said, looking from Bones to Mixer and back with a little grin on his face.

“Whatever,” said Bones. He crouched down and Mixer and me did the same, wedging our fingers under the barrel again.

“Ready,” said Bones, making a show of being in charge, just to get a little dignity back. We nodded and let him have some. Then we lifted. We stood up, shuffled a few steps forward, and sort of leaned in, resting the side of the barrel against the lip of the open trunk. Now we had to sort of readjust and squat down again to grip the barrel farther back, so we could tip it forward.

It hadn't gotten any lighter, that was for sure, and the sweat had already started creeping out again. I was going to have pit stains, which sucked. We got under there and tipped the thing forward, but whatever was inside was wedged in good and snug with the blanket. We sort of shook the barrel, but it wasn't really working.

“Little help here,” I said, and Haberman leaned in there, grabbed the top of the blanket, and gave it a good tug. It
almost pulled the barrel out of our hands, and I was sort of surprised that Haberman had that kind of strength. As I was thinking this, the contents of the barrel slipped out like one long turd. It made a sound like
THWUP
as the sides of the blanket slid free from the plastic. As it went, we sort of pulled the barrel up and away and all of a sudden the barrel was empty and light, and there was this sort of tube-shaped mass of blanket hanging out of the edge of the trunk.

It was two blankets, I could see now, bound together with gray duct tape. Whatever was in there was wrapped tight, but you could see there was some sprawl to it. It didn't want to be tube-shaped like that, and it was pushing out against the tape and blankets at a few points.

We put the barrel down on the asphalt, and when I stood up again, there was like a knob or something pushing out against the wool near my left hand. I reached out to touch it, but I kind of didn't want to for some reason, and that's probably why I was too slow. Haberman pushed in front of me and shoved the whole thing forward and down, stuffing it into the trunk. As he was pushing, the shape started breaking down and more sort of knobs appeared, pressing out against the blanket. But then it was in there, sort of taking the shape of the trunk.

“Excuse me, gentlemen,” he said.

We stepped back and, just like that, he slammed the trunk. Then he did that thing with his hands, rubbing his palms together a few quick times, like he was brushing some
dust off them, and it was like, Show's over, so long, thanks for coming. Mixer, Bones, and me were just standing there looking at the shiny paint on top of the closed trunk.

“Well, then, I suppose I can return this myself,” Haberman said, and I sort of jumped because, as dumb as it sounds, I'd half forgotten about him. “You have earned yourselves a hearty lunch, certainly,” he said.

He reached into his pocket and pulled out his wallet. It was old enough that the leather was worn smooth. He pulled out three dollar bills and gave us each a buck. I got the old crappy bill, which figured. You got the idea that he really thought that this'd cover it, that this guy could be at the school for decades and not know how much lunch cost or what exactly a sloppy joe was. A buck each was way below market rate for that kind of lugging—what was this, 1952?—but we took it. If he'd paid in advance, he might've spared himself some of the grief with Bones. But then, I'm not even sure he noticed the grief with Bones.

“Don't forget to retrieve your books from my room before you go,” he said.

He picked up the barrel by the top edges and then sort of tossed it up, so he could wrap his arms around the sides. Now it was in front of him like a giant plastic cup. He started carrying the empty barrel back toward the school for some reason. We watched him for a second and then looked back at the trunk. We could've asked him again what that was; I knew we were all thinking it. But it was pretty clear he wasn't
going to tell us at that point, and now I was starting to think that I didn't necessarily want to know.

It was the way it moved under the blankets, the way it shifted around. It seemed to have, I don't know, joints or something. I mean furniture can have joints, like a lawn chair or whatever, but that was no frickin' lawn chair.

Roadkill. That's what we figured it was. The three of us hashed it out over cold sloppy joes during what was left of lunch period. It took a little compromise. Mixer was just listing heavy things at first, more or less at random, but I told him it was flesh and bone, some kind of animal. I sort of put my foot down, and once I did, Bones agreed. He thought it was cool. Mixer climbed aboard, and after that, roadkill was the one thing we could all agree on. When we were listing possibilities, Bones said “Tommy,” but he said it as a joke and we took it that way.

“About the right size,” he added, even though it wasn't a funny enough joke to need a follow-up.

We figured it was a fawn, maybe a doe, terminated by someone's bumper. Not Haberman's. Even a small deer would do some serious damage to that little waterbug of a car. Of
course, we were mostly looking at the trunk and not the hood, but if that thing had hit something, we would've seen some sign of it. It would've had to've been that day or maybe the night before, I told them, fresh, the way things were still shifting around under those blankets.

It wouldn't've been too hard to find a dead deer. Someone creams one in their pickup and just pushes it off to the side of the road or doesn't even bother. It happened all the time. I was in the car when Joey, Mixer's older brother, hit one last year. A buck, but on the smallish side, it'd bolted out of the woods that run along Under mountain Road.

It came from the far side so that it had to cross the empty lane before getting to us. But at the speed it was going, a flat-out sprint, gallop, whatever, there was no way it was going to be able to stop. No way we were, either, the way Joey drives, but he slammed on the brakes, practically stood up on them. It looked like the thing might make it, might just clear us, but it didn't quite get there. Joey clipped him, just barely. It was the passenger-side headlight that clipped the buck's hindquarters. The headlight popped out of its socket, and the deer flipped up onto the bank and broke its neck, clean.

We pulled over and walked back and the thing had its eyes open, but it wasn't so much as twitching. It was dead as dead gets, with a little stream of blood coming out its ear. Joey was pretty pissed about the headlight and it was almost dark, so we turned around half a mile up the road and headed back. We looked at the spot when we drove past but the deer
was already gone. Somebody'd tossed it in the back of their truck and taken it home, a bonus deer, off-season.

This time of year, deer were everywhere, idiot young ones in tow. You got used to seeing broken glass along the side of the road. That'd ruin someone's day and maybe their life, too, if the deer made it up the hood and through the windshield. There was a pretty good chance of that, too, since they call them windshields and not deershields. Someone died that way once or twice a year around here.

The thing I remember about hitting that deer, there was a book on the seat next to me, a kids' book. It was called
The Happy Man
or something like that. It was for Joey's girlfriend's little kid. Joey still looks a lot like Mixer, but he's like seven or eight years older.

Anyway, I remember the book sliding forward, and it seemed real slow and fluid, like a lazy wave slopping onto a dock. Then it slammed into the seat back and flapped down onto the floor, and suddenly everything was back to full speed. It was the last thing I saw before I face-planted into the back of the headrest on Joey's beat-up old Saab.

I got a bloody nose, but it's amazing none of us ended up in the hospital. Joey had his seat belt on, because this was just after he started seeing Amy Krukowski, Amy K, and her having a kid and all made him into more of a buckle-up kind of guy. He was preparing for some real adulthood, I guess, and sure enough, they've got a little house now.

Anyway, that's what we figured it was, a deer carcass,
wrapped up in plastic to keep any blood in, and a few blankets to keep it a mystery. We figured it was Haberman's version of Mr. G's frozen bird, and if we were right, that man needed some serious help. We already knew that, but this was a whole new level of nuts. And that's why he wouldn't tell anyone what it was. He could get into some real trouble for bringing that much dead animal into a public high school. It was a long way from cutting up frogs in science.

“I hate that guy,” said Bones, when we were talking about whether Haberman could get fired for something like that.

“We know!” said Mixer, and they both laughed.

I laughed some, too, but it was just reflex. You know how sometimes you start laughing when the people around you do, just to cover yourself until you figure out what's so funny? Because it hadn't been funny in the parking lot, and I figured Bones wasn't really joking.

Anyway, that was lunch. I had last-period study hall, which was like gold if you were a senior, because you could leave early. But it wasn't gold if you were a sophomore, it was still made out of the same crap as everything else at this school. There were no tests and no one was talking at you in study hall, but it was pretty boring and especially bad last period, when you could almost feel what it would be like to be home already, on the couch with a snack in one hand and the remote in the other.

I signed myself into the library for this one, which you can do if you get there early enough. I had to go to the library
because I had to use a computer. I don't have one at home. I had to use a computer because I had to check my e-mail, and I had to check my e-mail because I can be a tremendous jackass sometimes, just a dangling set of donkey balls. Usually when I am, there's a girl involved. It's like magic: Instant donkey balls, just add girl.

I shouldn't be telling you this part. It's embarrassing as hell. A little background: The girls in this school had shown pretty much no interest in yours truly since day one. The only tits I ever got here were in the nickname, you know? And sure enough, thinking about the girls I thought were hot and the ones I thought were OK and the ones just below that who I'd actually tried to talk to, I was getting a big fat zero on the interest meter. I mean, they'd hear me out, but as soon as I turned around, they'd run back to their friends and I'd hear them giggling and whispering a mile a minute, and I knew what they were saying: donkey balls.

So anyway, with those kind of playing conditions on my home field, I'd had to cast kind of a wider net. The best place for that around here was at the Soudley town lake. Girls from other towns go there, because it was bigger and nicer than the other lakes around here. We even got tourists. I'd biked down there just about every day the summer before, which was going on a full year ago now. It was a better scene for me, because I could walk around in my swim shorts and wear a baseball hat down real low over my eyes. My left eye is messed up, and that side of my face a bit, but my body is just
normal, so walking around like that sort of played up the normal part of me and played down the messed-up part.

In all that time down there, I met two girls. They were both named Jenny: Jenny #1 and Jenny #2 is as much as you need to know. Now, two girls doesn't seem so bad—the problem is that I met them within a day of each other. I was down there four or five days a week for months, I only met two girls, and I couldn't even get that right. I swear to god, sometimes I think I'm cursed.

So I met Jenny #1 on August 1, real pretty day, semi-pretty girl. At least I thought so. Bones said she was a dog and I popped him hard in the chest, which is a good place to punch someone, because there's not much padding there and it hurts. He must've been looking at the wrong girl or something.

Jenny #1 was short and, yeah, she was sort of, well, I think the word is
stocky.
You know, not fat but kind of thick and strong. She looked like the girls on the softball team, and maybe she was, because she didn't go to the Tits. She went to Henderson. That's what she said anyway. I think she might've been a year younger than that, and she'd be a freshman there now, but that was just a suspicion I had, based on the way she talked. It didn't sound like she'd ever really been to Henderson.

Anyway, she had nice brown hair and brown eyes and a little mole or birthmark or something off to the side of her chin, which wasn't gross like it might sound but was actually kind of cool, and it made me think that, you know, somewhere
down the line she might understand better than the others what it was like for me. That first day, we just sort of said hi. I mean I said hi, which I did to a lot of girls down there, and she said hi back, which was more rare.

She said it real nice, too, not defensive at all. I stopped when I heard how she said it, thinking I might say something else. She sort of stopped, too, but I couldn't think of anything else, so I just sort of nodded at her and walked over to the snack shack, which wasn't where I'd been headed but was good enough. So that was the day I met Jenny #1, and it's not like we ran off and got married in Vegas or anything, but I definitely filed her away in my memory bank.

I got to the lake a little early the next day, even though it was kind of cloudy. I was looking around for her but, you know, trying not to look like I was looking. There weren't that many people there, and she wasn't one of them, but that's when I met Jenny #2, and this time, I had that second thing to say all lined up: “I'm Mike.”

“I'm Jenny,” she said, and at this point I didn't even know that the first girl's name was Jenny.

Jenny #2 was pretty hot. Even Bones said so when he got there. She wasn't tall or short, just sort of normal chick height, and she was thin with a little elf nose and big eyes.

“Your eyes are nice,” I said toward the end of the day. It was my big Romeo moment, the smoothest thing I'd ever said to a girl. “What color is that?”

“They're hazel,” she said.

She looked over at mine but I looked down quick, just enough to cover them up with the bill of my old Sox cap. I wore that cap because it was beat-up and cool-looking and because some of the girls around here were into the Sox, and you could score some points for that. I'm not sure how I did it but I seemed to have racked up some points with Jenny #2. I thought we might make out a little at the end of that day, maybe I'd get my hands somewhere, and just thinking about that, I had to put my towel in my lap because all I was wearing was swim trunks and they tent out pretty easy.

We didn't make out. The most that happened was that we sort of touched knees while we were talking. But it seemed like things were headed in the right direction. I got there early the next day looking for her, and wouldn't you know it, there was Jenny #1. “Dropped something,” she said, and sure enough I had, and we got to talking from there. If Jenny #2 showed up that day, I didn't see her.

For four days, Wednesday through Saturday, Jenny #1 and me were more or less coupled up. At the end of the fourth day, we went behind the little climbing wall at the play ground. The little kids had gone home by then, and I made it as far as I'd ever made it with a girl. But that's when it went bad, too, because I could see she was making an effort to look at my eye, especially since I wouldn't take my hat off when we were making out. Finally, she came out and said it.

“What's wrong with your eye?”

“I got pinkeye,” I said, even though that wouldn't explain the eye, much less the face around it. It was just the first thing that popped into my head, kind of the-dog-ate-my-homework of make-out excuses. She either knew I was lying and didn't appreciate it, or she believed me somehow and just didn't want to be making out with some dude with an eye infection. Either way, that was that. She said she had to go and she went.

I asked for her phone number or e-mail or something before she left, because I pretty much knew she wouldn't be coming back to the lake that summer.

“I'll give you all of that stuff tomorrow,” she said.

I knew she wouldn't but I biked down there early anyway. I sat on that climbing wall half the day. Sucks to be me sometimes. It was about two or three days later that I started to think about Jenny #2 again. She was cuter anyway. Cuter and nicer, but I'd blown that, too. I'd seen her a few times over my four days with Jenny #1, and more to the point, she'd seen me with her. What was I supposed to do? The timing was all wrong. God hates me.

But I did get Jenny #2's last name during that one day with her, and it was kind of a funny name, so I had no trouble remembering it. Well, it wasn't funny so much as really unfortunate—I'll just tell you: It was Butts. Even Monday, like eight months later, I still remembered it. And that's when I looked up her profile online and sent her a message.

I did a search by name, and hers came up: right name, right town, right high school. The age said seventeen, but everyone put that so they could have a public profile. Private profiles were for little kids. There was no picture, her page was as crappy as mine, but I figured it was her. So I wrote and sent the stupidest, lamest message in the history of electronics. And now I was in the library to see if she'd responded. I guess that makes me an optimist.

“I need a computer,” I said to the librarian. I said it in the way you'd say “I'm a loser,” and that's pretty much the way she took it. She asked me what I needed it for.

“Homework,” I said, even though I didn't understand why she was sweating me about it. She wasn't even our real librarian, just filling in until Ms. Moreno got out of the hospital.

She gave me a look like she didn't believe me, and I gave her a look like I didn't care, and she said, “Number three is open. Fifteen minutes.”

I signed on to my e-mail. There were a few messages but they were all junk. I went to my profile and checked my “pending requests,” and there was just one there: Jenny #2. I clicked on her profile and saw that she'd logged on already today, which meant she'd read my stupid message. I felt a little queasy for a second, like someone had just jabbed a pool cue into my gut. She'd read it and she hadn't answered it. She'd seen my friend request and she still hadn't accepted it.