Gentlemen (5 page)

I sat there feeling like a dumbass for a little while, but then I was like, Hey, it's only been a day. And as dumb as that message had been, I still worked hard on it and must've said a few things right. Maybe she was just thinking about what to write back. Like I said, an optimist.

After school, I called Tommy's house. He hadn't been around for the rest of the day, and so it seemed like, yeah, they'd gone ahead and suspended him for flipping that desk. There was no answer, which wasn't all that surprising. His mom and his stepdad would still be at work, and he'd probably be at McDonald's or something. I called his cell and it went straight to voice mail. I figured maybe he was talking to someone, so I called back a little later, but it was voice mail again. By then, I was a little surprised. I thought he'd be ready to give me the lowdown, the blow by blow between him and Trever, because it was pretty clear that it hadn't gone well.

Plus, someone would've had to've picked him up from school. They probably would've called his mom down at the town hall for that, and she was always ready to get out from behind that desk. But like I said, no answer, just ring ring ring.
I let it ring, hung up, and tried again. Nothing. Tommy lived over in North Cambria, and Mixer and me were in Soudley. Bones was, too, but farther out, almost in North Cambria. Tommy's house was way too far to walk and too far and too uphill to bike. And there was no one around to give me a lift.

It's funny because, the four of us, where we lived, it was like a line. It was stretched out from the center of Soudley over to North Cambria. It was like connect-the-dots, like four links in a chain, and that sort of made sense. Once we'd met Tommy at the Tits, he clicked right into place with us. He was a scrapper, a headbanger, and just kind of a good guy.

What I mean by that last part was that he was maybe a little friendlier than the rest of us. I don't mean that in a bad way, and not like that was saying much anyway. He was just kind of nicer. Like once we were making fun of some freshman for wearing an honest-to-god sweater vest. (Seriously, not kidding, he was wearing a sweater vest.) But Tommy was like, “Give him a break. He's just doing his thing.” Of course, I was just like, “Well, his thing totally sucks,” and we all broke out laughing.

Anyway, half an hour later, I got a call from Mixer. “No answer,” I told him, and he said, “Same here,” meaning he'd tried Tommy, too. But that's not why he was calling. He'd scored a sixer and he wanted to know if I wanted to head out to the house in the woods and help him drink it. I was like, “Damn straight.”

We hung up and like two minutes later, there's Mixer
banging on the door. It's a real small town. He was banging hard with his palm. He was hitting the wood part, not the glass, but I still thought he was going to do some real damage this time. He always did that, like he was half knocking and half trying to bust in.

“I'm coming, knock it off!” I yelled through the glass.

The door opens onto the kitchen, and I was right there by the fridge eating a slice of Kraft cheese. I threw the wrap per away, and Mixer stepped back so I could open the door and duck out. He had a paper bag rolled up under his arm, and there were water stains on it from where the beer cans were sweating.

“Hey, man,” I said.

“Hey,” he said and lifted his chin in a quick nod.

“Hey, bring the Daisy, huh?” Mixer said when we were halfway across the lawn. That seemed like a good idea, so I headed back into the house, shot up the stairs, and grabbed the old junker of a BB gun I'd had since I was ten or eleven. The thing's like a toy: a little brown plastic stock, a Winchester-looking lever to cock it, and a black barrel maybe two feet long.

Mixer was just waiting there in the middle of the yard. There were no cars coming so we crossed the road, him with a bag of beers under his arm, me with a BB gun under mine. No one gave a damn, but because Mixer had the beers, we cut through the O'Learys' backyard instead of walking farther up Route 44 and entering the path there.

It didn't look like anyone was home at the O'Learys'. Their black dog barked at us, but he was penned in and he didn't mean anything by it, just bored. Mixer nodded down toward the Daisy, but I was not going to shoot the dog. Not that it would do any real damage—no way the BB would even break the skin—but that's just stupid. Besides that dog was from the same litter as our old dog, Bullfeathers, and Bully was a good dog, until he got loose out front and got hit by a truck on 44.

It's not that big a lawn and pretty quick we were on the trail. You think of towns getting bigger as time goes on but Soudley had gone the other way. There used to be a lot more to it, back before I was around or even my grand parents probably. There used to be a lot of iron in the ground and people who worked digging it up and melting it down. There were even train tracks, a little railway back here behind town to ship the stuff out on.

The tracks are dug up and gone now, and we were walking on what was left of them, just a sunken dirt walking path, maybe twelve feet wide. People called it the bike path, but you really needed like a mountain bike or something. The dirt was worn smooth in the center, but there were rocks sticking up and sticks lying around and little ditches here and there. It's tough on my ten-speed, but it's fine to walk.

Every now and then, an old path shoots off the bike path into the woods, because there used to be houses back there. Maybe there were a dozen, scattered around like a little town
behind the town. Mostly they were pretty beaten down now. A few were leaning halfway over and a few others had gone ahead and fallen down so that the foundations were open to the air, just overgrown pits with rotted boards scattered in and around them. You could definitely fall in at night and break a bone or three.

The only one that was still safe to go in was the house in the woods. It must've been built later or lived in longer or both. Anyway, it had its problems, too. There were gaps in the roof and there was no glass left in the windows. The glass wasn't knocked out, it was just gone. I guess whoever lived there must've taken the windows with them. I'd never heard of something like that before. I mean, didn't the place they were moving to have windows? Anyway, the house had been empty for as long as I'd known about it, which was most of my life.

Mixer and I turned onto the path that led there. The path started out good, but it faded out fast and before long we were pushing through grass and weeds up to our knees. You can't wear shorts out there or your legs'll get all torn up. We were in jeans and boots and sure enough, Mixer was kicking his leg free of something, probably prickers.

“Let go!” he said, swearing at it.

That seemed funny for some reason, yelling at a plant. We laughed a little and then, like that was the sign he'd been waiting for, he decided to dig into the beers. He lifted the six-pack out and tossed the wet bag off into the grass.
It was Meisterbrau, which is not great beer but, you know, still beer.

He popped one out of the plastic and handed it to me. It was still pretty cold and the can was wet so it sort of stuck to my palm. I pressed the BB gun under my other arm so that I could pop the top, then I shifted things around so that I had the beer in my left hand and was holding the Daisy in my right. My finger was on the trigger, but the thing wasn't cocked.

Mixer popped the top on his. He held his open beer in his right hand and we both stopped for a bit to take a big first gulp. When we started up again, he hooked his fingers into the two empty plastic loops and carried the rest of the six-pack that way, hanging low from his left hand and trailing through the grass.

We went down the little dip there and headed into the field that probably used to be the yard, and there was the house in the woods, still standing square on its foundation, its white paint peeling and its empty windows open to the wind. We stood there looking at it and finishing up our first beers. Mixer shook his, to show that it was empty, and I downed the last mouthful of backwash and shook mine, too. Then we both chucked the empty cans toward the house—right at the same second, like we'd planned it—but they were too light and came up short.

The door's around back, or the door frame is anyway. What's left of the door itself is laying on the ground like a big black welcome mat. We didn't bother to go around, just
hoisted ourselves up into the empty windows. It was only four o'clock or so, and the sun came straight in through the window and door frames and all the other holes in the place, so that it was almost as light inside as out. The place was full of peeling paint and broken floorboards. There were names carved into the walls, holes punched into the Sheetrock, and empty bottles from older kids who went there to drink.

It's pretty much been worked over at this point, but you could see that it was probably a nice little place back in the day. When I was a kid, I used to think about fixing it up and living there. Now I know there's no way. It's all rotted out. You'd have to knock it down and start over.

Anyway, I walked into the little room that used to be the kitchen. The old linoleum tiles were warped in some places and missing in others. I kicked a loose piece against the far wall. There's a big gap in the tiling that must've been where the stove used to be. There's a thin pipe sticking out of the wall there that was probably for the gas. The stove was in the yard out back now. I'm not sure why anyone would go to the trouble of putting it there, unless they were going to take it with them and changed their mind at the last minute. Like: Oh, man, we can't take this stove. We got all these windows to carry!

I went back into the main room—there are only four rooms in the place, plus the attic and basement—and Mixer handed me another beer. It wasn't as cold this time. I went to lean the BB gun against the wall but just then there was a
noise in the attic, a scratchy little sound like
scritch-scritch.
It might've been a shingle falling in from the roof or something like that, but it sort of sounded like something moving.

“The hell?” I said, and I looked over at Mixer.

He was like, “Sounded like
claws.
”

So I put down the beer, cocked the BB gun, and fired a shot up into the attic through a hole in the ceiling. I had a couple holes to chose from, so I picked the one that seemed like it was closest to where the sound came from. The Daisy fired with its little
pfoot!
sound, and we could hear the BB hit the roof and bounce back down onto the attic floor. We waited. Nothing. I fired another shot for good measure, then put down the gun and picked up my beer.

After a few sips, Mixer and I sat down, backs against the wall.

“Tommy's in deep, huh?” said Mixer, even though we'd covered that topic already.

“Yeah, what a head case.”

“You see Doucheley's face?”

“Nah, I was watching the desk flying across the room,” I said, even though the desk really just sort of flopped up and over.

“Yeah, I was watching that, too, but afterwards, Doucheley was like”—and Mixer made this face with his eyes and mouth both wide open. It wasn't exactly how I remembered it, but it was a pretty funny face so I had a go at making it.

“Yeah, that's it,” said Mixer.

We sat there drinking for a bit.

“Think he took off again?” Mixer said after a while.

“I don't know,” I said. It hadn't occurred to me.

“I mean, it hasn't been that long, but you'd think we'd have heard something from someone. He's got a cell phone.”

“Yeah, but we don't.”

“He could've called us at home.”

“Maybe he's calling right now.”

“Yeah,” said Mixer, shrugging. “Suspended, though.”

“Definitely. Maybe a week.”

“He's frickin' crazy. Remember last time, though?”

He meant the last time Tommy'd taken off, and I had to ask which one that was because, truth was, Tommy'd hit the road a few times.

“Manchester,” said Mixer.

“Oh, man, yeah. He was crashing with that dude.”

“Yeah, good way to get dead.”

“Or worse,” I said, because there's no doubt there are some sick dudes out there, jonesing for teens and kids and like cocker spaniels.

“Yeah, I think maybe he was a relative, though.”

“No, that was the other time.”

“Oh, yeah…”

“Anyway,” I said, “it's a little early to call out the search party. Tommy can take care of himself.”

“I guess,” Mixer said. “But if any of us is going to get into that kind of trouble, it's him. He's too freakin'…I don't know what…He's too freakin' Tommy, that's what he is.”

Then he threw his empty can against the far wall and opened up another. That was his third, so I reached over and hauled the last one over by the plastic. I wasn't quite done with my second one but I didn't want to get cheated. Technically, it was Mixer's beer, but I knew it hadn't cost him anything.

“Joey hook you up?”

“Yeah.”

“Cool.”

By the time we finished the beers, it was getting later and the sky was beginning to change. It was maybe dark blue heading toward purple, still pretty early, but the bats came out early in the woods, and we took turns shooting at them. We hunkered down below the window frames, passing the Daisy back and forth and popping up to shoot. It was a game, like we were at war or like the bats might start shooting back.

It's pretty near impossible to hit the things, especially after three beers. They navigate by that sonar, and when you fire, the gun makes that little puffing pop. The sound gets there before the BB does, and it freaks the bat completely. I mean, I think they read that like it's a wall or something. They always dip or dive or swoop and never the same way twice. By the time the BB gets there, it's pretty late to the party and the bat is like two feet away.

Mixer hit one anyway. He was just that bad a shot. The bat dropped like a rock. Its wings ruffled on the way down, but it didn't make any noise at all when it hit. The thing probably weighed like six ounces, and the grass just swallowed it up.