Ivyland (4 page)

“Are you going to clean up whatever you spilled in there?”

“Dog could get it.”

“We don't have a dog.”

“I'm saying we should. You're not letting me finish.”

After lengthy and falsely superior sighing meant to indicate I'm ready to hear the big finish, I prop my head up on my elbow, bored, and take a sip of orange juice, failing to recall I'd just brushed my teeth.

“So the reason he was out of school is
pffffhaha
, O, God, this is too good, okay, so he, he, the first day after the emergency room he's in math with Ms. Delacroix, right?”

I wish I weren't laughing at this, but now I can't stop. Henri nods, already falling apart.

“That tight blue sweater we loved …”

“No,” I groan.

“He popped every stitch!” Henri exclaims. “Only Larry, man.” Nostalgic head-shaking. “Heh, Larry.”

“And the moral is … ?”

Henri disappears into the living room with his balled-up paper towels as I put dishes away.

“Sure are a lotta people staring at it,” I hear.

The maple in our front yard got struck by lightning last night. I didn't see the bolt itself, but I can picture it carving the storm-tossed treetop and stabbing at what's now a charred and leafless ten-foot trunk. I did hear the crack of doom that accompanies a lightning strike too close to home, the kind of thunder that rattles bones in their sockets and would've had our theoretical dog cowering under the dining room table. Just grateful it didn't kick off more blackouts.

“They're taking pictures.”

“Of a dead tree?”

“Check it out.”

I walk in to see, and he's right. Several flashes go off in less than a minute.

“Doesn't it remind you of––”

I'm out the door in ratty sandals before Henri can make the trademark non sequitur. I let the screen door slam behind me, cursing when I hear one of the hinges break off and clatter on the porch.

“Don't any of you come suing me when that falls on you,” I yell.

Only puzzled looks. Yeah, we all have total faith in this dead maple's structural integrity. A couple is poring over the blown-off twigs and boughs lying around. Across the street, open-mouthed and wary of the other onlookers, stands Grady, a mangled blue kite in hand. His dirty ferret is on the loose, exploring the drawers of a bureau left on the curb when our neighbors moved to Philly. I smile at him but stop short of anything more. The smile he sends back is cautious, meant for a stranger. He's trying to look past me.

“This your tree?” a pale woman asks.

“Until they tear it down later today,” I snap.

This fortysomething man, one of the Guatemalans who plays soccer down at Floods Hill on the weekends, takes a step forward and soberly corrects me.

“We cannot let you destroy this miracle.”

“Excuse me?”

A stringy-haired character who must've been home-schooled in the worst way, wearing a seasonal sweater knitted by herself or an equally creepy sibling, moves one deliberate step closer to Soccer Guy.

“God has spoken through your tree.”

Soccer Guy explains, in no inelegant fashion:

“Your tree, it embraces the Virgin.” He ushers me into the street, indicating a side of the maple's black skeleton I haven't seen.

“Uh.”

“You see?”

“Am I missing something? You did say virgin.”

“Look.” He steps forward and traces the outline of an overcooked vertical rift in the bark. “See?” I touch the ridges of the gash, darkening my fingers, soft black crumbs trickling off. Then I notice the split isn't just bark-deep—it cuts into the trunk itself.

“She is inside.”

The rest of the peanut gallery, up till now content to let this guy do the talking, produces a knowing chuckle. Really knew how to blow a first impression.

“She is in there,” the man says, as though he'd just made up his mind. I peer inside at the mangled tree guts, then step back off the curb.

“When you say …”

“The Virgin Mary is born of your tree.”

The whole picture, top-down now. I move forward again, staring through the crack, know what to look for and finally see it. The narrow chin with rough-hewn mouth. Shoulders smoothly sloping back. Supple arms meeting around a perfect oval abdomen with fingers meshed … like, linking, and she's pulling on that link—if it unclasped, the arms would snap gently off her pregnant belly. The trunk, blasted open at the top, allows the sun's designs to trickle down inside: dappled shadows thrown by the leaves of other trees, shapes that jump in slow electric flashes. The convincing effect of hair ruffled by wind. I blink with dust in my eye and whisper something into to my chest. Their spokesman introduces himself.

“I am Anastasio,” he says.

I mumble, unsure, that my name is Aidan. Anastasio sticks out his hand.

“I will not let you tear down this tree,” he says.

A glance at the rest of the crowd leads me to believe they pretty much agree.

OFFICER R. DANKE ///
IVYLAND, NEW JERSEY /// LAST WINTER

Let's be assholes, says Jack. So we are professional assholes. We prowl down the block collecting Christmas trees from the gutter and pile them in front of Tara Cable's front door because she refused to give Ed a freezejob. He cited hygienic advantages. She said it was perverted. Now Jack won't stop calling her “Ice Queen.”

She and her housemates are the only ones with decorations still up, some with last month's eggs still crusted on. I spit into the circuitry of the Holiday FX module that makes it so it's always snowing lightly in a soft gaslight kind of glow, snowing only on their house. Melts fast in 72° January, but even so. When spit fails, I stomp the box till it sparks and smokes, then run. Jack says to hold up. He zips back and kicks over a plastic reindeer. Okay, he says.

We pull out of the dead-end, I ask where to go, and he says: Straight, who cares, be a man here. I hear him but ask again out of habit. Just straight on Estronale Ave, he yells, straight as a clitoris, if you've seen one.

It's like that.

*

Most of what comes out of Ed's mouth, you can tell he's whacked and body-ringing on Belltruvin anti-anxies. (Best line yet: Watch out for that lake—oh! it's just water.) When we pick him up, his opening gem is, really, “Do you think volcanoes are the places where Hell is spilling over?” He leaves his car out on the turnpike shoulder, traffic patrol dummy propped up in the passenger seat. Why not behind the wheel, I wonder aloud. Don't trust him, Ed says.

We detail the action at Tara Cable's place—he's pissed we didn't wait. I swerve to miss a cat, and Jack slaps me harder than he has to. I don't do that, I say. No, retard, he goes, that was Coach Syd you just passed.

In the side mirror Coach is taking the scenic route to nowhere, drunker than when he crashed our Fourth of July party last year, before Jack pulled up all the No Parking signs for a bonfire but after Bert tore his leg open on the Slip-n-Slide. I don't go in for those blowouts anymore.

I back up and roll down the window. Coach ambles over, smoothing his, like, eight hairs back.

“What's up, psychos?” He grins good-naturedly, recognizing no one.

Jack leans over me and pegs him in the moustache with an egg, point-blank.

“Fagmaster,” yells Coach Syd, spitting shell, “I'll shove a whole carton up your dick.” But we're gone, and odds are this little memory won't quite stick. Here's a guy who'd guess that AC/DC invented batteries and Braveheart wrote the Bill of Rights, who never reassembles the previous night. Even if tomorrow we were back in his joke of a health class, he wouldn't add things up. He'd just pause for a sec, studying us with a hint of attempted thought, before repeating that you can't always see visible blood with the naked eye.

We find Bertrand at the outdoor shooting range, and he hands me his target: planet-sized tits Photoshopped onto my sister, bullet-hole beauty mark and all. Starts laughing. I crumple it up and shove the sooty ball in his gaping mouth.

Guy thinks he's going to be a comedian. His “impression” of Teddy Roosevelt, he explains, he beats a teddy bear with a dildo. How long does this go on, Ed asks. Till they laugh, Bertrand tells him. Your life is laughable enough, Jack says, polishing his nametag with a sleeve. We pass the sign with our town motto.
Ivyland: The Gateway to New York
. Abandon All Hope, Ye Who Gatekeep.

We stop for Atomic Motherclucker Wings from MexiLickin'SurfHog, but it's only 0130h and Sipwell's—I mean, the speakeasy that replaced it—is still going with some gay open mic thing, so we troop in and sit in the dark and drink the beer they serve in Adderade bottles as a joke. Ed, rung out, asks the bartender for a piece of ice and sits down with it. Jack says: Not here, freak. And in your pants? is what Bertrand asks, disappointed. So Ed gets up, testily rattling his Belltruvin bottle, and heads to the can, where he can get off by icing the back of his neck in peace, but on the way he spills his beer all over this twat in the next booth who is unwisely impolite in lecturing us on breaches of the social contract until Jack grabs him by the chin and makes a threat I truly can't hear on account of the noisy drunks and music.

Then out of nowhere it's last call. Blink later, lights out. At the door, we're getting shoved and jostled by these cologned-up frat boys from Iv College, real Grove Avenue jizzrags, some in the Collars, no doubt—matching chains, pastel polos, a snuffbox of rufies each. Mad rude.

Bertrand says, “Drunk and disorderly?”

Jack says, “Let's play this one by the book.”

So we let them start walking up the street toward campus. We get the car and circle around the block three times, egging them worse and worse each pass till they're red and screaming that we're pussy Endless rent-a-goons and one chucks a bottle that shatters on the windshield.

“Is there a code for egging?” Ed asks as we screech off, and I say, “The hell do I know, look it up.” He bends forward to scroll though the console for a while before announcing the closest he can find is malicious mischief. “Good ol' 594,” Jack says, knowing the book down to the comma. How
was
that solo freezejob in a public bathroom, Ed? “Can't believe everyone doesn't masturbate that way,” Ed says. “It doesn't work for
ev
eryone,” I remind him.
Poss
ible side effect. Of Belltruvin ab
use
. “It's so much better when you don't have to touch it,” Ed goes, “even if you gotta ice yourself.”

“There's nothing to do,” Bertrand whines, and I could just punch him in the throat, because aren't we doing things at this very moment? You miss high school, Bert? Miss ripping on me for being a crap-out, pass-out rich kid? Or the summer when you, you total waste, were with that busted skank from industry row in South Woodbane, and Jack, DH and I were driving around in Ed's mom's minivan with an Aqua Artillery 3000 and happened to pull up next to her as she was idling at a red light with the window open? Because I fondly recall the automatic van door sliding silently at the push of a button and the gun slung in a belt looped over the dry cleaning hook, a Blackhawk's deathbringer. I remember thinking Loki, god of mischief, had graced us, and purposely keeping that thought to myself. Two fingers curling around the giant trigger.

“Anybody been to visit Leo?” Bertrand then has the nerve to ask.

“Bertrand,” I say, “you owe me five bucks.”

“Burned,” says Ed.

“It's a Small World” was played at top volume on repeat in the station's holding cell, and Bertrand failed to successfully masturbate—classic style—in said cell without lubricant or visual stimuli within seven minutes. Easy money. Bert claimed he was just rusty that way. “He'll buy you a slice,” Jack says. “Not hungry,” I say. “Fine,” says Jack, “he'll cover you at the diner.” There is something Jack is not, and that is a listener. He wants to go up to the Reservation and bust some homos, some gas-heads. Ed says leave the gas-heads be, only hurting themselves, poor fucks. Homos too. They drive like that, I say, the gas-heads, and all raged up when they can't get it. You're too drunk to have this argument, says Jack, and we end up hitting the Res at primetime.

There's a ton of people parked, too many to walk through and terrorize, so we flip on the high beams and slow to a crawl. Most of the cars back out and peel away, but at the end of the lot a black kid bails from a station wagon and bolts for the woods.

“Good thing he's fat,” says Jack, and sprints after.

“I want to sit up front,” Ed says after we've waited a while. “Hate that I can't open my own door.”

Jack and his runner come panting back into the headlights, the kid understandably crying as he gets stuffed in the back with Ed and Bert.

“My mom's going to find out,” he wails. “They'll take my scholarship. Please.”

“Even worse,” says Jack. “You'll be the freshest virgin asshole New Jersey's correctional system ever dismantled.”

This gets a big wail.

“Unless you can spare pills,” says Bertrand.

“Take it all,” weeps the kid.

And Jesus was he holding.

“Liked him,” Ed says when we're back on the streets. “Reminds me of me at that age. But blacker. Fatter.” “Hardly fatter,” says Bertrand. Jack tells me to pull over when he sees a bike propped on a yield sign by the train station. Fetching a chain from the trunk, he locks it to the signpost. Then he tears the basket from the handlebars and hops back in with it under his arm. Reminds me of junior year, Ed says. Remember all those bomb threats? So easy to ditch during evac and take your pick of the bikes. Well, says Jack, everything reminds you of everything. What's your beat, Memory Lane? Just trying to help a guy out. Someone'll cut it tomorrow, I say. Money says it'll be there for months, Bertrand goes. We'll forget.

Smooth Larry comes on the radio and we tell him to die. “Have some more gingersnaps,” Bertrand says to the radio. “Eat them till you puke,” adds Ed, because Smooth Larry did do that at a department Christmas thing.

Vince gets on, saying he has multiple 594s, asking do we realize we're the only units on tonight and are supposed to be in separate cars?

“We are?” I ask.

“Don't worry about those 594s,” a pissed Jack radios while trying to pinch my nipple, “we took good care of them.”

“I wouldn't worry if you weren't shitting on my face, Officer Duffy.”

“By the way, how's that open homicide going, sir?” Jack radios. “The Volvo crash and shooting—two bodies, wasn't it? Any leads in that clusterfuck?”

“I will beat you with the biggest blunt object in evidence,” Vince declares, and his voice pops off.

Ed has the bright idea to put yellow tape around Vince's house so he thinks his wife got murdered. If he's even married. “But,” says Bertrand, “we'd have to call it in, otherwise he'd know for sure that nothing happened. Screw it, then.” We swing by Fong Friday's Chinese takeout, which bribes us, too dumb to know we're not health inspectors.

Afterward it's back on the highway, past the next-door black-on-black that used to be Viking Putt, whose plastic dragon had its eye clubbed to shit by yours truly the night before the whole place got torched. An arson Ed actually tried to take credit for—until the real story came out. We stop to skeleton-key into the abandoned Luckbolster Vid and have a fluorescent light swordfight that ends when they're in a million pieces, some bloody.

“Bored, bored, super-bored,” sings Bertrand, gauzing a wrist in the backseat. “Helpful,” says Jack. We cruise around without the lights going, because what's the rush? We drink in the squad car and finish Ed's Belltruvin and the fat kid's painkillers, crisscrossing town. “When is daylight saving time?” asks Ed. “Nobody cares,” I say. Jack is carefully unweaving the stolen bike basket, slipping strips out his cracked-open window one by one.

“Really should visit Leo,” Bertrand says.

“Novel idea,” Jack finally says, watching me.

I mumble something and turn around, pointing us at Saint Barnabas. It gets quiet.

“Visiting hours are over,” Ed says.

“Be less stupid,” Jack says.

“We didn't even visit DH when he was in there,” says Bertrand.

“He wasn't even in our class, really,” Ed says.

“Prolly the tard who gave Leo the gas,” I say.

“Actually,” Jack goes, “DH skipped town.” Better find someone else to blame.

“Leo should have known,” Ed says. “Happened to his older brother, didn't it? That's why he never had VV in the first place, figured he had the allergy too. Dumbass never thinks shit through.”

This is why I swore off those nights-of-mayhem: it becomes hard to notice when a dumbass acquaintance of yours is heaving and frothing and dying in the bushes.

“Cause I was thinking,” says Ed, “that when you spring ahead, there's an hour you skip, so couldn't you commit a crime in that theoretical hour and then create an alibi for that same hour and never get caught?” “No,” Bertrand says, “you'd need to do it when you fall back, so that the same hour would repeat twice and then you'd have, say, two different 3:30s. Man,” he goes, “that would seriously  .  .  . ! It'd be a crime
not
to kill someone.”

“That can't work,” says Jack, which I suppose is fortunate, because even I'd started to believe it made sense. Better than heckling guys through broken doors at porn café booths so they can't rub it out, or toying with a straight-edge like Smooth Larry. There's something creepy about a town that won't fight back. Impulse discovers you in places you refused to imagine. First it was popping pills and dumpster diving, a donut or two in parking lots. But you adapt to your prey, and secretly.

“Ivyland: there's never anything to do,” sighs Bertrand.

Which I guess is how all this nonsense gets started.

*

At the hospital, not even a badge-tap is necessary to get into the ICU and Leo's room, where he's hidden by a white plastic curtain.

“Y'all are his first visitors,” the nurse says.

“Fucker's been here a week,” Jack whispers.

We stay huddled until the nurse leaves. Then Bertrand opens the curtain.

It's a mistake.

Leo is as comatose as when the EMS dykes took him away from our New Year's party, shaking their heads at me, at us all, like we'd never get the call one day and find our noses in
their
shit. His face is swollen and monster-big, fattened veins like rubber hoses glued onto his arm. Breathing tube and a goatee of drool on the chin. Worst of all, eyes stuck blindly open, a leggy device overhead letting drops of moisture fall in every few seconds.

So this is what the gas allergy looks like. Bad to know.