The November Criminals (10 page)

“Naw, son, he juss like
mad
. Nigga juss
get
like that.” David was still stomping around upstairs. He was
rummaging:
you know, clanks and muffled self-questioning. The walls in Noel’s house are sound-conducive, and the emptiness of the place doesn’t help either, as far as acoustic amplification goes. Even your own speaking voice can blare into an aggrieved shout.

Blunt time! I told you Noel considers me a friend, and that’s why he shares his made-up sex stories with me. He gets high with me as another unrefusable token/proof of this friendship. It’s a little gross, the idea of a blunt, because it gets finished—the wrapper gets sealed up, I mean—with an intimate slurp: the whole thing goes into the roller’s mouth and then is drawn out, moistened, and closed.
Kind
of horrifying, when it comes out of a cavernous, fat-guy mouth. But we were all polite. Digger’s sole indication of hurry was her drumming heel, which made all the beads on her bag click. This solid-sounding
bony
click. She had a severe coughing episode after her initial puff. Blunts are harsh, the drags are copious, and the acrid cigar paper around the weed doesn’t mollify the taste.

“My shit be
crucial
, though,” cooed Noel. He was staring at Digger’s tits again, brought to heaving prominence by her coughing fit. With the white cloth covering his legs, and his goggling eyes, he looked like some deviant, obese and prematurely aged, used to having his whims satisfied. Hermann Göring or something. I was also—I’ll be honest—transfixed. By her tits, I mean. We were both lucky she was too busy coughing to notice our joint gawp.

And isn’t this the
essence
of all social situations? A group in which lines of relationship exist as fragments failing to connect the whole? I mean,
I
was connected to Digger, and
I
was connected to Noel. But they had nothing to do with
each other
. I had taken a long drag on the spit-wet, limpish blunt. Smoking weed always makes you think, even if it makes you think stupid things; it loosens you up, at first. I mean, we were sitting there with
nothing holding us together
. How did this serve my
higher purpose?
I wanted to stand up and shout. But it was too late. David quieted down upstairs. Digger got her coughing and her tits back under control. Noel had slapped on the fake-confident smile that means he’s about to assent. All the stupid, senseless elements were in place. For your sake, I’m going to distill what Noel told us into somewhat
reasonable
English, condense it. It took him an über-long time to finish. He kept having to grab breaths, to squirm around in his seat. He speaks at a
canter
anyway, when he’s stoned. Which just made everything take for-fucking-ever. So: Mike Lorriner, Noel said, was

like this nigga from like
Maryland
who like be friends with that shorty Kelly, you know that one with the mad thick ass? So like he like this real redneck nigga, nahmean, like real
racist
and shit, and he like came into D.C. like to handle his bidness and shit and like
party
. So like one weekend he had like been at the party like in fucking Chevy Chase, some shit like that, at some white nigga name D’s house, nahmean, just like chillin’. And this nigga
Kevin
like was talking all this shit about how like
Maryland
was some like shit or whatever, so like
Mike
started talking shit back, and like
then
they was like pushin’ each other and
screamin’
at each other and shit, and like Mike called him like a nigga, and then Kevin got like real
pissed
and shit and like took this cup of like
rum
or some shit and like dump that shit
right
in Mike’s face. And
then
like Mike punched that other nigga, I mean that nigga Kevin, and like Kevin punched him back, and they was all like
hittin’
each other and like shoving each other and shit and everyone was like yellin’, but like then these two
other
niggas like broke up the shit and like all the other niggas calmed down, and like Mike left but he was all like “I’m a fuck you up, son!” Then that nigga said like some crazy shit about graveyards, nah-mean? At least, that’s like what
Kelly
said, man, and she was like at this nigga’s house, man, it like some fuckin’ mansion she said. I think you prolly
know
that nigga whose house it is, man, anyway. Nigga like play
lacrosse
and shit. So like that’s all I know about Mike, man, he just like a crazy white nigga, you know, like all racist and shit.

“Man, he like
you
, Addison,” Noel finished, exhaling an impressive curlicue of smoke. “’Cept you ain’t like
racist
and shit.” He spoke as though
we
were being interrogated. Noel picked the banner up and began to fold it, hand over curdy white hand. Digger took another nostril breath. We would have had to go through another cycle of this, of her demands, his balks and feints, and my limp conciliation, if David had not, with his loud assured steps, come back downstairs, carrying something wrapped in a green-checked dish towel. No smile or frown. Just the same shut-eyed look—of disdain?—he’d been flashing us the whole time. There was a stitchwork dog on the cloth, and the excess gingham spilled over David’s smooth left fist. Holy fuck! My balls retreated as soon as David
unwrapped
it, just the butt. You could see the gun’s textured gray grip plate, which glinted in the subtle way concrete does.

“Shit, nigga, is you
crazy?”
Noel screeched, slamming his feet to the ground in an effort to lever himself off the couch. (Which failed.) David hushed him with a raised palm.

“It’s
for
him. He should get something useful out of this, you fat motherfucker.” This was the longest sentence I’d ever heard him speak. It gave voice to my own feelings on the matter, and to what I imagine were Digger’s. But at the time all I could think, if you can even call it thinking, was,
Holy fuck, it’s a fucking gun! For fucking shooting people!
Do you know what it means to have a gun? It’s amazing! Not in some
my dick is bigger than yours
way. You have this
thing
that puts you in touch with the absolute. Everyone dies, no matter what. No matter what you do.
Everyone
dies. Including you, ladies and gentlemen, including all of
you
. David tucked the cloth back over the grip and handed the bundle to me.

“It’s a Glock. You know how to use it?” I nodded: a complete lie. This moron’s grin had smeared itself across my face. I could
feel
it. “Nigga all smilin’ like it
Christmas
. Don’t he have like a Christmas smile,” Noel sandpapered out. It was heavy. It was
so
heavy.

“I gave you a clip, too. It’s like folded up in there. I ain’t load it, though,” David told me. Though he might as well have said,
Four score and seven years ago our forefathers brought forth upon this continent
, etc., for all the attention I was paying. I was
floating
.

“Hey, Noel,” I said. “Noel.” I wanted to ask him about Huang and Baltimore, if he knew anything about them, too. But I realized this would require telling him I’d gone to the cops. Which looked to be perhaps the stupidest thing I’d ever done.

“Whutchoo want, nigga? You
scurred
or suh’in?” His whale’s lips parted in derision. Just wanted to get back on the controlling side, I guess. But! My hands were moving now, unwrapping the rest of the weapon. Of their own volition. Amazing, right? I slipped the clip into my pocket and cradled the denuded gun. A Glock. Who even knew what that
meant?
Then, in the grip of a sure and perverse impulse, I aimed it at Noel’s bobbing, pointed head and squeezed the trigger. “Addison, don’t, come on, don’t
do
that, Addison, please,” he gasped, raising his arms in defense.

It took all my strength to pull, to make the gun give up its dry, thirsty, prefatory sound. Lick your lips and separate them. Like that. Much louder, more metallic.
Much
scarier. But identical in spirit. You know? Like it was preparing to
speak
. Like it had something complicated and awkward to say.

“Nigga, shit, naw, man, don’t fuckin’
play
like that,” Noel gargled. He’d recovered his lingo.

“Okay, man,” I said. I mean, I was ready to rush home and bring him
all
my money, as long as it meant I got to keep the gun. To put a final shine on everything, I wrapped up the gun again, and offered to pack a bowl for everybody. Digger fished out her pipe, without objecting. She looked from Noel to David as though she were deciding between victims. She even took a hit after Noel, who lipped the pipe way too much. Even David partook, and he never smokes. He told me once it was bad for the heart. I tried to refute him—“It actually has many medical benefits,” like what the legalization people say—but he just walked away from me without listening or saying anything further.

“So it’s like a Glock?” I asked Noel.

“Yeah, nigga, just point and it’s like bladow! Y’all can pay my ass lata, though.” David was making the muscles on his neck fan out. He does this when he’s bored, to kill time.

“And
how
much did you like want? Like two thousand?” I asked. Two thousand was less than 25 percent of my cash hoard. An über-reasonable fee for all this glory. David, emerging from glowering silence, cut this conversation off, shouting at Noel.

“FUCK you, nigga.” This was the first time I had ever heard him raise his voice. We all stopped moving in astonishment, including David, who was now wearing a surprised half smile. Digger released a squib of smoke. I swear to fucking God she gave a quiet accompanying laugh. Nobody
argued
. Nobody said anything
more
about money.

X
.

T
HE REST OF OUR EXIT?
Shrouded in a mental haze. Noel had sulked his way downstairs to his monk’s room. David watched us leave. Stokey the junkie was still muttering to himself in the dark. That much I remember. We drove not speaking, at least for a while. We were both solemn and stoned. Then Digger said, “I’ve never
seen
a gun before.” No criticism. No
moral lecture
. Just the same druglike, frightening delight coursing through me. Do you even understand how rare coincidences of feeling like that are? Another reason I value her company so much. It won’t surprise you to know that, despite the late hour—it was seven minutes after eight o’clock at this point—we headed to the Dump. It’s a second home to us, sad though that may be, so confident are we of our solitude there.

“Like what the fuck are we going to
do
with it,” I breathed. She didn’t answer me. I was
speeding
, which I never do, for professional reasons. The lights of the city rushed by in two low glittering wings.

“I can’t believe I’ve never even seen one, not a
real
one,” Digger whispered, as my engine groaned and struggled.

We got there in twelve minutes, record time from Noel’s house. We parked in the jagged shadow of a trash hill, a tangled heap of junked car chassis, and crouched in the brown dark. Digger unwrapped the gun with visible tenderness, lifted it, hefted it. We could hear each other’s breathing.

“Do you have to oil it or anything?” she asked. I slotted the clip in. By some miracle of instinct.

“We didn’t get the like
instructions.”

“What happens now?” Digger asked, fumbling with her lower lip as she spoke.

“What do you mean, now?”

“Aren’t you going to
fire
it?”

“I like don’t
know
. Should I?”

“How do we know it works? Right? I mean, consider the source. So I think you should at least
fire
it. It could be like a setup or something.” A
setup
, ladies and gentlemen. How can you fail to admire someone so detail-oriented? We had a wealth of crap to use as targets, anyway, so we ambled around choosing. At random, with our appraisers’ chin lifts, we chose a sturdy cardboard box and balanced it on a yolk-yellow chair. Then we placed a filthy bottle on top of the box and backed away comically far, as though the
chair
were armed. Digger quickstepped off to the side and palm-cupped her ears, crouching and ready. I lifted the gun—the weight strained my wrist—and pulled the trigger.

A huge percussive cough, from nowhere. A simultaneous kick from the gun itself. My nerves sang. And a reverberant gong-beat rose from the car heap and indistinct night birds took flight on both riverbanks. “Jesus
fuck,”
Digger screamed, scuttling even farther away and shifting her hands: the right now tented over her heart, the left still over her ear. Posed like an old-timey phone operator. You know, a switchboard girl or whatever? Listening to some outrageous conversation. The swift, tremendous noise of the shot itself thrilled me. Just that simple: it
thrilled
me. I won’t lie. Although the weird target we’d set up had survived my assault untouched. Digger walked back and slumped against me, shoulder-to-shoulder, in comradely praise. Her heart was vibrating, and I caught her scent as I massaged my tingling shooting arm. “Holy shit, man,” she whispered. “Holy
shit
. Can I try?”

I handed the gun over, barrel first, and it slipped between our reaching hands and clunked into the floury junkyard dirt. We leaped back, screaming our heads off. It didn’t fire. So Digger picked it up. “I feel like I don’t know what I feel like,” she said through clenched teeth, and turned her blue stare on the bottle. The river birds had calmed down. The yellow dump-light tinted everything. She dug her neat heels into the dirt, with two discrete squeaks. And pulled the trigger. Her entire small body was involved with the shot. The recoil shocked her; her shoulders heaved, like she’d let out one precise sob. There was the same from-everywhere percussion. The bottle shattered this time, and the pile of metal gave out a second lugubrious bong. Birds took panicked flight again. “Holy shit,” she crowed. “Holy fucking
SHIT.”
No humiliation! I’m not that kind of guy, I swear. I have a lot of
problems
—as you can no doubt tell—but it seemed
fair
, somehow, that Digger was a better shot. A natural.

I always keep a map in my car, a map of D.C., Virginia, and Maryland, which the map company considers part of the same unit, I guess. It’s old and water-damaged, the pages scarred with creases, marked with the anonymous shit-colored stains that paper picks up when neglected. Or (in this case) crammed into the crumby, dank underseat on the passenger side of my car. I inherited this map from my father, as well as the paranoid tendency to keep it around. Digger, always, has change for pay phones. It’s a neurotic habit of hers. Though we had given Lorriner’s banner to Noel, the brick it had clothed was sitting in my backseat. And now we had a gun. I know it may be hard for you to understand. But out of these simple and everyday components, we developed a plan. Or the plan came into spontaneous existence because these particular objects stood in close proximity for the first and last time in the history of the universe. That’s how it goes. Think of those experiments with proteins and simulated lighting, in the sixties or whatever, that produced amino acids. You get the idea. We didn’t even have to
discuss
it. We both knew what would happen: we would drive out to bumblefuck Maryland and return Lorriner’s brick by throwing it through
his
window. The gun was just
insurance
. Which we didn’t even need. We wouldn’t write a message. We weren’t a couple of racist hicks. Just a quick toss and “viola,” as my father says. (He chuckles
every
time.)

Events conspired with us. We found a pay phone right after leaving the dump, columned in baleful and buzzing light, cradled against the wall of a urine-stinking gas station on New York Avenue. I can be sort of terrified by these places, because they’re desert-empty, and because the name of one follows, eight times out of ten, the phrase,
She was last seen at
. Serial killers’ natural terrain. But the 411 lady was just as helpful as she’d been the first time I’d inquired about Lorriner, and sounded just as delighted to help me. Although it was a different operator now. I remembered the bizarre name of Lorriner’s street, even. I flatter myself that this impressed her. She gave me the exact address, which I’d forgotten. Then I was back in my retarded car, where Digger had lit a cigarette in mute joy, and we were off into the darkness.

All the kids in G&T hold it as an article of faith that Maryland contains the second-highest number of Ku Klux Klansmen in America. There is some debate over whether Ohio or Indiana occupies the top slot. But Maryland, we
know
, comes in at number two. It’s not impossible to believe this, in the long stretches of emptiness beyond the suburbs, which shade into genuine rural territory, with farmhouses and cows that look up with almost human stupidity as you drive past. In a winter dusk, you can pick out bare oak branches and black-looking ponds, and a sinister readiness breathes out of the whole landscape. I have no idea if these suspicions about Klan activity are true, or if they derive from the contempt for the white poor that educated members of the middle class in America are taught to feel and hide, from their earliest youth. Especially, I’d say, kids in the G&T Program at Kennedy, which is a
supercharger
for the development of bourgeois ideals. Good
and
bad. It’s hypocritical to malign just your own class.

Digger and I held this belief too, of course. And to combat the stark sense of
expectation
it fostered, we screamed along with the radio, shoving our faces out the window. Stations deteriorate into static one after another out there, and soon you’re left with anodyne and heart-twisting country music. We didn’t know any of the words. But we managed. We had a lot of enthusiasm. We even got a few honks in approval. Including one from a huge truck, which we sped ahead of. The roadside arc lights got more and more infrequent, and their high whine sharper and sharper. We passed gas stations, with stolid-faced loafers our own age lined up under blaring fluorescents. The highway climbed; we were out in the empty fields, with green weather-pocked steel signage to guide us. We could not see much farther than the guardrail, which gave us a nasty, cloaking sense of the dark. Nauseating, somehow. No stars visible, and just the desert of the dead farmlands spreading everywhere. Monotony remains the most horrifying thing imaginable. It’s why death is so horrifying, or a large part of why. Yeah, morbid, but what do you want from me?

Two hours we drove. Fuck! Even if you live in a small, pretentious city—like D.C.—the speed with which urban life fades astonishes. You can be out in the middle of real country, real agricultural shit, in ninety minutes, and then in the utter desolation of wild or fallow fields if you drive for another thirty. What’s funny, though, here, is how
oppositional
everyone is on this issue. City people scorning country people, who in turn look with indignant suspicion on city dwellers. But they all share the same morality, right? Is the overt racism, for example, that you find among rednecks who say THE N WORD in casual conversation somehow
worse
than the covert racism of our teachers, who introduce us to a few nonwhites and then proceed to entomb us in our separate lives and consider their duty done? What about people for whom ethnic minorities serve an
instrumental
purpose? People who collect ethnic friends as ornaments, to show off to their other, white friends, and to prove to themselves their own tolerance and generosity of spirit? Can you say with any confidence that one of these is
worse?
I expounded these theories to Digger, who agreed and agreed, keeping her finger on the map. A pleasure über-masculine, to be pronouncing these judgments unopposed in a speeding car, and flinging glowing butt after butt out the window, where it would vanish in the slipstream. “It’s like a
monument
to like all the
horror
of the twentieth century!” I remember screaming that. It made sense at the time, I promise.

The map became unnecessary, after a certain point: it all narrowed to one road, which wandered through clumps of houses, a few vague stores, back into open country, then more houses. This was Brander’s Hollow, I guess. Lorriner’s town. And then, out of nowhere, as Digger was mangling some more lyrics, something about a broken heart and wine, this
surge
overtook me. I felt like a
baby
. Adrift, alert, happy, secure. I don’t know why. I don’t know what caused it. Maybe the headlong murky nature of what we were doing. For some reason I wanted to
know everyone
in those decayed houses, know about their high school lives and friendships and misadventures. Do you ever experience that? When you stare out your window and into your city?

We’d been off the highway for a while, rumbling over a rutted surface road—withered clematis and creeper on the guardrails, that sort of nonsense—when Digger cried, “Hey, hey, stop. We’re here.” I parked; we climbed out to check the road sign. The yolky flames of our two raised lighters revealed the street name: FORK LUTE ROAD. The map had not lied. This always amazes me. It was now eleven minutes after ten. Digger chambered a shell and hid the gun, still gripped, in the pocket of her coat. I cradled Lorriner’s rosy brick. “Okay,
you
like drive behind the bushes.” I was whispering, pointing with the brick. There was a screening juniper hedge a little ways in from the road entrance. Digger reparked and caught up to me at the dark beginning of Fork Lute Road, and we shared a short silence. There were two houses we could see, one right off the main road, and another at the far end of the lane. The closer house’s mailbox, subjected to my lighter’s flame, was numbered 9778, in these saddening gold stick-on numbers, with some limp corners curled over. We got a muted chuckle out of those. And then we picked our way down the carious asphalt dividing us from the second house, through tea-stinking fallen leaves. “It must be this one.” Digger sighed. There was another mailbox, and a small barn set right near the property edge. “It’s gotta be, right?” Lighters out, mailbox examined: it was indeed 9780. Lorriner’s address, according to the omniscient minds at the phone company. We had
arrived
.

The little barn proved to be a garage faked up to look like a barn. Red timbers, white crossbeams. These are popular out in the sticks. There
was
a fence, but it was just split-pine rail. Digger’s breath was quickened by excitement and anger as we lugged ourselves over. I tossed the brick ahead of me, and Digger said, “Good arm.” We both giggled and then shushed each other. I swear to fucking
God
we were acting like kindergartners. In the brownish half-light, we could see the blocky outline of a house.

“It’s a rambler, ranch-style,” Digger whispered, hoarse and tense. As though that made the problem of our brick hurling more difficult. “So let’s like get closer and then like pick a window?” I had the brick clamped in my right armpit. It was starting to hurt. I loped ahead, but she hung back.

“Digger,” I hissed. She took her time walking up.

“Are you sure this is a good idea?” she asked. And that did me in. Just destroyed me.

“Are you serious? Digger, you like brought the
gun
. Are you like out of
steam
after that? You brought the gun and now you’re like Commander Moderate Violence of the Mounties or whatever?” I couldn’t whisper-shout anymore, I was laughing so hard.

“The gun’s for an
emergency,”
she got out, but she was gasping with laughter too. We were more nervous than we’d estimated. We had been conducting this whispered conversation as we walked toward Lorriner’s house, and we had reached the middle of a clump of pines, where we kneeled down in the fragrant needles. Digger had crammed a fistful of her jacket collar against her mouth, and I could see her ice-clear irises despite the lack of light. I put down the brick and she put down the gun, and she looked at me with this weird face, this open, appraising face; you couldn’t miss it even in the dark.