The November Criminals (5 page)

“The fuck is
this
shit?” Noel asked, reading the name on the thumb-grimy index tab. “A’ight, Kevin
Broadus
, shit. I
know
who did
that
boy. You ain’t got no tissues, man. And why you
got
this anyway.”

I was shocked to notice the calm suffusing me. At his revelation, I mean.

“What do you mean, you like
know?
Like you know who
killed
him?”

“Man, I ain’t say I
know.”
This apparent self-contradiction stumped me. “And shit, man,” he continued, “why you all askin’ up in my face?” Sometimes he fumbles his lingo. Such performances are hard to maintain, I guess.

“Dude, I’m not like trying to be
intrusive
or anything.” I almost mumbled this. Out of fucking … deference. Amazing, right? His audible, moanlike breathing filled my car.

“Intrusive. Shit. Man, ain’t you wanna know any more?”

“But like I thought you said you didn’t
know.”

“Man, ain’t you listen? I ain’t say I knew. I say I
heard
. Ya heard?” We go through this a lot, back-and-forths, bickering sessions. He thinks it’s how you talk to your friends. He used the same methods with the guys who hung around his house. Although not David, who had kind of a zero-tolerance policy for dialectical nonsense. With the sense of being done a great service, I asked him again what he had
heard
. Phrasing it correctly this time.

So he told me. “This dude Mike, Short Mike. Mike
Lorriner
. He out of, uh, Severn, some redneck shit like that.” Severn is a meaningless town somewhere in Maryland, the worst state.

“Short Mike. So like what’s his like
deal,”
I twittered. Noel inspected his still lightly besnotted hand and cleaned it with a fold of his vast shirt. His clothes are like bales of sailcloth. He’s by far the fattest person I’ve ever spoken to.

“His deal? Muhfuh, you a cop? Why you care? Shit, son. Why you even wanna know?” Another stumper. How to answer this? With a weak-ass piece of obfuscation.

“I knew him. Kevin, I mean. Pretty well, actually.” This didn’t fly with Noel, who brapped out a laugh.

“You don’t know anyone like
him
. Do you expect me to believe that? You hardly ever even come to
my
house, Addison.” His accent abated here, for some reason, but he recovered himself.
“Knew
him. Shit. A’ight den, I’ll tell you. White people be crazy, though, son.” So he explained to me what he knew. That he’d heard from someone that this dude Short Mike had shot Kevin for insulting him at a party, and that he’d shot the others to dispose of witnesses and to make the cops think it was a random killing. “Thass
all
I heard, man.
All
of it.”

I didn’t believe him, on principle. How can you believe a guy who spends fifteen minutes lying to you about fucking? He’d used the shelf simile about some
other
notional girl’s ass before. I remembered the little-boy’s gesture he used to indicate it: stroking a new football or something. But I couldn’t call him out for lying about Kevin, any more than I could for his other lies. What would have been the point? I mean,
I
was the one toting around some dead kid’s permanent record. I was the
weirdo
. Also I had my commercial interests to think of. So smiles and sage nods all around! I shook Noel’s hand again, in the complicated, flowing way he demanded: lock, reconfigure, unlock, touch fists. His mother’s house loomed huge and cream-colored behind the gate barring the drive from public access. A tall, thin woman (presumably his mother, the former Mrs. Eliot Bradley) was crunching across the gravel in pinpoint black heels, calling out, “Noel? Noel?” She was wearing a smoke-gray suit, and her face had that leathery tan. You know: the color of a boat shoe, maybe a little lighter. Looked about as durable. “Shit, that’s my moms. Peace, son.” Noel initiated the process of hefting himself out of my car, his cherry-red shirt billowing beautifully. I took off as their gate creaked inward, terrified—for some inexplicable reason—that his tanned and oblivious mother would see me. They were embracing as I drove away, Noel twice as wide as Mrs. Bradley, and their awkward double figure dwindled in my rearview mirror. For all the harshness he’s been subjected to by his parents, Noel does not hold them accountable. He speaks of his mother and even his father with genuine—if shy—love and respect. He knows all the particulars of his father’s business dealings and his mother’s fund-raising efforts. I never once heard him make a single ironic remark about either. Which is kind of astonishing.

V
.

T
HE FIRST NOTABLE THING
that happened when I got to school: a fight with Alex Faustner about the correct meaning of the phrase
begs the question
. Which she had misused seven times in a single English class. Mr. Vanderleun backed her up, and we had to go to the dictionary, and then because I was right Mr. Vanderleun got all purple and hush-voiced, and his stump waggled in fury, and by the time the whole thing was over the period had ended. For which I got an invisible wave of gratitude from everybody. Then came the assembly, which we were all looking forward to, because it would eat up another hour of class time. We were seniors, after all. And this was precisely why the admonitions from our teachers started coming. They had noticed a
restlessness
, a lack of
initiative
, a certain
aloofness
on our parts, and they wanted to remind us that, despite being seniors, WE WERE STILL PART OF THE KENNEDY COMMUNITY. It wasn’t phrased so explicitly. It never is, at Kennedy. We just got a general sense that our teachers were pissed, but also that they were too … what … spineless, I guess, to crack down on us. These admonitions against our laziness came compressed into the form of another college-preparedness assembly, which my entire class was forced to attend, a throng of unfamiliar black and brown faces. The G&T kids sat in their own row. It was in the back. No one paid attention to this obvious hideous fact. Our classes were held on the fourth floor, the highest floor, and thus it took us longer to get to the auditorium than anyone else.
That’s
why we had our own row, right? Nothing to see
there
.

A whole field of heads swept downward to the stage, where an aluminum stand offered the microphone to nothing. My pager kept vibrating. Digger felt it—she was resting her knee against mine, as she sometimes did in assemblies, and she gave me a knock with her sharp patella, without looking at me, as though to say,
Quite the entrepreneur
. I should mention here that public displays of affection—and this is bizarre, when you consider all the other shenanigans that pass without comment at Kennedy—public displays of affection bring with them downpours and cloudbursts of administrative trouble. So knee-to-knee contact was about all you could get away with. I know for a
fact
that Brent Academy does not have similar rules. You can see the students making out through the fence if you walk by at lunch, sitting or lying on their eternal-looking emerald lawn, goddamn Daisies and Toms (the second book ever assigned at Kennedy that provided me with any pleasure). This assembly took place Friday morning, in the hopes, I suppose, of ruining our weekend by inflaming our wretched consciences. As Dr. Karlstadt explained the nature of our still-meaningful relations to the school—“We are
all
Tigers!” emphasized by a subsequent moment of lull, as though she expected a spontaneous unitary cheer to rise—I ran through the state of my finances over and over in my head, until it was time to leave. Did you know that you can fit, on average, about thirty-four hundred dollars into a standard shoe box? At least when you use the currencies popular among high school students.

“What are you smirking about,” Digger asked as we trudged up the stairs, lagging behind the pack of our fellow achievers, staring at the flesh-colored marble floor.

“I’m not smirking.” She bodychecked me, and I caught a scrap of her scent, her burnt-leaf scent.

“Nope, you were
smirking.”
And here she made her idiot face: eyes crossed, crimson tongue limp in the corner of her mouth.

“No, like that was like my thinking face.”

“Like your
money
face,” she said through a sudden bright smile. And with no further communication the crowd parted and we followed our dividing streams, she into French and me into Latin, and the slablike doors closed and the class-starting noise—you can’t call it a bell—buzzed over the PA.

I tried to think about her knee against mine as Ms. Erlacher launched into a furious denunciation of the class’s performance on the last test—nice thematic continuance there, you administrative assholes! Although I myself had scored a ninety-seven, I was included in her indictment. But even setting aside Ms. Erlacher’s explosion, this was quite a memorable day in Latin class, for me. This was the day Virginia Werfell completely fucked up. Virginia, a girl famous for boning two guys at the same time, just
blanked
when Ms. Erlacher asked her to translate fifteen lines from the start of book two of the
Aeneid
, beginning with
Infandum, regina, iubes renovare dolorem
. This is how Aeneas opens his tale of the sack of Troy, in response to a request from Dido, the queen of Carthage. The line means, “O queen, you command me to know again pain beyond words.”
Infandum
is kind of a horrible concept: it indicates something so beyond comprehension it cannot be expressed:
in
(not) +
fandum
(to be spoken). And that’s the first word of Aeneas’s story! Which is kind of ironic, I guess, because he then goes on about the fall of his city at considerable length. A weird way to begin, right? It suggests that maybe underneath all the talking there really
is
some intractable, inexpressible misery.

Needless to say, not only did Virginia fail to mention any of this, which is
hugely
important stuff in the context of the book, she couldn’t even come up with even a basic translation of it. She just stuttered and
uhh
ed and
umm
ed, like some dribbling retard. Ms. Erlacher started looking pissed off. So I stood up, my eyes closed and covered with my left hand, to show I wasn’t even using the book, and ran through what Virgil was saying (not neglecting to point out the startling fact that Aeneas calls his city’s defense against the Greek assault the
supremum laborem
of Troy, which means both the “worst travail” and the “supreme work”) and even went beyond the fifteenth line. Why stop at the appointed boundary, right? I got all the way to the part about the once-magnificent isle of Tenedos now being a dangerous, wasted harbor before Ms. Erlacher started repeating, “Addison. Addison. Addison, I didn’t
call
on you. Addison. Addison.” She just went on like that, I kept going, and all these nervous titters fluttered around in my private, eyes-covered darkness. I took pity, though, and stopped talking, and uncovered and opened my eyes. Virginia went back to stammering. Class continued. At the end, as I was walking out, someone called, “Addison. Addison. Addison.” I couldn’t tell if this was meant to mock me or Ms. Erlacher or what. So I did not turn around.

After school let out I went with Digger to the Dump. Technically it’s called Trash Facility 10, or so the clattering sign on its chain-link front gate says. But the attendant’s shed, a compressed-looking house with green-and-white siding and a fake dormer and everything, never holds any attendant, and you can breeze right through the yawning gate without comment or opposition. It’s down by the Potomac, near its eastern border, touching Maryland. It juts out into the water a bit, so there are always cadres of seagulls flinging themselves back and forth above it. You could fish from the edge, if you wanted. There’s this retaining wall, gray with birdshit and vivid with graffiti. We never encountered its writers. Going there was our Friday ritual. It had no name, and she’d introduced it, as she’d introduced me to most of the innovative, freeing things I participated in. We would go there to break glass and ceramics and scream. It started as a test of the Dump’s isolation. Daring—I guess—whatever authority existed to come and chastise us. No one ever showed up. We have performed this test on one hundred of the past one hundred and four Fridays, by my calculations. Which made the Dump, by far, the most reliable thing in my life. This time, with a breeze kicking from the scummy river, we destroyed a gleaming toilet with rebar rods drawn from the sucking earth. We fenced with them for a while, after the destruction, shouting,
“En garde.”
And then lay panting on the hood of her car.

“I had to listen to another one of Noel’s
stories
today,” I groaned. She was the only person who knew about that side of my commercial arrangements.

“And you want sympathy?”

“No, I’m just like, I don’t really know what I can
do
. Right? Get it from some other guy? Right?” I flopped onto my side to look at her face. She was wearing, again, the bright, hard smile she’d flashed after the assembly.

“Don’t
complain
to me about that senseless shit. Don’t be like obtuse. You’re not obtuse. I mean, you’re kind of obtuse but not
that
obtuse,” she said, voice pitched low and steady. I
taught
her that word, I tell you with regret:
obtuse
. From the past participle of
obtundere
, “to beat something against something else hard and resistant.” She was not wrong, however. The rubble of the toilet—an American Standard, the most glorious brand—glittered in the afternoon sun.

You’re harboring all kinds of suspicions about my supposed
real feelings
right now, aren’t you? Digger and I may not have been
dating
, but I was still concerned for her honor. A concept that also comes in for a lot of ridicule these days. As do most of my beliefs. And maybe I failed in my desire to protect her honor, and I often did stupid things to her myself. Witness the above little conversation. But by and large we stuck to our agreement, which was founded on those principles of honor. We had no emotional involvement. Either of us could leave at any time. Sex is natural and necessary to people our age. And in case you think that Digger or I dictated the terms
unilaterally
, or that it was some kind of tyrant/sycophant relationship: we came up with them together, right after the first time we fucked, which was about two years ago, this soft-aired night in June. We leaned out of her bedroom window smoking cigarettes and arranging the terms. And we’ve stuck to them ever since. I still don’t know
why
Noel bothered her so much, though. Especially in light of our agreement, and in light of the fact that she smokes just as much weed as I do, and it has to come from somewhere, and better it come from someone you know, right? Someone you even have an investment in? We saved the night, though. We got over my explosion of nonsense. Digger, responsibly, took the lead. She’s going to be a great woman someday. I mean a senator or whatever. She can always just
read
you, which is terrifying, but comes in handy for getting out of awkward situations. She knew I would just sit there, not saying anything, forever, if she took no action. So she said, with a sidelong, shy look, “I
got
one for you. A good one. What’s brown and hides in the attic?”

This was the beginning of a joke about the Holocaust. Once you set aside your moral reservations about telling such jokes, another problem confronts you: what is the purpose of the Holocaust joke? It’s obscure, yeah. Ninety-seven percent of people will offer you a platitude, something on the order of,
It’s a way of managing the tragedy
. Oh, is it? There’s no way to manage tragedy, any more than you can manage the law of gravity. It can’t be redeemed or transfigured; it persists and persists without rest. Think of a phone book, of the text in a phone book, but it’s a list of names, and it goes on and on without end, without even the prospect of an end. And
some
claim it’s an expression of Jewish self-hatred. That’s at least what the psychological counselor who Ms. Arango forced me to see after my initial run-in with Alex said, in his office thick with the soul-murdering smell of paper and ink. That’s nonsense, too. Holocaust jokes are one of my central forms of expression. And only non-Jews consider me a Jew. Though that, once, could get you sent to the camps!

No, the purpose of the Holocaust joke is identical to the purpose of the joke as a larger proposition: the infliction of cruelty on the reason-inundated mind. It’s just more
naked
in the case of jokes about the Holocaust. As in everything else, the fuckers responsible for our conventions of thought have mistaken a difference in degree for a difference in kind. That’s why I tell them. That’s the
cause
of my telling them. A sampling of my greatest hits:
Why was the little Jewish boy sitting on the roof next to the chimney? He was waiting for his parents! What’s funnier than ten dead babies in one trash can? Six million Jews dead in the Holocaust! There’s no business like Shoah business! Where was the
highest concentration of Jews during the Holocaust? In the atmosphere! Ketchup is just the Auschwitz of tomatoes! “My grandfather died in the Holocaust …” “Really? I’m sorry to hear that.” “Yeah, he fell off his guard tower!” What’s the difference between a ton of coal and a thousand Jews? Jews burn longer! Have you heard about the new German microwave? It’s got ten seats inside!
And, of course,
What’s the difference between a Jew and a loaf of bread?
The joke that started it all.