Twelve (14 page)

Chapter Eighty-Three

HUNTER IS ON
the phone with his father, who is in a limo coming in from JFK. Hunter's voice is cracking for the first time since he was arrested.

“I didn't kill anyone. I mean, who kills people. Don't you get this, Dad? Dad?”

“Hunter, I'm here now, we'll take care of things, talk to the judge about bail—”

“No one kills people. Not me. I mean, come on.”

“Hunter, you have to calm down.”

“Dad, I'll tell you straight out that I'm innocent, but I am scared as shit, Dad, but I know that if it was you in here, you'd be more scared.”

Hunter's father doesn't say anything.

Chapter Eighty-Four

AFTER THEY LEAVE
White Mike's apartment, Timmy and Mark Rothko go to the grocery store.

On the way, Timmy asks: “What did the parrot say to the nigga?”

“What?”

“‘Polly wanna cracka.'”

Mark Rothko laughs.

“And waz the nigga say to the parrot?”

“What?” Guffaws.

“‘Fuck you, bitch,' and then he busts a cap in the parrot's ass.”

They're both cracking up.

“We need munchies. C'mon.” Timmy walks through the automatic doors of the grocery store. He heads to the crackers and picks up a box of saltines. He has lost Mark Rothko momentarily, but in the next aisle he finds him with his hand in a jar of Marshmallow Fluff, a portion of the sticky white substance already smeared on his collar and chin. A lady with a shopping cart moves away quickly. Timmy says: “Word, word, lemme get summa that.”

Timmy opens up a column of saltines and starts dipping them in the Fluff. The two of them keep working on the Fluff until they see a supermarket worker arrive at the open end of the aisle to stack jams. Timmy stashes the rest of the crackers in his pocket, and Mark Rothko drops the jar of Fluff, which breaks on the floor. Timmy and Mark Rothko beat a sticky retreat back to the automatic doors. They got a party to go to. The supermarket worker has a hell of a time cleaning the viscous confection off the floor.

Chapter Eighty-Five

THE PHONE RINGS
. It is late afternoon, and White Mike is eating Cheerios. He used to go in for all the sugary-type cereals but recently switched to simple Cheerios, so the Cocoa Puffs are rotting into plastic fungus in the cupboard. Mike uses a teaspoon to eat his cereal, not a big soup spoon, because he likes less milk in his mouth with each bite. The phone keeps ringing. White Mike picks it up. It is his father telling him not to go anywhere, that he is coming home and has something to tell him. He is holding his voice steady and level.

“What?” asks White Mike. “What is it?”

“I'll tell you when I get there.”

“Tell me now. I'd rather know now.”

“Let me tell you when I get there.”

“I can take it. Just tell me. Better I know now.”

“I'm serious, Mike.”

White Mike is caught off guard by the inflection in his father's voice. They are both silent for a moment. When White Mike hears his father's voice on the other end of the line again, it is hard and flat.

“Charlie is dead. He was murdered three days ago in Harlem, but they couldn't identify him. The police just called.” He hangs up the phone before White Mike can say anything.

White Mike screams. An explosion out of his chest, a snarl from the bottom of his spine out into the air to make everything stop for a second while he runs and jumps into the air, off a building maybe, to tire himself out and do something about Charlie being dead and the house being a mess. So White Mike starts cleaning. First he jumps and lands on the couch on his back and flexes his whole body, knocking the pillows off, holding the scream in the very top of his chest. He thrashes until he is worn out, and then he rises and starts cleaning the house. The house is a mess: the dishes aren't done and the blinds are half drawn and there is no fresh air but you can't open the windows because the kitchen windows were built soundproof, never to be opened. He goes to the closet and gets a broom and a bucket and a mop and rags. His steps are tight and wired off his toes as he moves from floor to sink to shelves, picking things up, putting them where they belong. As soon as he has cleared every surface in the kitchen, he fills the bucket with soapy water and uses the rags to scrub. He gets on a stool and scrubs the ceiling. Then the stool wobbles and flips, and he falls to the tile floor. On his stomach, he looks out over the plane of the floor, and this is how his father finds him when he walks in the door.

White Mike and his father look at each other.

“I'm sorry, Mike.”

“I have to go out. I'll be back.”

“Yeah, a walk might help. I'll walk you to the end of the block.”

“Whatever,” White Mike says, and his father flinches.

At the end of the block, White Mike's father is telling him that the police don't know what happened, but they think maybe Charlie was involved in a drug deal. Also, they'd like to ask some questions.

White Mike shrugs, but for the first time in his life, he wonders what his father actually knows.

Chapter Eighty-Six

WHILE SHE IS
getting dressed for the party, Jessica becomes distracted by her own eyes in the mirror. She wonders whether or not Twelve makes people's eyes dilate the way weed does. Whatever. She likes her eyes, big and brown.
Strong eyes, you in the mirror. Stronger than all these kids
, she is thinking.
Strong enough to get into Wesleyan, strong enough to go to that shrink, strong enough to work this party, strong enough to get dressed. Strong enough to get whatever you want. Strong enough to get the Twelve from that drug dealer. Strong enough to do whatever it takes. Strongest
.

Chapter Eighty-Seven

WHITE MIKE IS
walking west, into the sun. Now he turns on to Fifth Avenue, with the snow on the trees and the shadows lengthening. His mind is blank, and his hands are cold. At the north end of Central Park, he hangs a left and walks west again. He turns uptown again on the other side of the park. Up into Harlem.

He knows where he is going, the Cathedral of St. John the Divine. One of the world's biggest gothic cathedrals. Maybe the biggest. White Mike isn't sure. It casts a shadow so long he cannot see where it ends.
Why are you going here
, he thinks to himself.
Might just as well walk through Harlem and get shot yourself, like Charlie. You wouldn't get shot walking through Harlem. Who would kill Charlie?
White Mike walks faster through the cold air to the big double doors.

The ceilings are so high in this place, and it is dim inside, and there is no service or anything happening. White Mike looks at all the candles and almost lights one but doesn't because he doesn't know how to do it, really. So he just looks at them in the warm gloom for
a second as he passes. Far up ahead of him, beyond what must be a thousand old church chairs, is the altar. He can hear everything and especially his own footsteps. He keeps walking past the little vestibules on the side, in the echoes of the grand building with all its oak and metal gilded opulence. Eventually he comes to the Poet's Corner, where there are inscriptions he doesn't know, the kind of stuff he would usually stop to read but doesn't. He walks to the middle of the cathedral and sits down.

Isn't this where you're supposed to go numb
, thinks White Mike. He grips the back of the chair in front of him until his knuckles crack and turn white. The edges of his overcoat pool on the ground around the chair; and he realizes that he is hot and uncomfortable. The cathedral is very warm. He takes off his overcoat and leans his head back over the edge of his chair and stares up into the high ceiling. Out of the corner of his eye he sees someone else, an old lady, stooped and leaning forward in a chair, head down. He suddenly thinks that his posture might be uncouth, disrespectful, in this place, and he tucks in his legs and leans forward from the edge of his chair and bows his head.

White Mike sits in that chair for a long time, with his head down. And behind him in that sea of little chairs is the old lady hunched down, and somewhere else are two tourists who get up and leave pretty soon, and there are one or two others sitting far from each other. But White Mike sits there and thinks of nothing,
his hands gripping the chair in front of him, his head down, and the church dim and quiet and echoey.

And then he starts thinking of Charlie, and he thinks of how Charlie must have died. He remembers a scene in a war movie when the soldier describes how the bullet penetrates the skin and you get to watch it in slow motion go into some guts and make a clean tunnel almost, and then how that tunnel fills up with green goo, bile. And then when he finishes describing it, it all happens in reverse and the tunnel disappears and the bile is gone and the skin heals and the bullet flies backward, but of course that never happens. And White Mike can't help it when he thinks of how the next scene in the movie was about how a cow stepped on a land mine and exploded and how that was mad funny. But he gets angry at himself for thinking about that and decides that the cathedral is dumb and it is time to leave. He takes his overcoat over his arm and walks out into the street.

Chapter Eighty-Eight

JESSICA GETS TO
Chris's house earlier than she has ever arrived at a party. She wants to be there in case Lionel is early. Not that she thinks he will be early, why would anyone be early? So she goes over to Chris's house not long after the streetlights have completely replaced the sun. It is snowing on and off. And the party gets going.

Kids from half the private schools in the city start showing up. And boarding school kids who have to leave in two days. The party is getting more and more crowded.

Jessica is talking about Twelve with some of her friends, asking them to chip in.

A bunch of kids have started doing shots in the kitchen, and someone finally figures out the house stereo, so the music plays everywhere out of the speakers in the walls. It is loud all over the house. The CD player is on shuffle, so the Stones are playing one minute, then D'Angelo, then Weezer, then all the other bands Chris has put in, something for everyone. He doesn't want to
have chosen the music for himself, lest he should have to stand by it if someone brought it up.

The heavy pot smokers have already found their way up to the terrace, and in the darkness their joints are little points of light.

By this time there are close to fifty kids in the house. Sara is very happy, smiling, greeting everyone. She tells Chris to leave the front door unlocked. It is hard to hear the bell anyway.

Sitting in his room in a circle of candles, Claude can feel the house filling up. He doesn't know if he likes this.

“Jessica, do you have a number for some weed?” asks a girl in a tank top as Jessica looks at her watch and then at the door.

“Oh, yeah, fine. Here.” She hands the girl her cell phone. “Hit seventeen.”

Chapter Eighty-Nine

WHITE MIKE WALKS
out into the air, and it is snowing. The cathedral towers behind him. He knows that he was in there a long time, and he wants to go home now. He is suddenly very tired and wants to go to sleep.

In the cab, he wonders why he went to the church. Just more bullshit.
That is exactly what I don't need
, he thinks.
But that's what you do at times like this. You walk into a church even though you are not religious. And either it helps or it doesn't, but usually it doesn't and so what
.

The cab stops in front of his house, and he gives the man the whole twenty, a huge tip. The guy thanks him profusely, and White Mike says nothing back as he gets out. He just didn't feel like dealing with asking for change. It was on some weird cent, like he would have had to ask for $11.30 or something to get the tip right. The cab number is 4C46.

White Mike walks into his front hall and hears his father in the kitchen making dinner. He is standing over the stove, frying steaks in butter and lemon and wiping
grease out of the pan with sourdough bread. It used to be something they liked, lemon steak, his father called it. He used to make it for Charlie too. Before either of them says anything, White Mike feels his beeper go off.

Chapter Ninety

AT AROUND TEN
, Jerry, the only white kid besides Hunter who goes to the Rec, arrives at the party. He is having a beer in front of one of the big TVs with a bunch of other lads. He is recounting the story of Hunter's fight— a couple of the kids know Hunter and about him being in jail.

“You think he might have done it?”

“No way,” says Josh.

“I heard there were two dead guys.”

“Why would Hunter kill anybody?”

Chapter Ninety-One

LIONEL DRIVES UP
to the party in his 1988 white Lincoln Town Car and double-parks in front of the ivy-covered town house. He grabs a backpack from the seat next to him and gets out and locks the car. He rings the doorbell before he realizes the door is slightly ajar, and he walks in.

Jessica has been watching the door from the stairs. She is quick to beckon Lionel upstairs to the deserted guest bedroom, across the hall from Claude's room. The room is dark except for the blue light filtering out of the piranha tank and bouncing off the cymbals and metal of the drum set.

“Let me see the money.” Lionel's smooth voice floats out from under his hood as Jessica closes the door behind them.

“Oh yeah, fine, here.” Jessica is nervous.
I don't have enough
.

Lionel counts, and as he is getting through the bills, Jessica interrupts and tells him, “Look, there's only five hundred there.”

“I brought a thousand bag,” Lionel says sharply.

I don't have enough. Five hundred isn't enough. I don't have enough
. “It's enough.” Jessica surprises herself with the anger in her voice. “You can—”

“No. I told you, I've only got thousands.”

“I'm good for the rest of the money.” She speaks levelly and coldly. Her eyes have deadened, this close to the drug.

“No.” He turns to leave.

“Wait,” she shouts, and stamps her foot. “I can give you something else.”

Lionel looks around the room, noticing how expensive everything is. Good criminal judgment tells him he doesn't want to be taking anything out of here. It would be him getting busted, not the girl, if it ever came to that.

“I don't want anything from the house.”

“I'll give you a blow job.”

Lionel practically busts out laughing.

“I'm serious.

Lionel considers for a second as he looks at the girl, up her legs to her breasts where he stares, unabashed. She does not get embarrassed. He becomes slightly aroused, then thinks again.

“Five hundred dollars is an expensive blow job.”

“I'll fuck you.” And Jessica recognizes the voice coming out of her but feels far from it. She doesn't even look at Lionel, just keeps staring at the bag in his hand. “I'm a virgin.”

Lionel agrees to give her the bag for two fucks. One fuck before he'll give her the bag, he says. And then she'll owe him one.

“No, the bag first, then we'll have sex.”

Lionel knows he can get it back if he needs to, so he hands it to her.

Jessica sighs and steps back from Lionel, not thinking anything. She holds the bag tight, not quite sure what to do with it for a moment, before she puts it on a dresser.

She looks at Lionel and takes hold of the bottom of her sweater. She pulls it over her head, and in the blue light her pale breasts appear, supported by a simple white bra. Lionel stares and walks toward her.