Cheated (12 page)

“The pleasure has been all yours,” Brody said, then we all laughed.

“Here,” the Scarecrow said, handing me the change: the bills and coins mixed with the receipt, which I stuffed in my pocket. He then handed Brody a brown bag containing a twelve-pack of Miller High Life longnecks.

“Deal.” Brody took out two of the beers and handed them to the Scarecrow.

“Thanks,” the Scarecrow mumbled, then headed back into the woods.

None of us felt like walking back to Aaron's sister's, so we found a small clearing not too far from the Big K. We sat on the ground, and Brody opened the brown bag, pulling out a beer for each of us. I wasn't really paying much attention as Aaron started asking Brody questions about football, no doubt so we wouldn't talk about his lies anymore. I sipped my beer in the cool of the evening, holding it in my left hand. I put my right hand in my pocket and pulled out the money the Scarecrow had
handed back to me. I felt the beer freeze the back of my throat when I did something ex-Dad put in my DNA: I counted the change.

“He shortchanged me,” I mumbled to no one in particular.

“What?” Brody looked up from his beer, which he'd emptied in three or four gulps.

“Never mind,” I whispered, almost trying to pretend I'd never said anything at all.

“How much?” Brody asked, his volume cranked back up.

“Nothing, just two dollars,” I answered, reluctantly.

“Motherfucker!” Brody shouted, then hurled the bottle against a tree.

The sound of the shattering glass seemed to awaken Aaron, who'd been lost in High Life and his own thoughts. “That's what drunks do,” he said.

“It's not a big deal,” I said, looking at the ground, toward the spot where Brody's feet had been. But he was gone: running into the woods. I shouted, “Brody, where are you going?”

But I knew: my heart raced as fast as my feet as I grabbed the bag with the beer, then chased after Brody, with Aaron just a step behind me.

“I'm sick of being cheated and ripped off!” Brody shouted over his shoulder. By the time we caught up with him, he was standing outside the Scarecrow's makeshift house.

“Let it go,” I said, trying to catch my breath and calm Brody down, failing at both.

“Like that stupid bitch Mrs. Kirby!” Brody shouted. His long brown hair seemed wilder, his eyes unfocused, and his anger unhinged. “Everybody thinks they can take from me.”

“Brody, let's go,” I said as I reached out my right hand to pull him back.

“Fuck you!” Brody shouted at me, then knocked my hand away. I reached out again to grab his arm, but he pushed hard against my chest. I stumbled back while he charged inside the makeshift house with us in hot pursuit. “You cheated us, you motherfucker!”

The Scarecrow was leaning against the pile of bricks, slurping down one of the beers. “I didn't—” the Scarecrow started.

But Brody became a monster with no ears, just a mouth. “Don't sit there in your fucking filth and fucking lie to me!” he shouted, casting his large shadow over the Scarecrow.

“I'm not.” The Scarecrow seemed stuck, so Brody kicked him into gear. While he didn't kick as hard as he'd kicked Garrett at the party, Brody landed his size twelve shoe into the Scarecrow's shoulder. The Scarecrow didn't move or make a sound; he just spat on the ground.

“I'm fucking sick and tired of being cheated by everyone!” Brody shouted.

The Scarecrow rubbed his shoulder, then let out a small, garbled laugh. “What are you gonna do about it?” Even if the words were slightly slurred, the meaning behind them was not.

In the time it takes to blink an eye or ruin a life, Aaron
reached behind the Scarecrow and grabbed one of the red bricks. There was a quick look of surprise on his face that vanished the second Aaron smashed the brick into his skull. Even a dull thud can produce an echo.

“Drunken loser!” Aaron shouted as he brought the brick down again on the Scarecrow's head. The Scarecrow fell back, blood spurting from the top of his head. He didn't scream, he just moaned. Rather than reaching for his injured head, he reached for his leg. From his sock, he pulled out a short knife, which he used to slice open Aaron's ankle.

“Aaron, stop it,” I finally said, breaking through the paralysis of my throat, but Aaron didn't, wouldn't, or couldn't hear me. The Scarecrow held the knife in front of him pointing it at Aaron again, but Brody kicked him from behind. When he fell backward, Aaron landed another hard shot with the brick, this time in the throat. There was a strangled drowning sound as the Scarecrow spat up blood, most of which landed on Aaron's face. Brody started to stomp on the Scarecrow's prone body like he was on fire and Brody was trying to extinguish the flames.

Every sense was working overtime. I heard his last gasps in between the heavy breathing of Brody and Aaron. I heard the smack of shoe and brick on his body. As Aaron and Brody continued their savagery, I was paralyzed in the middle of a nightmare with no way to wake up.

· · ·

Brody's eyes were almost as red as the blood staining Aaron's gray hoodie and sock. Aaron crawled off the Scarecrow,
wrapped himself up like a ball on the ground next to the dead body, and started to rock back and forth. I couldn't tell if he was crying, laughing, or a little bit of both. I sat with my head between my legs, ready to throw up again. For a long while no one spoke through the death-filled air, until Aaron finally mumbled, “Mick, this is your fault.”

“
My
fault,” I said, trying to look anywhere except at the bloody heap next to Aaron.

“If you wouldn't have spilled the rum,” Aaron said, his head between his knees as his hand applied pressure to his ankle.

“Shut up!” Brody screamed. “We're not going to do this!”

“Do what?” I asked.

“Point fingers,” Brody said, then acted out the motion. “That doesn't help anything.”

“What
are
we going to do?” Aaron mumbled.

“How the fuck should I know?” Brody shouted. “Mick, you need to figure this out.”

I crawled over to the body, the dead body, for there was no pulse or breath. “I don't know, I guess we call the police and—” I started.

But Brody cut me off. “No police.”

“But Aaron and you killed a—”

“Aaron didn't do anything, I didn't do anything, and you didn't do anything,” Brody said as he reached over to the brown bag. He pulled out a beer, then rolled one over to me and one to Aaron. Brody took a drink, but this time there was no toast. “No one finds out.”

“Besides, he was dead already,” Aaron said. The beer remained unopened next to him. “You think if anybody cared about him, he'd be living like this? He's nothing. Trust me, we did him and anyone that knew him a favor, putting everyone out of their misery.”

“Who would know if he was living or dead?” Brody asked me, almost in a whisper.

“We would,” I said as I stared at the pile of rags, blood, bone, flesh, and skin.

“Dude, this doesn't leave here,” Brody announced. I knew if he was close enough, he'd seal the deal with a slap of the arm or poke to the chest. “Nobody talks, right?”

I shook my head to agree, but doubt drowned me. “But what if?”

“What if what?” Aaron asked.

“What happens when somebody finds the body—I mean—what then?” I asked.

“Then they can't.” Brody let his words hang there and waited for someone to finish.

“Can't what?” Aaron asked. When Brody didn't answer, I knew it was my place.

“Find the body,” I said as Brody nodded in agreement. I finally realized what my role in this friendship was. I was supposed to be the smart one, the guy with the answers. Shit, were we in trouble.

I got up, took a last sip of beer, but left the bottle half full. Then I walked over to the prone bloody body of the Scarecrow and poured the beer on his bloody bashed-in face. I found some dry newspaper and stuffed it under his body.
Finally, I pulled the bone white lighter from my pocket. I offered it first to Aaron, then to Brody.

“You do it,” Brody said, while staring me down. “It
is
your turn.”

I listened to the sounds of Brody's and Aaron's footsteps as they shuffled back outside, leaving me alone with the stinking dead body and a foul deed in front of me. I heard crickets chirp and an airplane pass overhead. I imagined miles away the Dragons scoring a touchdown, sending the crowd into a frenzy of applause. Miles away women were shopping, laughing, and spending money as Mom turned on a smile to sell them more clothes they didn't need. Miles away men were drinking and leering as Aaron's sister shook her ass and took their money. I pretended I heard these sounds of the living, so I could pretend that I was miles away from the death in front of me. Pretended to hear laughter rather than the sound of the thumb on my shaking right hand flicking the lighter. Pretended to hear anything other than the almost silent crackling of the fire starting to burn the Scarecrow's body and send his soul up to heaven and my soul into a free fall straight to hell.

· · ·

We returned quickly to Aaron's sister's trailer. Aaron found some men's clothes for us to change into. Aaron bandaged the cut on his ankle, and we wrapped our beer and bloodstained clothes in trash bags—including Brody's shoes—then threw them in the Dumpster at the other end of the trailer park. When we left via the front entrance of
WindGate, I thought I saw smoke through the trees and tasted ash sticking to the roof of my mouth.

As we walked quickly back toward school, the conversation was minimal: I wanted to talk about “it” but Brody's eyes screamed at me to be quiet, while Aaron looked like he was lost.

We arrived in the school parking lot just a few silent minutes before the buses started to pull up. A wave of red washed over us as the Dragon diehards climbed off the buses into waiting cars. I didn't see Whitney, Shelby, or Nicole, and I was amazed at how little they mattered to me. All I cared about was when and if the smell of smoke would ever leave my body.

Brody left us for a moment and walked across the lot. He chatted briefly with someone, ending the conversation with a slap on the back. When he returned, he said, “We lost twenty-seven to ten.”

I wanted to say,
Brody, why are you telling me this? I never cared about football, but now, even less so. Brody, what are we going to do? This isn't a football game. Aaron, this isn't a video game. This is real
. But instead, I just gave him a puzzled look. We didn't talk again until Aaron's mother arrived. We quickly piled in so she wouldn't notice our ill-fitting clothes.

In the car, the conversation was minimal except for Brody speaking about the game. He repeated the score five times, due to anxiety or alcohol, maybe both. The short drive drove me nearly insane. It reminded me of that Poe story Mrs. Kirby had us read: “The Tell-Tale Heart,” about a
guy who killed somebody, then buried him under his floor. He confessed to the crime because he was driven insane by thinking he heard the beating of the dead guy's heart under the floor. Locked in the car, Aaron's mom had to hear my heart beating faster than normal. She had to see the sweat, even in my coatless state, dripping down my brow. She had to smell the smoke, not of cigarettes, but of something much worse.

Aaron's mother dropped me off, and Brody got out with me. She said good night and seemed to be waiting for a response. But before I could say anything, my words and thoughts were both drowned out by the sound of the only thing louder than the beating of my heart: the sound of a siren.

· · ·

Brody waited until the scream of the siren faded before he spoke. “Relax, Mick,” he said as he tamped his last cigarette up and down on his hand, before putting it behind his right ear.

“Brody, we—” I started, but stopped since there was nothing to say or think. Instead, I wondered why I'd never noticed all the cracks in the driveway. I focused on the cracks as they broke off into separate paths, then formed more cracks: all of them small, all of them connected.

“Look, we've done this before,” Brody said.

“What do you mean?” I asked.

“Done stupid stuff, but we don't snitch on each other,” Brody reminded me. “Like today with that paper. I could've said you wrote it, but I didn't. We've covered for Aaron,
you've covered for me. Friends cover for each other. We can do this.”

“Do what?”

“Not tell about this,” Brody almost whispered. “Those sirens, that's probably a fire truck. There won't be anything left of the Scarecrow for them to find, and we can forget it happened.”

“But on TV—” I started, thinking about every TV crime show I'd ever witnessed.

Brody laughed, but my mouth couldn't move in an upward direction. “This is fucking Swartz Creek, Mick, not New York or Vegas. I doubt there's a
CSI Flint
.”

“I guess.”

“Nobody's going to know,” Brody said in the tone of a teacher announcing a test. Brody moved from the driveway and sat on the lawn. He leaned back, resting on his elbows, and looked up into the night sky.

“But what if?” I asked.

“Besides, it was just the Scarecrow,” Brody said, then grunted. Like he was unsure of the spin to put on the words. “I mean, Aaron was right. It's not like anybody's going to care.”

I shrugged, but wanted to say,
Dude, he's still a person. Or rather, he
was
a person
.

“Don't be scared,” Brody told me. I wasn't sure if it was a suggestion or an order.

“I'm not,” I said, another step down what seemed like an endless road of lies.

“You can keep a secret; I know that,” Brody said, then kind of half smiled. I scratched my head, then joined Brody sitting on the lawn, looking at the infinite sky rather than the
equally infinite connection of cracks in the dull gray driveway. The siren had long vanished; the crickets in the air and cars out on the street took over again as the soundtrack for the late evening.