Rage (15 page)

    He got up warily. "Charlie, put that down," he said. "Let's take you to the doctor and get that stitched up. "

    "You better say yes-sir to the Marines you see if your own kid can knock you down," I said.

    That made him mad, and he lunged at me, and I hit him across the face with the belt. He put his hands up to his face, and I dropped the belt and hit him in the stomach as hard as I could. The air whiffled out of him, and he doubled over. His belly was soft, even softer than it had looked. I didn't know whether to feel disgust or pity suddenly. It occurred to me that the man I really wanted to hurt was safely out of my reach, standing behind a shield of years.

    He straightened up, looking pale and sick. There was a red mark across his forehead where I had hit him with the belt.

    "Okay," he said, and turned around. He pulled a hardhead rake off the wall. "If that's how you want it. "

    I reached out beside me and pulled the hatchet off the wall and held it up with one hand.

    "That's how I want it," I said. "Take one step, and I'll cut your head off, if I can. "

    So we stood there, trying to figure out if we meant it. Then he put the take back, and I put the hatchet back. There was no love in it, no love in the way we looked at each other. He didn't say, "If you'd had the guts to do that five years ago, none of this would have happened, son… come on, I'll take you down to Gogan's and buy you a beer in the back room." And I didn't say I was sorry. It happened because I got big enough, that was all. None of it changed anything. Now I wish it was him I'd killed, if I had to kill anyone. This thing on the floor between my feet is a classic case of misplaced aggression.

    "Come on," he said. "Let's get that stitched up."

    "I can drive myself. "

    "I'll drive you."

    And so he did. We went down to the emergency room in Brunswick, and the doctor put six stitches in my cheek, and I told him that I had tripped over a chunk of stove wood in the garage and cut my cheek on a fireplace screen my dad was blacking. We told Mom the same thing. And that was the end of it. We never discussed it again. He never tried to tell me what to do again. We lived in the same house, but we walked in wide circles around each other, like a pair of old toms. If I had to guess, I'd say he'll get along without me very well… like the song says.

    During the second week of April they sent me back to school with the warning that my case was still under consideration and I would have to go see Mr. Grace every day. They acted like they were doing me a favor. Some favor. It was like being popped back into the cabinet of Dr. Caligari.

    It didn't take as long to go bad this time. The way people looked at me in the halls. The way I knew they were talking about me in the teachers' rooms. The way nobody would even talk to me anymore except Joe. And I wasn't very cooperative with Grace.

    Yes, folks, things got bad very fast indeed, and they went from bad to worse. But I've always been fairly quick on the uptake, and I don't forget many lessons that I've learned well. I certainly learned the lesson about how you could get anyone's number with a big enough stick. My father picked up the hardhead take, presumably planning to trepan my skull with it, but when I picked up the hatchet, he put it back.

    I never saw that pipe wrench again, but what the fuck. I didn't need that anymore, because that stick wasn't big enough. I'd known about the pistol in my father's desk for ten years. Near the end of April I started to carry it to school.

Chapter 30

    I looked up at the wall clock. It was 12:30. I drew in all my mental breath and got ready to sprint down the homestretch.

    "So ends the short, brutal saga of Charles Everett Decker," I said. "Questions?"

    Susan Brooks said very quietly in the dim room, "I'm sorry for you, Charlie." It was like the crack of damnation.

    Don Lordi was looking at me in a hungry way that reminded me of Jaws for the second time that day. Sylvia was smoking the last cigarette in her pack. Pat Fitzgerald labored on his plane, crimping the paper wings, the usual funny-sly expression gone from his face, replaced by something that was wooden and carved. Sandra Cross still seemed to be in a pleasant daze. Even Ted Jones seemed to have his mind on other matters, perhaps on a door he had forgotten to latch when he was ten, or a dog he might once have kicked.

    "If that's all, then it brings us to the final order of business in our brief but enlightening stay together," I said. "Have you learned anything today? Who knows the final order of business? Let's see."

    I watched them. There was nothing. I was afraid it wouldn't come, couldn't come. So tight, so frozen, all of them. When you're five and you hurt, you make a big noise unto the world. At ten you whimper. But by the time you make fifteen you begin to eat the poisoned apples that grow on your own inner tree of pain. It's the Western Way of Enlightenment. You begin to cram your fists into your mouth to stifle the screams. You bleed on the inside. But they had gone so far…

    And then Pig Pen looked up from his pencil. He was smiling a small, red-eyed smile, the smile of a ferret. His hand crept up into the air, the fingers still clenched around his cheap writing instrument. Be-bop-a-lula, she's my baby.

    So then it was easier for the rest of them. One electrode begins to arc and sputter, and-yoiks!-look, professor, the monster walks tonight.

    Susan Brooks put her hand up next. Then there were several together: Sandra raised hers, Grace Stanner raised hers-delicately-and Irma Bates did likewise. Corky. Don. Pat. Sarah Pasterne. Some smiling a little, most of them solemn. Tanis. Nancy Caskin. Dick Keene and Mike Gavin, both renowned in the Placerville Greyhounds' backfield. George and Harmon, who played chess together in study hall. Melvin Thomas. Anne Lasky. At the end all of them were up-all but one.

    I called on Carol Granger, because I thought she deserved her moment. You would have thought that she might have had the most trouble making the switch, crossing the terminator, so to speak, but she had done it almost effortlessly, like a girl shedding her clothes in the bushes after dusk had come to the class picnic.

    "Carol?" I said. "What's the answer?"

    She thought about how to word it. She put a finger up to the small dimple beside her mouth as she thought, and there was a furrow in her milk-white brow.

    "We have to help," she said. "We have to help show Ted where he has gone wrong. "

    That was a very tasteful way to put it, I thought.

    "Thank you, Carol," I said.

    She blushed.

    I looked at Ted, who had come back to the here and now. He was glaring again, but in kind of a confused way.

    "I think the best thing," I said, "would be if I became a sort of combination judge and public attorney. Everyone else can be witnesses; and of course, you're the defendant, Ted."

    Ted laughed wildly. "You," he said. "Oh, Jesus, Charlie. Who do you think you are? You're crazy as a bat. "

    "Do you have a statement?" I asked him.

    "You're not going to play tricks with me, Charlie. I'm not saying a darn thing. I'll save my speech for when we get out of here." His eyes swept his classmates accusingly and distrustfully. "And I'll have a lot to say."

    "You know what happens to squealers, Rocco," I said in a tough Jimmy Cagney voice. I brought the pistol up suddenly, pointed it at his head, and screamed "BANG!"

    Ted shrieked in surprise.

    Anne Lasky laughed merrily.

    "Shut up! " Ted yelled at her.

    "Don't you tell me to shut up," she said. "What are you so afraid of?"

    "What…?" His jaw dropped. The eyes bulged. In that moment I felt a great deal of pity for him. The Bible says the snake tempted Eve with the apple. What would have happened if he had been forced to eat it himself?

    Ted half-rose from his seat, trembling. "What am I…? What am I…?" He pointed a shivering finger at Anne, who did not cringe at all. "YOU GODDAMN SILLY BITCH! HE HAS GOT A GUN! HE IS CRAZY! HE HAS SHOT TWO PEOPLE! DEAD! HE IS HOLDING US HERE!"

    "Not me, he isn't," Irma said. "I could have walked right out."

    "We've learned some very good things about ourselves, Ted," Susan said coldly. "I don't think you're being very helpful, closing yourself in and trying to be superior. Don't you realize that this could be the most meaningful experience of our lives?"

    "He's a killer," Ted said tightly. "He killed two people. This isn't TV. Those people aren't going to get up and go off to their dressing rooms to wait for the next take. They're really dead. He killed them.'

    "Soul killer!" Pig Pen hissed suddenly.

    "Where the fuck do you think you get off?" Dick Keene asked. "All this just shakes the shit out of your tight little life, doesn't it? You didn't think anybody'd find out about you banging Sandy, did you? Or your mother. Ever think about her? You think you're some kind of white knight. I'll tell you what you are. You're a cocksucker. "

    "Witness! Witness!" Grace cried merrily, waving her hand. "Ted Jones buys girlie magazines. I've seen him in Ronnie's Variety doing it."

    "Beat off much, Ted?" Harmon asked. He was smiling viciously.

    "And you were a Star Scout," Pat said dolorously.

    Ted twitched from them like a bear that has been tied to a post for the villagers' amusement. "I don't masturbate! " he yelled.

    "Right," Corky said disgustedly.

    "I bet you really stink in bed," Sylvia said. She looked at Sandra. "Did he stink in bed?"

    "We didn't do it in bed," Sandra said. "We were in a car. And it was over so quick… "

    "Yeah, that's what I figured."

    "All right," Ted said. His face was sweaty. He stood up. "I'm walking out of here. You're all crazy. I'll tell them… " He stopped and added with a strange and touching irrelevancy, "I never meant what I said about my mother. " He swallowed. "You can shoot me, Charlie, but you can't stop me. I'm going out."

    I put the gun down on the blotter. "I have no intention of shooting you, Ted. But let me remind you that you haven't really done your duty."

    "That's right," Dick said, and after Ted had taken two steps toward the door, Dick came out of his seat, took two running steps of his own, and collared him. Ted's face dissolved into utter amazement.

    "Hey, Dick," he said.

    "Don't you Dick me, you son of a bitch."

    Ted tried to give him an elbow in the belly, and then his arms were pinned behind him, one by Pat and one by George Yannick.

    Sandra Cross got slowly out of her seat and walked to him, demurely, like a girl on a country road. Ted's eyes were bulging, half-mad. I could taste what was coming, the way you can taste thunderheads before summer rain… and the hail that comes with it sometimes.

    She stopped before him, and an expression of sly, mocking devotion crossed her face and was gone. She put a hand out, touched the collar of his shirt. The muscles of his neck bunched as he jerked away from her. Dick and Pat and George held him like springs. She reached slowly inside the open collar of the khaki shirt and began to pull it open, popping the buttons. There was no sound in the room but the tiny, flat tic-tic as the buttons fell to the floor and rolled. He was wearing no undershirt. His flesh was bare and smooth. She moved as if to kiss it, and he spit in her face.

    Pig Pen smiled from over Sandra's shoulder, the grubby court jester with the king's paramour. "I could put your eyes out," he said. "Do you know that? Pop them out just like olives. Poink! Poink!"

    "Let me go! Charlie, make them let me-"

    "He cheats, " Sarah Pasterne said loudly. "He always looks at my answer sheet in French. Always."

    Sandra stood before him, now looking down, a sweet, murmurous smile barely curving the bow of her lips. The first two fingers of her right hand touched the slick spittle on her cheek lightly.

    "Here," Billy Sawyer whispered. "Here's something for you, handsome." He crept up behind Ted on tippy-toe and suddenly pulled his hair.

    Ted screamed.

    "He cheats on the laps in gym, too," Don said harshly. "You really quit football because you dint have no sauce, dintchoo?"

    "Please," Ted said. "Please, Charlie." He had begun to grin oddly, and his eyeballs were shiny with tears. Sylvia had joined the little circle around him. She might have been the one who goosed him, but I couldn't really see.

    They were moving around him in a slow kind of dance that was nearly beautiful. Fingers pinched and pulled, questions were asked, accusations made. Irma Bates pushed a ruler down the back of his pants. Somehow his shirt was ripped off and flew to the back of the room in two tatters. Ted was breathing in great, high whoops. Anne Lasky began to rub the bridge of his nose with an eraser. Corky scurried back to his desk like a good mouse, found a bottle of Carter's ink, and dumped it in his hair. Hands flew out like birds and rubbed it in briskly.

    Ted began to weep and talk in strange, unconnected phrases.

    "Soul brother?" Pat Fitzgerald asked. He was smiling, whacking Ted's bare shoulders lightly with a notebook in cadence. "Be my soul brother? That right? Little Head Start? Little free lunch? That right? Hum? Hum? Brothers? Be soul brothers?"

    "Got your Silver Star, hero, " Dick said, and raised his knee, placing it expertly in the big muscle of Ted's thigh.

    Ted screamed. His eyes bulged and rolled toward me, the eyes of a horse staved on a high fence. "Please… pleeeese, Charlie… pleeeeeeeeee-" And then Nancy Caskin stuffed a large wad of notebook paper into his mouth. He tried to spit it out, but Sandra rammed it back in.

    "That will teach you to spit," sire said reproachfully.

    Harmon knelt and pulled off one of his shoes. He rubbed it in Ted's inky hair and then slammed the sole against Ted's chest. It left a huge, grotesque footprint.

    "Admit one!" he crowed.

    Tentatively, almost demurely, Carol stepped on Ted's stockinged foot and twisted her heel. Something in his foot snapped. Ted blubbered.

    He sounded like he was begging somewhere behind the paper, but you couldn't really tell. Pig Pen darted in spiderlike and suddenly bit his nose.

    There was a sudden black pause. I noticed that I had turned the pistol around so that the muzzle was pointed at my head, but of course that would not be at all cricket. I unloaded it and put it carefully in the top drawer, on top of Mrs. Underwood's plan book. I was quite confident that this had not been in today's lesson plan at all.

    They were smiling at Ted, who hardly looked human at all anymore. In that brief flick of time, they looked like gods, young, wise, and golden. Ted did not look like a god. Ink ran down his cheeks in blue-black teardrops. The bridge of his nose was bleeding, and one eye glared disjointedly toward no place. Paper protruded through his teeth. He breathed in great white snuffles of air.

    I had time to think: We have got it on. Now we have got it all the way on.

    They fell on him.