The Most Dangerous Thing (11 page)

Chapter Fourteen

September 5, 1979

G
wen was the only one of us queer enough—that’s what we called it then, sorry if it offends—to look forward to the first day of school. Perhaps Sean did, too, but he had the good sense not to say as much. Tim, in his Tim-like way, accepted school as a fact of life. Couldn’t get out of it, so why waste energy complaining. Then again, he wasn’t about to celebrate the fact, either. Let Gwen and Sean grade-grub. Tim had carved out a groove for himself as a B student, the path of least resistance, as he saw it. To be an A student would have required more work, to slide down to C’s would risk his father’s ire. That was Tim’s particular genius at the time, getting by. Doing just enough, but never too much.

Poor Go-Go had no genius, except for destruction, with a subspecialty in self-destruction. He was miserable in school, and if there was some root cause that might have been treated—attention deficit, dyslexia—the nuns of that particular time and that particular school weren’t inclined to investigate or address it. Go-Go was told he was lazy, incorrigible, bad. Work harder, try harder, think harder, his teachers lectured him, and he would see results. He was almost grateful for the reprieve of Mass, boring as it was. Go-Go could fake his way through an hour of Mass.

As for Mickey—she hated school because she hated being indoors. Ironic, one might think, given her later choice to spend her working life inside a long narrow tube, but Mickey would argue that she never felt freer than she did on a plane, thousands of feet above the ground, hurtling through the air. Free, if she chose, to disappear into a new city, to start life over again in Chicago or Seattle or Dallas. Not that she ever did, but the opportunity was there. She could grab her wheeled suitcase and disappear.

So: Gwen was the only one who cared that summer, in 1979, when Hurricane David began moving up the coast over Labor Day weekend, threatening the first day of school. Well before it reached us, David was a monstrous storm, destined for the history books, killing more than two thousand people in the Dominican Republic. But all Gwen cared about was the possibility that she would be denied her triumphant return to school. Triumphant because she had a boyfriend now, one that almost any of her classmates would envy. Good-looking, a grade ahead of her—a high school freshman yet. She had a photo of Sean in her new wallet, ready to go. In a photo, Sean was perfect. Did this imply he was not perfect in the flesh? As the first day of school drew closer, did Gwen start to notice the things about Sean that her private-school friends would find uncool? His politics, for example, inherited from his father, were conservative. The way he dressed, almost as if he wore a uniform even when not in school. Plus, his family didn’t have money, which everyone at Gwen’s school professed not to care about, but—everyone at Gwen’s school had money.

Yet, no, that can’t be. Gwen could not have had any doubts about Sean because that foils the before-and-after symmetry of our story, in which everything was perfect until the moment it wasn’t. Gwen and Sean were still in their honeymoon period, although perhaps understandably with some trepidation about whether this was a flimsy summer romance or something sturdier. Tim and Sean, good soldiers, marched off to the first day of school at Cardinal Gibbons. Gwen, giddy with reinvention, rode in her father’s car to Park School. For the second year in a row, Go-Go was alone at St. Lawrence, where Sean, and even Tim, left behind long, long, long shadows that the nuns kept holding up to him, like some Punch-and-Judy silhouette on the wall, a play in which Go-Go was always the butt of all the jokes. Mickey stood on Forest Park Avenue, waiting for the bus to junior high, furious and forlorn.

The first day of school came and went, without incident. But just as a change in barometric pressure anticipates a hurricane’s impending arrival, things were changing, even if we didn’t acknowledge it. Tim, advised by his father at breakfast that he would need a scholarship if he planned to attend school beyond community college, came home and cracked the books. Sean and Gwen raced through their homework so they could be alone. Mickey and Go-Go were left to their own devices. The last month of summer had been like this, too, with Sean and Gwen isolating themselves from us. But their continued desire to be just two instead of five was somehow more striking, now that a new season had arrived. The first day of school established what we had long suspected: the five of us, as five, as a star, as a constellation, were over.

Hurricane David moved up the coast. It was not as destructive as feared, not in the United States. Five dead in Florida, which was as remote to us as the Dominican Republic. As was Savannah and the Carolinas and even Virginia and suburban Washington, D.C., and western Maryland. It was only when the rains started in Baltimore on September 5, the
second
day of school, that we cared about Hurricane David. Yes, we were young, but this is how people are: we care about what affects us. Two thousand Dominicans, five Floridians—we could not muster true worry in the abstract. But when the rain started that afternoon and there were disturbing reports that the creek might rise and cross the road, as it had during Agnes, Mickey’s mother called Tally Robison and asked her to send her home.

“Mickey?” Tally said. “Mickey’s not here.”

S
ean was. He was lying on top of Gwen in her bedroom, the pretense of homework abandoned. They had all their clothes on—Tally Robison was within earshot, after all, and the door was ajar, house rule—but they were dizzy and amazed at the things that could be accomplished through their clothes. At Tally’s polite knock, Sean jumped back with so much force he almost hit the opposite wall. But they had their clothes on. No one could prove anything.

Tally, who had come up the stairs on swift, stockinged feet, took in the scene—the rumpled bedspread, the mussed hair, the high color in Gwen’s and Sean’s faces—without comment. She told them that Mickey was missing and her mother was worried, asked if they might know where she was.

“There’s one place—” Gwen began.

“We’ll go,” Sean said quickly. “It’s just over the hill.”

He called Tim at the Hallorans’ house, who arrived with slickers and high-beam flashlights. Like Gwen and Sean, he did not invoke Chicken George’s name. Why didn’t anyone say his name? Did we really believe that we would get in trouble if our parents found out we had formed a friendship with the odd man who lived, off and on, in the woods? What was our transgression? That we had traveled so far from home in our walks there, or that we had stolen from our families’ pantries at his instigation? That Sean and Gwen had then used the cabin to do whatever they did? Or was it something less rational, a desire to have a secret for the sake of the secret? Chicken George belonged to us. He had been missing for many weeks at this point and we believed we would never see him again. Still, we did not speak of him, not then. Tim, Sean, and Gwen walked, calling Mickey’s name, the flashlights strafing in the growing gloom. The rain had started, heavy and thick. Hurricane rain.

When they crested a hill, still about a half-mile from Chicken George’s, they saw Mickey and Go-Go running toward them, breathless.

“What happened?” Tim asked. “What’s going on?”

Neither one answered.

“What happened?” Tim repeated.

“Something bad,” Go-Go said.

Mickey tried to keep going, but Tim caught her by the arm. “Show us.” She paused, and it seemed she was considering whether she could outrun Tim. She probably could, but she didn’t try. Mickey was crying—and Mickey never cried. Shrugging off Tim’s hand, she turned around and led us back down the hill, to the stream, which was growing in width and speed. Chicken George was there, lying on his back, his precious steel guitar nearby.

“He went nuts on us,” Mickey said. “He found us in the cabin, playing his guitar—”

“You know you’re not supposed to touch it,” Tim said. “And what where you doing over there, on a day like today?”

“He’s been gone so long this time,” Mickey said. “I didn’t think he was coming back. We were going to save the guitar from the weather.”

“The guitar wasn’t there,” Sean pointed out. “He took his guitar when he disappeared, the way he always does. And if you wanted to save it, why did you carry it out without the case, into this rain?”

“We didn’t,” Mickey said. “Chicken George did. He went nuts, when he found us there. It was like he didn’t know us, had never known us. He cursed us, he said terrible things. He called us—he called us robbers, although we only meant to surprise him. That’s when he grabbed the guitar from Go-Go and started to chase us. He went nuts.”

Sean looked at Go-Go.

“He went nuts,” Go-Go said.

“And then he fell, lost his footing. It wasn’t our fault. He thought we were robbing him, but we only meant to help.”

“Mickey pushed him,” Go-Go said in a small voice.

She whirled on him. “Go-Go.”

He backed away, but he didn’t change his story. “You did. You pushed him.”

Sean—of course it would be Sean—knelt next to Chicken George, pressing a finger on his throat. “He’s alive. We have to call someone, figure out a way to get an ambulance crew in here.”

“But he’ll say we were robbing him,” Mickey said. She grabbed Sean, came close to hitting him. “He’ll get us in trouble. Don’t you understand? It doesn’t matter that he’s crazy. People will believe him, take his side.”

“Mickey—” Sean took her wrists, surprisingly gentle, unafraid of her aggression, the fingernails that raked his cheek.

“Look, I didn’t want to tell you this, but—it’s not about the guitar. That’s not what happened. I decided to go check on the place. It’s been empty so long now. I—I had a feeling. So I got off the bus from school and went straight there. It’s not like Gwen cared if I came to her house.”

It was clear she wanted Sean and Gwen to feel guilty, that she wanted them to confront what they had done to her, to us.

“And?”

“Go-Go was already here, and Chicken George. He was touching him.”

“Go-Go was touching Chicken George?”

“Chicken George was touching Go-Go.”

Tim and Sean looked at their brother. He didn’t exactly nod, only shrugged helplessly, as if he didn’t have the vocabulary to speak of what had happened. Then said: “But Mickey pushed him.”

“Go-Go!”

“You did. He tried to grab you and you pushed him. That’s when he fell.”

“He was trying to hit me. Because of you, because of what I knew.” Mickey was yelling at Go-Go as if everything was his fault. He hung his head. “I pushed him to keep him from hitting me.”

“We still can’t leave him here, without telling anyone,” Sean said. “Even if he did that. We have to tell our parents.”

“Can’t we go back and call 911 anonymously?”

“There’s no way to explain to them how to get here. There’s no road—and the street may already be impassable. If we hike back to the Robisons’, though, our dads might be able to carry him out of the woods. And Gwen’s father is a doctor. He can help him.”

“Help him,” Mickey said. “He’s a child molester. He’s been waiting all this time to get Go-Go alone and he finally did.”

There was an accusation there, for all of us. But mainly for Sean and Gwen. Go-Go wouldn’t have been alone in the woods if it weren’t for Sean and Gwen, if we were still a we. That was how Chicken George got to him.

“It’s the right thing to do,” said Sean, who still wanted to be a doctor then, having not yet been defeated by organic chemistry.

“What do we tell our parents?”

“The truth.” Sean paused. “Why is the guitar there?”

“He tried to hit us with it,” Mickey said.

“The truth,” Sean said again.

“That is the truth.”

He looked to Go-Go. After a second, he nodded. “He was trying to hit Mickey with it. He called her terrible names. He wanted to kill her. We didn’t take it.”

We made our way back to Gwen’s house as quickly as possible. To our surprise, all the adults were there—Dr. and Mrs. Robison, the Hallorans, Mickey’s mom and not-quite-stepdad, along with her baby brother.

“It’s an impromptu hurricane party,” Tally Robison said. “Your parents came here to wait for you all to return, and now people are worried it’s going to be like Agnes, with water rushing down the road. In which case, we’ll be stuck.” She seemed jolly about it. There were wineglasses out, the fathers had beers. Tally Robison liked parties and she tried to create them out of the flimsiest of pretexts. Still, we were struck by our parents’ naïveté, their assumption that we would all return safely. Didn’t they know, or had they forgotten: things could go wrong, so quickly.

Tim and Sean took their father aside and spoke to him. Certain things were not said, by unspoken agreement among all of us. We did not mention that we had a long-standing relationship with the man who was lying in the creek. We did not say that Mickey had pushed him. The story was only that Mickey had found him touching Go-Go and he had chased them both, then slipped and fallen.

“Touching? What do you mean by touching?”

“Just—
touching,
” Sean said, for he didn’t know, and he didn’t want to know.

Mr. Halloran then left the house with Dr. Robison and Rick, Mickey’s sort-of-stepdad. The boys wanted to go with them, fearful that the grown-ups could not find their way, but Mr. Halloran was adamant that they stay behind. They were gone for about an hour, but it seemed much longer. It seemed like days had passed before we saw the beams of their high-powered flashlights at the top of the hill. They came in through the basement door, and Tally Robison brought them towels and fresh T-shirts, then mugs of coffee with whiskey in them. She still wanted her party. She and the other women had played charades, and she wanted the men to join in.

“Where’s the—man?” Mickey asked.

“He was gone,” Dr. Robison said.

“Gone? Are you sure you went to the right place?”

“I mean—he didn’t make it. There was nothing we could do. I’ll call the police, but—you see, when he slipped, he fell and hit his head. He lost a lot of blood, and by the time we got there—” He shook his head. “We made our way down to the road, hoping to flag someone down, but there’s no one out there because of the storm. Our part of the road is clear, but there’s flooding farther down and up on Forest Park.”