Twelve (11 page)

Chapter Sixty-Three

ON THEIR WAY
downtown, Timmy and Mark Rothko stop in the Star Deli to buy cigarettes. The deli is clean and well lit but empty right now. The dark-skinned man behind the counter eyes them as they move quickly to the back of the store. Buying cigarettes requires more poise and human contact than shoplifting CDs. Finally, they shuffle up to the counter and look up at the packs of cigarettes behind the man. He looks down his nose at them, and Mark Rothko shifts uncomfortably in his big frame. He is still nervous about stuff like this from the time a guy snapped his fake ID in two. On the counter is a calendar that has the date on which you must be born to purchase cigarettes. Mark Rothko tries not to look at it and says: “Pack of Parliaments.”

“You got ID?”

Mark Rothko rolls his eyes in disgust and searches for his wallet in his cavernous cargo pockets. Timmy fiddles with the candy. Mark Rothko finds his wallet and takes out the Ohio ID card. In the picture, his head is tilted down toward the camera in an effort to throw
shadow on his chin. Short in a head shot.

The man looks at the ID card, snorts at Mark Rothko, and drops it on the counter. “No, is fake.”

“No? What the fuck, motherfucker? Don't hate the playa, hate the game!”

Timmy likes the sound of that and jumps in himself. “Yeah, what de dilly, you damn camel jockey? He's eighteen, give 'im the cigarettes. See the ID?”

“Is fake.”

“Is not fake, motherfucker.”

“Leave or I call the police.” The man reaches toward the phone.

“How 'bout I call my foot up yo ass.” Mark Rothko feints his double chin at the man. Timmy waves his hand sideways in imitation of gangsta music videos and concurs: “Word. Tell 'im. Sail breezy on the heezy fo sheezy mah neezy.”

The man looks at Timmy and then leans across the counter and stares at Mark Rothko, right in his little blue eyes. “I have this,” he says, pulling a revolver, old and battered, from beneath the counter and holding it over his head.

Timmy and Mark Rothko bolt for the door, Timmy shouting, “Shit, he busted out the nine milly and gonna pop a cap in yo cracka ass!”

The shopkeeper is surprised at how fast the boy said all that. He puts the empty handgun back under the counter.

Chapter Sixty-Four

IN THE WAITING
room at the dermatologist's office, there were old women with faces that made White Mike suddenly understand why the Indians called white people pale demons. The women's eyes were open, a little too wide, or slit just a little too narrow, all the time. One of them with a tiny chin was flapping ostrichlike at the terrified girl behind the desk.

“It's very disrespectful. I've been waiting here for an hour, and I have another appointment that I simply must go to now.”

“I'm very sorry—”

“And I simply can't do this, I have an appointment to keep, and now I have to reschedule in a week or two weeks or a month or three months.”

“We have an opening next Monday. Any time up to nine o'clock in the morning.”

“What about nine-fifteen?”

One of the other girls behind the counter shook her head, and the woman saw it and shot her a look.

*

In the examination room, a Chinese woman popped the blackheads out of White Mike's face with a silver tool, and he stared at her eyes and his reflection in the magnifier attached to her head like a miner's lamp
. This is a woman whose job it is to pop pimples,
thought White Mike.

White Mike thought about jobs and what color his eyes were. He could see his eyes in the reflection, and they were blue. Light blue eyes, thought White Mike. Not blue fire, not ice, not the sky, not the sea, just blue. And it pissed White Mike off. He thought about his father's job.
He gives people a place to eat.
This woman pops pimples. His mother who sent him to this woman to pop pimples and used to teach people about anthropology, the study of man. White Mike wondered, of course, what his job would be. Maybe he would pop pimples for a living
.

Chapter Sixty-Five

JESSICA IS HAVING
lunch with her mom at some bistro on Madison Avenue. It is a place of bisques and pâtés and teas and sorbet. Jessica is unsure why her mother wants to have lunch. It is not something they do. They are not best friends. They order small salads, Diet Cokes, one linguini with clam sauce, and one grilled monkfish.

“So how are you, Jessica?”

“Fine, you know”—she laughs a little laugh nervously, this is weird—“the same.”

“Your report card came.”

Jessica doesn't say anything. Her grades dropped last quarter from As to B's. She knows why she didn't do the work. She was busy.

“Yeah?”

“Well, Jessica, I know you try really hard, but with college applications coming up and everything, I thought we could maybe . . . rethink things.”

“What do you mean, like a new tutor or something?”

“Well, no. I was wondering though, is something wrong? Is something upsetting you?”

“No.”

“Because I was thinking if something was, upsetting you that is, then you might want to go and see this doctor I know.”

“A shrink?”

“Well, yes, I suppose, but you know, I go to one. Lots of people do.”

“A lot of girls at school go to one.”

“Yes, see, and I thought that maybe you might want to talk to somebody who wasn't so close, you know, and that might help you get your grades up. Because you know your father has his heart set on you going to at least Wesleyan.”

“Whatever, Mommy. I don't need a shrink.”

“It might make you feel better. It always helps me. It's just talking to someone to help you see things more clearly.”

“I don't know what I would talk about.”

“Oh, you'd find things to talk about. Look at your grades. There must be something.”

“Okay, whatever. I'll go. Just tell me when.”

“You'll be happy you went.”

At school, Jessica knows girls who talk about how they try to fuck with their shrinks. Or how they actually try to fuck their shrinks. How they lie to them and make things up about their lives. One girl who is a terrible student talks about how she could ace her classes but is frustrated by the stupid teachers who don't even make it hard enough to be interesting. She says she isn't
challenged. The ugly girl who never has boyfriends complains about boy troubles. Jessica starts thinking of things she'll talk about. Not Twelve.

Chapter Sixty-Six

“
WHAT DE DILL
, Mike?” inquires Timmy as they roll up to meet White Mike on the corner of Forty-fifth and Fifth.

“Don't talk that shit to me.” They start walking. “Fifty?”

“Yeah, fiddy,” says Timmy.

“Fiddy,” say Mark Rothko, chuckling. White Mike just looks at him. Mark Rothko gets nervous and turns away. He nudges Timmy, who removes a crumpled fifty-dollar bill from his pocket and palms it to White Mike while he hands Timmy a plastic film canister full of weed and turns away from them, downtown.

Mark Rothko is suddenly so happy he bursts into quiet song and busts out the pimp walk. “S'all about the Benjamins, baaabyyy . . .”

As White Mike is walking away, Timmy calls out to him. “Yo, Mike, hold up, I got a custie for you.”

White Mike waits with his back to them as they catch up.

“He went to my school. His name is Andrew. Called
me for the hookup, 'cause he knows I got the connection. Can he get some?”

“It's on you if he's a fuck-up, Timmy.”

“Yeah, no problem. He'll probably beep you tonight. Here's his number.” Timmy hands White Mike a Broadway show stub. Timmy had grabbed it from beside his mother's phone. “
The Producers.”

“Peace, White Mike,” says Timmy

“Right.” And White Mike walks away.

Timmy and Mark Rothko head to Timmy's roof to smoke a fatty jay.

Chapter Sixty-Seven

IN CENTRAL PARK
the fall that White Mike didn't go to college, there was a gang of skater kids who hung around by the little half-dome amphitheater near Seventy-second Street. They spent the afternoons smoking and doing tricks while old men played chess around them and the fit people Rollerbladed and jogged past and dogs got walked. White Mike first saw the skaters by chance but then kept coming back. He waited for his beeps on the benches and watched the skaters. It was pleasant. The weather was good.

The skaters would stack their boards sideways, and then someone would try to ollie over them. Some of the kids were pretty good. They could clear three boards. A lot of air. The tallest kid, one of the best skaters, always had a cigarette in his hand while he skated, and as he would glide by, sometimes he would take a long, elegant drag and the smoke would float behind him. He would hold the cigarette even as he did tricks, and after he landed a trick, he would take another drag. He wore big bag-ass pants and skate shoes and wraparound
reflective Oakley sunglasses and a backward Yankees baseball cap. He never fell. The first time White Mike saw him, he cleared four boards, arms out to the side like some bird of prey, with the cigarette smoking at the end of one long arm, and landed on the other side smooth and easy. White Mike was impressed.

White Mike did not start skateboarding, but he thought that even if he didn't get that out of seeing the skaters, he got the place out of it. And that dome and stage became one of his favorite places in the city, and he went there all the time, even at night. He knew that it was twenty of his strides across the stage, and that when he walked those steps, his overcoat billowed to the outside because the dome caught the wind and turned it around.

Chapter Sixty-Eight

JAIL ISN'T AS
bad as Hunter thought it was going to be. For one thing, he had ID on him, so he spent more than the first day in the local precinct holding cell and didn't have to go downtown till later. And it wasn't so bad even down there. No one really paid any attention to him. In fact, he was struck by the carelessness from cops and criminals alike. He guessed it was a slow day. He did a lot of thinking while he was in the cell, because he figured push-ups were clichéd and he didn't want to look like a fool. He tried to remember all the things he had ever memorized for school, but all he could really call up was the beginning of the
Aeneid
in Latin,
Arma virumque cano, I sing of arms and the man
. He thought that was appropriate.

Not that he wasn't scared sometimes. But Hunter knew he hadn't killed anybody, and knowing you're innocent is a strong thing in an enclosed space.

Hunter is thinking how much he'd like to talk to someone. White Mike would be best, but almost
anybody would do. Or maybe not. Maybe he never wants to talk to anybody again, ever.

At some point in the afternoon, an officer shows up and takes him to another room where a lawyer he has never met before introduces himself. The lawyer has Hunter's father on the phone.

“So I guess Andrew's father found you?”

“Yes, Hunter, he's been very helpful, and it was so good of him to track us down. We left you our itinerary, you know.”

“I know.”

Silence.

“Yes. In any case, I'll be flying out first thing in the morning, as I said. It's the best I can do. Jesus, who could ever expect anything like this.”

“I know.”

“I'm sorry this is all taking so long.”

There is another pause on the phone.
He's the dad, let him figure it out
, thinks Hunter.
Let him know what to say next
.

“How are you feeling?”

Hunter shakes his head and closes his eyes.

“Pretty shitty, Dad.”

Chapter Sixty-Nine

MATT MCCULLOCH HANGS
up the phone, exhausted. His wife was already asleep with her pills before he even made the call. He made sure of that, didn't want to have to listen to her. He mixes another gin and tonic and looks out to the beach. He supposes his son is scared.

He remembers what happened to him when he was Hunter's age, and how scared he was then. He had been drinking heavily then too, but he remembers the whole thing. He was a junior in high school, boarding school for him. Also in the winter, but just before the holiday break. The parents would come up and see the boys sing a concert before the end of the term. They would sing carols and church songs. “Hallelujah Amen” as arranged by Handel, and things like that. And in his first two years, when he was really happy to be getting out of school, he would be up there singing and it would all click and hallelujahs would be raining down in song and filling the big auditorium, and he would get into singing, it made him feel good, because hell, you know it was
Christmas and the whole student body couldn't be totally pissed and cynical.

But that third year, Matt had been drinking and horsing around the day before the concert, when classes were sort of over. There was a lot of snow on the ground, and he and some of the other guys had this idea that it would be fun to make a bonfire in the woods, just a little ways from their dorm but still out of sight. And so that night, hours after they had snuck out and were good and drunk, they started this bonfire, and it lit up the clearing, and the snow reflected the jumping flames up onto the red faces of the boys as they whooped with glee at their fire, and started singing “Hallelujah Amen” as a drinking song, and danced around the fire, hopping around in that weird half-light of the eastern winter as the wind picked up and blew a bunch of the sparks through the air, and the sparks landed on two of the boys and their jackets caught fire.

One of the boys was Matt McCulloch. His sleeve caught fire, and he saw the same happen to the other boy, but he just shoved his arm in the snow and watched the other boy run into the woods. Matt McCulloch had always been scared of the woods.

The other boy was drunk and took a second to realize he was on fire, and in the chorus of
amen amen hallelujah amen
he was sort of lost, and when he ran off into the woods no one really noticed but Matt, and as the boys all hit the fun loud part of
king of kings, forever, and ever, and lord of lords
, that kid's jacket melted onto his
skin and he passed out from shock; and in the woods, about forty feet from Matt and the other boys, the flames devoured all his clothing and much of his skin, and his corpse lay naked but for the melted vestiges of his parka, in the fresh, clean, cold snow of the New England forest.

And so Matt McCulloch remembers being in trouble as a teenager, even though he was never in any real trouble. No one found out that Matt had known the kid never came in that night. Matt McCulloch vomited the next morning when the lad was discovered, but everyone attributed it to a big heart. None of the boys involved were kicked out of school, there were too many. But someone had to take the blame, there had to be action, because this was a distinguished old institution, so one of the deans was fired, and he moved to Colorado and taught at a public school, and the kids in his English classes there had an awful lot more homework than usual. Matt McCulloch and the others felt guilty for a relatively long time, or at least until they left the school and went on their way, sometimes haunted by all of this and sometimes not.