Come Sit By Me

by Hoobler, Thomas

  North took a couple steps forward and stood in front of the desk, back straight and arms at his side. I followed his lead and stood next to him. My eyes went around the room, and I saw wood-paneled walls covered with a lot of plaques and awards, plus a whole collection of guns—rifles, shotguns, pistols, even some that looked like antiques. The metal barrels shone as if they were polished every day.

  After a few seconds, the Colonel looked up and said, “At ease.” No shit, he really plays the military game, I thought.

  He looked me over with a pair of gray-green eyes. I felt as if I were being measured for a uniform. Finally he nodded, and said, “You’re Paul Sullivan?”

  “Yes, sir,” I said. Saying “sir” was automatic when you were speaking to this guy. I had no trouble with it at all.

  “I understand you’re from New York.”

  “Yes, sir.” I had a feeling he thought it was a defect for me to overcome.

  “I guess you went to school with blacks there.”

  I wasn’t sure how to take that, but I answered in the affirmative again, hoping he’d let it go.

  He didn’t. “They’re all right if they have decent leadership. I had a number of them in my command. When I gave them orders, they obeyed. But if they’re left to their own devices, they revert.” I guess I must have looked like I didn’t quite get it. So he explained.

  “Revert to the primitive. It’s obvious in their music, their manner of speech when they’re not corrected, the instinct to criminal behavior. That’s where they go if left to their own devices.”

  I realized that I ought to be telling this guy he was full of shit, but it might turn out he had been in Special Forces and could break my neck with one hand. He gave you that impression.

  “They need discipline,” he explained.

  I kind of nodded, and North nudged me. “Yes, sir,” I said, feeling like an asshole.

  “My son says you’re a disciplined person,” the Colonel said.

  He does? “I try to be,” I said with a weak smile.

  “You know we’ve experienced a tragedy here,” he said.

  I thought he must be talking about the shooting, so I said I knew about it.

  “That boy needed discipline,” the Colonel said.

  “Yes, sir,” I agreed.

  “He was a lost soul, and no one told him, ‘This is how to behave. This is what to think.’”

  “Someone should have,” I said. “Sir.”

  He nodded, evidently satisfied. “I wanted to make sure what sort of person you were before you went shooting with my son,” he explained. “Good hunting.”

  He turned his attention back to whatever he was reading, and North swiveled and headed for the door. I did the same.

  “Dad likes you,” he said after we were outside the house again. I was pretty sure I hadn’t liked him, but if it helped me to get back inside Colleen’s shirt, I was glad.

  We drove out to a wooded area where there was room for North to pull the truck off the road. He took both the guns down from the rack and we got out. He had put on a camouflage vest with little loops that held shotgun shells. He gave me another one to wear.

  Taking one of the shells, North loaded one of the shotguns while I watched. “This shotgun is pump action,” he said. He showed me how to slide back part of it, which he called the forearm, to pump the shell into the barrel, or what he called the chamber. “Now it’s ready to fire,” he said. He aimed it and pretended to pull the trigger. “After you fire, you pump the forearm again. That ejects the spent shell and puts a fresh one into the chamber.”

  He let me try pumping it a few times. It was heavy but I enjoyed the feeling of it. It wasn’t just some toy. The parts all fit together like a precision instrument—designed to kill. I held it up to my eye and pointed it. “When you aim,” North said, “make sure you extend your left arm full length to hold the barrel steady, like I showed you before.” I got the idea with a little practice.

  He showed me the other shotgun. “This one is an autoloader,” he said. “After you fire it, the shell gets ejected from the side, and it’s ready to fire again,” he said. “All done automatically. But I’m givin’ you the pump action one, because then you always know when it’s ready to fire. Give an autoloader to a newbie and he might fire it when he’s not ready.” He gave me a grin. “Somebody might get their head blown off that way.”

  After loading both the shotguns again, we walked into the woods. North showed me how to carry the shotgun pointed at the ground. After a while, he waved for me to stop. “Listen, now,” he said.

  I could hear a few small birds chirping, but not much else. North explained. “We’re listening for gunfire. You don’t want to be too close to anybody else who’s shooting. Guess you can figure why.”

  “Because they might shoot you.”

  He nodded. “Rifle bullets can carry up to a mile, although nobody’d be using rifles much outside deer season. Even a .22 can do you damage though.”

  We sat down on the ground. Leaves on the trees had already started to change color, and some had fallen, exposing the branches. “This is a good time to shoot birds,” North said. “They’re active, and they aren’t able to hide in the trees so easily.”

  Apparently waiting was a big part of hunting. North had brought a couple of calls that were supposed to sound like turkeys. Sitting there doing nothing but blowing on one of them started to get boring. I felt like taking out my Blackberry and checking my email, but I didn’t think North would approve.

  Suddenly, he squeezed my arm and then pointed toward one of the trees. Then I heard what sounded like scratching. North had noticed it before I did. He raised his shotgun and aimed it in that direction. I still couldn’t see anything. Neither could he, evidently, because he didn’t fire.

  Then a flash of red appeared from behind a tree. I saw it moving. North, who was aiming just over my left shoulder, fired. The noise practically deafened me, and I ducked instinctively.

  “Got ‘im!” I heard him say. It sounded as if he was talking through cotton. My left ear was still ringing. North stood up and went over to the tree. The turkey was lying there. Picking it up by the neck, North brought it back to show me. It was bleeding from several wounds, but didn’t look as bad as I thought it might.

  “How come it isn’t all torn up?” I asked.

  “With a shotgun, the shot inside the shell gets dispersed the farther it goes,” he told me. “With a target as close as this bird, I couldn’t hardly miss. But only two or three of the shot actually hit him. Which is good, because if you want to use the meat, you have to dig out the shot. This is a tom, so it won’t be as good for eating anyway. You’ll see. Next one is yours.”

  North picked up the dead turkey and put it in a cloth bag. He said that the noise we made would keep other birds in hiding for some time, so we walked farther into the woods till we found a new spot to sit. This time I paid more attention, because I was nervous. I told myself that I really didn’t give a shit if I killed a turkey or not. The damn turkeys never did anything to me. But I had this feeling gnawing away at my insides that I wanted to impress North.

  Sitting there waiting, all sorts of thoughts went through my head. Was this what meditation was like? I had always heard that meditation was supposed to help empty your mind, calm you. But waiting to kill something—that was the opposite. You were focused. And actually holding a gun in my arms made me wonder just exactly what went through Cale’s mind when he killed those people.

  Or was anything? Of course he had to be crazy, so what kinds of thoughts does a crazy person have? Did he just decide to do it, and it didn’t really matter who he killed as long as he killed somebody? Was he just going on autopilot by then? Or did he really have reasons?

  What sort of reason could you have for killing seven people? I knew that Cale’s USB drive must have some kind of answer to
that question, but—

  North nudged me. “Down there,” he whispered, pointing.

  I saw it. It was smaller and less colorful than the one North had shot. More gray than anything. Creeping along the ground about twenty yards away. I raised my shotgun, and it saw me. Looked right into my eyes. And then spread its wings and took flight. Without thinking about it, I raised the gun and fired. It had a lot harder kick than the rifle I’d used earlier. Maybe the kick made me shoot higher than where I’d originally been aiming. But the turkey’s wings stopped flapping and it fell to the ground.

  “You got ‘im,” North said. “Beginner’s luck.”

  I practically ran over to where it had fallen, and there it was, lying on the ground. I stooped over to get a better look. I had taken off both of its legs, and you could see its bloody insides. But the eyes were still open, shiny and black.

  The next thing I knew North was slapping me on the back. “Not bad. I thought you’d flinch when you pulled the trigger,” he said.

  I didn’t tell him I actually had flinched. I was looking at those black eyes. A feeling of power started to rise up in me from someplace. It surprised me.

  A second ago, the turkey had been alive. Now it was dead. I did that.

  I felt blood rushing through my head, behind my eyes. This was what it was like to kill. Cale had felt this way.

  Only…a turkey wasn’t a person. If I had killed a real person, everything I was feeling now would be way more intense. You would feel so powerful that you would be like the king of the world. No matter how much people made fun of you.

  chapter sixteen

  WE DIDN’T SHOOT any more turkeys that day, although we saw a few. Hitting them wasn’t as easy as it first seemed. We took them both back to North’s house, where he gave them to the family cook. As a reward, she heated up some meat from a turkey the Colonel had shot a few days earlier. It was different from the kind of turkey Mom used to cook at Thanksgiving. A little tough, and it had kind of a strong taste.

  Of course there was the idea that somebody had actually killed this stuff that we were eating. Went out into the forest and took the life from it. Added that life to our own.

  Made me want to do it again.

  North told me I ought to get my own shotgun.

  “My dad would never allow that,” I told him. “What do they cost, anyway?”

  “New ones, a nice Browning, around 700 dollars. A Stoeger would run half that, if you didn’t care what you were using. But there’s a gun store out on the highway between here and Susquehanna where the guy would sell you a used one for a lot less.”

  “I’d need to get my dad to buy it for me,” I said. “I’m only seventeen.”

  North grinned. “Not from this guy. That’s where Caleb bought his, and he was fifteen. No ID, either.”

  I blinked. I had thought nobody knew where Cale had gotten the guns. And I’d only heard one other person call him Caleb—that weird guy Seese who all but admitted he was Cale’s friend. “How’d you know that?” I asked as casually as I could.

  “Oh, I don’t know,” North said. “I think it was in the papers. Anyway, where else would he have gotten them?”

  It turned out that the Colonel had in fact called my Dad. “I hear you’ve been hunting,” Dad said when I got home. His voice indicated that he wasn’t too upset that I had neglected to mention that fact when I left, so I relaxed a little.

  “Yeah,” I said. “North is showing me how to be a country boy.” That was a little dig at the fact that Dad had wanted to leave the city, and I hadn’t.

  “His father says he feels you’ve been well disciplined,” Dad told me. “I guess my use of whip and chains has been effective.”

  “He was in the military,” I explained.

  “What exactly were you hunting?” he asked.

  “Just turkeys,” I said casually.

  “Did you get any?”

  “A couple. North says I could do better with practice, if I, you know, had my own shotgun.” Hint, hint.

  “Next year you’ll be in college. I hope you’ll get into one that doesn’t require you to carry a gun.”

  “If I didn’t need it any more, I could give it to Susan,” I suggested.

  Dad gave me a dirty look. “Don’t press your luck,” he said.

  At school on Monday morning, Seese was waiting for me at my locker. He was as creepy as ever. “I was wondering if you’d let me look inside,” he told me.

  “Inside?”

  “In the locker.”

  “There’s nothing of Cale’s in there,” I said. “The police must have taken everything, and then the janitor or somebody wiped it clean. And painted it. Anyway, my stuff is in there now.”

  “Would it kill you to just let me take a look?”

  I remembered what Susan had said about kids coming down here to take a look at the locker because they knew who had it before me. I didn’t want to become a tourist attraction.

  “What are you looking for?” I asked.

  “I’ll let you know if I see it,” he said.

  “You swear?”

  “Yeah, sure. I’d need to make a copy.”

  I opened the door of the locker and stepped aside. It was still early in the year, so there wasn’t a lot of accumulated junk. Seese peered inside and asked me if he could move my coat. I stepped in front of him and removed it.

  He ran his hands over the walls of the locker, and then moved stuff aside so he could do the same for the floor and the top of the little shelf. He peered inside and looked at the ceiling of the locker, and then the inside of the locker door. I began to realize what he was looking for, and I saw that he had missed the one place where he would have found it.

  Seese brushed some dust off his hands and shook his head.

  “Find it?” I asked. It was clear he hadn’t.

  “Nothing,” he said.

  “Now you gotta tell me what you were looking for,” I told him.

  “Well, I didn’t find it,” he said.

  “Yeah, but I let you try.”

  He shrugged. “Caleb’s grandmother was blind.”

  “I heard that.”

  “She liked him to read to her.”

  “Right.” I wasn’t going to tell him the name of the book, if that’s what he was looking for.

  “But she’d been blind a long time, and she had learned Braille.”

  Braille. Right. Why hadn’t I thought of that earlier?

  “So she taught it to Cale?” I said.

  “Kind of. He told me once that it would be cool to send messages in Braille, because it just looked like a lot of little dots, and unless somebody guessed what it was, they couldn’t read it.”

  I was struggling not to show my excitement. I casually shut the locker door, and said, “Well, you didn’t find anything in there that looked like Braille.”

  “Or felt like it,” he said. “Because the dots are usually raised so that the blind person can read them with her fingers.”

  “You’re assuming that Cale wanted to send a message,” I said. “Maybe killing seven people was the message.”

  Seese shook his head. “You didn’t know him. That was why he was always writing on his laptop. He told me once that he wanted to explain himself to himself.”

  “But maybe not to you or anybody else,” I said.

  Seese shook his head. He was stubborn. “I know that whatever is on that USB drive would explain a lot.”

  “But nobody knows where it is,” I said.

  “Right. But he must have left some clue, some way to let people find it.”

  “Or maybe he erased it, or the cops took it, or he threw it away,” I said.

  “If the cops had it, they would have released the information on it,” Seese replied.

  “Or not. They didn’t hav
e an obligation to release it.”

  “You weren’t here. Everybody wanted to know why he did it. They had psychologists come in and talk to everybody, because they thought we were in shock. And that was one question they always asked us, if we knew him, if we had heard him ever threaten violence. Shit, there were even TV shows about it.”

  “I saw some of them,” I said. I would have paid more attention to them if I’d known my dad was going to move us out here.

  The first bell rang and we went off to class. With Seese around, I couldn’t look inside my locker again. It didn’t matter. I knew where Cale’s message was. Still, it was a struggle to sit there and listen to Ms. Hayward discuss The Odyssey while I was dying to go back and check out the bottom of the shelf in my locker.

  It was probably a good thing that I had to wait because that allowed me to think it through. I’d need a flashlight to see what the marks on the bottom of the locker shelf looked like. That ran the risk of attracting attention. The best way to get a look at those marks would be to take a piece of paper, tape it to the shelf, and then use a pencil or something to make an impression of it. A rubbing.

  When would be the best time to do that?

  I couldn’t do it at noon. The halls were filled with people. Between classes was just as bad, because a lot of people went back to get the books for their next class.

  So it had to be after school. That was a long time to wait, but I told myself I didn’t want to attract any more attention.

  I got through the morning, and took my books back to the locker. I was tempted to run my hand along the bottom of the shelf, just to feel the marks, but I decided I already knew they were there. I went to lunch and North waved me over to his table, where there were a lot of other jocks.

  North wanted to sort of display me to his friends. He joked about how I became a man with him on Sunday. “He killed his first big game,” he said laughing. “Got one on the very first try.”