Bait Dog: An Atlanta Burns Novel

by Wendig, Chuck

  “That sounds like the slogan for a really weird douche commercial.”

  He laughs.

  “So where’s your Mom?”

  He shrugs. “She left us when I was six.”

  “That sucks.”

  “Way of the world. Your Daddy?”

  A twinge of sadness in the real estate between her heart and her guts. “Died.”

  “Shit, girl. I’m sorry.” His face sinks like a stone.

  Time to change the topic. “The fourth attacker. The ones who hurt you. We still don’t know who he is?”

  “I didn’t really see him much. He stayed off to the side. Hard to even call him an attacker, honestly. Just stood there in the other room, sometimes hovering near the doorway. Watching. Overseeing.”

  “Didn’t get a good look?”

  “No. Not a big guy. Shorter than John Elvis, for sure. Arms crossed. Any time I tried to look they pulled my head the other direction. Mashed it into the ground.”

  “Now it’s my turn to be sorry.”

  He sighs. “This is bumming me out. Let’s go find Shane and talk about boys in front of him to make him uncomfortable!”

  * * *

  It’s been nice hanging out with Chris and Shane. Even if she doesn’t understand their conversations half the time. Blah blah blah, Firefly, Star Wars, Star Trek. Blah blah blah, Glee. Batman, Superman, whatever. Linux. Android. Apple. Facebook.

  Their babble is comforting. It’s like the warm wash of white noise. Womb sounds from yammering geeks. Helps her feel relaxed.

  And like she already said, the Adderall certainly helps.

  At least, it helps until it doesn’t. By the end of the week, though, she’s feeling torn up around the edges. Like she drank a football helmet full of espresso and now she’s coming down but isn’t quite at the bottom yet. Not tired, but not awake, either; floating in the uncomfortable space between.

  * * *

  On Friday is when it goes sour.

  Things were good. Suddenly, they’re not.

  It’s like those two lines in the Housman poem:

  And early though the laurel grows

  It withers quicker than the rose.

  * * *

  Mitchell Erickson finds her as she comes out of the cafeteria.

  “Do we know each other?” he says, face feigning obliviousness. Perfect teeth. Not a hair out of place. He’s like a teenage Ken doll, which makes her think, does he have balls down there, but that conjures to mind some dark magic she doesn’t care to stir up and so she puts it down.

  “I don’t think we do,” she says, and she goes to keep walking.

  But he steps in her path.

  It occurs to her: you’ve got nothing, you know that? Nothing with which to protect your fool ass. Did you ever order more bear mace? Did you bring that baton? Can’t carry a shotgun into school. You were so goofed on up Adderall you didn’t think about that, did you?

  Mitchell gets close. She tries to pull away but he grabs her backpack straps—not violently, but with a grim authority that leaves her scared and angry at the same time—and holds her still.

  “I do know you,” he says, still smiling, but his voice soft and cold. “Took a little while for your message to get to me but it found its way, like a lost puppy looking for home.”

  “That’s a sweet story,” she says, straining to sound ballsy, trying super-hard not to let her voice go all shaky on her. “Does it end with the puppy biting off your face?”

  “Nah. It ends with the puppy taking a big shit on the carpet when he wasn’t supposed to. Sad how they had to put that puppy down. Hit him over the head with a shovel. Buried him in the backyard.”

  “I suspect we’re not talking about puppies. I’m taking this English class about poetry, and we’re learning all about metaphors. This is one of them, isn’t it? A metaphor? You’re like a poet.”

  “Shut the fuck up and listen.” Smile still in place, but now he’s speaking through those white Chiclet teeth of his. “You kicked over a hornet’s nest.”

  “Like that girl from that book I keep seeing.”

  “I said shut up. I don’t care who you are. Or what you did. I just want you to know I got your message, and give you a message of my own.”

  “White Power?” she asks, sticking out her chin. “Hail Hitler?”

  “I’m going to make you hurt,” he says.

  He pats her cheek. She flinches—his touch disgusts her, upends a paper plate full of cockroaches inside her stomach. Mitchell Erickson walks away, then, joining up with the flow of kids in the adjoining hallway, merging with the stream, calling to some “bro” of his.

  Atlanta goes into the girls’ bathroom and throws up her lunch.

  * * *

  It’s when she sees Shane at the end of the day that she knows how fucked it’s going to get. His nose is swollen. Not broken, but bleeding. His whole upper lip encrusted with a blood mustache.

  Shane’s eyes are puffy, too. He won’t say why but Atlanta knows.

  She starts to tell him she’s sorry, Mitchell came up to her, threatened her, she had no idea—

  “Mitchell? No,” he says, but the way he says it with his nose all busted it comes out Bitchell? Doh. “Wasn’t him. It was the other two. Jonesy and Virgil.”

  Shit shit shit shit shit.

  * * *

  “Shit shit shit shit shit,” she says. It’s her, Chris, Shane, outside her house. Those two on the porch steps, her pacing in front of them like a nervous tiger. A tiger who’s burned out on no sleep and lots of Adderall and who just got threatened by much bigger tigers.

  “It’ll be fine,” Chris says, upbeat, but nobody really believes it.

  Shane’s nose looks like the nose of a proboscis monkey. Except scabbier. He says they surprised him around the side of the building. By the bus platform. Hit him across the bridge of the nose with a piece of smooth sanded wood—like a chair-leg or something from shop class. Then they ran off. A teacher found him, actually had the gall to yell at him. Like it was his fault he got bullied.

  “That’s how they are,” Chris says when he hears that. “The adults don’t care. It goes back to that rape thing. They think we get bullied it’s because we’re asking for it. Look at the way those nerds were dressed. You’re gay. You’re Mexican—“

  “Venezuelan,” Shane corrects.

  “You carry comic books. It’s like a bullseye. They don’t ask, how do we stop bullies but instead those assholes say, how can we get these stupid kids to stop painting bullseyes on their foreheads? They rely on it gets better rather than we need to make it better now.”

  “I’m sorry,” Atlanta finally blurts out. “Y’all, this is my fault.”

  “Your fault?” Chris asks. “Oh, shit, excuse me.” He takes a sip from the beer that Atlanta stole from her mother—Coors Light again, i.e. run-off from dirty rain gutters—and then spits it out in a comical spray. “Your fault? Sorry, wanted to do a spit-take on that one.”

  “I poked the bear. You don’t poke the bear. I’m sitting here thinking, what? That I could just swoop in like some kind of god-dang vigilante—“

  “Like Batman,” Shane says, holding a bag of frozen peas to his nose.

  “—and all the assholes would be cowed? People are monsters for a reason. They don’t stop being monsters just because you piss in their eye. Shit. Shit!”

  Next to the porch sits a dead potted plant in a red clay container. She kicks it with her boot. It shatters. Shards and dirt-clods everywhere.

  Nobody says anything. Eyes wide, they watch her fume.

  “Bad enough we got those Jonesy and Musclehead. But now we’ve got a meaner set of fuckstains coming at us from a whole other side.”

  Chris holds up a finger. “Pardon. Can I get a clarification?”

  “What?” She frowns.

  “You’ll say fuck. But not damn. Correct?”

  She thinks about it. “I guess. What of it?”

  “It’s just weird, isn’t it?”
/>
  “Well… damn’s a bad word!” she barks. “That’s not the point. The point is, we got ‘em coming at us from both sides and it’s because I can’t leave well enough alone.”

  Shane speaks up. “You saved my ass that day. I’m still thankful you were there.”

  “And when I die,” Chris says, “I will die satisfied by the look on John Elvis’ face as you shot the… well, whatever that part of his guitar is called, off. The dick? The guitar dick? Let’s go with that.”

  “If only we could get ‘em all to bully each other,” Shane says, “then they’d leave us alone.”

  Atlanta stops. She’s tired. Bedraggled. All parts of her feel like a paper-cut with lemon juice squeezed over it. So maybe she’s just crazy, but something there sounds pretty good.

  “Bully each other,” she says. Chewing on it. Noodling it.

  The two of them watch her, obviously concerned. Finally, she says:

  “I got an idea. C’mon.”

  * * *

  She thinks they’re going to have to coerce him—stick a shotgun under his chin or wave a hundred bucks in his face—but turns out, Chomp-Chomp is totally cool with this.

  “Those guys are kind of assholes,” he says, looking sad. She guesses it’s because he knows the only friends he has are worthless bullies. “What are you going to do to them?”

  Atlanta doesn’t tell him everything. The poor horse-toothed bastard may not like every little detail of the plan. All she says is, “We’re going to teach them a lesson.”

  “Okay.”

  “So you’ll tell them where we’ll be?”

  “Uh-huh.”

  “And when?”

  “Yes. Yup.” He gives her a thumbs-up.

  She kisses him on the cheek. “Thanks, Chhhh—“ She’s about to say Chomp-Chomp, but instead she manages to pull out of the nose-dive and end with, “—ssssSteven.”

  * * *

  “So,” Chris says, “what’s Mister Toothy going to tell those two thug-monkeys?”

  “That we’ll be out behind the old church playing D&D in the graveyard.”

  Chris laughs. “Dungeons and Dragons, wow.” He does a theatrical bow. “Well-played, milady. If ever there was a perfume that exuded the scent of weakness, it would be a fragrance that stank of multi-colored polyhedral dice and fermented gamer sweat.”

  It looks like Shane wants to say something.

  They wait for him to finally spit it out.

  He clears his throat.

  “We could actually play D&D sometime,” Shane says. Eyes hopeful. “What? Shut up! It’s fun.”

  “Okay, I do that, I think I really will have to give up my seat in the La Cozy Nostra,” Chris says. He gives that idea a thumbs-down, then pulls on the thumb like a cow’s udder and makes a fart sound. “So sorry. Thanks for playing.”

  Atlanta ignores all that waffle. “Time for phase two.” She looks to Chris. “You sure about this?”

  “As sure as I am that Shane here will be a 40-year-old virgin.”

  Shane tackles him. They wrestle on the ground like idiots. Atlanta just shakes her head.

  * * *

  She and Shane watch at a distance, hunkered down behind a banged-up Jeep Cherokee.

  Mitchell Erickson drives a nice ride: a Lexus hardtop convertible in what is described as “Matador Red.” He’s got a baseball game that Saturday morning up at Werner’s Field. Thing is, Erickson parks his car away from all the others. Paranoid, probably, about getting any scratches or dings on that cherry paint.

  The morning’s cool. Fog slides between needled pines.

  The hardtop’s up. Windows all closed.

  Nobody here in the parking lot. Everybody’s at the game. No cameras. No worries.

  Chris whistles as he saunters up. He does these jaunty dance steps—what Atlanta would call “Fred Astaire moves,” if she had to name them—and he twirls the tire iron like it’s an umbrella.

  He gets to the Lexus.

  Batter up.

  He brings the tire iron against the driver’s side window. It pops and crumples inward. Even from their view, Atlanta and Shane hear Chris squeal with what seems to be some combination of fear and delight as it shatters and the alarm goes off. He looks over to them. Giddy.

  Chris holds up the origami boulder—a crumpled-up note he worked on all night by cutting out letters from an issue of Cosmo (“Okay, fine, I do read Cosmo, don’t judge me, you monsters”).

  He thrusts his arm into the window. Drops the note boulder onto the front seat.

  Then hurries to meet his cohorts.

  It’s the second car Atlanta’s helped to wreck in so many days.

  Phase two, complete.

  * * *

  Nestled in what Atlanta likes to think of the armpit of the southern side, just before you go up into Grainger Hill and beyond to buy meth or hunt turkeys or whatever, is an old Episcopal church—the Church of St. Agnes. Way the church sits, it looks to her like a big stone middle finger which is appropriate given her feelings on religion and all. Behind that church is a narrow graveyard. New graves at the back, and up front are all the old plots: broken headstones, many tilting or tumbled, the whole thing overgrown with weeds since it no longer appears to have any kind of caretaker.

  Atlanta lays up on the hill, looking down on the graveyard with a pair of binoculars she bought from the Army-Navy store a couple years back. Chris sidles up next to her, sitting there, and she fast grabs him by the shirt and pulls him down flat against the ground.

  “Uh, ow,” he says.

  “Stay flat. Don’t want them to see us, do you?”

  “By them, do you mean the nobody that’s down there?”

  “It’s not time yet. We’re early.” She looks around. “Where’s Shane?”

  “He’s on his way. He wanted to bring snacks.”

  “Snacks.”

  “He gets hungry.”

  “Sonofabitch, if he gets here late he’s going to spook the—“ But then she sees. Two figures moving up the side of the church and into the graveyard. It’s them. Jonesy and Virgil. “Shhh. Look.”

  The two come into the graveyard. Poke around. Virgil mostly just stands there on his phone, texting someone. Jonesy is fidgety. Wanders around. Kicks rocks. Kicks gravestones. Takes a piss on one. Checks his watch. Atlanta looks at her own watch and sees that time is fast escaping. They’re not going to hang out forever. They think they’re here to break up a D&D game and maybe give Atlanta “what she deserves,” but they won’t hang around forever.

  Virgil pockets the phone. He and Jonesy have words. Atlanta can’t hear them up here on the hill—from here it’s just murmuring.

  Jonesy shakes his head. Moves back toward the front of the graveyard. Toward the exit. Virgil follows, still texting as he walks.

  No, she thinks. No, no, no.

  A new plan starts forming in her head—okay, she can’t have them leave so she’ll sneak down there, call out their names and then hide behind one of the big tombs, the ones with the stained glass in the door, the ones with the thistles growing all around, and she’s just about to dart down the hill—

  When a car pulls into the church lot.

  Oh god. Not Shane. Please, not Shane.

  It’s a cherry-red Lexus. With a busted window.

  Score.

  * * *

  The note that Chris dropped into that Lexus?

  It read:

  FIRST WE FUCKED UP YOUR GUITAR

  NOW WE FUCKED UP YOUR CAR

  MEET OUR BOYS AT THE ST AGNES CEMETERY

  4:15PM

  BECAUSE IT’S TIME FOR YOU TO GET FUCKED UP

  Boom.

  * * *

  It’s Jonesy that speaks first. Way his face looks tells Atlanta he’s mouthing off, probably because he can’t help it. That’s just the way he is. Mouth running like an out-of-control go-cart. Virgil, again, is the prudent one. Pulling Jonesy back. Shaking his head. He doesn’t want trouble, that Virgil. Which is too bad, because Jonesy’
s got trouble in his eyes.