Goodhouse

by Peyton Marshall

  In an adjacent field, another group was landscaping an area that would hold a row of portable toilets. I could see the main gate from where we worked. There were more guards stationed along the fence. Tanner’s kennel was nearby, and I watched the brown, dusty dogs streak back and forth, silent but eager, speaking only with their bodies.

  Owen and I were each given plastic square-point shovels and assigned to stand at the base of the gravel mountain. We loaded wheelbarrows when they arrived. The shovel was flimsy and it took a lot of strength to bury it in the pile. “It’d be easier to just pick it up with our hands,” Owen whispered. The white edge of his left eye had a red, creeping rash, as if he’d broken a blood vessel.

  “Quiet,” I said, but everybody was talking tonight.

  A dump truck idled behind us, waiting for clearance to leave. I saw the driver watching us in the rearview mirror. He wore a gold necklace with a small cross on it, and when we made eye contact, he spit something onto the ground.

  “Do you think Creighton and Davis have to do meditation and reflection?” Owen asked.

  “How should I know?” I said.

  Runt pushed a wheelbarrow up to our station. We hurried to fill it, and then Harper arrived and we filled that wheelbarrow, too.

  “Hey, shitheads,” Harper said. He was smiling.

  “Hey,” I said. I looked around for a class leader and didn’t see one. We continued to shovel.

  “I got your old room,” he said. “But I’ll sell it back to you.”

  “Keep it,” I said.

  “Good price,” he offered. “Or are you all going to stay 3 and 4 forever?”

  And then, suddenly, Creighton was standing next to me. “Is there gossiping over here, ladies?” he asked. We worked with renewed effort. “You can tell me,” he said. “I don’t mind.”

  Harper hurried off, the wheelbarrow wobbling dangerously, its weight at the edge of what he could control. Under Creighton’s watch we made sure we were keeping pace, our backs like pistons contracting, moving, and swiveling—turning a patch of scrubby grass into a road. He stood for a moment, then he picked up a shovel himself. We were all wary. With that thing in hand, his reach was longer, and there was a look about him—a certain testiness—that had me eager to stay off his radar.

  “So what do you ladies talk about when I’m not around?” he asked. Nobody answered, and this annoyed him. “I asked you a question.”

  Blake, a Level 4 boy from our new dorm—a quiet, big-shouldered kid—nodded to Owen. “We listen to this little bitch whine,” he said.

  “Is that right,” Creighton said. “What about?” He was trying to conceal how winded he was after just a minute of work. Creighton leaned on his shovel. He looked heavier; a small belly hung over his belt, and he kept his weight on his good leg. We must have been staring at him, because after a moment he snapped, “I didn’t say take a break.”

  A new kid with an empty wheelbarrow ran up and waited for us to fill it. We got back to work, everyone except Owen. “You are getting fat,” he said.

  I elbowed him. “Shut up,” I hissed.

  “What did you say?” Creighton asked.

  “Nothing,” I said. “He didn’t say anything.”

  “It’s what everyone’s thinking,” Owen said.

  “Is that right?” Creighton looked around, daring any of us to meet his gaze. “Is there anyone else?” No one spoke. The boy with the wheelbarrow backed away. “Looks like you’re the only one,” he added.

  “I promise you, I’m not,” Owen said. His hands tightened around the handle of his shovel. Not far from us, the dump truck started its engine. A blast of exhaust rolled from its tailpipe and pellets of gravel kicked up in its wake. It began to head down the road toward the exit.

  “You want to fight me?” Creighton asked. “You want to make it official?”

  “No,” I said, “he doesn’t.” I turned to Owen. “Cut it out.”

  But Owen was fixated on Creighton with a frightening, almost manic intensity. “You,” he said, “are a little pig-eyed cunt.”

  Creighton responded with a low, growling sort of chuckle. Nobody was even pretending to work now.

  I glanced at Owen’s face and I recognized then, in my roommate’s expression, a kind of reckless desperation. He wanted a fight and he didn’t care if he won. I said the only thing that came to mind. “Think about the college,” I whispered. “You’ll lose your chance. You’re going to hear any day.” But this only seemed to sharpen his determination, and now all the boys nearby were leaning on their shovels, murmuring to each other. I shifted my weight, getting ready to restrain Owen. I was so focused on him, on what I feared was about to happen, that the siren, when I heard it, didn’t immediately make sense. It was the escape alarm—not the throbbing sound of lockdown, not the alarm we’d heard all morning, but just one high, sustained note. A proctor ran past us, down the main road. “Stop the truck!” he was yelling. “Stop the truck!”

  * * *

  The dump truck, the one that had idled behind us just moments ago, passed the guardhouse and was now making its way down the civilian road that bordered the school. Guards raced after it, waving for it to stop. The driver accelerated. We were too far away to hear anything, but I could see the men shouting commands. A few guards emerged from the guardhouse with long-barreled guns, and then the driver lost control of the truck—it veered to the right, careening off the roadway, punching through the black, comblike fence, picking up speed and colliding with Tanner’s wooden kennel. One side of the structure exploded into timbers. The truck tilted then and rolled onto its side, wheels still turning. Hounds sped in all directions. The scene was just far enough away that it appeared unreal, a disaster in miniature.

  Creighton dropped his shovel and started to run toward the gate.

  “What’s going on?” I asked. But nobody answered. We were all migrating toward the scene, inching forward as if drawn to it.

  “I think it’s one of us,” Owen said.

  I heard gunfire then, several sharp, percussive cracks that pierced the sound of the alarm. Proctors swarmed the wrecked dump truck. They dragged a body out of the cab, and we saw another on the ground, thrown during the accident. Nobody rushed to help them. Instead, the proctors focused on the truck itself, investigating it like ants on a slice of apple.

  “Line up,” a proctor shouted. “Line up. Hands behind your backs.”

  “What about the dogs?” someone said. They were dispersing onto campus.

  “Who is it?” someone else asked. We fell into a line, two by two.

  “Shirts off,” a proctor called. “Shirts off.”

  We fumbled with our clothes, but kept glancing over at the scene of the accident. There was an ominous cloud of smoke issuing from the engine, and the proctors were backing away from the wreck. I heard the name Ortiz percolating around me. I threw my shirt onto the ground, adding it to the growing pile.

  A boy nearby whispered, “Are you sure?”

  “Clasp your elbows,” a proctor called. We put our hands behind our backs. Several T-4s raced down the street toward the accident. One of them had a stretcher. Another T-4 with a large fire extinguisher shot past. The late-afternoon sun was hot on my shoulders. I could smell our perspiration. They’d clustered us together in a horseshoe shape. The boys on the adjacent field were in the same formation and their class leaders were telling them to strip down.

  “We got one here,” Davis called. Creighton marched a boy into the center of the horseshoe and threw him on the ground.

  “Don’t get up,” Creighton said. There was a dark stain on the front of the boy’s shirt, a brown smear that could have been mud, but Creighton stepped forward and ripped open the shirt, revealing a deep oozing cut on the boy’s belly. He had stuffed it with pieces of bloody rag. I heard the collective suck of air as we saw the wound. He’d dug out his chip, or tried to. I was suddenly afraid they’d see the mark on my stomach, the black dot I’d maintained until it had become almost a
tattoo.

  “You stupid shit,” Davis said. “Where’s your roommate?”

  The boy just looked at him, resolutely silent. We knew his roommate must be one of the boys in the truck.

  “All right,” Davis said, and then kicked him in the face. There was a nasty crunching sound, and the boy clutched his nose, moaning. His legs pulled inward in a tight, protective curl.

  Davis leaned over and patted the boy’s hair. “Where’s your roommate?” he asked gently. When the boy didn’t answer, he hit him again in the face, then waved to a nearby proctor. “Box this one,” he said.

  “You,” Creighton said, pointing to Owen, the bright light of revelation in his eyes. “You were helping them.”

  “No.” Owen shook his head.

  “That’s what all the chatter was about,” he said.

  “I had no idea,” Owen said. “I swear.”

  “You were distracting me,” Creighton shouted over Owen’s protestations. “Yes, you were.”

  The proctors dragged the semiconscious boy into the cavity of an open boxer. They stuffed him inside, and his head flopped forward as if he’d passed out. I wondered how long they would leave him in there.

  “Box this one, too.” Davis nodded at Owen. They opened the other boxer, and I saw that someone had clawed the wood on the interior.

  “You’re making a mistake,” Owen said. “I’m a Level 1 student. You can’t do this.”

  A proctor stepped forward. “Get in,” he said.

  “No,” Owen said. “I had nothing to do with this.”

  “Get in.” The proctor reached for his Lewiston. The boys around us stood wide-eyed, shifting from foot to foot—some straining to see what was happening with the capsized dump truck, some staring at the arrival of Ione police cars. Two dogs dug in the soybean field. Creighton and Davis were huddled, heads together, deep in conversation.

  Owen turned toward them. “You can’t box me,” he said. “I want my chance.”

  Davis looked up. “What did you say?”

  Owen stepped forward, unclasping his hands. “You heard me.” The proctors looked to Davis.

  “Step back and I’ll forget you said that,” Davis said, but Owen had a fixed, ecstatic look on his face.

  “All the rest of you shitbirds lie facedown on the ground,” barked Creighton. “I want every nose in the dirt.”

  We lay on the ground. I heard the boy in the boxer moaning. I dug my hands into the soil and prayed like I hadn’t prayed in months. Owen began to hop from foot to foot in what appeared to be a parody of a boxing stance. I’d never seen him fight, but this told me everything I needed to know.

  “I got this,” Creighton said to Davis. He wasn’t as fast as Davis, but he had meaty, oversize hands that didn’t seem to mind running into bone and cartilage. He didn’t take pleasure in his job the way Davis did. He just wanted to get it over with.

  All the boys in the horseshoe were watching. Nobody had their face in the dirt. Everything that happened here would be reviewed—discussed and analyzed in every common room for weeks. People liked to talk big about what they would do, how they would take leadership. Some stories were legend. Years ago a student had actually stapled some kind of metal grid onto the bottom of his tennis shoes. He’d used his feet to pulverize his opponent’s face. Another had made a knife out of a defunct handheld, melting the plastic. That was before they got strict on what kinds of plastic they let us use on campus. These were the more fantastic fights, but I suspected that the biggest asset was really luck. You needed your best day to couple with someone else’s bad day. And our class leaders were having a bad day. I tried to send Owen a telepathic message. The knee, I thought, go for his right knee.

  Owen was fast. Much faster than I would have suspected. He was able to dodge Creighton’s first swing. And I watched as it gave him a dangerous confidence. Owen barely ducked the next punch, and then, when he tried to launch an attack of his own, he mistimed it. Creighton stepped in and easily took the blow in his ribs. He seemed not to even feel it, and then he was past Owen’s defenses, up close, where he wanted to be. His big hands had their pick of targets. He hit Owen hard in the neck, just above the collarbone. Owen gave a high-pitched yip and staggered backward.

  I hated this kind of fighting—hands tearing and reaching. I thought of Tuck, of the way I had treated his body like a door to be opened. I’d tried to dig through him, to excavate some memory. Every sound that Owen made scratched some raw internal place; it galvanized something inside me, some inner unwillingness to be a witness, to do nothing more than silently sanction.

  Owen went down, skidding on gravel. It was just in front of me, and I could hear Creighton mumbling in concentration. He kicked Owen in the crotch, which made him shriek and brought a sympathetic intake of breath from everyone else. Owen writhed and clawed at the ground.

  “Anyone else?” Davis asked.

  Harper started to rise, but he looked shaky and uncertain as he gained his feet. His roommate Runt was beside him, tugging on his pant leg, calling him an idiot. “Harper,” Davis said, “you think you got it? You think you have what it takes to step up, every day? To bust every little asshole with ambition?” Davis grabbed a handful of gravel, knelt beside Owen, and then stuffed it into Owen’s mouth. “You ready to work that hard?” he asked.

  Harper just stood there. Owen began bucking and choking, trying to spit gravel. My body tensed. I was on my toes and elbows. And then Davis leaned onto Owen, clamping his hand against his mouth. Owen’s eyes began to flutter. The cords on his neck stood out as he tried to suck air through his nose.

  “He’s choking,” I shouted.

  Harper lay back down. I looked to the proctors, but they were busy. A sleek helicopter wheeled overhead, its rotors slicing the air. Civilian police vehicles encircled the gate, red and blue lights spinning.

  “You made your point,” I said to Davis. “Let him go.”

  “Don’t get up,” Davis said. He looked at me with a steady, bored expression. He took his other hand and pinched Owen’s nose closed. “That’s it,” he added. It was a tone of soft encouragement, the way you would talk to a child learning to walk. “There you go.”

  And then my body acted of its own accord. The itch that had been inside me all day, the news of Tacoma, the feeling that the air was pressing too close, the dust irritating my skin. The itch overtook me and I swung my foot into Davis, knocking him off Owen in one fluid, explosive movement. It was a kick I’d learned at La Pine, something we’d practiced for fun. It was too fancy a move to use in a real fight. It broadcast too easily. But Davis wasn’t expecting it, and it had a lot of power. He was knocked sprawling onto the ground.

  My next move was to kick out Creighton’s knee. He was kneeling beside Owen and I had a perfect shot. We were both getting to our feet, but he was just a second too slow. I slammed my heel into his kneecap. I heard the crunch of collapsing tendons and cartilage. Or maybe what I heard was the sound of shifting gravel underneath my feet. The chatter of a hundred tiny pebbles. Creighton howled. It took no effort at all to right myself, to reach for Owen, to roll him on his side. One of the boys in the circle came forward to pull the gravel out of his mouth. Owen started to heave and vomit.

  Davis made a guttural grunt, something to help him regain his breath. I turned just in time to leap out of his way.

  “It’s always the roommate,” he said. He exhaled sharply to flex his diaphragm. Sweat stung my eyes. As Davis closed the distance between us, I used a basic kick to stop his forward momentum. Any boy at La Pine would have been able to sidestep it, and I was shocked to feel it connect completely. Davis staggered back, his legs shaking, a flash of fear in his eyes. The boys on the ground were calling out advice now, sensing possibility. I couldn’t hear individual words, just a rising hiss as if the gravel itself were speaking.

  Davis was more experienced and he was stronger; still, it took a moment for him to realize what was going on, to realize that this wasn’t just a haphazard
flail. I was speaking a different language. I knew what I was doing, and my calm flustered him, more than anything else.

  He stepped forward again and I spun to his side, kicking him in the kidneys, which catapulted him forward and made him scramble to stay upright. I kept on him, but didn’t get another shot. His arms were too fast and he swung for me, so that leaping back, I was off-balance.

  The boys around us were yelling now. Some were standing up. I didn’t know where Creighton was. My world had shrunk into this tiny circle. I don’t even know how long we fought. It may have been only a minute, but it seemed longer. I didn’t go for obvious targets. I knew he’d protect his groin and his face, and he must have had something in his hand, because when it passed over my shoulder, it left a deep cut that soaked my arm with blood. I barely felt it, or rather, it felt like fire and I pulled at the sensation, using it to fuel me, to add power to everything I did.

  His face was lit by rage, and the wilder he became, the more calculating and dispassionate I was. But then the fight changed and I was no longer in control. Davis seemed to be everywhere at once. I struck out with my hands, and he knocked me to the ground, where the bigger, stronger boy always won. I struggled to rise, to roll out of his range. I had a fresh cut across my back. I don’t know what would have happened next, but two proctors tackled us. “No,” I shouted. I was gasping for breath. “I called it. I can beat him. It’s my right.”

  “Shut him up,” someone said. I recognized Tanner’s voice. He stepped into the circle, wearing his usual black suit. His hair was unkempt, and two of his personal bodyguards stood very close to him, expecting trouble. A proctor twisted my arm behind my back and then eased when I stopped struggling.

  “Get them out of here,” Tanner shouted. “Line up and march. I want every dormitory on lockdown.”

  Tanner glanced at the gate. A small crowd had gathered. “Jesus,” he said, “that’s all we need.” He turned to the boxer. “And what the hell is this? You want to see this on the news? Get him out of here, too.”