Mojo

by Tim Tharp

  So now I was alone, but it wasn’t much of a relief. Hanging at the police station is weird. There’s this air about the place that makes you feel guilty even if you didn’t do anything. It’s like you can’t move or even think the way you normally do. Chances are, they have a camera trained on you and are analyzing every move you make. There was a phone right there on the desk. I could’ve called my parents, but I didn’t. It was stupid, but it was like even doing that might make me look bad, like I was a criminal because the powers that be thought I was. So I just sat there staring at the floor.

  I don’t even know how long it was before the dynamic duo waltzed back in to tell me how Randy just confessed. Usually, I would find that funny. After all, I was the king of watching TV crime shows, true-life and fictional, so I knew it was pretty much standard procedure to trick one guy into spilling the beans by saying his partner already did. But knowing Randy, I wasn’t so sure he wouldn’t cough out a confession. I could just imagine the exchange:

  Detective Hair Gel: I’ll bet you’d like a Coke right about now, huh?

  Randy: I wouldn’t mind a Dr Pepper.

  Detective Hair Gel: Well, you tell us what we need to know, and I’ll see you get one.

  Randy (unable to sacrifice immediate satisfaction in order to keep out of the big house): Okay, yeah, we did it. We pumped Hector Maldonado full of ecstasy, heroin, and a little jet fuel just to see what would happen. Now, how about that Dr Pepper?

  No, I didn’t feel so good about my chances. “I want to call my parents,” I said.

  “Dylan wants to call his parents,” Detective Forehead told his partner, in a mocking, playground-bully way.

  “Do you really?” Detective Hair Gel asked. “I doubt that. I mean, what are you going to tell them, that you’re down at the police station because you were out doing drugs and killed your best buddy? Because that’s what we’ve got on you right now. The only question is whether it was an accident or intentional. And let me tell you, we’re a lot more likely to lean toward the accidental side of the situation if you just come clean about what you were up to tonight.”

  It was starting to look like I’d never get home. At least not until I’d served a good twenty years in maximum security. I wondered what I’d done to deserve this kind of trouble. Obviously, I didn’t kill Hector, but maybe I’d done something else the universe was paying me back for.

  Just then, the door opened and a lady cop motioned for the detectives to come into the hall. “Sit tight, kid,” Detective Forehead told me. “We’ll be back to have you sign a confession in a minute.”

  They didn’t have anything for me to sign when they came back, though. Instead, they did something I never would’ve expected in a million years. They told me to go home.

  I’m like, “What? Just like that?”

  “Just like that,” Detective Forehead said as he studied the contents of some kind of paperwork.

  “Don’t worry, Dylan,” added Detective Hair Gel. “We’ll be in touch. Don’t leave the city.”

  Don’t leave the city. Like maybe I had a private jet waiting to fly me off to Acapulco.

  CHAPTER 3

  Waiting for my parents to come pick us up, Randy and I sat on the edge of the concrete planter in front of the station trading interrogation stories as we simultaneously texted the news to whoever came to mind. Turned out Randy didn’t crack under pressure after all. In fact, he had a better strategy than I did—playing dumb ass. He acted like he couldn’t even understand the questions, getting the cops to restate them over and over, then acting like he understood, only to come up with an answer that made no sense at all.

  “I think those guys chasing us might have been Wiccans,” he told them when they asked him how long he’d known Hector.

  Not bad. Maybe Randy was some kind of weird genius after all. He wore them out way before they could wear him out, so they came back at me.

  “But why do you think they let us go all of a sudden like that?” he asked, the streetlight shining on his oily brown hair.

  “Simple,” I said. “They probably finally called the grocery store and found out we were at work all evening. Idiots.”

  “Yeah,” he said. “Kind of hard to get loaded up on ecstasy with your buddies when you’re standing around catching salami coming down a conveyor belt and packing it into paper or plastic. They should’ve called the store before hauling us to the station.”

  “Nazis.”

  Driving us home, my parents also got pissed about the cops giving us the third degree, but did they do anything about it? No. They just rattled on about civil rights until it finally dawned on my mom that finding a dead kid in a Dumpster might be traumatic for our tender teenage minds. Then she and Dad both started in with their TV-talk-show psychotherapy. Randy and I traded exasperated looks like, Parents—how can they be so clueless?

  At home, I passed on their offer to sit around the kitchen table with some cold leftovers and discuss my feelings about what happened. They meant well, but how could I talk about Hector Maldonado while Mom and Dad stared back at me like I was still their five-year-old little teddy bear? No, I accepted the cold meat loaf all right, but I took it back to my room, where I could call my all-time best friend and confidante, Audrey Hoffman.

  I’d known Audrey since the days of the little inflatable backyard swimming pool—me in my Tiki-head swim trunks and her in the frilly pink one-piece that I never let her forget. I mean, you should see her now—she’s definitely not frilly or pink. Mostly she does her hair in pigtails and wears plaid shirts, baggy black pants, and some kind of hat, mainly a black Kangol 504. Artsy garb. She’s the photographer on the school paper but plans on doing high-art photography later on.

  Audrey used to live across the street, so we did everything together. We read the same books, watched horror movies on late-summer nights, even shot two-character videos in the backyard. The best had to be the one about two Martians trying to figure out how to eat spaghetti. It was pretty hilarious.

  When she found out her parents were getting divorced and she would have to move across town with her mother, she came straight to me. Same with when she decided she was a lesbian in seventh grade. Turned out we had similar tastes in girls. Not that either one of us was exactly successful in that department. At least not by the start of junior year.

  So, anyway, there was no way I could go to bed without talking to her voice-to-voice about this latest ordeal. In a way, she was kind of like my conscience sometimes. I could talk to her, and she’d help me figure out what was really important. This time she didn’t seem to totally get what I was going through, though. I tried to explain how the cops had hammered away at me, making me feel like a total nobody loser, but she kept pulling the conversation back in Hector’s direction.

  Why didn’t I haul him out of the Dumpster? she wanted to know. Give him a little dignity. And she couldn’t understand how the cops could be so sure Hector had OD’d. Guys like Hector don’t OD, not in her opinion. She even wanted to know when his funeral was going to be. Like I could possibly know that already.

  I’m like, “Look, I’m trying to explain how these cops go at you like everything you ever were doesn’t matter.”

  And she goes, “Well, I just thought you’d care a little more about Hector.”

  “I care, but nobody can do anything to him anymore. Me, I’m not so sure about.”

  Maybe talking about the thing wasn’t such a good idea after all. When I got into bed, every time I closed my eyes I saw Hector’s face, staring blankly, the candy-bar wrapper stuck to his cheek. I felt his arm next to mine and his hair against my fingers. Dead-kid hair. And in the background I heard Detectives Forehead and Hair Gel drilling me with questions, trying to beat me down. What if I hadn’t had an alibi? Would I be in jail right now? It was enough to make you feel like a beetle on the sidewalk with a boot raised right over your head.

  CHAPTER 4

  The next morning there wasn’t much in the news about Hector, jus
t the basics about where he went to school and who his family was. Body in the Dumpster. Cause of death: suspected drug overdose. Discovered by two teenagers. Names not released because of their ages.

  Really? It was okay to tell Hector’s name but not Randy’s and mine? No wonder the local news wasn’t barraging us with phone calls.

  My parents offered to let me stay home, like finding a dead body was some kind of stomach bug. I passed. No, I had to go somewhere. If the newspapers weren’t going to call, I could hang with Audrey and rehash the ordeal with Randy. Funny thing, though. As I walked down the hall to first hour, kids started calling to me.

  “Hey, dude! Way to go!”

  “Dylan! That is, like, so surreal, man!”

  “Hey, Dylan, what was it like?”

  Some of these people I didn’t even think knew my name. Obviously, the story had blazed its way across the text-message universe like a renegade asteroid. Nothing so perfect to prick up the curiosity of the high school populace like the death of a classmate.

  So there I was, surrounded by eager faces, some of them even belonging to some pretty decent-looking girls. They all wanted to know what it was like, sitting in a Dumpster with a dead body. Hector and I were suddenly famous. Too bad Hector wasn’t there to enjoy it.

  I don’t know how many times I told the story that day. First in one hall, then another. At the beginning of class, at the end of class. In the cafeteria, the library, the parking lot. Everybody wanted to hear it. This one guy, the baggy-black-clothes-and-silver-chain-wearing Corman Rogers, kept coming back for more. I’m like, “Dude, morbid much?”

  I got better with each telling. By lunch, it started to seem more like a movie I’d seen than something real that’d happened to me. And Hector, I guess, became more like a movie character than a kid who had walked those same high school halls. Maybe that was what I needed him to be at the time.

  After lunch, my teacher sent me to the front office to have a talk with this special grief counselor they called in to deal with the student population’s feelings about the death. There wasn’t exactly a line waiting to get in. Apparently, Principal Chrome Dome, or whoever, thought if anyone needed to talk about it, Randy and I were it. But I didn’t have much to say. Nobody likes having someone they don’t know picking at their brain.

  I was okay, I told the counselor lady, but she insisted I had some feelings I needed to sort through. Maybe she was right. Later, at night, when I was in bed in the dark, Hector’s face came back again, and the detectives came back, and it wasn’t like a movie. It was like doom itself had infiltrated my brain.

  CHAPTER 5

  A couple days later, Hector’s family threw him a funeral. I thought it would be weird to go—maybe they didn’t want to be reminded of the condition I’d found him in—but Audrey was like, “No, you have to go. We’ll both go. It’d just be too sad for his family if, like, nobody from school shows up. Besides, don’t you want to remember him at peace instead of how you found him?”

  So there we were on Thursday afternoon at St. Andrew Avellino, and what do you know—the place was actually pretty full. Sure, there were only a couple of kids from school—that’s all the friends Hector had—but apparently he had a pretty big extended family. By far most of the people there looked Hispanic to some degree. Audrey and I had to grab a seat in back, which was fine. I didn’t want to stick out as the guy who only spent time with Hector in the Dumpster after he was already dead.

  I’d never been to a Catholic funeral before. My parents aren’t exactly into organized religion. On Facebook, under Religion, they entered spiritual. But I have to say this for the Catholics—they really know how to put on a show. And I don’t mean that in any kind of disrespectful way. I don’t usually call clothes garments, but the priest running the program had some mega-cool garments going on. The hat alone made you feel like, This is going to be serious.

  And then there was the light filtering through the stained-glass saints, and the praying, and the Latin, and the rituals. Even some Mexican songs. And on top of that, this huge crucifix staring down at you from the front of the sanctuary, all kind of sad and beat and worn out with humanity but forgiving you anyway. I’m telling you—as the thing wound down, I couldn’t help but feel Hector’s ghost or spirit or whatever was a long way from the high school trash bin.

  It made me wonder what my funeral might be like. I’d probably have about the same number of friends from school show up but a whole lot less family, since I was an only child and our nearest relatives lived in Dallas. No fancy garments or elaborate rituals either. No big accomplishments to reel off in the eulogy. After all, my most noteworthy act so far was finding Hector. That wasn’t exactly eulogy material.

  I’d be lucky to get a half-dozen flowers around my casket. The school probably wouldn’t even hire a special grief counselor to come in. Outside of Audrey and Randy, my other so-called friends would probably forget me in a week. I felt like Scrooge from A Christmas Carol when the Ghost of Christmas Yet to Come showed him his own gravestone. The good thing was Scrooge had a second chance to do something, so maybe I did too.

  After the service, we hung around so Audrey could snap some photos of the church and the crowd coming out for the school paper. I should mention that I submitted a story about Hector in the Dumpster to the paper, but Ms. Jansen, my journalism teacher, wouldn’t accept it. She said my writing style was too informal and the Dumpster stuff was too undignified. She thought a simple obituary would do.

  Anyway, several of the mourners were standing around staring in our direction. I didn’t know whether they were staring at Audrey, this picture-taking chick with pink, blue, and green streaks wound into her brown pigtails, or if they figured out I was the guy who’d found Hector.

  Then, on the way to the parking lot, this minivan of a guy in a black suit and a black hat with a red feather tucked into the hatband walked up and grabbed my arm.

  “Your name is Dylan Jones?” he asked. He was probably nineteen or so—his goatee made it hard to tell. He was a good couple inches shorter than me but was so square and solid, you knew he could run you over and leave nothing but a dark spot on the road.

  “That’s my name,” I said.

  “Do you know the North Side Monarchs?” he asked, his eyes digging deep into mine.

  I’m like, “The what?”

  “One of my boys told me you’re the one who found Hector when he died.”

  “Uh, yeah.”

  “And you don’t know who the North Side Monarchs are?”

  “No, I don’t have any idea.”

  His face relaxed, and he almost smiled. “I guess it was just fate, then, that you found him.”

  “Fate, yeah, that’s right.”

  He put out his hand for me to shake. “My name’s Alberto Hernandez. Everyone calls me Beto. I’m Hector’s cousin. Thanks for coming to the funeral.”

  I’m like, “That’s all right,” and introduced him to Audrey.

  “You know,” he said, “it’s not like the cops and the news said—Hector didn’t take no overdose. If he had drugs in him, someone else must’ve dosed him.”

  “I never thought he took any drugs,” Audrey said, and I go, “Me either,” though truthfully I wasn’t so sure. I mean, yes, he didn’t seem like a druggie type, but then you can’t really be sure what goes on with people after the last school bell rings.

  Beto stared into my eyes again. “You be careful.”

  “Never anything but.”

  As he walked away, Audrey goes, “Wow, that guy was good-looking. I mean, if I liked guys, that’s the kind of guy I’d like.”

  “I don’t know,” I said. “He kind of weirded me out the way he just came up out of the blue like that.”

  Audrey nudged her shoulder against my arm. “Well, that’s just the cost of being famous, I guess.”

  CHAPTER 6

  Famous. Yeah, right. Fame is fleeting, they say, and they know what they’re talking about. In my case, it lasted less
than a week. And to be even more specific, it changed within five seconds. On Friday, I walked into first hour, and Jason “The Growth” Groethe—who’s a big loser idiot—called out, “Hey, check it out, here comes Body Bag.”

  Body Bag. What was that even supposed to mean? I didn’t put Hector into a bag. But the whole class erupted into laughter. Ha ha ha. How lame. But by the end of the day, that was all I heard—Here comes Body Bag. Even from girls.

  It was all over then. A major rule of high school is that once you get a nickname, you’re stuck with it no matter if it makes sense or not. Maybe Jason figured he had to get even with somebody for his getting tagged as The Growth, but, hey, I never called him that. At least not before he came up with the Body Bag deal.

  By the next week, I’d given up on getting a decent article about Hector in the school paper. Instead, I decided to interview Haley Pressler, the cheerleader’s cheerleader. Okay, yes, some people did call her “The Pretzel,” but apparently being super-hot is a pretty effective inoculation against the full-time nickname curse. Anyway, I had this idea for an article about how new kids could adjust to school, and Haley seemed like a good expert to get tips from. Besides, like I said, she was ultra-hot.

  So I met her by her locker right before lunch, thinking just maybe I’d talk her into doing the interview over a burger and some fries. But no, she wanted to do it right there in the hall. So I’m like, “Okay. I mean, it’s not the most comfortable way to do an interview, but I guess it’s cool,” and just then I heard footsteps and a rustling sound behind me. Before I could turn around, some of Haley’s stupid jock friends grabbed me and yanked a big plastic trash bag over my head and shoulders.

  It was the worst. You cannot see when you’re stuffed inside a Hefty bag. I couldn’t move my arms, and I was stumbling around the hall yelling, “Get this thing off me! Get this thing off me!”

  All the while these idiots were chanting, “Body Bag! Body Bag! Body Bag!”