Bobby’s own face went bright red and drew back his foot. “I’ll kill you, you fucking bastard!”
That’s what Rafe was hoping would happen. He hadn’t a doubt that he could take Bobby as long as he was aware the attack was coming. But Bobby’s friends grabbed him and pulled him away.
Rafe leaped up. Well, he’d have to bide his time but the paybacks, when they came for Bobby Kelly, would definitely be hell.
He waited and he watched. It took a couple of weeks but finally, he found Bobby and half a dozen of his cohorts down at the back of the school grounds under a group of trees where the smokers congregated to burn one. It was a place the teachers never went. By common consent all the grown ups averted their eyes and pretended it didn’t exist.
Rafe walked up to Bobby. “It’s time to finish this, Bob.”
“I think it is finished.”
“Nope, not yet, it’s not.”
His fist came out so quickly, no one even realized what was happening. Then again and again, until Bobby went down, puking, with a broken nose, a missing front tooth, two swelling eyes and a cut chin, all before he’d had even had a chance to get his hands up.
“Stop, Rafe, I quit.” The bigger boy gasped, spitting blood.
“How can you quit when you never even got started, Bob?”
Bobby figured it was over until he heard the snick of a switchblade and saw the blade leap out of its handle. The group around them gave out a collective, “oh, my God.”
“Jesus, Rafe, please don’t kill me!”
“I’m not going to kill you, you dumb fuck. I’m just going to give you something to remember me by.”
He lightly drew two quick lines on Bobby’s cheek with the razor-sharp knife, one slightly longer than the other. Blood instantly bubbled out of the wound. Which resembled a check mark….or perhaps a slightly off-kilter Vee.
“Do you think I would I kill you in front of this many witnesses?” he asked casually, as if he was truly curious about the answer. “But, Bobby, let’s say for the sake of argument that you told about today…” he looked around the rest of the on-lookers, “or that anyone did, and I did want to kill you, do you think, Bobby, that I’d be smart enough to come up with a way to do it so that no one would know what happened?” The smile came and went so fast, they weren’t quite sure they’d even seen it.
But everyone there believed totally, absolutely and positively that if Rafe Vincennes decided to kill Bobby, or anyone else, he would be smart enough to do it and never get caught.
“One more thing before I go, Bob - I hit you ten times, do you want to know why?”
“Why?” It was a reluctant grunt more than a word.
This time, the smile stayed long enough to be plenty sure it was there - “why, its Rafe’s Rules of Vengeance, Bobby - whatever anybody does to me, I do back to them times ten.”
*
So when Bobby Kelly went home with his broken face and a double line of crusted blood across his cheek, he told his folks he’d been jumped by a gang of, he thought, six kids. They must have been from out of town. He didn’t ever remember seeing any of them before. He didn’t remember what any of them looked like. He didn’t remember what they’d been wearing.
Even when his outraged parents took him to the police station to file a report, he stuck stubbornly to his story. The police were pretty sure it was bullshit but no matter how they asked the questions, they got the same answers. Finally, they just let it go and sent Bobby Kelly home.
No one really ever told what happened but still, the truth got around through the school grapevine. It became one more part of the Rafe Vincennes legend.
* *
All the Benedict Incorporated School District teachers were at the annual conference. These three days were something they all hated. An endless series of boring panels and seminars about the proper way to make out lesson plans and how to comply with No Child Left Behind, blah, blah, blah. Meal times were the only bearable parts of the day. The food at the historic Marylebone Inn was excellent and at least they could kick back and talk about subjects they were interested in, at the present moment, that subject being Rafe Vincennes.
At the table was Linda Dee, tall and skinny, with wiry, short black hair and faintly bulging brown eyes, arched over with heavy, thick brows. (Some of her colleagues had discussed buying her a brow-shaping session at the salon but they never had quite enough nerve to actually do it). Even though, most female teachers were wearing slacks now, Miss Dee still stuck to straight skirts and cotton blouses and flat-heeled shoes. In the chair next to her sat Rhonda Fisher, the high school guidance counselor. She was plump and rosy-cheeked with a gray pageboy and twinkling blue eyes. She was one of the most popular adults in school and genuinely cared about the problems of the kids who came to her for assistance. Jeb Kroner was next. He taught Earth Science at the high school. He was a dedicated teacher but he’d been teaching long enough that his subject was getting a little boring and he was becoming somewhat cynical about stuffing Earth Science into mostly not-very-interested young minds. He looked a little like he might have been a hippie back in the Swingin’ Sixties, with his shapeless gray beard and an easygoing attitude that made you think he could still remember how to roll a joint if he wanted to. And finally, Judith Lentz, who taught Honors English. Judith revered authors and literature. She could quote poetry for hours on end. She affected the look she thought portrayed her soul, with mostly long, filmy Renaissance-type dresses and flowing blonde hair. Rafe Vincennes was one of her best students. She’d given him an A+ last semester in spite of the fact that she suspected his ability in her class stemmed only from his head and not at all from his heart.
Rhonda Fisher was telling them about her latest experiences in counseling.
“I have so many girls coming into my office to cry on my shoulder about Rafe Vincennes, it’s an epidemic. I think I could respond to them in my sleep. ‘Yes, dear, I know how much you love him’. ‘Yes, dear, I know you think you can’t live without him”. ‘Yes, dear, I know how he makes you feel when he makes love to you.’ ‘Yes, dear, I know he broke your heart.’ I’m beginning to think he’s going to run out of pretty girls before he runs out of time at Benedict High.“
“Rafe Vincennes,” Linda Dee said with loathing in her voice, “I’d like to kill that worthless little prick!”
“Whoa, Dee, we’ve always known you didn’t like Rafe but that sounds personal.”
“It is personal, because my Chelsea is one of those girls Rhonda is talking about. As much as I’ve always distrusted him - and yet I had to sit on the side of her bed and listen to her cry her eyes out and tell me how much she loves that little bastard. The whole time I was thinking that if I had my hands around his neck, he wouldn’t be taking advantage of any more young girls. She admitted she was a virgin until he got a’hold of her. He should be charged with statutory rape!”
“But, Dee, how could he be charged with statutory rape when Chelsea’s 18 and Rafe Vincennes is what? Fourteen now?”
“Fourteen in actual years, yes, but he’s always been an adult in that sociopathic brain of his!”
“Careful, Dee, it wouldn’t be smart to let many people hear you call one of our students a sociopath with no evidence whatsoever, especially when he’s a Vincennes. That’s a pretty heavy charge.”
“It’s true though. I suppose you’ve all heard the gossip that it was Rafe that beat the hell out of Bobby Kelly and then cut him. He’ll probably always have that scar on his face.”
“We’ve heard it but no one has ever been willing to say it, especially Bobby himself. Jacobs called him into his office and talked to him for about an hour trying to get him to tell and he flat out denied it was Rafe.”
“But we know it was, don’t we, because who else would have the power to intimidate them all that much except Rafe Vincennes?”
They nodded in agreement.
Jeb Kroner laughed. “Well, I think what any of us who have pretty daughters have to do
is go home and make them ugly until Rafe is gone from Benedict. Maybe we could buy some of the make up that actors use to make them big gross noses and put moles with black hair sprouting out of them on their chins.”
Had Rafe been there, he would have chuckled back and maybe told him, “too late to lock the barn door now, Mr Kroner, that horse has already left.”
* *
“You know what, Rafe?”
“What, Lane?”
“Today, Mrs Jett, the gym teacher, was out sick and they told us we could just spend the class dancing or doing floor exercises on the mats or whatever we wanted to do. But, some of us just sat around in a circle and talked about sex.”
He cocked one dark eyebrow and grinned in amusement. “And just what did the girls in your 7th grade class have to say about sex, Laney? Did they tell you anything you didn’t already know?”
She giggled. “No. They told lots of wrong things. Misty Madison is the only one who has ever done it with a boy and she said he was in and done in less than a minute and he didn’t have a clue that she was supposed to get something out of it too. She said most girls don’t have orgasms from sex with boys anyways, they just fake it and wait ‘til it’s over and then masturbate. She said her Mom said it’s even that way with grown women and she had never had a climax from a man! Stormy said her older sister told her if she gave a boy a blow job to be sure and stop and finish him with her hand, to never let him come in her mouth. And Heather said she thought the whole idea of putting a boy’s privates in her mouth was gross and she would never do it. Lacy said you could only come if you were in love and probably Misty didn’t love the boy she was with and that’s why nothing happened. She said that’s how you could know if love was true, if the boy could make you have an orgasm. Is that true, Rafe, do you have to love somebody to have an orgasm? I love you and I have orgasms all the time.” She giggled again.
“No, Lane, that isn’t true although it’s nice when it happens that way. I think probably lots of girls have to fool themselves into believing they’re in love to be able to come though.”
“But not boys?”
“Nah, Lane, it doesn’t matter to guys, they can get it off whether they like a girl very much or not. So, anyway, Lane, what were you saying when this intellectual conversation about sex was taking place?”
“I was just looking at them with my eyes real wide like I didn’t have the faintest idea what they were talking about. Everyone thinks I’m Miss Innocent, you know?”
He stroked her hair. “You are Miss Innocent, Laney. I might have taught you a lot about sex, but you’re still Miss Innocent.”
* *
Every Vincennes got a new car for his or her 16th birthday. It was the event Rafe had been looking forward to more than any other in his life. If ever there was anybody who needed a car, who deserved a car, who belonged behind the wheel of a car, it was Rafe, or so at least he thought. He’d always been older in his head than his age, as noted by Linda Dee, and he’d always been treated as if he was older, like being advanced so far ahead of his peers in school. He’d done everything else early. It had chafed him bloody raw to have to wait until the fucking bureaucracy decided when he could have a license to drive a car.
He’d read reviews by the hundreds and had decided that he wanted a Corvette. It was the fastest street legal car he might, might, be able to talk Renny into and he was going to have to do some serious talking to get it done. His father had always sprung for decent rides for his kids. He couldn’t remember as far back as Morgan and Wyatt but Gabe had gotten a Mustang and he thought Denis’ birthday car had been a Monte Carlo. Forget the girls. Madeline and Jocelyn had both chosen SUVs and Annecy picked a PT Cruiser of all things. Still, he thought Renny might give him a little trouble over a Corvette, not only because it was more expensive than what he’d spent on the others (the ice-blue one Rafe coveted was $50,000 plus), but there was the cautiousness factor as well. Would he trust Rafe not to drive it too fast and maybe wreck the car or kill himself? Maybe not. Could Rafe be trusted not to drive it too fast? He grinned to himself. Ummm, absolutely not.
There was not much middle ground with Rafe. He was a person of extremes. Stop or Go. He was capable of being almost Zen-like in the way he could maintain a level of total stillness. Teachers had noticed, even when he was little, when most small boys are full of pent energy, that Rafe Vincennes could lounge without moving a muscle for longer periods of time than most grown ups could. He never squirmed or fidgeted. He never interrupted a conversation and he never rushed out to recess but strolled gracefully down the hall like time didn’t concern him. His kindergarten teacher said whatever the opposite of Attention Deficit Disorder was, that’s what Rafe Vincennes had.
By contrast, when he swung into action, it was quickly and surely, without hesitation or wasted motion. It was why he was so good at hunting. He could sit, silent and unmoving, in a deer stand or a duck blind for as many hours as necessary, maintaining his focus, until his target was in range and then within seconds, boom, he aimed and fired and the deer or duck was dead, his shot invariably hitting exactly the spot he’d targetted.
He’d heard the phrase, “need for speed” but couldn’t recall what it was associated with. He knew he had it though. He thought he must have a lower tolerance for boredom than most people or maybe it was more of an addiction to stimulation. He’d never been tempted by substances. He neither drank nor did any drugs whatsoever. He didn’t even take the pain pills the doctor had given him the time he got a groin pull on the football field and that had hurt like a son-of-a-bitch. His avoidance of chemicals was because he always wanted, not really wanted but needed, to be in complete control of both himself and others. He had learned that most people were more controllable than they thought they were. It was just a matter of discovering their strengths and weaknesses and what triggers could be used to manipulate either one. Most of the time, they weren’t even aware of what was being done. Bobby, for instance. He could have got Bobby to go after him on the spot if his friends hadn’t saved his ass. Of course, in the end, waiting turned out to be more fun. Or Laney, you could wrap her right around your little finger with just a little attention and affection. But, the thing was, how could you expect to control others if you couldn’t control yourself?
Rafe walked warily through life. He usually had his guard up because he had to learn things that seemed to come naturally to others. Like taboos. He didn’t think he had the moral boundaries that held most people back in their behavior. (He still didn’t consider himself a sociopath though). Thank God, he was as smart as he was and able to catch on as quickly as he did to be able to adapt to society’s restrictions or at least to be clever about violating them.
Of course, he’d violated one of the most serious taboos with Lane but he truly didn’t see why it was wrong. He’d cared for her since she was a baby when no one else seemed very interested in doing it. He’d watched out for her and protected her as best he could and they loved each other so why shouldn’t they show it with sex when it was so enjoyable to both of them? In fact, he thought she was probably the only person he did love or had ever loved or probably ever would love. It was his own kind of love, he admitted that. And that way maybe wasn’t as committed and dedicated as the love he saw in the movies, the kind of love that made you want to forsake all others. He knew he kept her tucked on a mental shelf for the most part, only bringing her down when he wanted her. He also knew it wasn’t like that for her. If things were different and they were boyfriend and girlfriend, she’d be as faithful to him as anyone could ever be to another. But as much as he was able to give of himself, he gave to her.
But anyway, back to speed. He loved it and always had. That’s why he asked to be able to ride Destiny when he was 10. The gray stallion liked to run as far and as fast as he could and no one else let him do that but Rafe. They all held him back but Rafe let him fly flat out. He always felt a kind of bond between them when he mounted Des, feeling the horse’s eagerness, l
ike he knew there would be no governor on him as long as Rafe was on his back.
He felt the same way about skiing. He was a fearless skier who’d always taken on slopes considered too extreme for someone his age. Once an instructor had seen him and had approached him about training for the Olympics. He was sure, he said, that Rafe could easily make the Olympic team. But Rafe was honest with him. He didn’t want to work that hard. He loved skiing because it offered him freedom but it wouldn’t seem like freedom anymore if he had to follow a ruthless regimen of training. “I’m too lazy for that,” he told the disappointed coach.
He found the same freedom when he was first old enough to take the cigarette boat, which wasn’t very old, because the keys to all the boats and cars were kept right there in the key safe in the entry way into the kitchen and it was never locked. And who was there to tell him he couldn’t do it or for that matter, who would even know? He’d watched when he was a passenger to see how to work the controls. He knew he could do it. He practiced when he took it the first time until he had it down pat and then he went far out, beyond any traffic, and let it rip. He could still remember the exhilaration of charging the choppy waves, bouncing across them, feeling the cool spray hitting his body and the wind whipping his hair, just him and the boat, far away from anyone else. Speed was his drug of choice. It was the thing that let him forget people and all their idiotic and arbitrary rules and how carefully you had to plan to deal with them because it was their world and not his, not like soaring through the air on skis or jetting across the water, where he was in his element.
He wasn’t like sweet little Lane, who just accepted what people gave her. If something was important enough to him, he’d make it clear to his parents until he got what he wanted and since he asked for so little, they were always happy to oblige. Like ski camp. He’d never been skiing (Vincennes family vacations were a thing of the past by the time he and Lane came along) but he could tell by watching it on t.v. or looking at pictures of skiers bulleting down snowy hills that it was something he’d enjoy so he researched ski camps on the computer and when he found the one he wanted, he presented it to them and they’d readily agreed. He hated leaving Laney for the whole week. She was only about six then. He made them promise they would at least check on her now and then and make sure she was okay. He guessed they did but the night he got home and brought her to bed with him, she clung to him at first, crying, “please, please, Rafe, don’t ever go away and leave me so long again, it was just awful here without you.” And he never had. He always listed a skiing trip when he was asked what he wanted for Christmas but from then on, he confined himself to only going for long weekends.
Sociopath? Page 6
