Mean Boy

by Lynn Coady

  “This is the greatest country,” he told me, leaning in. “Call it boring!” Dekker suddenly challenged me. “Call it boring if you will! Peace is boring. Sanity is boring.”

  “I didn’t call it boring,” I objected, feeling defensive. I didn’t, did I? Thinking and saying are not the same thing—not the same kind of betrayal.

  Dekker stared at me for a strangely blank moment before sitting back. His eyes darted toward the ladies’-room door.

  “I know you didn’t, Lawrence. I’m sorry.”

  I looked up, suddenly curious. “So then—where did you end up going to school? Did you go to school in Canada?”

  He sat blinking a bit longer than I would have expected for such a basic question.

  “Well I—I did an undergraduate degree in Cape Town, of course.”

  “But then where? What got you out of there? Did you go to Oxford?”

  He smiled, releasing a breath of laughter. “Oxford? No. No, Larry, I went to school in America. They wouldn’t have let someone like me within a mile of Oxford.”

  Now it was my turn to blink. Each blink served to shape a growing certainty behind my eyes. Each blink was an echo of the words someone like me. I didn’t want to ask, because I was afraid I knew the answer already. I didn’t want to hear it, but I echoed, I asked.

  “Someone like you?”

  More self-deprecating smiles from Dekker—I was starting to think it was the only kind of smile he knew.

  He scratched the scruff of his neck, still smiling. “How did I hear you put it one night? The way you described Rimbaud?”

  I thought for a moment, and then it swam to the surface of my brain. “Rimbaud was just some hick from a farm,” I restated. With, I imagine, not quite as much aplomb as the original.

  Dekker nodded at me, tapping himself in the chest. Like me. Like us.

  After which there is not much to do but get drunk under the pretence of “celebrating” the dismal poetry reading, which is what I proceed to do. So. Let’s see where we stand here. Poetry? Nope, draw a line through that. How many cosmic hints do you need, after all, how many bolts to the head? How many alleys to be scuttled in and out of before you see you’re not wanted up any of them?

  Oxford? That’s another line. Forgot where you came from for a minute there, didn’t you, big shot? Hullo, stranger. Welcome to the Highwayman Motor Hotel and Mini-Putt (adjusts crotch, removes sprig of hay from teeth). My name is Mungo, and I’ll be changing your sheets and replacing your toilet paper for the rest of my natural life.

  I finish my beer and gaze for a while at the bottom of my mug. When no one is looking, I hork into the mug, drawing it out. Making it last. I have christened the bottom of my mug Joanne.

  Time passes and people ignore me, as is only fit. Slaughter shows up once he can be good and sure the poetry is over—not, as you might expect, on his own inclination, but because it turns out Sherrie asked him to stay away out of an attack of shyness. It’s ten o’clock and Slaughter is already well beyond three sheets to the wind, slapping my back so hard in greeting my vision of Joanne vibrates briefly. When Sherrie, still high from the success of her event, babbles to him how great Claude’s reading in particular was, how people applauded for him, and how some of the birthday girls even hollered—Woo-woo!—Slaughter suddenly whirls, grinning, and seizes Claude by the head.

  “Guck,” says Claude in the ensuing silence.

  We all watch. Slaughter has grabbed people like me and Todd and flung us cheerfully back and forth like Raggedy-Andys on countless occasions. But it’s not the sort of thing you do to Claude. Nobody is smiling except Slaughter, who looks glazed and far away as he buries his knuckles into Claude’s scalp, rubbing furiously.

  “Good for you, there, Frenchie!” he enthuses. I can hear bone grind against bone.

  “Charles,” says Sherrie. And Slaughter lets Claude go.

  “What? It’s a congratulatory noogie!” Then he follows it up with what I suppose has to be a congratulatory shove. Claude staggers, but straightens up quickly. He smooths his dishevelled hair and looks at his watch. Todd starts to laugh, and I’d like to punch him.

  “I’m going to get a beer,” says Claude, looking off toward the bar since he can only look at his watch for so long.

  “Okay,” says Sherrie, seeming to gasp for breath. “But, um.”

  Slaughter drowns her out by yelling for a pitcher, and I’m the only one who sees when Claude walks past the bar and out the door.

  Chuck keeps bellowing, “Let’s do the Mariner, you assholes, whaddya say?” every five minutes, and jumps up, ready to herd us into the street.

  “The Mariner makes you too crazy,” Sherrie vetoes whenever he does this—but Sherrie would probably veto Slaughter if he suggested going out and making snow angels, after what happened with Claude. “You get weird about the Mariner.”

  “You get weird about the Mariner!” Chuck hollers back, cheerfully incoherent. “You and Rory, it’s all you can talk about half the time, kicking his fuckin’ head in. You’re obsessed.”

  “Yes, that’s right, Charles.”

  “I’m getting damn sick of it, if you want to know the truth. What did that asshole Rory ever do to you?”

  “Nothing, Charles.”

  “Nothing! Poor old Rory anyway, everybody wanting to kick his head in. Rory’s had a tough life. Rory never hurt anyone.”

  “I thought he was some kind of gangster,” Todd interrupts.

  “That’s just town gossip,” says Sherrie.

  “He is a gangster!” Slaughter insists. “He fuckin’ bootlegs. Sells drugs. Whores. It’s like the Old West down there.”

  Sherrie closes her eyes like a clubbed baby seal after whores. “He does not.”

  “Campbell’s a wildman,” yells Slaughter, suddenly grabbing me around the shoulders. This causes the entire room to shift as if we are in a ship’s hull. “Me and him, we musta snorted coke off every whore on Rory’s payroll.”

  “All right,” says Sherrie, looking around the room as if for Claude. It’s been hours since he left.

  “I’m telling you he’s got whores on the go! I got a different kinda sore on my dick from every last one of them!”

  The clubbed-seal look again from Sherrie and then a hearty round of hawg, hawg, hawg. Todd tries to join in, opening his mouth, but then shuts it abruptly. It’s a look I’ve drunk with him enough to recognize. He weaves hastily to the men’s room and I know it’s the last we’ll see of him all night. Todd gets shy when he gets sick, slinking off like a hurt animal to tough it out on his own.

  Twenty minutes later, the waitress yells last call. Slaughter stands, then falls like a wounded moose, then heaves himself up again, using Sherrie and me for balance, laughing.

  With some people, the cold air makes them sober. But Slaughter, I realized after seeing him sink to the floor, was beyond being sobered. The cold air is like a slap. Like a punch. It makes him crazy. He runs ahead of us toward Scarsdale Holdings, ready to poach another flag and singing “I Am Woman” by Helen Reddy at the top of his lungs.

  Sherrie and I look at each other. “I hate that song,” she tells me. “He knows it.”

  Even half-cut I can feel the trouble coming.

  I hear a whoop out of Chuck, peer down the street, and there it sits, parked—huge and yellow—just a few feet past Scarsdale’s. The driver is probably off drinking himself somewhere.

  Slaughter forgets all about the flag—he runs right past— it even flutters in the breeze he creates. “Oh my God,” Chuck howls. “The keys are in it, man! The fuckin’ keys are in it!”

  “Chuck,” I call, breaking into a wobbly run.

  “Let’s go dig up the graveyard!”

  He vaults into the seat before we can even catch up with him. He starts up the thing before we can say a word.

  The noise is like a backhoe belching itself to life in a small town in the dead of a winter’s night. Slaughter keeps gesturing like a train conductor for us to climb aboard
, and we keep hopping up and down shaking our heads back and forth, yelling “No,” and “Stop,” and not hearing ourselves.

  After a minute or so of this, he turns from us in disgust and yanks one of the levers in front of him. The backhoe belches and lurches like a goosed dinosaur. He shoots us a prideful grin as if to say, See how well I’m doing? and pushes the lever forward. The thing gives a roar and begins to move.

  It is happening so stupidly fast, I decide this must be one of my nutso dreams. We’ll follow him to the graveyard and Lydia will pop up from behind a tombstone waving her Milton, exhorting us to rein in desires lest we get fat like Janet, warning us off temptation.

  And then Slaughter will lower the shovel, pierce earth, and—snakes. Serpents everywhere.

  29.

  CHUCK WAVES ONE HAND in the air like a cowboy riding a bull as he trundles off down Livingston Street. Sherrie and I run about a block in the opposite direction, panicked and sobered by the sudden criminality saturating the air—desperate to get away from it. We’ve always been so good.

  I hear myself yelling, when I can hear my own voice again. I’m yelling that Slaughter is crazy.

  This is how we end up bushwhacking our way through the paths that encircle the marsh. People come here in summer to picnic and make out because it is private, surrounded by shrubs and the occasional stately willow. This allows them to imagine it to be a romantic lagoon-type place, as opposed to the swamp that it is. But Sherrie and I have plunged into the paths to hide, jazzed on the fear that someone has noticed Slaughter’s hijack—and who wouldn’t notice a backhoe roaring to life at two in the morning?—and called the cops.

  Reeds poke up from the snow, frozen cattails. I’ve never been in here at night, or in winter. We push our way through the brush like adventurers, a full moon piercing down. I am freaked out and babbling, demanding to know what the fuck is wrong with Slaughter, and what the fuck Slaughter thought he was doing, and does Slaughter want to get us all the fuck arrested and expelled.

  “He drinks too much,” Sherrie whispers. “And does God knows what else. And then he gets crazy.”

  “Well that’s—” I stammer, aware of the liquor and adrenalin battling it out for supremacy in my brain. “That’s—that’s pretty much obvious now isn’t it? But he can’t pull that kind of shit.”

  Sherrie is walking ahead of me and whispering so that I can hardly hear her over the noise of our feet punching through the snow, the bone-rattle of frozen branches as we move them aside.

  “What?”

  “There is something wrong with Charles.” She keeps whispering, but turns her head to say it this time.

  “Once again, stating the obvious.”

  Sherrie stops walking and I bash into her.

  “Oh, look,” she says. Through a break in the trees, we can see the whole marsh, the ghostly brightness of the moon, the glowing snow. Jutting reeds and branches, leafless, sagging. It feels like another graveyard, but a natural, incidental sort of graveyard—which means peaceful, and deathful, but without all that human fear.

  What is wrong with Slaughter, anyway? Why would he want to disturb such peace? So immediately? So instinctively?

  Now that we’ve stopped walking, nothing but winter silence. No birds, no bugs. No distant noise of some marauding backhoe. We stand in it—the cold silence—very much alone together.

  And I swear I didn’t even know it was coming. It’s my still-racing heart, my booze-heated blood. The words sneak out before my brain can catch up. It’s like I’m dreaming awake again.

  “Is there,” I hear myself saying, “a thing with Jim?”

  Sherrie turns to face me. Her big eyes seem to lose their colour in the dark, seem black inside—all pupil.

  “A thing with Jim.”

  “Um,” I say.

  “What do you mean? A thing with Jim and Charles?”

  “No,” I say, “I’m not talking about Slaughter anymore.”

  Sherrie goes back to gazing at the marsh.

  “It’s just that,” I say, “there’s been a couple of times when you seemed sad. About Jim.”

  “Well we’re all sad about Jim.” She waves a hand.

  “Yes,” I agree.

  “About what’s happened to him,” Sherrie adds.

  “Yes,” I say. “But—I don’t know. There’s just been a couple of moments where. Um. You seemed. Particularly sad.”

  Sherrie sucks a lungful of frozen air into herself as I speak, raising her shoulders to her ears and then letting them drop as she exhales.

  “I’m your friend,” I add. I put my hand on one of the shoulders because somehow it seems like the thing to do. “And so. I thought I should ask.”

  “I know you’re my friend,” Sherrie whispers, looking down.

  I am actually kind of surprised by this.

  “You’re probably my best friend at Westcock, Lawrence.”

  I’m really surprised by that. My hand is still on her shoulder, and I knead it a little, moving closer as I do. This also seems like the thing to do. That’s how it works in dreams, after all. Things just happen. It’s not like you have any say. I put my other hand on Sherrie’s other shoulder and turn her to face me. She keeps her eyes on the ground.

  “But I can’t talk to you about it right now,” she says. “I want to, and I probably will, but right now I have to wait.”

  She won’t look at me. I feel like she’s resisting the dream, struggling to wake us both up. What’s supposed to happen, I feel very strongly, is that she is supposed to look at me. And then I look at her and we see each other and she folds herself into my chest and the smell of her hair wafts up my nose and things start to warm up around here.

  “Wait for what?” I whisper, squeezing her shoulders with creeping impatience. My fingers are already starting to tingle with the cold and I want to shove them back in my pockets. I can feel a very un-friend-like desire taking hold of me. “Prurient interest,” I think it’s called. I heard the expression in a bootlegged Lenny Bruce recording one time. It means wanting to know what you know you shouldn’t know. It means wanting the dirty details.

  “I have to wait,” say Sherrie, glancing up at me, “for the time to be right.”

  “To be ripe?”

  “To be right.”

  I wiggle my toes around in my boots to keep them from going numb, to get my curiosity under control, the overwhelming need to wheedle. With that—the cold and the curiosity prickling away at me—the stupid dream dissipates. I awake to find myself a drunken, runny-nosed fuckwit in the middle of a frozen swamp.

  “So let’s not talk about it right now, okay?” she says, glancing up at me in a kind of plea. “We will. But not now.”

  I let my hands drop, turning away to look up at the moon. There is a thing with Jim. Fuckwit. There is.

  “Slaughter,” I say. “Speaking as a friend? It might be best not to get too attached to him. He just wants to get into your pants.”

  Sherrie sputters laughter, which is not the effect I was angling for.

  “Okay, Lawrence. Thanks for the tip.”

  “Yeah,” I say, shifting my weight and shoving my hands in my pockets. “Can we go?”

  “No,” says Sherrie, putting her hand on my chest because I’ve started to move away. “We have to stay for a couple more minutes.”

  I turn back to her, sighing, and the next thing I know I am sighing into Sherrie’s mouth. I freeze. I stop breathing entirely. Then I put my hands on her shoulders again and try to resume, inhaling surreptitiously through my nose. The smell of her hair fills my head.

  And just when things are starting to warm up the way I dreamed, she isn’t there anymore. I open my eyes, groping for her.

  “I want us to stay friends,” she tells me, stepping back. “Just friends. Okay, Lawrence?”

  I’m hopeful for a moment. “So we can we keep doing that? Every once in a while?”

  “No,” she says. “That was just to get it out of the way.”

  �
��I am having a terrible semester,” I fret to Sherrie. “Nothing is working out for me.”

  So Sherrie gives in and lets it happen one more time.

  30.

  THE MAIN EXHIBITS of the Hollywood Horrors used to give me nightmares as a kid, just like everybody else I grew up with. And then we all got a little older, got used to them, and started laughing at our younger, chickenshit selves, scared of a cartoon character like Vincent Price with his pencil moustache. In the summer, we would go into the Hollywood as a joke, run our hands up one of Tippi Hedren’s cold thighs if the caretaker’s head was turned, take turns positioning our necks beneath Dracula’s dripping fangs. The real test of fear was approaching the dummies, extending your hands to them, making contact. Dracula’s leering rictus didn’t scare us at this point. The monsters weren’t the problem. It was the physical reality of the dummies themselves—and the small, gruesome details of the regular-people dummies, the ones under attack.

  Eventually, though, we got used to that too. We forced ourselves to get used to it because that’s what growing up is all about.

  But right around that time we were deemed old enough to ascend to new levels of psychic discomfort. At sixteen, you were allowed to view the legendary “hidden” exhibit. The older kids had always terrified the younger ones with stories of what lay beyond a thick set of curtains in the back of the museum—curtains so black that light got lost in them, and if you didn’t know they were there, you never would until the day someone drew them apart with a malignant flourish and bade you witness the abominations that lay beyond.

  Spikes through heads, the older kids avowed. Brains, dripping. Women pinned spread-eagled on tables, naked. Working guillotines. Expelled eyeballs, dangling from heads. By the time we hit thirteen, no self-respecting kid claimed to believe in the hidden exhibit. The older ones who kept insisting upon its existence were a pack of boys crying wolf as far as we were concerned. We stopped up our ears, wore sneers the moment the subject came up. How stupid did they think we were? Tell us the one about Santa Claus next. Tell us about the guy with the hook where his hand should be.