by Tom Upton
“Yeah, she does,” I confess.
“What kind of things? Does she tell you to get up in the middle of the night, take a butcher knife from the kitchen, and then go visiting your parents’ room?” she asks in a low, creepy voice, but she’s just kidding-- I think she is, anyway.
“No,” I whisper. “Nothing like that.”
“Then what?” she demands.
“Just little things-- harmless things. That’s all Joker ever tells me.”
“Like what?”
I am reluctant to tell her the last suggestion Joker made to me. It was rather grand compared with her other ideas.
She leans toward me, whispers in my ear, “Tell me-- what is it?”
Just then the voices come alive. They sound as though they are in my head, but they also sound as though they are coming from everywhere, from inside the school, from across the open field where the traitor is chugging along in perfectly straight lines.
What’s the harm in telling her, Joker says. It’s all in good fun, so tell her.
And Angel chimes in, Of course, it‘s not harmless. Any of these things we tell you are just for you and nobody else. It is like giving away dreams.
Grumpy grumbles, Bored? Bored! Why are teenaged girls always so damned bored? Build a bridge, and get over it. All life is boring. What did you expect?-- to be entertained every second of the day.
Tell her, Joker says sweetly.
Don’t, Angel warns.
Grumpy groans.
I turn my head to look at Jackie. Her face is right there. Her large brown eyes seem to be staring right through me, and then, as though they have just spotted something joyous, they brighten.
“It’s a good one, isn’t it?” she says. She is all smiles now, though she doesn’t yet know why she is so happy. She is my friend, and seeing her so happy, makes me happy. When Jackie is smiling you never see her scars. She looks perfect.
Then the voice that scares me speaks. Jackie is such a pretty girl, much prettier than you, Lurker says. Look at those eyes! And that mouth-- her lips all soft and luscious. Why don’t you lean forward and kiss her? You know you want to do it. Nothing wrong with that. Girls kiss girls all the time--
“Shut up,” I hiss
Jackie shifts away, and stares at me.
“Are they talking to you now?” she asks. “What are they saying?”
“Never mind,” I tell her.
She looks hurt, but only for a second, and then her scowl returns and she stares at me hard.
“It’s crazy,” I say.
“That’s what I want. The crazier, the better.”
“You know the church?” I ask.
“The church? Which church? There are only about fourteen churches around here. I always wonder why the town needs so many.”
“The church down the road from my house,” I say, and I can hear Joker snicker in my head. “The white one, with the tall steeple.”
“Yeah, yeah,” Jackie says impatiently. “What about it? We burn it down?”
“No, no, we don’t burn it down.”
“You sure?” she asks. “There hasn’t been a good church burning in years.”
“Just listen, hunh?” I say, getting annoyed. It is my idea, after all-- after Joker gave it to me, that is. I hate when somebody horns in on my fun, and now I am beginning to regret saying anything to Jackie. “You know how people are when they leave a church?”
She looks at me dully, and shrugs. She is sort of a heathen.
“They are all dressed up and-- I don’t know --and something else. I can’t quite explain it. It’s like that are happy and don’t think anything bad will ever happen to them. You know what I mean?”
She shrugs again.
“Well, that’s the way they are,” I assure her.
“So?”
“So that’s the exact moment to surprise them.”
“With what?”
“Something shocking,” I say. “Something outrageous.”
“Yeah?”
“Yeah.”
“Like what?”
“Like somebody running down the street buck-naked,” I say, and allow it to sink in.
She mulls over the plan, and then says, “Who were you going to get to run naked down the street?”
“Me,” I said, thinking how dense Jackie can be sometimes. What?-- do I have to draw her a picture? Can’t she imagine the shocked expressions on everybody’s face? Eyes will pop out, and jaws will drop. Little kids will hide their faces behind adults, and they will never forget the sight. They will talk about the episode for years.
“But that’s stupid. You’ll get caught. You live right down the road from that church.” Jackie says, and I can’t believe how ignorant she is.
“Duh! Nobody’s going to recognize me. You think they’re actually going to look at my face?”
Jackie thinks about that. An impish grin spreads across her face.
“It’s the perfect crime,” she says.
“Not quite,” I say. “There’s a problem with the get-away.”
“What? You keep running, right?”
“Everybody will be shocked at first. Then the shock will wear off. They have cars, the police have cars, and somebody will end up catching me. Even if I manage to make it home before they come looking for me, how many other people will see me along the way. No, I’d need a car to get away fast, a car parked round the corner, out of sight. It has to be, like, naked girl running, shock, and then poof she’s gone. You know what I mean-- it has to leave them wondering whether it ever really happened at all,” I explained, the way Joker explained it to me when she first came up with the idea. “But I don’t have a car,” I say. “I don’t even have my driver’s license yet.”
“I have a license,” Jackie offers.
“Oh, yeah, that’s right,” I say, as though it’s news to me.
“And I can get my mom’s van, especially on a Sunday morning-- she usually stays in bed until noon.”
“Really?” I ask. I try not to sound too bright and bubbly. “Then we can do it-- the perfect crime.”
“The perfect crime,” she echoes, finally sounding satisfied, finally not too bored.
The class bell rings just then, and we get up to go back inside to our next class.
As I follow Jackie through the door, Joker says warningly, You can’t trust her. It’s perfect only if it involves one person.
You told me to tell her, I think.
But she seems too interested.
Of course, you can’t trust her, Grumpy says. People will stab you in the back every time.
Oddly Angel remains quiet. I wonder what she is thinking.
And all Lurker can say is, You should have kissed her. Why didn’t you? You know you wanted to….
I tell them all to shut up, and start heading toward my next class.
************
Over the next couple days, Jackie and I work out the details of the plan. It is our plan now, not just my plan, and at moments that rankles me. One of Jackie’s failings as a human being is that since she has so little she can call her own, she tends to cling to things that belong to other people. I figure she is a born boyfriend-thief, which is why I never even tell her who my crushes are. If I did, I am certain that I will eventually catch her behind the school as she’s sticking her tongue down the throat of some guy I am madly in love with. I mean, really, who needs that? Still I allow her to be my friend. I don’t know why. She really is a horrible human being, but, for some reason, I forget that whenever I talk to her.
We have lunch together every day. We are like two comrades at war with the rest of the world. The food is lousy, and the lunchroom is filled with enemies. Some genius decided that it would be a good idea to put a mural on the lunchroom wall, but it is a mural of a pasture-- a red barn and a silo in the distance and cows grazing in the foreground. Why would anybody want that on the wall? I mean, you can go outside and see the real thing.
“Did you decide yet?”
Jackie asks, through a mouthful of food. She is a pig, the way she eats. She talks with her mouth full, and now and then a bit of something flies through the air. Even when she swallows her apple juice, she makes weird, gurgling sounds.
At first I don’t know what she means. Then I realize it is about the shoes. Will I wear shoes when I run naked past the church?
“Probably?”
“It doesn’t seem right,” she says. “You won’t be completely naked.”
“You think somebody’s going to be looking at my feet?” I say.
“I’m just saying…”
“I have to wear my gym shoes. There’s a lot of rocks and stuff along the roadside. What if I cut my foot on a piece of broken glass. That would be perfect, wouldn’t it? Me rolling around naked on the ground, with blood spurting out of my foot. The idea is to do it, do it fast, and get away. I need the shoes,” I say, resentful that I have to explain it all to her.
“Okay, okay, chill,” she says, and then resumes rooting through her food like a wild boar.
“We doing it this Sunday?” she asks.
“Not this Sunday, no.”
“Why not?” she demands.
“You see the weather report?” I immediately regret asking that; Jackie never watches the news or reads the papers. “It’s going to be cold, with freezing rain.”
“Wouldn’t it be better that way?”
“Better how? I just want to shock some people who look like they need to be shocked. I don’t want to end up getting pneumonia,” I say, getting thoroughly aggravated. Why did Joker encourage me to tell her? I wonder if he’s playing a separate joke on me. She knows how Jackie can be. She knows that Jackie is going to be nothing but a pest until it is all done. “Just--” I start, now fuming. “I don’t want to talk about it anymore. I’ll let you know what Sunday, all right?”
Jackie stares across the lunch table at me. Although I snapped at her, she isn’t mad. She looks more hurt than anything else.
I hear Tsk, tsk, tsk in my head. I can’t tell which voice did it-- probably Angel; she is the only voice who can make me feel guilty about something.
“Sorry,” I mutter, but it doesn’t sound sincere. I wish I never told her about the plan or the tiny voices or anything; it was like giving away a piece of myself that I will never be able to get back.
Days come and go. The warm spring days descend back into cold wintry days. A layer of powdery snow covers my world, making it seem the more depressing. You can get used to the fact that you live in a small “there’s nothing to do” town, but somehow it’s all worse when everything is covered in icy white.
I go through my classes in a daze. Teachers lecture, and their words are like the plinking of water dripping far away. I don’t have the mental endurance to listen. I don’t have the emotional endurance to care. Who gives a damn that somebody shot whom two hundred years ago? Is anybody ever going to stop me on the street and ask about the square root of pi?…My mind drifts, drifts through the window and into the cold white world. I know that nothing good is ever going to happen to me. I will languish and perish in the waste lands between cornfields and cows pastures.
I can barely listen to the tiny voices. They seem to want to cheer me. Even Grumpy makes a half-hearted attempt at humor. But nothing works.
I think about the plan. I try to play it all through my mind, as though it is an event that has already been captured on video and uploaded onto YouTube. I try to imagine millions of people seeing the video and sharing in its hilarity. But now it doesn’t seem so funny. The idea has lost its edge since I disclosed it to Jackie-- that idea-glomming, boyfriend-stealing heifer!
Suddenly I know what will happen. It all flashes through my mind, as if it is history, like who shot whom two hundred years ago.
She will completely steal the idea. She has the car and driver’s license. She doesn’t need me, like I would need her, to accomplish the feat.
It feels as though I have lost everything, somehow, and really I didn’t have the strength to care much about that, either.
************
Sundays come and go, but the conditions never seem right to me.
Jackie has turned hostile. She accuses me of being a coward. I figure let her think what she wants. I am definitely not a coward. I have no problem at all running around naked in public, and as long as I know that, it doesn’t matter what she thinks.
Every day at school, she harps at me. “Does this Sunday look good?”
“No,” I always say, and give her a different excuse. The real reason I keep to myself. The real reason is now, since I told her everything, it doesn’t seem as much fun as when nobody knew.
Every Sunday, I leave my house and wander down to the church. I watch the people pour out of the large double-doors after service. They mill around outside the church. They loiter in the parking lot. They all look so clean, so chipper, so… normal. They pray and they feel better. Whenever I pray, I still feel like shit. Maybe this is why I hate them so; even prayer cannot make me forget that the world is an awfully gray place.
Sometimes, I wish I was born utterly stupid.
Each Sunday I expect to catch Jackie as she steals my plan. I know she will do it, sooner or later. One of the troubles with this world is that there are too many Jackies, too many thieves, too many sappers of life. They end up taking little bits and pieces of life that belong to somebody else, and they don’t care-- they never even think about it.
Then one Sunday it happens.
I have watched all the good people left the church. Some gather in small cozy groups in front of the church. They speak in a neighborly way. Others are drifting toward the parking lot, where their cars are waxed so shiny that the glare from the sun bouncing off windshield and chrome is nearly blinding.
I turn away, to go back home, when I hear the first screams. Gooseflesh rises on my arms. Suddenly I am a raging fan, craning my neck to see the game. Although Jackie has stolen the idea from me, although I hate her for that, I still wish her well. That is the thing about friends: sometimes you love them, sometimes you hate them, and the rest of the time you wonder why you ever bother with them.
At first, I can’t see her; she must have appeared coming round the other side of the stodgy white building. But then she comes wheeling round to corner to the side I can see. I start to laugh, along with all the tiny voices in my head, at the sight of her just then. She is running faster than I thought she could and, boy, does she ever need a sun-tan. I can see the contorted faces of all the good people as she passes them, and even though I am not the one causing their shock, I feel somewhat gratified. She bolts along the side of the church, over the long narrow patch of grass, heading more or less in my direction. Her eyes look wide and rounded, filled with terror, as though she has realized too late this was an awful idea. She looks white as a sheet that has flown off a clothesline, except for-- Damn, girl, I think, didn’t you ever hear of a Brazilian?…
And then I see why she looks so scared. Two church guys, dressed in somber gray suits, come running round the corner of the church. They are actually chasing her! I can’t believe my eyes. I watch in horror as they slowly catch up, and then one of them, like a former football hero, makes a driving tackle, grabbing her around her ankles and bringing her down on the grass. The other guy is already pulling off his suit coat to throw over her, while several of the women walk quickly toward the bizarre scene. Once they get Jackie on her feet, they all huddle around her and slowly lead her back toward the front of the church.
I jog over to them, yelling, “Hey, leave her alone! Leave her alone!”
But they don’t hear me. They have formed a protective ring around her.
I get close enough to hear a couple people saying sympathetic things, like, “Are you all right, dear,” or “Has somebody hurt you” or “Don’t cry. You’ll be fine now.”
And she really is crying. She’s crying and trying to explain why she did it. “I get these tiny voices I my head… they tel
l me to do things… I can’t help it…”
Outraged, I watch as they lead her into the church, all safe and cared-for and loved.
I am left standing outside, looking up at the closed church door, my mind screaming, But they’re my tiny voices! They’re mine! She stole them from me!
And then Joker says meekly, Well, that didn’t work out so well.
You didn’t like her anyway, Grumpy says.
It’s probably for the best, Angel finally says.
You should have kissed her while you had the chance, Lurker says in disgust.
I tell them all to shut up, and then start walking home.
THE GREAT SQUIRREL
HUNT OF 1977
I wanted to tell this story that took place in Oland Township, Oland County, Texas, when I was a kid.
The story is about Billy Bob Dupree. Saying that he was a mean kid doesn’t seem enough; many people believed he was borderline evil. In the third grade, for instance, he shot a spitball at our teacher, Sister Margaret Olive, and hit her in the eye. He did it on purpose, too-- it wasn’t even an accident. He wouldn’t apologize, either, not even after getting a good whupping by Sister Margaret and one of the other nuns. (Of course, it was already known, then, that they weren’t supposed to be whupping the students, but because it was Billy Bob, nobody really complained, not even his parents.) Anyway, what showed how mean he was wasn’t that he hit Sister Margaret in the eye; it was that afterward, she had to start wearing glasses, and Billy started calling her Sister Four-Eyes, without a pinch of guilt that he was the one responsible for it in the first place. That was how mean Billy Bob was.
Anyway, I was walking through Beauchamp Park one summer day, bored and looking for something to do, when I ran across Billy Bob. He was standing at the base of one of the old oak trees that graced the rolling green expanses of the park, and he was sneering up at the tree and apparently talking to himself.
Most kids would avoid Billy Bob at all costs, but I didn’t care much. I’d had a run-in with him last year, and survived. I hadn’t won, though; it was a short grabbling match that ended with me losing my balance and falling on my face and Billy Bob losing his balance and falling, with his considerable bulk, on my back. I had blacked out for a moment, and had-- or, anyway, I think I had-- what people call a near-death experience. It had been as though I was floating over the scene; I could see the two of us on the ground, and after Billy Bob struggled to his feet, he gave me a good kick in the ribs while I was unconscious.
