by Jaime Clarke
“It’s a nice idea,” Axia said, yawning. She kicked off the bed. “I’m going for a walk,” she announced, intimating that she was going alone.
“Be careful,” Figs wanted to say as Axia tied her shoes, but he didn’t want to frighten her. While he worried about how far Hands and the others would go to intimidate Axia, he knew she could handle them in ones and twos. He also knew that any misbehavior would result in the nullification of the fellowship. Figs would make sure of that.
Figs loitered in Axia’s room, too wired for sleep. He’d kill some time with Lindy, who had taken the community center roof as his permanent observatory, animating the night sky with stories, Warren occasionally supplementing the tales with information we’d learned in textbooks but had long forgotten.
Figs’s enthusiasm for the idea was brief, however, as he spotted not Lindy but Roger on the roof. He watched as Roger raised a pair of binoculars, sweeping the development in slow arcs. Roger aimed the binoculars in the area where Figs stood, and Figs backed farther into the shadows.
From then on, we manned the daily schedule with clockwork precision, moving in two distinct teams as effortlessly as if the work had been assigned as such. Indeed, we ran on two separate but simultaneous schedules—Hands and his team took to the playing field after breakfast to run drills, while Figs and his crew took the early shift at 1959 Regis Street, then the whole routine swapped after the midmorning break. Meals were staggered, so each team ate in a half-empty dining hall, everyone scavenging the kitchen for themselves, pairs of cooks pooling their expertise to concoct dishes other than peanut butter and jelly sandwiches, or plates of spaghetti dowsed with parmesan sprinkles dumped from the economy-size green canisters in the pantry. Figs and Warren continued to refuse classroom instruction—and Sprocket continued to smuggle them the packets and tests—but the rest of us assembled for the vital component of the fellowship, the classroom remaining silent except for whoever was taking a turn reading aloud from the handout. Axia continued to drift behind the scenes, spending the bulk of the day inside her air-conditioned room (“catching up on my rest,” she called it) and passing the evenings with Figs and Warren and Lindy, the three engaging in various entertainments—most involving cards or dice or the telescope. And while it was true that a disharmonious note rang in the air, it played in the background, and from the vantage of our last weekend at Garden Lakes, it looked like we would make it.
In retrospect, the events of that Saturday night were the seeds from which we would reap out-and-out failure.
By all accounts, the evening started to ebb until Kerr produced the bottle of cabernet he’d secreted from the case Mr. Hancock had brought. Many times he’d thought to offer it, but he was glad he’d waited, sensing the moment was finally right. Kerr and Cantu were passing the bottle when they were paid an after-hours visit by Hands and Roger and Assburn, who were looking for Reedy. The search was called off, though, when the fellows discovered the contraband. Roger requisitioned the bottle from Kerr, who ceded it with a mild complaint. Hands and Roger and Assburn passed the bottle, Hands abstaining because of his allergy, an affliction that astounded Cantu.
A rattling sounded. “Party favors,” Assburn said, producing the bottle of Lindy’s painkillers Lindy had assumed he’d lost the day after returning from the emergency room. Years later, Assburn’s fondness for pharmaceuticals would fuel his decision to smuggle counterfeit gaming systems from Canada, resulting in his icy death as he plunged through the frozen lake somewhere near Detroit, in an effort to raise enough bail money for his best friend.
The living room of Quinn’s former residence grew boisterous, and the bottles of wine and pills circled. The pills spread a thick fog through Hands’s brain, dulling his senses and draining the stress of the preceding days. In addition to shepherding the fellows and sophomores through their final days at Garden Lakes, Hands knew he would have to find ways to give Roger some command without giving him too much. He’d made a step in that direction by giving Roger leeway with the soccer team, even looking the other way when Roger screamed at any player that made a foul or a bad shot; but he wanted to make sure Roger understood the leeway had been bestowed upon him, and by whom.
Hands’s warning about keeping Axia out of sight had been successful too. If he thought about Figs and Axia spirited off somewhere, laughing and fucking around, he became so angry his thinking muddled. Whether or not he would be friends again with Figs, he couldn’t say. Hands’s command of the situation at Garden Lakes—and the recognition he would receive from the faculty and others—would go a long way in equalizing what Hands perceived as a power differential in their relationship.
As he passed the bottle of wine to Roger, he realized that he hadn’t imagined hearing Figs’s name. He heard it again, this time ferreting out the source: Laird was trying to be heard over the din, asking something about Figs.
“What?” Hands asked, raising his voice. Laird seemed very far away.
“Do you want to know the real story about Figs?” Laird asked.
“What story?” Hands asked.
“About what happened in Mazatlán. At Rosa’s,” Laird answered.
Hands and Roger and Assburn exchanged looks.
“How do you know about Rosa’s?” Roger asked.
Laird glanced around nervously. “Everyone knows.”
“Yeah?” Roger asked. “And what does everyone know?”
Hands diffused the atmosphere with a laugh. “Who cares if everyone knows?”
A smile spread across Laird’s face. “Yeah, but I know what really happened.”
Roger coughed. “Tell it or shut up,” he said.
Laird settled back, recounting what we all knew by rote about that night at Rosa’s.
“What was it like?” Laird asked, making us wait. “Was it cool?”
“Don’t get sidetracked,” Hands said.
Laird reveled in his station as master storyteller for a moment longer, then said, “There weren’t any federales.”
Laird laid out what he knew: that Figs had taken advantage when the heavy at the door left his post, and run screaming into the house, scattering those inside and those in the backyard, Laird’s older brother among them. “He goes to Trevor Browne,” Laird said. None of us knew Laird at all, let alone that his older brother went to public school. “He saw everything.”
We sat waiting for more details, the truth about that night stirring our hunger, but that was all Laird had to tell. The reality of Figs’s elaborate lie sank in as the bottle was passed around.
“Faggot,” Roger exhaled. “I knew it.”
Hands stood and bolted for the door. In retelling the story for the administration, he would omit that he’d been high and would declare that he’d simply needed some fresh air. That Roger mistook Hands’s action as an advance on Figs’s house would not exonerate those who besieged the residence, dancing and chanting, “Federales! Federales!” the chant amplifying, punctuated with the sound of shattering glass. Not even the administrative inquiry could bring to light the identity of the hurler.
It was around this time that I began to feel my loyalties shift. I’d fallen in with Hands’s bunch instinctually—Hands knew of my dislike of Figs and had invited me to that first meeting with the others. But that meeting seemed to me to be the first step toward putting affairs at Garden Lakes back on the right path. I did not sense that Hands wanted to do Figs harm. Conversely, I recognized Hands’s ambition to lead the fellowship to its glorious conclusion, and given my choice, I preferred it be Hands rather than Figs who claimed the crown.
I was even willing to overlook the weaknesses in Hands’s administration. Certainly, he couldn’t be held liable for Roger’s rough behavior; Hands’s surrounding himself with lunatics like Roger was a matter of chance. And as far as I was concerned, the fault lay with Roger, whom I considered an asshole. I dreamed lasciviously violent dreams about smashing Roger upside the head during sports, or leading a gang of vigilantes against him. Roger’
s heartlessness inspired the kind of cruelty we imagined only the depraved felt.
I had no opinion about Axia. For the most part, Axia kept to herself. Other lusty feelings did not make their way into the official record. And while I was reluctant to say so publicly, I could understand Figs’s point about assimilation. Mr. Malagon spoke often of the need for tolerance—no one in his class was permitted to talk over someone else, himself included—and the claims Figs had made about inclusion struck a chord with me. Still, I was reticent to align with such a risky enterprise. What if, upon learning about Axia, the administration voided our fellowship? Any appeal would be undermined by fraternization. There were others who felt similarly, though we were too cowardly to express it.
The undignified ruckus that Sunday night moved me a step in Figs’s direction, though.
I looked out my window as Roger led the charge on Figs’s residence, Kerr, Reedy, Cantu, and Laird behind him. Roger bade his lieutenants to kick in the door, but as many times as their feet bounced off the front door, the lock held. I imagined Figs cowering inside, fearful of the glazed look in the sophs’ eyes. Kerr and Reedy disappeared, Laird and Cantu sticking close to Roger, who was hunting for rocks large enough to hurl at the double-paned windows donated by a local glass company. Kerr and Reedy reappeared with a hammer from Sprocket’s supply shed—which Sprocket would discover ransacked the next morning. Kerr handed Roger the hammer and he busted out the front-room window. Hands looked on as the sophs entertained themselves by tossing rolls of toilet paper up and over the house, the strands billowing in the hot desert breeze.
The chanting began again, but the riot eventually succumbed to thirst, everyone opting for a raid on the dining hall. I sensed that they did not want to confront Figs anyway and was relieved when they dispersed, Roger lingering, glancing at Figs’s door as if daring it to open.
My attitude changed, however, when I learned of the smashed telescope at breakfast. A group whose complete membership was never verified had set out from the dining hall to spread the word about what had happened in Mazatlán. The group came upon Lindy and his telescope in the lake bed. Lindy would wait until he was securely ensconced in the administration’s bosom before he would name those he remembered from the assault. He told about how Roger had knocked the telescope to the ground and how Hands had held Lindy back while Roger stomped the instrument into uselessness. Lindy remembered yelling, hoping someone would hear and come to his aid, but his yells were quieted by Roger’s fist, which landed squarely in Lindy’s chest, knocking the wind out of him. (It was not this assault but the one on Mr. Baker that led to Roger’s expulsion from Randolph.)
While Lindy stayed silent about the attack the next morning, it wasn’t hard to piece together that Roger was behind it. And because Hands and Roger moved in tandem, the assumption that they were in on it together was hard to ignore, though it would come out later that Hands hadn’t so much participated as allowed it to happen, turning his back on Lindy, as he did Figs at Summer Griffith’s party. Not that anyone objected on Lindy’s behalf. Instead, we privately assured him that we would take his side of the matter should he choose to pursue the issue. This cowardly turn did not sit well with your faithful columnist, and for all these reasons, I convinced myself to jump ship and throw in with Figs.
I would not get a chance to exercise my decision, though, as my mind would be decidedly changed again the following morning.
To his credit, Figs was able to function as if nothing had happened, though he did skip breakfast, electing instead to finish the knockdown roller finish, the final step toward completion of the work at 1959 Regis Street. He had to outlast the chiding for only three more days. He would work to repair the damage over the summer, first with Hands and then with a few key fellows that would back him up at the start of senior year. The reclamation of his credibility lay in the fellowship, he knew, a fact Figs could not later reconcile with his actions that Monday morning.
The rest of Figs’s crew reported to the construction site, and while no one had the courage to challenge Figs about his lie, whispers of “Federales! Federales!” rose with the wind. Whether Figs heard or not no one would ever know, but it was the only rationale for what happened next.
Roger saw it from the playing field, training Mr. Magalon’s binoculars on the construction site. He had arrived with Hands for breakfast with the binoculars around his neck, and they spent the morning zooming in on us, Hands providing commentary on our food’s progress as we chewed and swallowed. The binoculars were not as unnerving as Hands’s and Roger’s freshly shorn heads gleaming under the fluorescent lighting, hurrying us through our bowls of cereal.
Through the lenses of his binoculars, Roger saw Figs yank a panel of Sheetrock from the far wall in the living room.
Lindy and Warren reacted first, racing into the living room.
“What’s happening?” Warren asked.
Figs looked at Warren like he wondered who he was. “What?”
Warren pointed at the displaced drywall. The others gathered around the vandalism. Play in the lake bed ceased, and Roger and Hands passed their binoculars around so the rest of us could see the commotion in the living room. And while we could not hear what was being said, we understood the look on Warren’s face as he chastised Figs.
We raced to the construction site. Figs’s explanation—that the piece had been hung improperly—did not convince many. “Why didn’t Mr. Baker catch it?” Roger asked when told, quieting Figs.
“I saw it,” Warren said, bailing Figs out. “I didn’t mention it because I wasn’t sure. But it wasn’t sturdy. It had a”—Warren chopped his hand through the air—“dent in it.”
Warren’s corroborative testimony only temporarily mitigated the feelings of sabotage, feelings that intensified when Figs disappeared for the balance of the day, disabusing me of any notion about changing allegiance. Roger’s transgressions appeared small when matched against the pettiness Figs had exhibited. Even if I felt strongly about my complaints about Hands and Roger, Figs’s ship appeared to be sunk that afternoon.
My renewal of faith in the other side would not last long, however. In hindsight, it is not hard to understand the actions taken by some that afternoon. But I was as baffled as the other fellows by the second wave of vandalism in the living room of 1959. Hands’s convenient evacuation from the vicinity as Roger pulled down a second panel of Sheetrock implicated him. Hands knew that he would need plausible deniability, and there were rumors at lunch that Figs had wrecked the entire living-room wall. Only those who had observed Roger and his minions—Laird, Reedy, Cantu, and Kerr, their bald heads bobbing in unison as they kicked in a wall—knew the truth, though no such witnesses could be found.
The anatomical view of insulation and wiring sprouting from the living-room wall brought the application of the finish to a halt.
“End of the line,” Warren said. “We need to call Mr. Baker and get some more drywall.”
“No can do,” Hands said, shaking his head.
“Give me Hancock’s mobile phone and I’ll do it, then,” Warren persisted.
“I can’t,” Hands said, hoping to leave it at that. But Warren pressed him, following Hands out of the dining hall at lunch. “It’s broken, okay? It doesn’t work.”
“I don’t believe you,” Warren said.
Hands turned on Warren. “I don’t care if you do,” he said. “Why don’t you ask your buddy?” Hands said. “He knows all about it.”
Warren did not ask Figs about the phone, though. That Figs was complicit in a conspiracy over Mr. Hancock’s mobile phone would’ve proved too much for even Warren to bear, and he persuaded himself that he did not want to know, preferring the impression that Hands was hoarding the device for his own use.
An afternoon spike in temperature drove us indoors, our energy sapped by the heat. It was reasonable to say that we, including yours truly, were overcome by recent events, too. An awful taste developed in my mouth, my mind muddling whenever I tr
ied to get straight what was what. It was impossible to know where virtue lay, and I was adrift, overwhelmed by hopelessness, surrendering to the certainty that it didn’t much matter what I chose to believe or whom I chose to follow: The fellowship had been consigned to failure, maybe as early as Mr. Hancock’s departure—maybe from the beginning—and that inevitably ushered in a flood of indifference that washed over us all.
Under the cover of night, I saw Laird and Reedy and Cantu and Kerr in the community center doorway. They disappeared inside one by one and then reappeared in formation, each carrying sacks of purloined food, their skin glowing under the streetlights.
Warren wanted to know what the joke was. “I don’t get it,” he said when Figs told him. “Where’d she go?”
Figs was too angry to repeat what he’d told Warren, that Hands had expelled Axia in the middle of night—he’d been hearing murmurs that Hands was putting Roger up to something and guessed that it was Axia’s removal, confirmed when Figs knocked on her door for breakfast to find her gone. The idea that Axia had up and left on her own was inconceivable. That she had no ties to Garden Lakes, or to anything, really, was a concept that Figs couldn’t grasp. A concept he could grasp was malice. He swore to meet Hands’s malice with malice, whatever the cost. Warren bolted for Axia’s, blind with rage, wanting to see for himself.
A blast of humidity greeted Figs as he followed in Warren’s wake. He gasped when he saw Mr. Baker’s truck parked nose-first in front of the construction site. He shaded his eyes and watched as Hands and Roger and Mr. Baker stood in front of the exposed living-room wall. Hands shrugged several times while Roger pantomimed how the panels of drywall had been pulled down. Figs hoped Hands was negotiating with Mr. Baker for more drywall—there was still time to mend the wall and slap up the finish, though barely—but he refused to join the negotiations. Hands would see how he’d taken him for granted all these years.
Figs scanned the development. Most everyone was at breakfast, he knew. He looked at the sky, the coming cloud cover visible beyond the rooftops on Regis Street, and headed for the dining hall for something to cure his hunger. He passed Warren asking anyone he encountered if they’d seen Axia. No one had.
