by Greg Johnson
The fourteen-year-old black boy was found dead, his head bludgeoned with a blunt instrument, but Thom paid little attention to the news reports, which had become routine. Now that he could drive, he could not think of anything else. He loved everything about his car!—its deep burgundy color and black vinyl roof, its black leather bucket seats and sleek dashboard whose controls he eyed so fondly he’d almost rear-ended several cars in his first week of driving. He loved zooming along Rock Springs Road or Morningside Drive, switching radio stations every few seconds, smiling at the way the burgeoning oak trees dappled his hood and windshield with quick-darting shadows, as if teasing him. He was always heading somewhere; now that he owned a car he was volunteering happily to do errands for everybody.
As he drove, his heart throbbed with an almost uncontainable joy.
For his birthday a couple of weeks earlier, Abby had given him a silver key chain with his initials engraved in fancy Gothic script on a small disk, and though he’d gotten kidded for this “faggy” item (boys’ new keys were always inspected minutely by their high school peers) the gift had touched him. Now that he had a car, Abby had followed through on her months-long threat and had fixed him up with an “older woman”: one of her senior friends, a shy white-blond girl named Melissa Hayes who was new this year at St. Jude’s.
During the next few weeks, his mother kidded Thom, calling after him, “I guess I won’t wait up for you, Casanova!” as he walked out the door wearing a starched dress shirt and reeking of cologne. He left around seven every Friday and Saturday night, and sometimes Sunday night, too. His family seemed mildly but pleasantly surprised that he dated so much. Of course, he didn’t really have dates on most of those nights (why had lying come so easily to him, from the moment he’d gotten his car?) and he suspected that Abby, who was good friends with Melissa Hayes, knew the truth. But somehow that didn’t matter, either. Once he got into the Torino and drove off, he forgot about his parents and his sister, as though he’d turned into someone else. Someone who could lie smoothly to his family and feel not a twinge of remorse.
He drove all through Atlanta, marveling at its steep hills and crazily twisting streets and lush foliage as if he were new to the city and hadn’t lived here all his life. He puttered through his own neighborhood, Sherwood Forest, with boyish vanity, hoping kids he knew might see him, and he drove through Ansley Park and Garden Hills, through Buckhead and Druid Hills and Brookhaven, looping and twisting and occasionally getting lost but again finding his way. They called Atlanta the city of neighborhoods, after all. Or the capital of the new south. Or, most famously, the city too busy to hate.
Would the Atlanta child murders put an end to that?
Thom gave little thought to the matter, though he’d frowned at the image of Ronald Reagan he’d seen the other night on television, a clip from one of his campaign speeches insisting that his America would become “a shining city on a hill.” Thom had watched dully, thinking, What an old fool—does anybody really believe this guy? And he wondered how anybody imagined that a doddering actor with dyed hair and one foot in the grave could get elected. For some reason Thom had thought of Oz and had a fleeting image of Reagan as the wizard they discovered behind the curtain, a charlatan with reddish hair dye oozing down the sides of his face. Yet the local Republicans had taken up Reagan’s buzz words and claimed the candidate ought to come down to Atlanta, his shining city on a hill was right here, just waiting! As though the city needed another nickname, Thom thought. The politicians never mentioned the fact his mother had cited: that Atlanta was “the murder capital of America,” too, where a serial killer was slaughtering black kids and the local police literally didn’t have a clue. In early June another boy, twelve years old, disappeared on his way to a neighborhood swimming pool, and soon there were more killings: a girl snatched from her bedroom the night before her seventh birthday, a ten-year-old boy found with his neck broken beside some railroad tracks. Punching buttons on his car radio, Thom heard a report that Mayor Jackson—a portly, smiling black man, charismatic and fairly popular—had been asked what the murders suggested about race relations in Atlanta, but the normally loquacious mayor had no comment.
The summer advanced, the hysteria mounted, and Thom drove. Though he’d promised his parents he would stay off the interstate, he drove along 1-75, keeping his eye out for patrol cars as he inched the speedometer to eighty, even ninety. He would exit at random, turn around, and head back toward the city, glorying in the fact he could take any exit he wanted, do anything he wanted. Back in town, he drove up and down Peachtree, the city’s most famous street, one he’d traversed hundreds of times in the backseat of his parents’ car. There Thom and Abby would have their own quiet, murmured conversations, and in the months before Thom got his car, one of their favorite topics had been a blond-haired senior boy named Lawton Williams, a hunky football player on whom Abby had a desperate crush. Or so Abby’s little brother insisted. There was no real evidence for this, since Abby was dating Justin, a nice-looking but boring math whiz, and Lawton had been dating one of the school cheerleaders, Ashley Blaylock, since their sophomore year. But Abby and Lawton were both on the yearbook committee and the senior prom committee and the debate team, so Thom claimed that Abby had joined these groups just to be near Lawton, a name he pronounced with an exaggerated Southern drawl, batting his eyes.
After the prom committee had met at the Sadler house, Thom ribbed her about how “cozy” they’d looked, there on the sofa. Abby just laughed at him, asked what he was talking about, insisting she had no interest in Lawton Williams—he wasn’t even very bright.
“Well,” Thom said, one eyebrow cocked in a conspiring leer, “he doesn’t need to be bright, does he?”
Abby laughed again. “Oh, he’s gorgeous, I’ll give you that.” She frowned in disbelief. “But I can’t believe you seriously think I like him.”
Thom had given a little grimace, turning away. “I know what I know,” he said.
One midsummer day Thom drove slowly through Ansley Park, one of the city’s oldest and most elite neighborhoods—clean, winding streets; towering oaks and magnolias; aging homes set far back from the road; redbrick mansions and spectacular white-painted colonials with pristine columns, verandas, porches. The other day a nine-year-old black boy had been found dead of multiple stab wounds in west Atlanta—but you would never know it in Ansley Park, and certainly not on Westminster Drive where Lawton’s family, descendants of plantation owners who now made their money in real estate development and a design firm run by Mrs. Williams, lived in an ochre-colored brick estate originally built by Lawton’s great-grandfather. Thom drove along Westminster first thing every morning, no matter where he was headed, and again on his way back home. That day his vigilance bore fruit. He slowed at the sight of Lawton’s white Porsche in the circular driveway, the soapy water snaking its way down to the street. He’d been waiting for this, he supposed: a summertime glimpse of Lawton Williams. He parked across the wide street, under the shade of a huge magnolia, not feeling at all like one of those movie detectives who did stakeouts, waiting for endless hours in their cars. Though later, much later, he supposed he must have looked like one.
The afternoon was still, cloudless, and very hot, the temperature in the high nineties. Typical July afternoon in Atlanta. Like a mirage there Lawton Williams appeared beside his car, an orange bucket in one hand and a spurting garden hose in the other. He sprayed the driver’s side and then, taking an oversized sponge from the bucket, began soaping the door, working slowly, meticulously, his big sunburned face stilled in the meditative frown of a teenage boy alone and thinking of nothing in particular. He wore a pair of denim cutoffs and some bedraggled sneakers. That was all. Shirtless, his muscular smooth chest and arms gleamed, his skin gently stippled by sunlight filtering through the ancient oaks and elms. His tanned legs shimmered in their coating of pale blond hair. His body seemed almost too smooth and hard to be flesh, the rippling muscle beneath the skin perhaps a
trick of the light, and even the shadowy armpits, revealed as he scrubbed the hood in a dreamy circular motion, seeming smooth and sculpted with only a suggestion of silky hair, itself part of the universal blondness of Lawton’s physical being at which Thom simply and endlessly stared in the way of homely gawkers at a museum.
The only disruptive moment came when Lawton dropped his sponge and, bending to pick it up, seemed to glance in Thorn’s direction, so that Thom lunged to the floorboard as if urgently looking for something. When he inched his head upwards, peering out the bottom part of his window, he saw to his relief that Lawton had gone about his work, unbothered. He’d picked up the hose and stepped back a few feet. Idly, he sprayed the car, gripping the hose a few inches from its tip as he moved it along with a frantic, shaking motion, Thom watching enraptured, his mouth ajar, until he blinked and came to his senses and, covering the exposed side of his face with one hand in case his car’s movement should catch Lawton’s eye, cranked his engine and pulled away. In his side mirror, he caught a last glance of Lawton’s bare back, the arching muscle of a brawny damp shoulder gleaming in sunlight as he lifted the hose and continued rinsing the car.
That evening Thom had one of his infrequent but friendly dates with Melissa Hayes, who seemed to understand and not to mind that they were “just friends,” though she waited patiently each time he escorted her to the door for her good-night kiss, which was also friendly and which Thom enjoyed as much as she did, since clearly she did not expect anything more. That week Thom had made several hundred dollars helping landscape a big place near the Ansley Golf Club, working eight or ten hours each day, so feeling flush he took Melissa to the Pleasant Peasant, where the older patrons beamed at this handsome teenage couple: the amiable, dark-haired, sunburnt boy with his angular face and ready smile, the fragile sweet-looking girl with her delicate chalk-white skin and straight whitish-blond hair reaching past her shoulders. Then they went to a movie at the Tara, and afterward stopped at the Dessert Place in Virginia-Highland where they shared a huge chunk of triple-layer double-Dutch chocolate cake, Melissa allowing herself only a few tiny bites but chattering happily to Thom, looking around constantly as though pleased to be seen here with this handsome, popular boy. But even as he talked with Melissa, joking and smirking and ducking his head in laughter when one of them made a joke, every few seconds he thought about Lawton Williams.
The brawny-smooth cut of his chest.
The sinewy twists and turns of his arms in the leaf-dappled sunlight.
The salty glisten of sweat along his biceps, his back….
Thom could feel droplets of his own ignoble, ordinary sweat running down his sides, causing him to twitch one wrist sideways and glance at his watch.
“Gosh, it’s almost twelve,” he said.
Midnight was Melissa’s curfew, though usually he’d gotten her home not much past eleven.
“We can be a few minutes late,” she said, smiling. “My parents really like you, Thom.”
Thom looked slightly to one side and narrowed his eyes—meant to express friendly skepticism, the gesture was popular with boys at St. Jude’s, that year.
“They don’t know the real me,” he said.
Melissa gave her vague, misty smile. Often Thom had thought she looked like one of the young girls in those Renaissance paintings from their art-appreciation text; she had the same pinkish-white skin, the overlarge, slightly protuberant eyes.
“Maybe I don’t, either,” she said.
For some reason Thom was in a jaunty, jokey mood; maybe it was the late hour or the long days he’d spent this week out in the sun. He bared his teeth and made his eyes round, like someone in a loony bin. He stage-whispered, “Who knows, maybe I’m the Atlanta child killer! Watch for my mug shot on the eleven o’clock news!”
They laughed. They finished eating their chocolate cake.
On their way back to Melissa’s, they listened to an old Stones tape, “Satisfaction,” the volume up high, and at a red light he reached over impulsively and took her hand, their ringers interlacing, squeezing, and Thom wondered idly how many times Lawton and Ashley had gone out before they’d had sex for the first time, and whether they now had sex on every date. Was it the natural, expected conclusion of every evening they spent together, and was it Lawton who always initiated their lovemaking, and were they limited to fugitive couplings inside his car? Thom couldn’t imagine how they accomplished it, in that tiny Porsche. Maybe Lawton had college-age friends who loaned him their apartment, or did they rent a motel room? Thom had no idea. This was 1980 and Thom had turned sixteen, but he was still a virgin. He was fairly sure that Melissa Hayes was a virgin, too.
By the time Thom parked in front of her house, not only their hands but their forearms were linked, Melissa having scooted as close to Thom as she could get in bucket seats, the console between them. He switched off the ignition, turned, and brought his mouth to Melissa’s; her lips were already parted, her big magnolia-petal eyelids closed and trembling. Thom supposed that Lawton Williams kissed his girlfriend like this, and that she probed Lawton’s mouth now gently, now boldly with her tongue, as Melissa was doing, and he supposed all boys instinctively cupped their hands to a girl’s breast in this way, to which Melissa seemed to respond eagerly, inching closer to Thom as if somehow she wanted to squeeze her way over the console and into the seat beside him.
Before he was quite aware of it, she was gently massaging the wobbly erection inside his khakis and then—was it possible?—she began unzipping him. Sweet angel-faced Melissa Hayes with her little-girl’s pale blue eyes reached deftly inside his pants and grasped his warm, bobbing penis that was now fully erect: for imprinted on Thorn’s eyelids so vividly that not only his penis but his whole body ached with longing there was Lawton Williams, finished washing his car and lying with his brawny naked limbs flung along the backseat, crooking one finger to Thom. Blinking his eyes open, Thom resisted the urge to glance behind him. With a few more strokes of Melissa’s thin, bony fingers, he felt the familiar heated anticipation and his breath came heavy and Melissa stroked harder, their mouths still locked and tongues probing wildly, but then Thom had to pull away, his head tilted back, as he spurted all over his cordovan leather belt and starched blue shirt. He stayed still a moment, breathless. When he opened his eyes, Melissa was digging in her handbag. Efficient as a nurse, she daubed at his clothes with a Kleenex, then reached over and kissed him on the cheek. She allowed herself a smile.
“Feel better?” she said.
He couldn’t speak. His head was reeling.
“You don’t need to walk me to the door. G’night, Thom,” she said.
He shook himself and smiled sleepily and had enough presence of mind to kiss her, the same friendly good night kiss from their half-dozen previous dates, and then she was out the door and hurrying up the sidewalk.
Thom sat there awhile, inhaling, exhaling.
The next morning, Sunday, Thom skipped mass for the first time in his life. He stood at the sink rinsing his cereal bowl, staring at his face vaguely reflected in the window and thinking he looked like a criminal.
He hadn’t shaved. He hadn’t bathed. Strands of dark hair sleep-plastered along his forehead gave him the look of a mental patient. He had thrown on a T-shirt and blue jeans and had no idea what he would do with the rest of the day. That’s when his mother came up behind him, clicking her tongue.
“Thom Sadler, it’s almost ten! Hurry and splash some water on your face, honey, and change clothes—we need to leave in five minutes!”
Self-consciously, Thom rubbed one bare foot with the other as he leaned back against the counter. He let his shoulders slump a little, feeling the lie already forming on his lips.
“I’m not feeling so great—I think it’s the flu or something. Maybe I’ll go to evening mass.”
She hurried forward, laying her palm against his forehead. “But you’re not hot, honey—if anything you feel chilly. Why aren’t you wearing your sandals? Why hav
en’t you shaved?” She fondly brushed his jawline with the backs of her gloved fingers. “You always shower and shave before you come to breakfast.”
He stared at the floor, not daring to meet her eyes. “Think I’ll just go back to bed,” he muttered. “I feel like I might throw up or something.”
Thom had no history of feigning illness. He’d always loved school and had missed only four or five days in his life. His mother had no reason to doubt him.
“OK, honey,” she called as he shuffled out of the kitchen. “We’ll be back about twelve—I’ll peek in and see how you are. If you’re asleep, I’ll make you a plate for later.”
“OK. Thanks, Mom.”
On the stairs he met Abby, who was wearing his favorite outfit of hers: a pink silk blouse dotted with tiny white flowers, white pleated skirt, white sheer stockings and shoes. Her light-auburn hair shone; it smelled fresh and lemony.
“Thom? Are you OK?” she said, tilting her head sideways.
“Feel sick,” he said, hurrying past.
He went into his room and shut the door. He sat on the side of his bed and stared at his longish, bony feet. Along the tops of his big toes were tiny dark hairs; he hadn’t really noticed that before. A few years ago, he had thrilled at the sudden growth of hair on various parts of his body, but now he felt something akin to disgust. His toenails could stand a clipping, he thought. It occurred to him that his body was gross. He was gross. He closed his eyes, feeling suddenly drowsy.
From downstairs, he heard the slam of the door to the garage, then the tedious grinding of the garage door as it shuddered open. He waited with his eyes closed, and after a minute or two the grinding noise came again. His family was gone and it was official: he was deliberately flouting his holy obligation to attend mass on Sunday, which was a mortal sin that would condemn him to eternal damnation if he should die before going to confession. Even if the Atlanta child murderer got him, he would go to the same hell where the murderer himself would end up!—a mortal sin was a mortal sin, after all. Once in theology class, in fourth or fifth grade, a girl had asked Sister Barbara—a slender, ivory-pale nun with a thin bitter line of a mouth—why there weren’t different hells for different sins. Robbing a bank and killing somebody were both mortal sins, but shouldn’t hell be hotter for the murderer than for the guy who just stole some money? A wave of giggling had shimmered through the room, but Sister Barbara, who seemed oddly pleased by the question, shook her head.
