The November Criminals: A Novel

by Sam Munson

  This associate was called Digger Zeleny. Not on her birth certificate, but that’s the nickname she and everyone else uses. (Real name: Phoebe.) We’d known each other since the beginning of our time at Kennedy. She was a frequent, reasonable customer of mine, and an acknowledger of my in-class sarcasm, as I was of hers. Her nickname is weird, I know, but she’s even gotten our teachers to use it. I asked her about it, right after we met, and she refused to tell me. This was four years ago. But a week later, when I sold her weed for the first time, and we ended up smoking some of it together, she came clean. When she was a kid, she had a sandbox in her backyard, where she spent most of her time digging. Not making castles or fake pies and hamburgers or anything, just digging and filling the hole, and then digging some more, and mumbling to herself the whole time, Dig-dig-diggety-dig. She continued this practice when she started kindergarten, and some genius in her class started calling her Digger. To make fun of her. So she bashed him in the face with her plastic shovel, and then with her bucket, and afterward refused to answer anyone who didn’t address her as Digger. She took proprietorship of the insult. She’s that hardheaded. Her parents had to take her, she told me, to a psychologist to get her to revert to Phoebe. But she defeated him too, and Digger she stayed. “I never liked Phoebe anyway, that much,” she muttered through a mouthful of smoke. “I suspect I was named after that guy’s sister in Catcher in the Rye. I started suspecting when I had to read it, I mean. So fuck that.”

  We cut out right after the assembly—there’s a little-known exit in the corridor that curves between our main chancel-like building, which is always filled with this horrible brown light, and the auditorium—and headed over to the Bench, which is a cedar bench set in a small deer park on the expansive property of a private school down the street from Kennedy, Brent Academy, named after our city’s first and least corrupt mayor, Robert Brent. We discussed a lot of initial trivia, and then I just let her talk, so I could avoid the real subject. She was telling me something about her mother, who’s a doctor, an in-depth fumbler in other people’s machinery, not some dermatologist or something. Her mother hates me. Understandable. Even though she doesn’t know the full extent of my relations with her daughter. We were stoned, a bit thick-lipped but still compos mentis. I sat there and watched her tweaking her hair and shoving the glasses back up onto the bump, that little Mediterranean bump, on the bridge of her nose. A path of scalp stood out, a demarcator, in Digger’s dark hair, a dumb dead white line. Shadows curtained the grass at our feet, which was still lush, and crept up over our ankles—a heavy cloud was passing. And then we were in the September light again. I was so high my head ached, a beating numbness above the roof of my mouth. Weed is the consummate drug for adolescents, because it induces that weak-shit sense of potential I was just talking about. This cloud swooped over us and cut off the light, and the sudden shift jarred me: here’s the light, here’s the darkness. Nobody wants to go into the darkness, to cross that line, right there, over by the clump of pines, that rooftop, whatever. The physical specifics don’t matter. Nobody wants it, it’s not at all what is wanted, but you can’t help looking at it, at the dividing line, and wanting to cross it anyway. The whole time Digger was telling me this story about her mother fishing a forceps out of someone that another surgeon had left in.

  “And you can’t tell anybody. It would be proof of malpractice anyway. And it was this old black lady. So it makes the hospital super-vulnerable, legally.”

  “What like just passed over us?” I mumbled.

  “Dude, a cloud? What are you talking about? You are fucked up.” She chortled, and then I was off into the trees, to get out of the light and into the shadow, which cooled my hot forehead. My limbs hurt now, a dull body-wide ache. From the thicket I heard her call out my name twice, and then give up. It took a few minutes to recover my composure. I was still hideously stoned, though, in that phase of weak hilarity.

  “Dude, Kevin Broadus. I mean, what do you even do with that,” I told Digger, still leaning against a tree.

  “Are you all right?” she trilled.

  “Do you think they’ll find the guy?”

  “What guy?”

  “The guy who killed him. I don’t know. Whoever. The guy.”

  “Dude, were you even friends with him?”

  I huffed out a long breath. Grinding my shoulder against the comforting wrinkles of the bark.

  “No, it’s fine, it’s just like it doesn’t matter. Your story like kind of fucked me up, I guess.”

  She squinted at me, saying, “You are all over the place, dude.” And then returned to her narration. Dr. Zeleny—I’d met her a few awkward times, as I snuck down from Digger’s room—was as tiny as Digger. Tinier, maybe. The first time we met, she was wearing a short-sleeved periwinkle Oxford, which revealed her muscle-clotted forearms. The thought of her sawing open someone’s chest cavity, the blinding operation lights glancing off her fine-modeled avian head, terrified me as much as it made inevitable sense. The single occasion we’d spoken she’d thrust out an arm for a shake, her corded wrist manacled in a matte-silver Gestapo captain’s watch. Digger looks nothing like her, except that they’re both short. I gave up trying to explain to her about Kevin. I had nothing to explain, really, just a gaggle of stoned, moronic, unrefusable thoughts. So I listened to her talk about the hospital problems some more. My jaw clenched, along with my fists. I wanted to hit someone. For my own stupidity, I guess. But there was no one to hit, so I shook Digger’s hand and walked to my car.

  I went to sleep when I got home, for an hour or two. In the car, I’d listened to the gargling radio, but I couldn’t stand it after one song, so I rolled down the window and listened to the wind inhabiting my neighborhood. The house was dark when I walked in—not dark but dim, as it is when my father is in his studio. He shuts off every light. And pulls the shades. This always mystified me, but it’s easier just to open them than to inquire or argue. But that night I stumbled through the dim house shivering, and slept with my heavy shoes still on. Have you ever noticed how heavy shoes are if you fall asleep in them? Like they contained reminders of gravity, of your bound state, right? An hour or two of sleep, and then my father woke me up. He had turned on the light in my room, which I had relocated to the basement in seventh grade. It’s comforting and windowless there. Secure. He had turned on the lights and bent over me, and his hilarious ponytail had slipped over his shoulder and was painting the air under his chin. “My Greek urn,” he mumbled, “exploded.” “I don’t know what to say,” I answered. The whole intrusion had the stagy, rushing tone of a dream. “It exploded. What’s the fucking point of all this?” My father cannot react to inconveniences without finality, without mentally removing himself from the landscape of life. This makes it easier (I think?) for him to suffer no reaction at all to major problems or catastrophes. So call it an adaptation, maybe. I knew where he was going with his speech, anyway: Sometimes I think, Addison, I just fantasize sometimes about throwing myself under a bus. His usual rhetorical capstone.

  He also always uses my full name, in consequence of which I have never developed a nickname, in consequence of which everyone else, from Dr. Karlstadt on down, calls me Addison. He finished his speech about suicide, and I gave him a look of … what? Sympathy? Consolation? He accepted it and patted my shoulder, the clay still staining his nails and the faint webs of wrinkles on the skin between his fingers. My father’s hands, I should note, are huge, the paws of some clumsy, lugubrious animal. I was drenched in sweat. I felt as though I’d been swimming for hours against a nameless and powerful tide. Just from one afternoon of school. We overestimate our fortitude. After my father left me, I tried to do my calculus. No luck. I tried to translate some of the Aeneid. No luck. I lay back down, dressed and iron-quiet, and struggled into sleep an hour before sunrise. He was already burning pots when I woke up and checked the backyard, where the kiln is. I could see eyes and leaves of fire lashing out from its ash-colored bricks. Almost feel the sucking
heat, in fact.

  I made some coffee—which tasted, as usual, like earth—and I drove to Kennedy, early as fuck, and smoked some cigarettes at the Flagpole. This is the flagpole in front of our school. The flag is at permanent half-mast: the crank has rusted and no one can or will replace it. There’s a big vacant concrete court between you and school when you sit there. Smokers have used it as a meeting place for as long as I’ve been at Kennedy. I got through half a pack, watching the light, looking for shadows, which don’t exist at that hour in the fall. All the asphalt looked blue. This, I came to believe later, was the day when it began. When the whole process started that left me freed of my part-time occupation. And maybe even in possession of knowledge I lacked. But you’ll have to judge that for yourself.

  II.

  CONTRARY TO WHAT you might have assumed, Digger Zeleny is not my girlfriend. This is her own idea. Hers and mine. She doesn’t want a boyfriend. And I don’t want a girlfriend, preferring instead a life of free-ranging (albeit imaginary) concubinage. A lot of people think we’re dating. I’ve been asked that several times, by my father and others. We’re not. We’re, as I said, associates. Not even friends. People who share a set of parameters in their approach to life. She is not my girlfriend. I would fight you for saying so. She would fight you for saying so. It’s important you understand that, during everything that follows.

  She’d seen me at the Flagpole and taken my arm, telling me I looked weird. She never sounds faux concerned, only observational. I mumbled something about needing more coffee, which she refused to accept—“Bullshit!” she fluted—and started marching me to the Tip-Top Diner. This is where Kennedy students go to avoid school. We have an eternal and inviolable agreement with the owner, whose name is not known. We behave ourselves, and he pretends we’re legitimate adults. The Tip-Top Diner, as its name implies, has terrible, addictive food. It’s just a tiled shack, the grout pond-black, the row of fuchsiacushioned stools defeated by legions of asses. There’s a pay phone, which has served at least two generations of dealers as an office: “Call 6883!” runs our refrain. It spells MUTE, NOTE, and nothing else meaningful. This is covered by the arrangement, too, as long as no commerce happens on the premises. The place was filled with that sad morning emptiness, the hooked column of stools and the short row of booths vacant except for a catarrhal man walled off from his pancakes by a newspaper and a sleeping junkie with an immobile tear lodged in the corner of one eye.

  Digger had chosen, her transparent blue eyes hardened with shut-mouth delight, the booth between these two champs. I couldn’t decide where to start talking when we sat down. “You’re going to make me ask,” she muttered. So I did something moronic. I told her the truth.

  “I’m kind of a mess, I guess. I sort of couldn’t sleep.”

  “So,” she asked, “what do you want me to do about it, man?” A cough from the pancake eater: earth being shifted, a grave being scraped.

  “I don’t know. I can’t even really say,” I said.

  “That’s bullshit, man. You were standing there with that look on your face.”

  “I didn’t have a look. That’s not correct.”

  “It is correct. Unfortunately.” She grinned and poked my shoulder.

  “How is that correct?” I pursued. “I mean, I get it if you have trouble understanding me, but it’s totally unfair to say I had a look.” I was grinning now, too, through the haze of my tiredness.

  “You are such a jackass.” Digger’s laugh chimed through the absurd thunder of the newspaper reader’s cough. “You were making your little-boy face. You get it all the time. And you think nobody notices. But they do. So don’t jester around.” I sucked at my scorching coffee and started talking. She’s hard to deny, ladies and gentlemen.

  I said what, you ask? That some more serious region of life had intruded yesterday? That Kevin Broadus something something memento mori something something? I can’t remember exactly, because I was in a rush to get it out. But it was along the lines of: It’s not fair that Kevin’s dead, and I don’t even know why I think it’s unfair, and I couldn’t sleep last night because of it, and and and. Has this ever happened to you? You realize that something has disturbed you only when you say it out loud? I hadn’t even known I’d been thinking about Kevin until that retarded assembly. Digger took it in with her unfracturable slight smile. “And it’s just like,” I panted, “he took some other element with him. From me. I mean, why do I give a fuck? Maybe because nobody really cares but they all just fake it. I mean, with Alex bitching about the First Amendment.”

  She hockeyed a butter capsule between her hands, the foil glinting. “So their fake care is worse than your heroic emergence from indifference? Come on, man. That’s even more bullshit. And you’re making the face again now.”

  I took another scalding gulp and blurted out, “No, man, I don’t mean that. I mean, how can you feel fucking guilty about not knowing someone you didn’t even know? I don’t even know why but I want to know. It’s been three months.” Another grinding cough. The junkie’s pearly tear careened down his dusty face.

  “What do you want to know?” Digger answered. To my utter lack of surprise, I found that I could say nothing. Her meal came, though, just then, always an event for her, and that balked further discussion.

  At ten o’clock in the morning food horrifies me. Not Digger. She’d ordered the Tip-Top Deluxe, which is an obese hamburger capped by an amnio-slippery fried egg. She’s one of those compact, petite people who eats as though she were pregnant and three to four times her corporeal size. And gains no weight. Something invisible makes demands of her energy, I guess, keeping her metabolism jacked up to some inhuman speed. I like to think that this is why, in every season, she carries a slight odor of wood smoke, of burning. The burger, bleeding yolk and shining grease, obscured the lower half of her face.

  “How can you eat that?” I asked in awe.

  “Because it’s fucking delicious,” she grunted, her mouth full.

  A truck rumbled up the street, the same truck—I swear—twice. It was a Rex Rentals truck, a well-known local moving company, which uses a servile, staring maroon dog as its mascot. This happens to me a lot. I mean, I look up from whatever I’m doing and some trivial action in the theater around me is being repeated. Fucked-up, right? “What you want to know,” she said, having demolished the burger, “well, you could ask around. Not about the shooting, you morbid jackass. But Kevin. You’re just pretending to be unsympathetic, anyway.” And she drained with a gusty slurp the last of her grape soda.

  “Wouldn’t people think it’s weird?” I asked. “I think they would, right? Some random guy asking questions.”

  Probing the glass with her straw, she answered me. “No one could think you’re any weirder than they already do.” This was, I am sure, correct. I mean, I must have done an okay job of faking normalcy, or else my business would have suffered, because there’s only so much sketchiness—I’m talking about emotional unpredictability here—that people will tolerate in a guy who’s selling them a bag of weed. People consider me odd, though. I can see that look in their eyes, that puzzled look. Digger and I walked after she’d finished eating. She had just cut her hair, and the wind kicked it in oblong strands across her forehead, her dark hair, which she cropped herself, out of stubbornness. I couldn’t tell you about her clothes on many other days, but I remember that morning she was wearing all black, which she always started wearing around this time of year with eagerness, and she had a heavy silver chain around her throat. This her mother had given her. She told me once it was from Chile, in a tone that demanded my nod of wise amazement.

  She even had the tenacity and kindness to finish our argument. About my little-boy face, I mean. She waited until the old couple dog-following us up the street in the busy wind was out of earshot, though, to explain my misunderstanding further.

  “I wasn’t trying to insult you,” she opened with. I stumped along, wrong-footing it to match her motions.

&nb
sp; “No, I know. I admit it. I was doing it. Making that face.” I knew exactly which face she meant, too: I’d caught myself making it once, while mooning around the house, caught a glimpse of my pout and half-lidded eyes in our age-dim hallway mirror.

  “See? See how easy it is? So why deny it? You just make more work for yourself. Because I’m right like ninety percent of the time.”

  “You’re wrong like ninety percent of the time,” I sang, and in the black sea of a velvet-backed empty shopwindow we watched the old couple pause and drown.

  “You just can’t stand that I’m right,” she said, and sped ahead. I caught up to her at a parking meter whose glass forehead had been smashed in. At this point going to school would have been idiotic. We shared a look of sudden complicity, which shocked me, as it always did. I mean that she was so willing to let me fuck her.

  Digger is not my girlfriend. She doesn’t want to be. We’re just making use of each other, as she puts it. You wouldn’t think she was hot, and she is not. But she is remarkable-looking. A blade-thin nose and pale, fragile-seeming skin, which looks even paler next to her jet hair. She has this constant stare, and her eyes are transparent blue. I’m not saying this out of any sense of possession. I’m just being objective here. I could go on and on about her and about fucking her. And you’re expecting me to: I wouldn’t know better at my age. Just to frustrate your expectations, though, I’m going to tell you all the incidental details of that late morning, without any of the salacious stuff. (1) In our eagerness, we knocked over the rubber plant that stands guard in her townhouse’s front hallway, which spilled a spray of clean-looking soil on the paws of a white porcelain dog-lion (her parents have a matched set). (2) I tripped three times on the stairs, once on each flight. (3) The handles to the windows in Digger’s bedroom are made of bronze, heavy real bronze, and they spin and cantilever the windows open. (4) She did not remove her necklace. (5) We could hear traffic filtering up from the street. (6) We both spoke to each other the whole time. As usual. (7) The answering machine took three calls: one from her mother, responding to her own voice, one from a garbled and soft-voiced man looking for her mother, and one that was a smear of hissy dead air. (8) Judging from the traffic sounds, someone rammed someone else’s car, and human cries mingled with the other noise. Afterward the flames of sunlight, through the opened windows, licked at the white ceiling.