The November Criminals: A Novel

by Sam Munson

  “Shit, shit, it’s all shit,” he sang. He was addressing, apparently, a goosenecked red number standing on the massive credenza that hulks at the room’s edge. A find of my father’s—the credenza, I mean. “Why should it matter? None of it matters.” Digger and I stood up to leave, on the point of some simultaneous and limpidly false excuse. He waved us back down. “I’m just going to go hang this, Addison.” He waggled the tube, still tucked under his arm. “I’ll leave you alone with Phoebe, and you can continue.” And he turned abruptly to walk out, and his tube knocked a pot—“more of a small flask, really,” as he once described it—from its place, this swinish iron shelf at eye level next to a window, and his wordless cry of relieved outrage obscured the earthen clink of its breakage. “You. Are. A pretty girl,” he told Digger as he left. Which is, as I’ve said, not strictly true, and she knows it. At least, I think she does.

  “What’s in the tube, Mr. Schacht?” Digger yelled to show she wasn’t cowed. (Destined for greatness!)

  “Some designs. For exhibition posters. Some designs I was going over with a certain someone.” My shame changed all at once into a sudden, moronic happiness: I had my answer. I mean, about what to do about Kevin. That’s how life is: it provides these accidental answers. Or seems to. You have to judge by results.

  I’d thought Digger would be more into the idea. I explained it to her the next day. That we should put up posters asking for info about Kevin. But her brows contracted in this way that suggested deep hesitance. “I don’t know. It seems sort of hackneyed?” We were huddled over our lunchtime cigarettes in one of the few fully hidden corners of Kennedy’s field/track/basketball court/lunch area, which is set on two levels of land. Smokers gather by tradition in this corner near the front fence, hidden from the street by bramble and from the eyes of administrators by an overhanging wing of the building, which can’t be gotten at from the inside, and whose green doors are bound with a rusty, titanic chain.

  “No, man. Look,” I argued, “they didn’t try this before. And I just think it can’t do any damage.” I was shouting, I realized, half standing (the overhang of the building got in the way) and shouting. Digger’s face was still flattened with skepticism.

  “Do you know that you’re the only person I know who gets like this? All speechy. Literally the only person. You sound like you’re forty.” She says this to me a lot. And she’s right, and I’m glad to have the chastisement. Because rocketing off on the strength of your rhetoric alone takes you into some of the stupidest possible situations. I kept at it, though, lowering my voice and refusing to abandon my argument. We went through almost a whole pack together, and missed the end-of-lunch-period buzz.

  There is a copy machine in the Kennedy offices that students have access to. It has a big sign over it, on eye-hurting pink posterboard. The lettering is purple. BE UNSELFISH, the sign admonishes. With paper and time, et cetera. But it’s part of the larger official message hawked by our administration: selfishness is the highest evil. Which means, if you think about it, that all private desires participate in evil. Which means that desire itself is in the wrong. The urge to deface that sign is the strongest feeling I have about my school, I think, as an institution. So I had the slip of paper that I surreptitiously made in Latin class. IF YOU HAVE ANY INFORMATION ABOUT KEVIN BROADUS, PLEASE PAGE, and then I put my number, which I won’t include here. It would be useless to you. No mention of a reward. I thought that would be presumptuous. No photo. I had none. Just a blank vague plea. I thought it would work. I was sure it would work. You understand why Digger was so skeptical.

  I’d make a hundred to start, I told myself. And paper them up on weekends, after school, during deliveries. Fucking seamless, right? I was humming with self-satisfaction when I heard the drumming sound of someone sucking mucus back down from their nose into their throat. This could only be Ms. Arango, Dr. Karlstadt’s subordinate, whose job it was to maintain the file systems on Kennedy students. Her mucus sound is famous. She’s a world-class nose breather. And so ugly. I don’t want to sound harsh, but it’s objectively true. Her skin is sallow, the color of old newsprint. A rodentine, pushed-forward mouth. A mole crested with three stiff hairs. And this avid misery in her eyes, a misery that wants only more and more unhappiness. She gets downright excited by annoyances and problems. And I’m in a position to know. I’ve had to be processed by Kennedy’s disciplinary apparatus nine times, and she is the operator of that process. I have nine disciplinary actions appended to my permanent record. Form 102B4, goldenrod in color. You have to get a parent’s signature. But my father, his hair unbound, had instructed me to forge his on the first one, when I was in ninth grade. And that had been standard procedure since. The cause? I told a Holocaust joke to Alex Faustner, who started weeping. Right in biology. Where’s the self-respect? So I began my little tradition of collecting and repeating jokes of that kind. (What’s the difference between a Jew and a loaf of bread?) Because she cried. I would have lost interest otherwise. (A loaf of bread doesn’t scream when you put it in the oven.)

  “May I help you, Mr. Schacht,” Ms. Arango asked, and her mucus rumbled.

  “Uh, no, like I think I like have everything under control here.” I pointed at the copier, which was vronking away and emitting its green hell light. She answered with a snot-fluting sigh. It was widely believed that Mr. Vanderleun was boning Ms. Arango, and students in their dealings with her made subtle references to this fact. I saw them walking or eating together sometimes, and she seemed to find his missing finger fascinating. It did make a nauseating show when he combed back his dark, greased hair, which clumped into blades, when he combed it or adjusted it with three fingers and a thumb, the active remnant of his little finger signaling like a stubby antenna. Their affair might have been real. Who knows? Some people find über-weird shit attractive. Her small, neat figure—she has no extra flesh—quivered with some invisible satisfaction.

  “Make sure that you don’t overuse the machine, Mr. Schacht.” Behind her, I saw the gray sergeant-like ranks of her file cabinets, which contain the records of all Kennedy students. She stood there, a sentinel, ladies and gentlemen, watching with covetous attention as the copier worked. Like I was taking something from her just by using it. She wore this weary half-smile of acceptance.

  So I had to take stronger measures. In the face of this, I had to. And stealing Kevin’s file from the records office was not a crime or anything. It was just sitting there. I came up with the whole plan as Ms. Arango and I faced each other down. There wasn’t even any premeditation! If it had been anyone there but Ms. Arango, I doubt I would have done it. If she hadn’t put on that martyr’s smile, I would have made my stupid copies under the glaring BE UNSELFISH sign and left. But she just had to come and stare at me and make that face. And rage gives me ideas. It makes me ingenious and daring. So I started lying, pitching my voice just right, and I knew as soon as her face shifted, the hairs protruding from her mole tick-tocking as the muscles beneath it twitched, that this was going to work. “Uh, Mr. Vanderleun? Like asked me to ask you to come up to his classroom? Four oh three?”

  Thought, like a migraine, forced her eyelids lower.

  “Did he say why?”

  “Toner?” I asked.

  What toner is, I still don’t know. But its possession and hoarding are contentious subjects among our teachers and administrators. I stared at her, stone-faced. Her eyes glowed with unhappiness, and her hands sought and found each other before she spoke.

  “Well, I guess somebody has to make sure that the ship doesn’t sink!” I swear to God! That’s how she talks, in grandiose and banal metaphors. And with these clicky, self-righteous heel taps she trotted out of the office, in her dress that matched the gray of the file cabinets, and I was alone. The file drawers were, of course, unlocked. Not because our administrators trusted us, but because they were negligent. I lifted Kevin’s light folder from the BO-BY drawer, which released the tannic scent of decomposing paper. I was too thrilled to open
it. So I tucked it under my left arm and my sheaf of posters under my right and ran off, doing an idiot’s wobble, knees half locked. Down the echoing brown hall, through the knots of kids sneaking kisses or sly gropes, waiting for class to begin.

  When Digger and I met up that afternoon, at the Flagpole, I told her I had something to show her. “The posters?” Her voice was still laden with mistrust. I wanted to keep her in suspense. I promised her I’d say, once we’d smoked. We were driving around in long ovals from her house to Kennedy to my house and back. On our second loop, we saw a man with a sky-blue megaphone haranguing the passersby from the small meadow in the middle of the traffic circle, named for a second-rate general, behind the blind back of the school. We pulled over to listen to him. “Some people want nothing to rule over them,” he shouted over and over, through his megaphone, into the air. “It’s eternity either way you look at it, my friends.”

  “Are you going to tell me now?” Digger sighed, mouthing out a torus of smoke. “Waiting doesn’t make any sense.” A silence, from me, from the man with the megaphone. Even a miraculous break in the flow of cars.

  Then everything lurched back into motion: Digger fumbled the radio on and the shouter spread his arms and yelled straight up into the sky. I could see his Adam’s apple bobbing with tremulous effort. He was just putting himself to work at it. Not caring whether he convinced anyone. It was time for me to speak, all signs indicated. I reached into my backpack and removed Kevin’s file.

  “What’s that?” Digger asked. The folder had CONFIDENTIAL stamped on it, in red, and PROPERTY OF KENNEDY ADMINISTRATIVE RECORDS. In that army lettering my father uses to indicate his private materials. So there was some appropriate awe in Digger’s question.

  “It’s his file, man,” I whispered to her. I don’t know why I whispered this. Because I was high, I guess. She faked a little unease, to hide her eagerness. Why do people do that at all? Fake unease, I mean? We let it lie there for a long moment. Opening it would be proof that we were really going to investigate. A Rubicon. We’d both stopped breathing.

  Do I even need to tell you it was a colossal disappointment? Every expected thing is, because it can’t withstand the inflating power of the human mind. We went by year. Just for order’s sake. First semester, ninth grade. Nineteen-ninety-fucking-six, one of the most style-free years on record. Pre-Algebra: B+. Asian History: B. Band: A. Visual Arts: C. Earth Science he had dead-bang aced, an unmodified A. Kevin had actually been in my Earth Science class (by mistake, I assumed, given the aptitude his later science grades suggested; Earth Science is a bullshit class), which I had almost failed—sixty-six average. Mr. Ramses, our teacher, was a charitable man. We skimmed the rest of Kevin’s numbers. We could already tell they were going to be boringly normal. The upshot of the whole thing—for me, at least—was that Kevin at the time of his death had been carrying a 3.4 GPA and had a total of zero incident reports of any kind appended to his record.

  “Jeez.” Digger coughed. “They really thought this kid was in a gang? That’s so racist. He’s so boring.” I had to suppress my surging delight, so I said nothing. My GPA was higher than Kevin’s, despite his generally better performance in the sciences. Not to speak ill of the dead or anything. But having a lower GPA than a dead guy would have stung. It would have been a terrible and ignominious failure.

  IV.

  I DON’T WANT TO BORE YOU with trivial stuff—Addison Schacht woke up and brushed his teeth. He had a morning hard-on and it was raining, that kind of nonsense. Or the repetitive stuff: how many times do I need to tell you that I went to calculus? So the next thing that looms up in my memory is the Friday of the college-preparedness assembly. That day turned out to be one of those decisive ones that don’t announce themselves. Which I guess all human life is composed of.

  The college-preparedness assembly happened ten days after my theft from the records office. The assembly itself turned out to be dull, as I’m sure you are all shocked to hear. But I need to explain something about my line of work, in order for the events before the assembly to make any sense to you. Weed sales are not a seasonal business. I mean, if people want drugs, they are going to want them year-round. So there’s always this steady base of demand. However, there are certain times when it spikes. Minor spikes around weekends, larger ones before school vacations, and then a long crescendo during summer, which peaks around the third week of July. Then there’s a slow descent back to normal, and then we’re back in the school year. September, though, is a statistical outlier. It often shows a real drop-off in sales, for me. A lot of kids decide to “get serious” about school (hilarious!), so they take up the ascetic practices that they associate with high achievement. Another instance of the Protestantism infecting our society. But this year, September had been profitable. No one cared about excellence any longer in my class, or maybe the standards of excellence had come to seem trivial to us, faced as we were with the prospect of imminent release.

  On account of this I had to get up early, in the colorless dawn, to go and buy more weed. I figured the transaction would take between ninety minutes and two hours. Noel, my supplier, is a weird early riser. Which is convenient. But he considers me a friend (I think). Which always makes our business dealings drag. I should explain about Noel. His father, Eliot Bradley, owns a controlling interest in Envivia, formerly Bradley Pharmaceuticals, formerly Bradley Brothers, formerly Kingman Bradley and Sons, some kind of dry-goods emporium extant in the 1820s, according to my city history textbook, which lists the Bradley family as among the most notable and permanent (white) residents of D.C. Noel has a brother named Paul Preston Bradley, and Noel’s own middle name—this is amazing—is Eleuthere. Eleuthere! I got him to tell me this once, when we were making an exchange. And despite his slender, euphonious set of names, he’s huge: one of those fat guys whose fatness is joyless. With green rings of exertion under his eyes just from breathing and walking around. When he sits his thighs spread to the width of my waist.

  He lives on Otis Street, at Tenth Street and Otis. His house is tall and narrow, ash-colored, with decrepit stone pineapple finials jutting from the facade and almost no furniture inside, just a spine-broken leather couch in the living room and a king-size mattress on the concrete floor of his basement. Such houses aren’t unusual in his neighborhood. Loose congregations of black guys my age build up outside the convenience stores and identical Chinese restaurants; a few buildings stand blinded with plywood slabs. Smiling and indifferent old people hunch on stoops and porches. But the same heavy blue sky covers it that covers my neighborhood, and the same absurd problems of conscience afflict its residents, I imagine, exacerbated by the grime and poverty maybe, though fundamentally identical, which should prove that squalor isn’t ennobling, at least as far as basic inner makeup is concerned. Noel has chosen to live there, and contrary to what you think, he doesn’t do so on his family money. He’d been bounced from private school to private school, this by his own admission, in D.C., in New England, one in Texas, one in Hawaii. After he was booted out of Chandler, a last-chance kind of prep school in the forests encircling Blue Knock, Vermont, his father disowned him. Old-fashioned as it sounds. I kind of admired Noel for having been disinherited, though I can’t say why. His parents divorced right after he returned from the woods. As though they’d been awaiting his homecoming.

  How did he get into the wholesale drug business? I have no idea. He never told me who his suppliers are. But he took to the work. His fat-guy’s friendliness helps, even though it’s overdone. I was at a party at his house once, right when we first met, which was right after he moved down there, and this old crackhead/junkie/general bum came around, this guy Stokey. This was three years ago. It was a June Saturday. Still balmy, the scent of whole and crushed grass filling my nose and mouth, along with the harsh stinking-sweet smoke from the blunt we were handing around. Noel’s backyard has, for some reason, five or six rusted lawn mowers scattered around it. Stokey tripped over one hidden by a thatch of tall gra
ss and weeds, and we in the circle laughed our various stoned laughs, animal sounds: grunt-grunt, haw-haw, cackles, barks, and hoots. Stokey lumbered toward us, tugging at the pointed lower corners of the filthy blue corduroy vest he wore, and called out, “You best let me hit that.”

  So we did, and he stood next to me, and he stank of dead sweat and liquor, of decay. I was the only white guy there, besides Noel, and that’s why Stokey asked me what he asked me. “You know what D.C. stand for? The letters?”

  “District of Columbia?” I responded. His mouth was a ruin, teeth post-shaped and omelette yellow, and his breath vinegary and choking. He shook his head, as though to get rid of a gnat.

  “Then I don’t know.”

  “Drama ci-taaay,” Noel warbled out. That was wrong, too. Stokey—his eyes cleared for an instant, smiling a weird, gentle smile—croaked out, “Don’t. Care.”

  “Man, dis nigga always come up here wissome nonsense.” Noel cackled, and my terror at his use of THE N-WORD dizzied me, dried out my mouth. But everyone was already guffawing, and Stokey handed the blunt to the next guy and crowed a jagged laugh, and the conversation wandered elsewhere. A natural, right? Noel certainly dresses the part. In winter and fall, jeans that sit well below his ass, and billowy T-shirts, white or primary colored, blazoned with names that mean nothing to me, the hems hanging almost to his knees. He’s too heavy, really, to need a coat. In the spring and summer he switches from jeans to low-sitting khaki shorts. These sit so far down that you can see only three inches of his cellulite-dimpled pale calves above his shoes, filigreed with greenish veins. A thin strap of beard frames his round chin. He keeps his hair short, a caplike scrub. All this sounds like it would look idiotic, but on Noel you half believe it. Still, meeting with him can be trying, because—as I said—he considers me a friend. He’s always telling me stories, as he breaks off my package, about his recent imaginary sexual conquests.