by L. A. Fields
“Look at you, you look like you’re full of movie-quality Christmas spirit.”
“But what do you think?” Ray says, his volume rising now that he’s no longer using the red flag words that could implicate them if overheard.
“I think we should go for a walk,” Noah says, gathering his things and dressing for the weather in a calm and orderly fashion. He notices but does not comment on the frantic bee-line path Ray left in the thin snowfall on the Kaplan’s front yard (Ray did not find time to take the footpath up to the door), and they start following Ray’s tracks as they stroll and Noah thinks.
Ray occupies himself by letting his surroundings dazzle him: the twinkling stars, the pure whiteness of the snow, the way the air feels so huge when the cold keeps moisture out of it. It’s a big, bright world tonight!
They pass an undeveloped lot, and the icy crunch of their footsteps disturbs some creature, which causes Noah to finally speak (he classifies in rote, automatic habit).
“Eastern Screech Owl,” he says, not necessarily to Ray, but just out loud.
“It sounds like a neighing horse.”
“Kind of misnamed, isn’t it? There’s nothing screeching about that musical trill.” The bird burbles at them again, perhaps a farewell as they continue past the copse of trees where it’s sitting.
“Ransom,” Ray says again. “It makes things a little more complicated, we’d have to contact the family, police will be brought into that, even if we tell them not to tell the cops, but what a success that would be. You can spend the money on your Europe trip, I’ll take mine to Canada or Mexico or Indiana or something, who cares, just so long as it’s outside the state, right? What do you want, five thousand, ten thousand? Take how much sounds right to you, double it, and that’s what we’ll ask for.”
“Okay, yeah, we’ll add that stuff to the list of details to figure out.”
“So you’re in? We’re officially going for a ransom too?”
“Yes, officially,” Noah says sarcastically. “I’ll rubberstamp your forehead when we get back if that would reassure you.”
They turn onto Ray’s street and pass the decorated yard of his Jewish Christian neighbors. They can’t be lazily Christian like his vaguely Catholic mother; they’ve got the zeal of the converted. Ray doesn’t remember if their yard was lit up when he tore out of his house (he was one hundred percent in his own world at that moment), but it’s certainly a beacon now—lights wrapping every tree that’s theirs and festooning a manger that has baby Jesus nestled in the center.
“Hey, want to practice a dry run of this kidnap?” Ray leans close to Noah to ask, his breath tickling Noah’s neck in a way that makes him shiver and flinch. “Let’s go see if Jesus is attached to his hay box.”
“I’d rather just do the murder; you know how Christians can get about their religious crap. Kill their kid, go to Joliet, take their tacky plastic Lord, end up in Guantanamo.”
That observation makes Ray laugh so hard, he nearly kneels down in an attempt to keep his sides from splitting open.
4
NOAH VISITS RAY’S HOUSE TO revisit their victimology. With ransom thrown into the fray, they can’t choose a boy at random anymore, they have to pick a kid whose parents have money, and seem soft enough towards that particular kid to hand it over in the hopes of getting him back.
This task is such a cold-blooded form of math that it empowers Noah to spend time in the unwelcoming Klein house without total discomfort. Ray’s parents still don’t like Noah, they never really did, Ray’s older brothers have counseled Ray against him, and even Tommy (who still agrees with Ray on just about everything) is ruffled by Noah, sort of like how a particularly loyal pet will dislike someone that subtracts from its owner’s affections. Ray is playing a video game with Tommy when Noah arrives, ledger in hand, ready to take accounting of all the neighborhood boys; when Ray gets up to tend to Noah instead, letting his character die and mess up Tommy’s mission or quest or whatever, Tommy glares at Noah with a pure and all-consuming distaste.
“Sorry,” Noah mumbles at Tommy.
“Yeah, you are,” Tommy says, turning back to the TV. Ray is delighted at the way his nine-year-old brother just managed to insult the only guy he knows with a genius IQ, and his laugh soothes Tommy’s jealousy. At least everyone
else is happy.
They ascend to Ray’s barren room, decorated only with a mess of clothes, an overflowing ashtray near the window he steps out onto the roof through to follow the ‘no smoking in the house’ rule, and his telescope, which is what they’re headed for.
“You know, the closer we choose this victim, the better vantage-point I’ll have for the fallout,” Ray says as he sits behind his telescope, happy at the thought of watching a funeral procession from the comfort of his own bedroom, probably.
“Also the better chance you have to become a suspect.”
“You’re a suspect if you’re hanging around a crime where you don’t belong, but I live in this neighborhood, I have a right to be concerned for the safety of its children. Just think of my little brother!”
When Ray says this, both he and Noah do think of Tommy, watching each other cautiously, in total mental synchronicity. They did convene to discuss the young sons of rich parents . . . isn’t that what Tommy Klein is?
Ray has half a smile on his face, feeling that pure thrill of danger one feels when considering doing something truly drastic. He couldn’t do that, or could he? He seems to decide he could at least talk about it.
“Who’s going to actually say it first?” Ray asks.
“You just spoke, you said it first,” Noah says, finally setting his notebook and pencil case down and sitting on the desktop beside them.
“Let’s both talk about it,” Ray says, getting comfortable for the storytelling feeling these meetings have started to take on.
“You like Tommy too much,” Noah says.
“You don’t. And you’re not the only one who can train himself to be beyond the reaches of emotion. I’ll be killing somebody’s beloved little brother, so why shouldn’t I do it to mine? Wouldn’t that be fair?”
“Not to the rest of your family.”
“I like all of them less than Tommy.”
“That argument is a Gordian knot, and besides, all the practical concerns we’ve already figured out are way too complicated if you’re part of the victim’s family.”
“How? I don’t need a car, it’ll be easy to lure him.”
“If you lure him, people know you were in charge of him, you would be the last person to see him alive, you would be the main suspect, your parents would blame you forever—”
“All right, all right,” Ray says, cutting Noah off.
“You couldn’t help with any of the ransom stuff after the disappearance of Tommy, you’d actually have to leave all that to me, and I don’t want it, and you do, so—”
“You’re going to make a great lawyer, you can’t stop arguing even after you’ve won.”
Noah finally stops talking. That was a little backhanded and self-serving, but it was still a compliment based on observable facts. Noah’s face does the opposite of a blush—his blood rushes away from the skin to somewhere else. He picks up his ledger to hide it.
“Start listing names, I’ll write them down in Sanskrit, we’ll discuss, and burn the page before I leave.”
“Very cloak-and-dagger,” Ray says, putting his eye to the telescope. “Okay, Levine, Johnny. Adelman, William. Schaffer, Kendall. The Wallaces have a bunch of grandkids, we could go for one of them.” The list goes on until every family on the block with a young heir is represented. Then they start crossing off names.
Some fathers are too stingy, some are wealthy but not liquid, Ray is thinning down the list with an abundance of gossip he’s picked up from his mother. He knows more about their neighbors than Noah knows about the other members of his own family. In the end their list is short enough to remember: Danny, Johnny, Henry, and an open mind in c
ase a better opportunity presents himself when the time comes. Noah asks for Ray’s lighter to destroy this first piece of physical evidence they’ve produced, and Ray hands it over before digging a bottle of whiskey out of an overstuffed decorative pillow on the tiny bench seat under his smoking window.
“To the perfect crime,” he toasts, taking a swig and handing it to Noah. Noah also raises the bottle in a small salute, and takes his own sip. The burn of the liquor numbs his lips too much; when Ray rewards Noah for his work today with a peck on the lips at the moment of departure, Noah barely feels it.
5
SPRING FINALLY ARRIVES IN THE Midwest, and with it comes an American urge for a road trip.
Ray hasn’t spared much thought on how to acquire a car for the commission of their crime without using his name (seems like something Noah will figure out first), but since it’s agreed that a car will be involved in the kidnapping, he has begun to think about the route of body transport. The faster the actual murder is completed, the better, less of a chance for fight or flight from the victim . . . but then there’s a dead body in the car for who knows how many miles of highway. Problematic, that.
In February, on their mutually dateless Valentine’s Day, Ray brings up the question of body disposal, and Noah suggests a dump site: a remote area of Hegewisch just over the state line of Indiana he knows from his birding classes. A lot to love about that idea! The body probably won’t be found in some nowhere drain pipe, and even if it is, it becomes an Indiana body, not an Illinois one, and certainly far from a Chicago corpse. Perfect, but . . . they still have to get the body from Chicago to that culvert.
In March, Ray demands a daytrip, a dry run, a dress rehearsal. He wants to know how long it takes to drive from their neighborhood to this pipe Noah knows about, and what it feels like to drag a body over to its final resting place. Ray asks Tommy how much he weighs and packs a suitcase five pounds heavier to use as their mock-body. Ray tells Noah he’s driving, since Ray will have to be in back where the action’s going to happen. Noah wholeheartedly agrees.
The day starts out so optimistically.
“This is about a thirty-minute drive,” Noah says as they get into his car for the trip with snacks, drinks, a stopwatch, that fucking ledger book Noah’s keeping for notes on this crime which will soon have to be burned with their victim’s clothes, the murder weapon, everything but the money and the memory. “I usually push the speed limit with my birding students, but we can’t break any more laws than the ones we’re already planning that day.”
“Yeah, it’s smart to keep the lawlessness to a minimum,” Ray says, feeling the purr of Noah’s upstarting engine through his toes, his viscera (as Noah refers to guts), his teeth. He’s vibrating with energy, watching the timer reflect the passing sky, which starts out as a fluffy panorama of cloudscape, but slowly starts to curdle into a storm.
Thirty minutes for traffic and safety becomes more like forty minutes due to inclement weather conditions, with the road turned black and slick and the other drivers igniting their headlights for visibility through the water.
“We’ll just budget a whole hour for this leg of the journey,” Noah tries to reassure Ray. “We’ll have all day for this, it’s no problem.”
But it is a problem, and Ray wishes he’d sat in the back for this test drive instead of the passenger seat, because though there might be a diminished sense of adventure in the back seat on the practice run, at least he would have been able to hide from Noah’s concerned glances. The traffic is one thing, the weather another, but complications keep arising even after the rain lets up: there’s construction on I-90.
The traffic is whittled down to one lane for a time, with concrete barriers scraping along one side, and orange plastic netting designating the work site on the other. Sitting in the passenger seat, Ray knows for sure that the workers are close enough to the car to roll down the window and shake hands, make friends. One of the guys actually jaywalks between the cars to cross the street. Might as well let people press their faces up to the glass, since that’s the only way they could see more clearly what’s in the back seat.
“This isn’t going to work,” Ray says. They can’t have a body in the backseat and drive through here. All his shivering excitement drains from him in an instant.
“We can take I-94 instead,” Noah suggests. “We’ll plan ahead for a day without rain. We can put the body in the trunk?”
“We’re killing him in the car, so that means somewhere we’d have to stop and drag it out in the open. Maybe pick a boy that would actually fit in that suitcase,” Ray murmurs, looking back at their representative cargo. “Or get a car where you can access the trunk from inside the cab, those exist.”
“You know,” Noah says slowly, “this is what I worry about the most.”
“Getting caught with a dead body? No shit, that’s what we’re both worried about, it would worry anyone.”
“No,” Noah says as they pull out of the tight squeeze of the construction zone, which gives him the freedom to look over at Ray for a longer moment, with a horribly adult expression of disappointment on his face. “I worry about your morale. This hasn’t even happened yet and you’re already so down. I worry that we’ll do this, and right away it’ll be like that drive back from the ZBT house, on a much more serious scale.”
“But I’ll have so much to look forward to,” Ray says, remembering his solo return to his frat house. There will be a real investigation for a missing child, focus, attention. It’ll be all over the news, and Ray will get to watch that news with his mother, with his brother, with a consuming sense of power and superiority to those who wonder at what he’s actually done. “It won’t be the same.”
“Not the same, no,” Noah agrees. “Worse.”
Ray sighs, not liking how true that sounds. Noah flips the turn signal and moves into the right lane, and leaves it on as they approach an upcoming rest stop. He’s pulling over.
“Don’t stop,” Ray says, the closest thing to a plea he’s ever made. “The timer’s still going, and I want to see this pipe place you know about, and this drive is just the first collection of data, right? To find out how much we don’t know, haven’t thought of yet, so we can plan accordingly. Besides—”
“Yeah, Ray,” Noah says gently. “I’m not stopping you.”
6
THOUGH RAY PERKS UP ONCE he sees that culvert—its cavernous maw and the murky weeds in the water below it—Noah doesn’t find any renewal there. Ray starts taking in deep gulps of country air (nevermind that the ditch water smells kind of sour), and galloping around trying to see the opening of the pipe from every angle to reassure himself that yes, this must be the place. Meanwhile Noah thinks of how peaceful he finds bird watching, alone, in silence, in empty places like this, and wonders if leaving a dead body out here will taint the closest thing he has to a spiritual communion. Noah thinks of his mother without missing her when he goes birding. This little project of Ray’s better not ruin that.
The drive home is quicker, and Ray completely resurfaces from his pessimism by the time they get back. Noah can’t shake a sense of pity out of himself for a much longer time. Not when he grabs a snack before dinner, not the next day when he smirks at completing the paperwork needed for housing, class registration, and a meal plan at Harvard, not when he sees Ray a few days after that to listen to him prattle on about cars and drive times and plans to make that lackluster trip again, just for the research. Noah can’t even pretend to listen after the first five minutes. Ray realizes he’s talking to himself after another ten minutes pass. Noah’s staring at him from a very remote place inside of his own mind.
“Hey, who died?” Ray asks, thinking he’s being funny and that a joke like that can break the tension. “Why do you look so glum?”
They’re sitting in the living room of Noah’s house, and Noah stands up from his seat on the couch with an urge to flee to the woods, but he doesn’t want to actually leave Ray’s company, and doesn’t ha
ve the words to describe that feeling of push and pull at the same time. He goes upstairs instead, knowing Ray will follow him (out of curiosity if not concern), and when they’re behind his bedroom door, Noah kisses him hard. It’s less of a kiss and more of a way to press their lips together between two sets of teeth, an attempt to squeeze all that useless verbiage right out of them.
“Hey,” Ray says, offended that he was given no warning maybe, or perhaps Noah has bad breath and doesn’t realize it. Noah glares at him regardless of the reason. His part of the deal is not harder to endure than Noah’s, and it’s offensive for him to act otherwise.
Noah pushes him lightly towards the bed, mostly because a real push would probably start a fight he would lose, he’s that annoyed right now. Ray rolls his eyes, but complies. All he has to do is ignore what’s happening, he doesn’t have to participate. It’s not that big a burden.
Ray gets into position, pants down, underwear up, eyes closed, and a hand covering them like he’s suddenly got a splitting headache. Noah wants a step further than this. He pulls down everything before joining Ray on the bed, and starts to tug down Ray’s underwear too. That makes him break his spell, and turn towards Noah with ‘no’ stamped all over his face. Noah puts his hand over Ray’s mouth and assures him, “I’m not doing that, just . . . don’t.”
Ray squints warily at Noah, then at the hand still touching his face, then he turns back away from it. A little trust, at last; that’s nice.
Noah puts himself between Ray’s legs, nothing drastic, nothing more than the same sort of friction they’ve shared before, but this time with direct skin contact, a space to thrust into, and because of that, a florid heat . . . it’s over faster than ever. Ray scrambles to the bathroom as fast as he can. Noah sits up, buttons up, and waits. Ray comes back in wiping his hands dry on his hair, swiping it into a helmet formation.
