Wicked Cruel

by Rich Wallace

  Callas holds the basketball up a bit and stares at it like it’s the most fascinating thing he ever saw. Then he looks at the ceiling. “I never heard that,” he repeats, very softly.

  “Heard what?” Scapes has come over and he’s towering above us even higher than Callas. He’s got that scowly red face and his armpits stink.

  “They say Bainer died,” Callas tells him.

  “That’s bull,” Scapes says, taking the basketball. “People always say stuff like that when some geek moves away. I’m sure Bainer’s annoying everybody at his new school, just like he did here.”

  “Don’t be too sure,” Gary says. “He’s already haunting Jordan.”

  I give Gary a shove. “Shut up. He’s not dead.”

  “Bainer was indestructible,” Scapes says. “Believe me, we tried.” He and Callas both crack up.

  We hang around for a few minutes and watch them practice, then head for the door. Just as we’re about to leave, Scapes comes running over. “Hey,” he says. We stop and turn. He looks back at the basketball court, then lowers his voice. “Were you kidding around?” he says to Gary.

  “No. That’s what I heard.”

  Scapes sticks his finger in his ear and starts scratching, then stares at the floor for a few seconds. “Let me know if you hear anything,” he says. “I mean … it would take a lot to kill a kid, wouldn’t it?”

  Gary shrugs. “Depends how you measure it.” He makes a fist and gently punches his own jaw three or four times. “It adds up, you know?”

  I follow him down the steps and out to the street. Cheshire Notch isn’t all that “dinky,” and technically it is a city. I think there’s about twenty-five thousand people living here, and at least that many more who come here to work every day. Plus six thousand college students for most of the year. Main Street is wide, and both sides are busy with offices and stores and restaurants. There’s manufacturing and tech stuff all around the outskirts.

  I’ve never felt spooked in this town before, even though there are signs of death and the past everywhere. Up the street is Chase Tavern, an inn that started operating before the Revolutionary War and is said to be haunted by several ghosts. It’s a museum now, and I’ve seen wispy lights in the upstairs windows some nights when I was sure there was nobody there.

  Cheshire Notch has New England’s biggest jack-o’-lantern festival in late October every year, and we make a huge deal out of Halloween, too—skeletons and ghosts all over town. And there are at least eight cemeteries here, with graves dating back to the 1700s, and very old dirt roads that wind through the woods and go nowhere.

  Gary’s dragging his jacket by one sleeve as we walk along Main Street toward home.

  “You should put that on,” I say.

  “What are you, my mother? I’m hot. I sweated my butt off in basketball.”

  I zip my own jacket up higher. That breeze gets cold once the sun goes down.

  I step around a pile of gunk on the sidewalk in front of Mario’s; it looks like a wad of pizza or stromboli that got mashed under somebody’s shoe. There’s a diminishing line of globs of it on the next few sidewalk squares, too.

  Gary stops under the overhang of the Monadnock Savings Bank and puts his jacket on. “You think somebody really found a fried rat in a bucket of chicken?” he asks.

  “Beats me. I definitely heard about that fingertip somebody bit into in a Big Mac a couple of years ago.”

  “I thought that was in a cup of Wendy’s chili.”

  “Whatever. It was something like that. Maybe in a burrito at Taco Bell.”

  “Yeah,” he says. “I don’t remember the details. I mean, I like to deflate hoaxes as much as the next guy, but some of these urban legends really do happen. The severed finger thing was one of them.”

  We start walking again and head to the crosswalk. Cars are supposed to stop for pedestrians here, but this time of day hardly anybody does. Too much of a hurry to get home from work. Finally, a pickup truck blasting Lynyrd Skynyrd screeches to a halt and the guy waves us across with his cigarette. We stand on the grassy island in the center of the street, waiting for the traffic heading the other direction to notice us and stop.

  “The Bainer legend is another one,” Gary says. “True, I mean. I even heard one of the teachers talking about it.”

  “When?”

  He nods a thank-you to the car full of teenagers that’s stopped to let us cross, then turns to me. “I don’t know. Last year sometime.”

  I’m not buying this. “Which teacher?”

  He shoves his hands into his pockets and looks up at a streetlight, like he’s concentrating. “I think it was … maybe Falco … that bald guy who teaches sixth grade at one of the other schools. He was telling somebody else.”

  Right. “Real convincing,” I say.

  He smacks my arm. “What difference does it make who I heard it from? I heard it. And it was a credible source, as they say. Somebody who wouldn’t be lying.”

  The guy who runs the Thai restaurant is standing in the doorway with his arms folded. He gives us a nod. All these food smells are going right through me and making me realize how hungry I am. Next door is another pizza place, then the bagel shop. I’d take anything from any of those places.

  “What do you care so much about Bainer anyway?” Gary asks.

  “I don’t.”

  “The kid was a weasel. It was impossible to even possibly be friends with him.”

  “No kidding. So?”

  He stops again and looks back at the pizza place. “You got any cash, Jordan?”

  “Some.” I’ve got a twenty-dollar bill in my wallet; my dad gave it to me just in case.

  “My parents won’t be home till eight o’clock,” he says. “You buy me a slice?”

  Uncle David is cooking up a feast at home, but I told him I didn’t know when I’d get back, so I say yeah and we go to the counter and get slices. Gary shakes some dried red pepper on his. This place is tiny—mostly takeout food, but there are two booths, so we slide into one.

  “You shouldn’t feel guilty,” Gary says as he chews.

  “About what?”

  “Bainer.”

  That strikes a bit of a nerve, but that’s none of his business. “I’m not guilty of anything.”

  “That’s what I said. You were the only one who ever came close to being his friend.”

  “I did not.” Who’s he kidding? I couldn’t stand Bainer any more than anybody else. It’s true that I didn’t have many friends until last year, but I’m a lot different now than I was then. I was very uncool, but I changed.

  “You hung with him sometimes,” Gary says.

  “I did not hang with him. Even if I wanted to—which I absolutely, positively did not want to do—then being seen with him would’ve gotten me beat up and ditched just as much as he was.” The same fate as him: no opportunity to ever fit in.

  Gary wipes his fingers across his mouth and leaves a streak of grease on his chin. “Very true,” he says. “You were riding pretty close to the edge for a while. People were wondering.”

  “About what?”

  “Whether you were more like him or us. I wouldn’t have been caught dead being seen with you in fifth grade. Not when anybody thought you might be friends with Bainer.”

  “I wasn’t.” I practically spit out the words, and I can feel my face getting red. I get up to leave the restaurant.

  He puts up both hands like a surrender, but he’s grinning as we walk out. “Hey, don’t sweat it,” he says. “I know you’re cool; I figured it out. I’m just saying …”

  “That you did me some huge favor by becoming my friend?”

  “No.” He turns the corner and heads for his house. I stay with him. “Just … we’d see you talking to him sometimes,” he says.

  “I couldn’t get rid of him.”

  “Everybody else managed to.”

  “Yeah, by beating him up,” I say.

  “That seemed like the only way.”
r />   Great solution. Cruelty.

  I didn’t like Bainer. You’d try to be friendly with him, or at least help him out, and he’d do something stupid in return. He was in my third-grade class and one time we were reading a story in our literature book. Each person read a paragraph out loud, then the next person in the row would read the following one. Bainer was sitting in front of me, and I could see him looking around at everybody’s books to try to figure out where we were, since his turn was coming up. I stuck my arm over and put my finger on the spot in his book, so he’d be ready on time. After I’d read my paragraph, I looked up and he shot a rubber band at me from close range, hitting me in the forehead. It stung. Some thank-you, huh? I also once caught him picking his nose and wiping it under my desk.

  “He was a total jerk,” I say as we enter Gary’s house through the back door, into the kitchen. “I’m not buying that he’s dead, but I’m sure glad he doesn’t live around here anymore.”

  The yellow lab, Barney, runs up to us, wagging his tail like crazy and licking the pizza grease on Gary’s thumb. “You hungry, boy?” Gary asks. “You must be starving. Me too.”

  He opens a cupboard and pulls out a bag of cheese puffs.

  “You’re feeding him those?” I ask.

  “No way. These are for me. Have some.” He bends to a lower cabinet and opens a bag of Pedigree dog food and pours it into Barney’s dish. “You never know what’s in that crap,” he says, pointing to the cheese puffs. “We don’t let him eat anything that isn’t pure.”

  He takes a handful of puffs and shoves them into his mouth, then steps over to the refrigerator and opens a giant bottle of Mountain Dew, chugging down several gulps.

  Barney finishes eating and burps. Gary grabs his floppy ears and gently lifts them up. “Who’s a good boy?” he says like he’s talking to a baby. “Who’s a good little doggy?”

  CHAPTER THREE

  Our house smells like garlic when I walk in. Uncle David’s in the kitchen with every pan sizzling.

  “Pour yourself something,” he says. “Something that goes with shrimp.”

  For him, that obviously means white wine. For me, I guess it’s Sprite. I pour half a glass and top it off with orange juice.

  “Smells wicked good in here,” I say.

  He dips a finger in the sauce on the stove and licks it. Then he dumps in a load of chopped parsley.

  David’s cooking beats my parents’ by a factor of about a thousand to one, so he’s always welcome here as far as I’m concerned.

  “I remembered another good urban legend for you,” he says. “This teenager is babysitting for the neighbors. She puts the kids to sleep, then goes looking around the house for a TV. She finds one in the den, but there’s this full-size clown statue in the corner of the room with a creepy grin on its face, and it makes her very uncomfortable. The only other TV is in the parents’ bedroom, so she calls their cell phone and asks if they’d mind if she watches TV in there because the clown statue is freaking her out. The dad says, ‘Grab the kids and get out of the house! We don’t have a clown statue.’ The parents rush home, and when they get there the babysitter’s been murdered.”

  “Wow,” I say. “That really happened?”

  “Absolutely. I think it was my friend’s barber’s cousin in Chicago.”

  We dig into the shrimp and rotini. “So,” he says, “you’ve gotta spend a week in Boston at my place next summer. I’ll show you around. Go to a couple of Sox games.”

  “Great,” I say. David grew up here, like my mother, but he went to college in Boston and stayed there. Mom commuted to Cheshire Notch State and never left town. That’s where she met my dad.

  “How’s basketball practice been going?” he asks.

  “It’s gone,” I say. “This was the only one.”

  “One practice?”

  “Yeah. It’s just games every Saturday. They let you have one practice session to get organized, but they say there’s not enough gym time for more than that. So today was it.”

  He laughs. “You’ll be ready for the NBA in no time.”

  “We play the biggest team in the league right off the bat this weekend. The tallest guy on our team is, like, five-two.”

  “What are you?”

  “Five even. Gary’s a quarter inch shorter.”

  After dinner I say I’ll do the dishes, but he tells me to just dump everything in the sink and he’ll take care of it in the morning when I’m at school. “Let it all soak,” he says.

  “Sounds like a plan.” I remember that I should bring in the mail. I never get anything, but the weekly newspaper comes on Thursdays, and I usually spend about eight seconds reading everything in it that interests me.

  Spike the cat is waiting on the porch to be let in when I open the door. She’s very quiet and spends most of her day wandering the neighborhood. She rubs against my leg and disappears into the living room.

  There’s a bill from the power company, two offers for credit cards, and some supermarket circulars. The front-page headline of the Observer says “Mayor-Elect Promises Fiscal Responsibility.”

  David’s in the living room with a fresh glass of wine, strumming his acoustic guitar. I take the mail into the kitchen and start flipping through the newspaper. The “Police Blotter” has a short item about one of our neighbors down the block who got arrested for a fight outside a bar. There’s a write-up about the high school football team losing in the first round of the state playoffs. And the school menu for next week is highlighted by pizza on Tuesday and chicken fingers on Friday.

  I look at the obituaries, which I never do, but I’m suddenly thinking about death.

  Nobody I know. Two men in their eighties plus some professor at the college who retired thirty years ago. They had long lives. Wonder if they ever got beat up when they were kids?

  There was this one time, midway through fifth grade.

  Lorne kept bugging me about entering the school talent show with him. He had an idea that he’d win everybody over with a stand-up comedy routine, and he needed what he called a “straight man” on stage with him to set up the jokes. (Apparently, the Bainers were always watching clips of comedy teams like the Smothers Brothers or Jerry Lewis and Dean Martin—ancient stuff that you see advertised on TV infomercials.)

  So Lorne had at least a marginal sense of humor. He figured we’d work up a ten-minute routine and he’d get all the laughs. Why he chose me I’ll never know, but I have to admit I had a sliver of interest. My life wasn’t going anywhere at the time.

  So I spent maybe five minutes on the steps of the school with him, letting him make his pitch. “It’s all in the timing,” he says. “The straight man says something that sounds kind of logical but is really stupid if you think about it. But you don’t give the audience time to think. Just a tiny pause for the idea to sink in, then I come in for the kill.”

  “And I look like an idiot.”

  “It’s a routine,” he says. “We both get the laughs. And you could use a few, you know? So you can stop being the class loser.”

  “Me?” I laugh. “You think I’m the class loser? You ever look in the mirror?”

  “I’m trying to help you out here.”

  “You gotta be kidding me.” Like I needed help from Bainer. The only thing he could help me do was lower my status to zero.

  “So,” he says, “we get onstage and you go, ‘One day in kindergarten, I was making faces at the girls. The teacher tells me, “If you keep making that ugly face, it’ll freeze like that forever.” ’ Slight pause, then I go, ‘Well, you can’t say nobody warned you.’ ”

  I admit that I laughed. A little.

  “I heard your father is working as a plumber’s assistant,” he says.

  “No, he isn’t.”

  He rolls his eyes and sighs. “This is part of the routine.”

  “Oh.”

  “So … I heard your father is working as a plumber’s assistant.”

  “Uh … yeah. That’s right.”


  “The plumber’s cell phone rang, but he was knee-deep in a problem and asked your dad to answer it. He goes, ‘Hello.’ The voice on the phone says, ‘I need your help right away; I gotta leak in the sink.’ So your father goes, ‘Whattya need our help for? Just go ahead and do it.’ ”

  So I’m laughing my butt off over that one just as Callas and Scapes get out of detention and come walking down the steps. You can imagine their reactions.

  I didn’t get punched out or anything, but I suffered by association. Just being seen with him would have been enough. This was worse—I’m sitting there laughing as if me and Bainer are buddies.

  The next day before gym, Bainer comes up to me and asks if I’ve made up my mind about the talent show.

  “Talk to me later,” I say and start walking, getting away from him as fast as I can.

  I bump right into Scapes. “So, how’s your new best friend?” he says. “You guys planning a sleepover for geeks or something?”

  I give Scapes a shove—big risk—and tell him to get lost. “Bainer’s just pestering me like he does everybody,” I say. I make a fist and hold it up. “Don’t worry, he’ll pay for it later.”

  So after gym we’re walking out. Bainer hangs back and says really loud, “Hey, Jordan. You wanna come over after school and practice with me?”

  Everybody starts looking at me and laughing. I stop walking. The other kids all leave the gym, and I walk over to Lorne, who’s standing on the side of the basketball court. We’re alone in here; the gym teacher, Mr. Brendel, is already gone.

  “Shut your mouth, Bainer,” I say. “I’m not doing that stupid comedy routine with you. Nobody can stand you, get it?”

  To reinforce that, I give him a push, not any harder than the one I gave Scapes. His feet go out from under him, and he crashes into some metal folding chairs that are stacked against the wall.

  He twists as he tries to catch himself and hits his head, but it’s no big deal. There’s a tiny scrape on his forehead and a drop of blood. I stand there waiting for him to start crying and threaten to kill me and run to the principal’s office. But he just sits on the floor, looking stunned.