Gentlemen

by Michael Northrop

  And this is why people hate people like him. He wasn’t wrong, exactly, but he was full of crap, because there are laws. Obviously. They’re written down and if you break them and you aren’t careful, you go to jail or get your head kicked in by the cops, and just because it hadn’t happened to him or anyone he knew didn’t mean it wasn’t real, that it was all an idea. I do something serious and my life is flushed down the pipes, and sure, I might do it anyway, but that’s a chance I’m taking, and I still know the fact of the matter. But he just kept going, acting like he was on a roll.

  “And what is punishment? Well, it comes after a crime, doesn’t it, after a crime or at least a transgression of some sort? The ideas are linked. They are universal. Tsumi to batsu, that is crime and punishment in Japanese. I don’t know why I remember that; I just do.”

  And I was thinking: I don’t know why I don’t care; I just don’t.

  “The concept, and it is eastern as well as western, is that the crime creates an imbalance, and the punishment restores that balance. It is yin and yang or action and reaction, but is it true? Isn’t it all just an idea? Couldn’t you look at it differently? The crime changes things—a house that was standing is now burned down—and the punishment changes things more—a man that was free is now in jail. Excuse me, a man who was free. Is that more in balance or more out of balance? A case could be made either way. Ideas can be linked to one another, and they can also be at odds with one another. To an extent, everyone must be their own judge, their own jury. Think about that as you read this book. How does it apply to Raskolnikov? What is his conception of crime? Does it change over the course of the book?”

  I was thinking, How does it apply to who? I looked at the clock and it was a little more than ten minutes to go before lunch, and that ten minutes went pretty much the same way. Haberman did the talking, and now he was talking about this dude Raskolnikov. It made me think of rascal, a word my gramps used to use. A minute or so to go and a few people actually raised their hands. Again, it wasn’t something that happened much in here. Haberman picked Max, and Max goes, “So what’s in the barrel anyway?”

  Haberman curled his mouth up into half a smile, spread his hands, and said, “Ultimately, it doesn’t matter. Whatever you think is in there, well, then that is what’s in there. In every way that matters, the contents are in your mind, not in the barrel.”

  Which is the same crap he’d been saying all class and not an answer. One more example of why we didn’t raise our hands much.

  When the bell finally went off, he gave us our homework, adding another twenty-five pages to the twenty-five none of us had read the night before. We figured we’d find a one-page wrap-up of the book on the Internet before the test. Bones found a pretty good site for those last time. I didn’t need it for that one, because I’d seen the movie, but I figured I’d check it out for this one. I didn’t think there was a movie of Crime and Punishment. I hadn’t heard of one, anyway. Maybe there was an old one, but I didn’t watch any of that black-and-white crap.

  2

  We grabbed our stuff quick. Haberman’s class was a haul from the cafeteria, and you didn’t want to be at the end of the line and have to stand there forever like a tool. We’d sort of formed up around my desk, you know, assembling Strike Force Delta, but just as we were heading out, Haberman was like, “You three, Benton, Bonouil, and Malloy, a moment, please.”

  That’s me, Bones, and Mixer, and we gave each other a quick look. We hadn’t done squat and had no idea what this was about. It turned out he wanted help getting the stupid barrel out to his car. That still didn’t answer the question of why us, and as the others pushed past you could see they were looking at us and thinking the same thing. He shouldn’t have been allowed to just jack our lunch like that, but if we walked out, we’d be the ones in trouble.

  Haberman was either lucky or good, because if he’d asked just me, I’d just as likely’ve said no thanks and taken my chances. If I end up in detention with Tommy, then I end up in detention with Tommy. I knew the way. If Tommy was suspended already, well, then I’d be a full step up the ladder from him. Mixer probably would’ve done the same thing. Bones might or might not’ve. He was on the brink of failing in here. English is a core class and no one wanted to do tenth again, especially Bones. He’d already failed a grade once. The first time we met him was his second try at fourth grade.

  He was pretty different back then. He was still called Gerard, for one, and he wasn’t so angry. I mean, he was ten, and there’s only so angry a ten-year-old is going to be. He was just hyper and a year older than the rest of us. It wasn’t the kind of thing you discussed, but everybody knew. We’d seen him around in the hallways and the cafeteria, so we knew he wasn’t new to the school, and we knew he hadn’t been in our class the year before, so it wasn’t too hard to piece together that he’d been held back. He just came with fourth grade, like the furniture.

  You could tell it wasn’t something he wanted to talk about, but he loosened up some in the second half of the year. He’d made two friends by then, the same two friends he had now, and the teachers mostly hadn’t bothered to change the tests from the year before. Even the pop quizzes were mostly the same. He’d been left back one year, but in a way, it’s like the teachers are left back every year. Anyway, he started giving Mixer and me a heads-up on the quizzes and tests, the ones he remembered anyway. It was probably the first and only time in his life he qualified as smart. But that was when the other kids turned on him. I guess maybe they wanted him to share the test info a little more widely.

  Toward the end of the year, they started in on him. They’d be like, “So long! Say hi to the next class. We’ll write you when we get to fifth grade, let you know how it is.” I think that’s when the anger really started to creep into his system. And then every year after that, the teachers handing his tests back face-up, a big red D or F on top, having to sweat it out every June, whether or not he was going to move ahead with the rest of us.

  Hell, it even kind of makes me angry, thinking about the little kid he was back in fourth grade. He used to jump off the top of the slide and yell “Spider-Man!” We’d all be laughing and he’d be smiling and his face’d be bright red from the attention.

  But that smile was gone now, and it’s like all that was left were the Ds and Fs. And it’s kind of funny, too, because all those little bastards who made fun of him were right: That kid, the kid he was, never really did make it out of fourth grade. And two years into high school, I was starting to suspect that I was friends with someone who didn’t really exist anymore. Just sometimes he’d make an appearance, the old Bones, smiling out at me about some dumb thing and I couldn’t help but smile back. We had a history, you know, and isn’t that what friendship is?

  Anyway, like I said, Haberman asked all three of us, so any one of us bailing kind of screwed the others. Plus, with three of us, it seemed like it would be quick and easy to haul the barrel out to the parking lot. Throw in the facts that Haberman had a sweet car and English was on the first floor, and we were just like, All right, whatever.

  But we were wrong, because it turned out that he was not kidding about the barrel being heavy. A watermelon, my ass. At first we tried to slide it along the floor, but that didn’t work at all. The blue plastic dragged along the tile, sticking more than it slid. The floor was smooth enough, but there was some kind of grit on the bottom of the barrel. We started to tip it over to roll it, but Haberman said no way, so we had to lift it. It was tricky to grip, so it took two of us to get the thing off the ground. Then Bones found some space in the middle and became like the outboard engine. He did most of the pushing us forward, while Mixer and me did most of the lifting. Haberman didn’t even pretend he was going to help. He was just like, “This way,” but we knew where the teachers parked.

  There was the usual mob scene between classes. Kids who had early lunch period coming back, eating snack packs of Oreos and picking their teeth. Kids who had late lunch heading that wa
y. People talking at their lockers, some couples kissing, and here we come like the hired help. I hated that. I hated how it made me feel. I knew they were looking at me, and normally I might shoot them a look or shoulder into them when I walked by, but it’s hard to look tough when you’re squatting down and red in the face, so I just kept my eyes straight ahead and kept my feet shuffling along.

  “This frickin’ sucks,” I said, loud enough for Haberman to hear, and of course, I didn’t really say frickin’. He didn’t say anything. What did he care? We were the ones breaking into a sweat. Mixer and Bones sort of grunted their agreement. They knew what I was talking about. I knew everyone around us was like, There go those losers. Get used to the heavy lifting, boys. They’re no better than me, but that’s not what they were thinking then, and I just wanted to pop someone in the mouth.

  We finally reached the big double doors. Haberman opened the one on the right, and he was like, “After you, gentlemen.”

  He always called us gentlemen. Any group of guys in the hallway or rolling into class a little late got one of those. He called the girls ladies. I wondered what he called the principal, Your Majesty? Anyway, it was like, Yeah, screw you very much, and we were through the doors and out into the sunlight and open air.

  “I’ve got to put ’er down for a sec,” said Mixer, and that was fine with me. We dropped the barrel at the top of the wide stone steps that led down into the front parking lot. Just three steps, real short and wide, so they wouldn’t be a problem getting down. I straightened up, and for a second it was actually kind of cool. Being outside on a nice day was one thing, but being outside on a nice day when you were supposed to be in the god-awful gloomy hallways of the Tits was another thing entirely. Pretty nice.

  “All right, then,” said Haberman, like he was our boss and not our teacher. Totally ruined it. We leaned back down, wedged our fingers between the heavy plastic and the hard granite. We lifted with our legs and not our backs, like we learned when we helped Tommy’s dad move into his apartment in the city. Gary, who told us that, was Tommy’s stepdad now. It was kind of a bad scene, that move, but it was good advice.

  “Not for nothing,” said Bones, “but what the hell’s in this thing?”

  “Are you recanting your guess, then, Mr. Bonouil?” said Haberman.

  “Yep. I’m recanting all of those guesses, everybody’s.”

  “Everyone was wrong? Not one of your classmates hit the jackpot?”

  “Nope,” said Bones. He was grinding his teeth and spitting out his words between huffs and puffs. He wasn’t looking at Haberman, but he was talking right at him, if that makes any sense. He was talking to Haberman like he was a freshman and not a teacher. It’s not a real offense, not like shoving him or something, but it was close to one, especially the way Bones was going about it.

  Bones was just not good at this, at provoking people, picking arguments. He had no volume control, and everything he said just sounded like a threat. This was more Mixer’s game, and as long as Bones had hung out with Mixer, he never could pick it up. Bones lacked the mental tools for it, I guess, and the patience.

  Mixer was excellent at this kind of thing, at needling people without giving them any real good excuse to smack him. Since fourth or fifth grade, he’d been able to get the other guy to start it, roomful of witnesses, and then pound the poor kid into the ground “in self-defense.” With teachers, he could just piss them off without giving them any good cause for punishing him. You couldn’t do it all the time, otherwise people would catch on. Mixer knew that. He saved it for special occasions, and he was smart about it.

  Bones was always the other guy, the one it was easy to get going. If you wanted a fight, it’d take all of about three words to get Bones to go. And early on, that happened a lot. Back in elementary school, when he was just this skinny, aggressive kid, he used to get into a lot of fights. But at some point, I guess around sixth grade, he just stopped following the rules.

  Kid fights don’t usually have clear winners. Sometimes, like if somebody slips or takes one clean on the nose, yeah, it’ll be pretty obvious. More often, kids just grab and paw and swing wide at each other until they get it out of their system. Then they stop when the one who’s getting the worst of it decides to quit while he can still pretend he won, or at least call it a draw. The way to quit is to sort of pull back and stall until the teachers get there. Everyone knew the deal, but Bones got to the point where he wouldn’t stop until he was pulled off. Sometimes it took three of us.

  That’s when people stopped wanting to fight him. That’s how he got the nickname, too. You might think it’s because he’s skinny, skin and bones, but that’s not it. It’s because pulling him off a kid in a fight was like pulling a dog away from a bone. And it might seem like it’d be hard to be friends with someone like that, but that’s only half the story, because it was cool, too. It’s like rappers have pit bulls, you know? And when kids stopped wanting to mess with him, they stopped wanting to mess with us. There wasn’t much of a difference back then. We were tight. If Bones saw someone giving me trouble, he’d give it right back to them.

  Haberman didn’t know any of this, of course. He thought he was talking to a student, but really, it was like he was poking a dog with a stick. He was a teacher and that’d probably always been enough to keep him safe, just the name, the word. But Bones didn’t put a lot of value in words. He could understand being in the school, just that there are different rules in there and walls and doors to hold him in place, but we were out of the school now. Just a few yards out, but those must’ve seemed like some long yards to Bones. His voice, his body language, it’d all changed from the hallway to here. He was coiling up, giving all the warning signs that anyone who’d gone to school with us would’ve recognized. But Haberman had never seen them before.

  “And why do you suppose your classmates all got it wrong?” he said.

  “Well, A, because you said so, and B, because they didn’t have to lift it.”

  We arrived at Haberman’s car and dropped the barrel near the trunk.

  “Yes, this is the one. You three seem to know that already, though. I guess I know who to ask if my tires mysteriously sprout holes.”

  Yeah, we knew his car. It was a sleek little MG sports car. Vintage, dark red, real nice. There weren’t any other cars like that in the teachers’ lot. There was one sweet BMW in the student lot, but that was new. This thing was like an antique, but it ran smooth. I’d heard the engine hum by a few times.

  We served detention in a little room that was just thirty or forty yards from here, and in the nice weather, the windows were open. Everyone sort of wondered why such a wreck of a teacher had such a sweet car—he made more noise coughing than the car made starting—but I guess it was just that family money of his. If I had that kind of money, I’d buy a car like that, too. I was counting the months till I got my license. There weren’t too many left, but it felt like they were just crawling by.

  “Well, then, Mr. Bonouil,” said Haberman, getting back to Bones’s question. “You have had to lift it. Knowing what you know now, after all of your hard-earned insight, would you like to revise your guess?”

  “I’d prefer you just tell me,” said Bones. He stood up straight and he was three, maybe four inches taller than Haberman. He could pound him into dog meat, and out here in the parking lot, it seemed like that just might happen. But Haberman just kept ignoring the vibe, running right through the red lights.

  “Oh, I don’t think you’d believe me if I did.”

  Now they were looking right at each other, and I was thinking, Don’t do it, because it just wasn’t worth it. Yeah, that sucked, hauling that thing past half the school and everything, but it was over now, so I broke in.

  “Yeah, well, you better believe that this thing won’t fit into that trunk,” I said.

  “Hmmm?” said Haberman, looking down and sizing things up a bit. “You’re quite right, Mr. Benton. Sometimes, you know, I think you’re holding out
on me.”

  I ignored that last comment and said, “We’ll have to dump it out. It’ll probably fit without the barrel.”

  It would fit if there was any give to it, because the shape was the problem. So once again, the topic swung around to what was in the barrel. Haberman took the keys out of his pocket and unlocked the trunk, which rose open on its own once he removed the key. Just a few things in there: another blanket, like the one in the barrel but folded flat, a jug of water, and a jack. I didn’t see the tire iron, but it might’ve been in the shadows farther back.

  “You could’ve filled this thing up with lead shot, just to make us carry it,” said Bones. I could tell he was still angry, because we’d stopped lifting, but his face was still red.

  Mixer had been quiet this whole time. That’s sort of what kept me from being too worried about it. Mixer was good at reading people, when they were likely to lose it, where that line was. Like I said, it was almost a game to him, and he could read Bones as well as anyone. I sort of figured, if anything was really going to happen, Mixer’d speak up. And he was speaking up now.

  “Hey, Bones,” he said. “Got any plans this summer?”

  That must’ve seemed like a weird comment to Haberman, like totally random and out of the blue. There’s a phrase for things like that: non-something, non-sensical, maybe? Anyway, Mixer had a point. He was telling him, in so many words, you do anything out here, anything at all, and you fail English. You fail English, and you go to summer school. Bones looked at him for a second, the anger was still in his eyes, but then he got it. He let his head roll back and around, like someone had just taken the spine out of his neck. He shook out his shoulders a little. He was making a show of calming down, letting us know it took some real effort.