Gentlemen

by Michael Northrop

  Even without me asking, I guess she knew I’d be thinking about dinner. Like I said, I was getting pretty predictable that way. “Pizza?” she said.

  “Heck, yeah!” I said. And that was the good thing about overtime. She must’ve worked till just about seven, so that’s two extra hours, but she’d get paid for three. That’s what I meant by time and a half. So now it was like we were going to spend some of that money and get pizza delivered. I was all for food and spending money and any combination of the two, so she walked off to get the menu and I clicked off the outside light and stood there thinking about what toppings I wanted.

  We ended up compromising on that, because I didn’t like peppers and she thought three meats was two too many. So we got a large sausage and onions, which was awesome. Mom ate slowly. She wasn’t super into pizza, which was weird, but Mixer’s mom wasn’t, either, so maybe that was a mom thing. I knew ordering pizza was more for me than it was for her, and I guess I sort of appreciated that, because I decided to sit down in the living room and eat it with her. Usually, I took my dinner to the front room to eat in front of the TV, but I knew she liked it when I sat at the table. That was definitely a mom thing.

  We didn’t say much, but it didn’t seem to matter. I thought about telling her about Tommy, but what was I going to say, Tommy flipped his desk over and got suspended today and I haven’t heard from him since? She knew what kind of kids we were. We got in trouble, broke things. We served detention, got suspended. She didn’t need any more reminders of that. We were having some nice pizza here, so why bring that stuff up?

  Then I thought maybe I’d tell her how we’d been paid a buck each to carry what we were pretty sure was roadkill. I was going to make a joke about how I was going to start a union to get better wages, like the Roadkill Luggers of America or something. I laughed a little when I thought of that and a strand of cheese blew out of the side of my mouth.

  “What’s so funny?” she said.

  I had a second to think about it while I plucked the cheese gob off the table and stuck it back in my mouth. “Nothing,” I said when I finished chewing, because roadkill probably wasn’t the kind of thing she’d want to hear about at the dinner table, either.

  Mom had seen one of my uncles in the sandwich shop at lunch, so she passed along some family info and I pretended to be interested in it. And that was pretty much it for the conversation. I didn’t ask her about her day, and she didn’t ask me about mine, because she’d probably worked too hard, and I probably hadn’t worked hard enough, and that was just the way it was. Plus, I just wasn’t that kid, the one who talked about classes and grades, the one whose mom was hoping he’d become a doctor or a lawyer or whatever. My mom was just hoping I’d graduate, and if it looked at any point like I might not, she trusted me to tell her.

  When we finished up, we each took our own plate into the kitchen. She ate a grand total of one slice, so even though I ate a lot, there was still some left over. I figured I’d have one slice later for a snack and another one for breakfast. Cold pizza was one of my favorite things in the world. Cold pizza and I don’t know what else. It’s kind of weird to think about your absolute favorite things. Summer vacation and my friends, I guess. I liked beer, but to be honest, I was still kind of getting used to the taste. Sleeping in was good. My mom.

  The Descent came on cable at ten. It’s a pretty good horror flick, plus it’s basically all hot chicks, so it’s kind of like the perfect movie, if you think about it. I sat there eating cold pizza and watching these creepy crawlers chase after the chicks in the dark. It was a pretty good night, all in all. The one thing I didn’t do was read any of that book.

  6

  “No doubt you are all well into the book by now,” Haberman said, meaning the opposite. “What do you think of the opening? Action-packed, wouldn’t you say?”

  He either meant that it really was action-packed or that it really wasn’t. He wasn’t asking anyone in particular, and no one particularly felt like answering. Tommy’s desk was empty again today, but it almost seemed less strange. He hadn’t been home the night before, a fact I knew because his mom was still working the phones this morning, even though I’d already told her I didn’t know anything more than she did.

  This time my mom picked up. It was the first she’d heard of it, and sure enough, she freaked out. She caught that from Tommy’s mom, like the mom flu, which was so contagious it could be caught over the phone. Moms got hysterical easy about their little baby birds. She asked me if I knew where he was, knew anything at all. When I said nuh-uh, she pulled back and stared me in the eyes, giving me that don’t-you-lie-to-me look. But I really didn’t know anything, and she must’ve seen that, because she just let me go without another word.

  When Tommy didn’t show up in homeroom, we figured we knew the deal. The longer he was gone, the clearer it got. He’d hit the road, gone to crash somewhere with someone. It was a family thing now, and his family was eight kinds of messed up. The family he lived with day to day, I mean. Tommy had this endless list of aunts and uncles and cousins and everything else. There were Dawsons all over the place in this part of the state, coming out of the woodwork, and Tommy seemed to get along with every one of them except the ones he lived with.

  So we thought we knew, and that was when Haberman kind of climbed into our heads. He almost always paced when he talked to the class, and he was doing that again, but instead of just looking at people at random or scoping out any stray noise, I swear he was looking at me. Over and over again as he talked, and I think he was looking at Mixer, too, and maybe Bones. And then there was what he was saying. “By now you all know of Raskolnikov’s crime. How does that rhyme go: Lizzie Borden took an ax and gave her mother forty whacks?”

  I hadn’t heard that one before, but I knew that Lizzie Borden was like a historical figure, like Jack the Ripper, so I figured this Raskolnikov guy had offed his mom with an ax, too. I sort of noted that down because it’s the kind of thing Haberman would put on a test.

  “And it’s causing him quite a headache, no? He is in utter turmoil, literally feverish. Does he regret what he did, or does he just fear getting caught? Anyone?”

  I looked around to see if maybe someone had read enough of the book to know. You could usually tell. They might not have their hand up but they probably wouldn’t be looking down and avoiding Haberman’s eyes when he asked the question. Turned out, I was the only one with his head out of the gopher hole, so I got called on.

  “Mr. Benton, what do you think?”

  “Both,” I said, just guessing.

  “Interesting,” he said, looking at me like we were playing poker. “Murder is a complicated business, wouldn’t you say?”

  “Yeah,” I said. “I guess.”

  “Indeed. There is the act, the bloody, bloody act itself, and then there is the aftermath. Dostoyevsky is interested in the latter more than the former. He is interested in the actions of the killer only insofar as they tend to illuminate the mind of the killer. To illuminate and to agitate. After all, the act itself, well, he gets that out of the way relatively quickly. It is almost offhanded, his treatment of it. What’s he really interested in? Mr. Benton, care to extend your hot streak?”

  I shrugged.

  “No?” he continued.

  He turned around, showing us his back and picking up a piece of chalk.

  “He is interested in…” and we could hear the chalk scratching and squeaking on the board. He turned around and moved to the side in a little hop, and we could see that he’d written CONSEQUENCES in big block letters.

  “And above all,” he said, turning back to the board.

  This time he wrote, even bigger: CONSCIENCE.

  He was sort of worked up now.

  “Let’s talk about that for a moment, shall we? To Raskolnikov, his acute awareness of what he has done is a sort of personal hell. It afflicts him. Is it all in his mind, though? Isn’t it just an idea? Like the ones we put on the board yesterday?”
>
  I could still see bits and pieces of those words on the board, where they’d escaped Haberman’s sloppy erasing.

  “Like crime? Like punishment?” Haberman said.

  Like watermelon.

  Haberman sat down on the corner of his desk. He was still for a moment, taking the pulse of the class. He did that every once in a while, and when he did, he was like a bug with its antennas up. He noticed everything, the whispers in the back, the movements off to the side, and the energy level of the room, which right now was like a balloon deflating. He frowned.

  “Of course, a faraway, long-ago St. Petersburg is just an idea to you as well,” he said. “Perhaps that is causing the trouble. Let’s say it’s not Russia but the United States, not St. Petersburg but right here, in this school. Let’s say a murder is committed in this very room, between classes. A student is suddenly missing. It’s as if a hole has opened up in the school, but it isn’t a hole, it’s a murder.”

  And right there, my ears pricked up. Maybe he was just trying to get our attention, make it personal, but it’s a weird thing to say. Haberman was looking off to my right. I figured he was looking at Mixer, because Mixer looked down right then, like there was suddenly something interesting on his desk. Haberman went on, and as he did, he swept his eyes over the class and started looking at me. Standing above us and scanning the room like that, he sort of reminded me of that big, fiery eye from the Lord of the Rings movies.

  “That’s a problem, isn’t it?” he was saying. “Can you see that now? It is no longer a problem for the victim, who is dead after all and beyond caring, but it is a problem for those left behind. As Dostoyevsky writes: ‘God give peace to the dead, the living have still to live.’ It is a problem for the victim’s family. It is a problem for the victim’s friends,” said Haberman, still looking at me and putting a little extra emphasis on the word friends, it seemed to me. Then he broke off his stare, even though I hadn’t so much as blinked, even with my bad eye. He swept his high beams toward someone farther over, maybe Bones.

  I looked over at Mixer and half mouthed: “A student is missing?” We weren’t dense. Plus, it was already sort of in our heads from Bones’s joke. Tommy’s empty desk was in a line, connect-the-dots style, between Mixer and me. But we weren’t crazy, either. Mixer gave me a look like, Is this guy frickin’ nuts? I gave him a look back like, I don’t know.

  “And certainly,” Haberman went on, “it’s a problem for the murderer. There is a body; there is probably a weapon. It’s like a living thing, this problem, a living thing that can stay hidden or can keep extending outward. Say someone, or some ones, help this murderer get rid of the body, aren’t they also, in some sense, guilty?”

  I looked over at Mixer. He didn’t look back. His eyes were far off, unfocused. He was thinking about something, and I knew that it was that barrel.

  “And if afterward they wanted to inform the police, the Petroviches of this world, would they be welcomed with open arms or viewed with suspicion? What if they had participated unknowingly, what if they had done nothing knowingly wrong? Would it matter? Would they still be stained by the act, as if dipped in ink? Do appearances matter? What sort of people are they? What sort of person is the killer? What if these unwitting helpers seemed more guilty than the killer?”

  The bell rang and Haberman let out a wet little cough. His body slumped down a little. He called out some page numbers, but the class was already loud, collecting their stuff and pushing back their chairs.

  “I want you to think about these things when you’re reading tonight,” Haberman shouted above the noise. “This idea that a crime extends past the moment it is committed. That a man’s conscience…” but the class was too loud and his voice trailed off.

  He took as good a breath as his ragged lungs would let him and shouted, “Just read the book!”

  Then he gave up and a little smile crawled onto his face. He looked sideways at me and it seemed like, yeah, I had some reading to do.

  7

  So I was walking down the front hallway of the main building after school, and god knows I hate the Tits, but the hallways after school aren’t so bad. They’re empty and open and cleaned and polished. At home, I’ve got to kick my way through all the stuff on the floor half the time, at least in my room, but after school you can just motor through all this clean open space. You can sort of skate on the tiles, depending on what kind of shoes you’re wearing.

  It’s not like it’s a huge thrill; it’s just much better than it is during the day. You can pretty much go where you want, and you don’t need a pass. That’s because the people who stay after school are mostly the jocks, who are outside or in the gym, or the geeks, who are holed up with their clubs. There’s detention, too, but then you’re shut in the Tank, which is what we call the detention room. So if you’re just hanging out after school, it’s like you’ve got the hallways to yourself. You’re like 99 percent less likely to run into someone you don’t want to. That goes for some senior looking to stomp you or some girl you’re avoiding. (And, yeah, it’s pretty much always the girl who’s avoiding me, but whatever, it could happen.) More to the point, it goes double for some teacher who’s been acting like a psychopath.

  Before sixth period, I turned the corner heading out of the east wing. I was going fast, trying to get to the library before the sign-in sheet filled up, which I didn’t, and I nearly ran head-on into Haberman. He was coming out of the teachers’ lounge with Grayson. Now, Mr. G I can deal with, but I’d heard plenty from Haberman for one day. Lucky for me, I was going fast and was past him before he could say anything that’d piss me off. I’m not even sure he saw me. He was already talking and coughing at the same time, and how many things can a man be expected to do at once? Anyway, that’s the exact kind of thing you don’t have to worry about after school. Most of the time, you turn the corner and there’s no one there, just an empty hallway, like in The Shining.

  The catch is that it’s not like you can just leave whenever you want. You’ve got to wait for the late buses and ride home with the jocks and geeks. Sometimes the late buses are at five, sometimes they’re at five forty-five, and sometimes they’re even later. It depends on if anyone has an away game or if a field trip’s getting back. There’s a schedule printed up and you want to check it so you don’t get stuck waiting forever. This was Wednesday and the buses left at five, which was fine, because we were staying after to talk things out face-to-face, and it seemed like it’d probably take a while.

  I’d just been over at the little roadside place on Route 7, which had the nearest pay phone and was a ten-minute walk from the Tits. They didn’t have a pay phone at the school, because if it was official business, they’d let you use the phone in the office, and if it wasn’t, they didn’t want you calling. A lot of the kids had cell phones. You weren’t supposed to bring them to school, but that was like the most ignored rule in the history of rule-making. I would have brought mine in, if I had one. My mom said she wasn’t paying for me to have a cell. I’m pretty sure she thought that getting one would magically turn me into a drug dealer. She was half right, though, because it probably would’ve turned me into a more hooked-up drug taker.

  She’s clever, too, because if I got a cell myself, I wouldn’t have any money for anything like drugs. Those things are seriously expensive when you’re not on someone else’s plan. It’s like fifty bucks a month, minimum. Last winter, Tommy said we should all go in together on a plan. At first we were like, “Jesus, Tommy, how gay are you?” Then it didn’t seem like such a bad idea and we looked into it, but it turned out none of us was old enough. Then Tommy talked his way onto his mom’s plan anyway. So good for him. As for me, it just wasn’t important enough to spend that kind of money on. And what did I really need one for? It’s not like I’m a chick.

  Except in this case, it would’ve saved me twenty minutes of walking, round-trip. I’d been deputized, lucky me, to give Tommy’s place a call and see if he’d turned up. It sucks when the o
nly one of us with a cell phone is the one who goes missing. I figured his mom would be home, and she was. Just the way she answered the phone—first ring and totally desperate—saying hello twice in like one second, I knew he hadn’t turned up. So I hung up. Because what the hell, I was calling from a pay phone.

  So I was in the front hallway, main building, like I said, making time. And that’s the other thing I wanted to say about the hallways, they have that smell, like, patented. It was sort of like that hospital smell, but without the piss mixed in. I guess it was whatever they used to clean the floors. You really didn’t notice it when the halls were crowded, but you couldn’t miss it after school. So I got to the courtyard and pushed open the door, and Bones and Mixer were at the table all the way at the far end. There was no one else out there, but I guess they figured this was top secret and the far corner worked best for that.

  It was still a few months till summer vacation but it was a nice enough day. I had a denim jacket on but I probably didn’t even need it. I could see from here that Mixer had left his jacket in his locker and was out there in just that Nosferatu T-shirt of his that has the hole in the front. I always thought that was kind of gay, having a big hole in your shirt like that. It was just like a little too close to his nipple, which no one needed to see.

  So I sat down and gave them the report: “He’s not there. His mom’s like waiting by the phone.”

  We started talking, not whispering exactly but not talking full volume, either. We were all talking at once for a little while, because I guess we all had something to say. I’ll spare you the play-by-play on that, because there were a lot of lines like: “Is that bleeping bleep-head bleeping bleeping with us?” It’s not like I mind the swearing, but there’s not much sentence to sentences like that, and we were kind of beating around the bush.

  Finally, Mixer laid it out, just to get it out into the open. “I mean, he wants us to think he killed him, right? ‘A student is missing’…‘it’s murder.’ Am I reading that right? He’s saying Tommy was wrapped up in that barrel, we carted it to the car for him, and now we’re guilty, too?”