Gentlemen

by Michael Northrop

  “He didn’t say he killed him,” said Bones. “Just that someone did.”

  “Who the hell do you think he was talking about, dumbass?” said Mixer. “He said it happened in his classroom.”

  Bones shrugged. “Yeah, I was just saying.”

  There was a red notebook on the table in front of Mixer, the kind with the thin plastic cover and the metal spiral binding. He picked it up, opened it, and started reading. He was doing a pretty good imitation of Haberman’s voice.

  “’Say someone, or some ones, help this murderer get rid of the body, aren’t they also, in some sense, guilty?’ ”

  “That could’ve been the barrel,” he said and sort of tossed the notebook down on the table.

  I still wasn’t sold on all this, so I said, “Since when do you take notes?”

  I thought that was pretty funny, but the others didn’t laugh at all, so I could see they were taking this more seriously.

  Bones goes, “That is so screwed up. I mean, first of all, Tommy would kick his ass. I mean, it’s ridiculous, right?”

  But he wasn’t telling, he was asking. The question just kind of hung there for a bit. I guess we were all thinking about it. The evidence we had at this point basically boiled down to this:

  Tommy, who was missing: It wasn’t the first time, but it was still unusual.

  Haberman, who was weird: Always had been but was reaching new heights lately.

  The barrel: It was the first time Haberman had done anything like that in class.

  Whatever was in the barrel: Could’ve been a deer, could’ve been a dude, but it seemed like some sort of a dead body to me.

  What Haberman said about disposing of a dead body: See above.

  What Haberman said about crime being “a matter of opinion”: Sounded like something a killer would say.

  What Haberman said about a murder in the classroom: Sounded like something a killer would say.

  Haberman talking about “the victim’s friends” and sort of singling us out: Sounded like something a killer would say if he was also an ass.

  So anyway, that’s what we were turning over in our heads, all filtered through standard-issue high school paranoia and our natural belief that everything was basically about us anyway.

  “Knickerbocker, please,” I said finally. It was like this joke expression we had, and the three of us laughed a little, just at how out there this whole thing was. I mean, it wasn’t exactly funny, because Tommy really was missing, and even if he’d just run off, that was still pretty dangerous. But the easiest thing to do with something that was bothering you was always to make fun of it.

  “Yeah, I mean, it’s dumb, but that’s what he was getting at, right?” said Mixer. “I mean, he knows we’re Tommy’s friends, and he’s sort of been picking on us. Making us haul that barrel yesterday, and whatever the hell was in there, and today in class, I mean, Mike said he was looking at him.”

  He reached for his notebook, and I knew he was going to read the line about the victim’s friends, and I looked at him like, Don’t bother.

  “Listen,” I said, “I think it’s all in the book. I think the Russian dude kills his mother with an ax and maybe like she had some friends. Who saw something or carried something or whatever. I don’t know, I’m just going by what he said, but it’s a lot more likely that he’s talking about the book than about some real-life killing spree. I mean, it’s English class, frickin’ Homoman. What’s he going to do, kill Tommy with that fish club?”

  And I wasn’t serious about that last part, but as soon as I said it, I got a sick feeling. I remembered that club, hard and balanced in my hand. I remembered how Haberman tugged whatever was wrapped in that blanket out of the barrel, stronger than I thought he’d be. And I remembered the way the blanket moved, all joints and knobs, and come to think of it, the idea of bringing roadkill into class wasn’t a big step down in the craziness department from stuffing a body in there.

  So now I was finished saying my piece, and it was like the other two were more or less convinced, because they were like, Yeah, that’s crazy, dude’s in Manchester again, and now I was the one who wasn’t so sure. I had the book in my locker, and I had half a mind to go and get it, just to start reading it and trying to match what was in it to what Haberman had been saying. But it wasn’t like I was going to sit around with Bones and Mixer reading, so I just sat back and looked over at the glass hallway that runs along the courtyard. I must’ve caught the movement out of the corner of my eye, because there were three girls walking by.

  They were freshmen, I think. There should really be a word for freshman girls, like one without “men” in it, but I don’t think there is. Anyway, one of them was kind of cute, once I got a better look. Then I heard Mixer laughing, so I knew Bones was up to something. I turned around and he had two fingers V’d out in front of his mouth and he was darting his tongue in between them. The girls giggled and hurried past us like typical freshmen chicks. Mixer and Bones were feeling better about things now. They were sort of leaning back on the benches like they owned the courtyard, but I was still sitting up and thinking.

  When I started talking, they could tell by my voice that I had something serious to say. “I’m not saying it is crazy or it isn’t.” That’s how I started it out, and they sort of looked at each other, because I guess they thought we’d settled this. “But if Haberman did do it, here’s how it could’ve happened.”

  Then I laid it all out for them: Tommy was in the hallway in the middle of the period. He’s in no hurry to get to the office. And there’s Haberman. He’s got a free period, and he’s like, Come in here and help me with something for a second.

  I started off slow, just throwing it out there, but as I went on, it kind of fell into place, and I really could see how it could’ve happened.

  I’ll sort it out with Trever, Haberman would’ve told him. I just need help hanging something on the wall, or whatever. Then Tommy’s in Haberman’s room, just the two of them. Tommy’s got his back to him, hoisting a picture frame. He’d be saying, Is this OK? Higher? He’d hang a picture or two if he thought Haberman could really square him with Trever. Then, bam, Haberman clocks him on the back of the head with that frickin’ club: Bam! Bam bam bam! Out comes the plastic sheet and the blankets, like a spider going to work on a fly.

  Yeah, I could see that. And by the time I’d finished talking, the others could, too.

  8

  I didn’t do much on Wednesday night. Welcome to my world. It was almost six by the time the late bus dumped me out on the side of the road. The bus just crawls sometimes. I swear, it goes like two miles an hour on the hills. And this area is all hills. On the plus side, Mom’d finally been food shopping. I could smell the Shake ‘n Bake as soon as I opened the door. The first dinner after she went shopping was almost always something good: Shake ‘n Bake chicken, Hamburger Helper, something like that. It would take a few days until we got to the frozen stuff, but hey, that’s why it’s frozen, right?

  After dinner, I took a bag of potato chips and went into the front room to start reading the book. Mom was probably confused not to hear the television click on right away. That took an hour or so to happen. I put the book down once I figured out who was going to get killed first. I figured maybe I’d pick it up again later.

  And I know that an hour of reading might not sound like much, especially with what I was saying before, how I had half a mind to take it out right at school and start reading it there. But there’s something you’ve got to understand: That book is seriously frickin’ dense. Thing’s like a brick.

  There are probably other versions, with bigger type and more pages, but the one we had just crammed the words in there, with tiny type and words out to the edges. The pages were just like all ink. And the writing was the same way: really complicated and hard to figure out. Some of the paragraphs went on for two pages!

  Anyway, add it together and you could be reading for a while and not be halfway down the page. And I’m
not exaggerating, either. This is one paragraph from the first page, talking about this dude Raskolnikov:

  This was not because he was cowardly and abject, quite the contrary; but for some time past, he had been in an overstrained, irritable condition, verging on hypochondria. He had been so completely absorbed in himself, and isolated from his fellows that he dreaded meeting, not only his landlady, but anyone at all. He was crushed by poverty, but the anxieties of his position had of late ceased to weigh upon him. He had given up attending to matters of practical importance; he had lost all desire to do so. Nothing that any landlady could do had a real terror for him. But to be stopped on the stairs, to be forced to listen to her trivial, irrelevant gossip, to pestering demands for payments, threats and complaints, and to rack his brain for excuses, to prevaricate, to lie—no, rather than that, he would creep down the stairs like a cat and slip out unseen.

  So there you go, and that was just one paragraph. First of all, was there a sale on commas? Second, that’s a long way to go to say that the dude was broke and decided to duck his landlady. After an hour of that I needed a break and maybe an aspirin. Anyway, I watched Without a Trace on cable, and it sort of felt like part of the same assignment.

  I don’t know if you’ve ever seen that show, but it’s all about missing persons. It’s not something I watched a lot, but I’d seen it a few times before, and this one went pretty much like the others. It starts off, someone disappears, like walks out the front door and just fades out on the screen. Then this group of FBI agents, who all seem like they’ve had way too much coffee and way too little sleep, go to work trying to find them. They start by putting a picture of the missing person up on a board.

  I tried to remember if I had a picture of Tommy anywhere, like a school photo or something. I didn’t think so, but what the hell would I need one for? It’s not like I was going to forget what he looked like.

  Anyway, the thing I liked about the show was that it seemed sort of realistic to me. I mean, what did I know, except that it was a little less cute and clever than a lot of other mystery-type shows, and I was pretty sure at this point that real life wasn’t cute and clever very often. It’s like on other shows, some old lady or flighty dude will string together all of these random clues, like a church bell going off early, some spilled flour, and a cracked picture frame. They’ll take all this in, mull it over, and then with two minutes left in the show, they’ll be like, Reggie did it! For the inheritance!

  And sometimes it was fun to follow along with that stuff, if there was nothing else on, but it just sort of seemed like bull to me. You know how they got things done on Without a Trace? They shouted, and if they were really at a loss, they shouted louder. You might think I’m joking, but it’d happened in every show I’d seen so far. Their big thing wasn’t collecting weird clues, it was getting people in this little room and questioning them as loudly as possible.

  The clues that mattered to them were the ones that mattered in the real world: Who knows who? Who knew the victim, who did the suspect know, who had a grudge or a crush or whatever. They drove all over the place in these sleek black cars, flashed their badges, busted down doors, and hauled anyone like that back to the little room.

  Jack was the main guy, Jack Malone, and he was kind of a big, burly guy, and he always seemed about one nervous twitch away from totally losing it. I think sometimes it was an act, you know, to scare the person, but it was hard to tell. I mean, the whole thing was acting, but you know what I mean. Anyway, he’d get angry and red in the face. He was supposed to be Irish, so that part was believable. He’d yell at the guy, pick up a chair and slam it down, slam his hands on the table, say he was going to arrest him or worse. Or he’d go the other way and lean in real close, still just as angry, like he was barely in control, and whisper in the guy’s ear. He’d get totally in his space and go like, Did you kill her?

  Sooner or later, the poor dude would crack and tell him something. It wasn’t even necessarily something about the missing person. It could just be something that’d lead the agents to someone else who might know a little more. Then they’d haul that person in and repeat the whole process. And Jack would be even angrier the second time, so what chance would that person have?

  They’d just work their way through everyone who might’ve had anything to do with the person going missing. And by the end of the show, they’d find them. And yeah, they’d break through the door and rescue the lady or kid or whoever with two minutes to go, just like the other shows, so it was still sort of a fairy tale. It was still TV, when you came right down to it. It just seemed a little more like how things were, that’s all.

  I mean, cute and clever or angry and loud, how do you think the world works? I think you could pretty much turn on the news right now—or hell, just go through grade school again—and that would give you your answer. And sure enough, I picked up the book again and, right away, this dude killed an old lady with an ax.

  9

  Mixer and me were out in the hallway before homeroom on Thursday morning. Neither of us had heard anything new about Tommy, and Mixer was like, “D’ya read it?”

  I was like, “I read part one.”

  “How many parts are there?”

  “I don’t know, a lot,” I said. “This thing’s got like parts within parts.”

  He looked a little annoyed, like it was my job to read the stupid thing. Like there was someone with a knife to his balls ordering him not to, for that matter, so I said, “What?”

  He shrugged because he probably realized he was being a jerk. Finally, he said, “So?” Meaning he wanted to know if the stuff Haberman said was in the book.

  At that point, I really didn’t know. It seemed like I’d read a lot, but I really wasn’t that far into the book. So I kind of recapped what I did know, thinking maybe he could help me puzzle it out.

  “All right,” I said. “So, yeah, there’s a crime, all right, a murder, but it’s not the dude’s mom. I was wrong about that. It’s this old lady with like a pawnshop in her apartment. He completely offs her.”

  And as I said that, I realized I was getting ahead of the story, and right away I was in the weird role of feeling like an English teacher or something. I just took a breath and started over.

  “So it starts out and this Russian dude Raskolnikov is casing this old lady’s apartment, but you don’t know why yet. And anyway, the dude’s sort of like a stuck-up ass, even though he’s completely poor and hard up, and it seems like maybe he’s a little nuts, so you figure this dude could do just about anything. Tick tick tick, total time bomb, you know?”

  “Yeah,” said Mixer. He made a little circle motion with his finger: Move it along.

  “But he’s having trouble psyching himself up to do some bad thing,” I said, “which pretty early on you know is to kill the old lady and rob her little pawnshop. He’s all like a commie about it, you know, give her money to the people and all, but he’s kind of squeamish about really getting his hands dirty.”

  “He doesn’t want to kill her?”

  “No, he does, he’s just fagging out about it. So anyway, he meets this other dude who is a total drunk loser, who’s like pimping his own daughter.”

  “There any sex?”

  “No, they just say he’s pimping her. Or she’s doing it herself, or whatever, but the thing is the family needs the money because the guy’s a total loser and chicks couldn’t work real jobs back then. And so the book goes on about the loser family for a while and then there’s a dead horse and a letter from home and none of it seems to have much to do with anything until the dude, the main dude, is walking through a market and he, like, overhears the other chick who lives with the old pawnshop lady saying how she’s not going to be home the next night.”

  “Yeah, so he’s going to whack her then.”

  “Seriously, he thinks, like, the universe is telling him to. So he heads over there the next night, and he’s got an ax that he found somewhere on a loop inside his coat, and he g
ives her some little thing to unwrap and as she’s doing that—whack, man! Whack, whack, whack! He chops her up good. But then the other chick comes back, and it’s like wrong place, wrong time, and he does her, too.”

  “That’s cold, man.”

  “Yeah, and she’s just like this cleaning helper lady to the old lady, like a relative, who totally didn’t do anything except show up at the door and gawk at the body, and this dude—just one shot, whack, she’s done, even though he’s all like trying to come across as like the people’s poet or some crap.”

  At that point, the bell went off, and we had to get into homeroom. That was fine because that was just about as far as I’d read. Anyway, we were sitting there in homeroom, and I could see across the room that Mixer was thinking about it. I thought that by the time the bell went off he might’ve come up with something in all that, but when we met up in the hallway on our way to first period, he was just like, “Well, what the hell? Haberman didn’t mention any of that stuff.”

  And I’m like, “Yeah, he’s all talking about guilt and spreading stains and getting rid of bodies and weapons and stuff. This guy didn’t even really get rid of the bodies, but he did clean off the ax and put it back where he found it. And with the guilt, I don’t know yet. He just killed them, but like I said, he’s pretty messed up in the head, and I could see him freaking out about it. He’s a weird dude and a total bedwetter about pretty much everything else he does. Like he’ll give people money and then go on and on, like, Why the hell did I give them my money for? I think maybe that’ll be in the next section.”

  “Do you think the chicks who got killed had any friends? Remember, Haberman’s like, ‘That’ll cause a lot of problems for their friends’?”