Gentlemen

by Michael Northrop

  “I’ll have four,” I yelled back, closing the bathroom door behind me.

  I looked in the mirror and my hair was still sticking straight up on the left side from where I’d been sleeping on it, and right then, I thought about Tommy. I didn’t know where he was, if he was OK, or what, but standing there in a warm house with my favorite breakfast waiting, looking at my hair sticking up and my face still red from sleep, I hoped he was OK, I hoped he wasn’t dead or cold or lost. Then I brushed my teeth, because really, what could I do about it? No need to shower, since it was the weekend.

  When I got out, I saw there was already a plate at the table, so I pulled up a chair.

  “There you are, four Mommy Surprises for the young gentleman,” she said, and I really wished she wouldn’t say things like that, but I just thanked her again for the food, and she went back into the kitchen to drain the grease into a Tupperware container. She used it for cooking with. It made everything taste good.

  It was just my mom and me, almost since I could remember. I was embarrassed about that for a long time. This was a real small town, so everyone knew your business, and most of the kids around here were a lot better off. Full families, bigger cars, vacations out of town, stuff like that.

  It hadn’t seemed so bad for a while now. First with Bones and then with Tommy, as messed up as things were for them, I’d gotten to feeling almost lucky. I mean, we had this little house, no one hit me, I got to eat bacon on the weekends. Whatever, I’m not going to tear up here or anything, but I knew it could’ve been worse.

  After breakfast, Mom was like, “What are you going to do today?”

  “Well, first off, I’m going out back to dig up some night crawlers,” I said. There’s a patch out back by the fence where the grass never took that’s good for that.

  “You going fishing?” she asked.

  “Yep,” I said. “Mixer, Bones, and me are going up the mountain tomorrow.”

  Normally, Tommy’d come on a trip like that. There’d be four of us, instead of three. I’m pretty sure we were both thinking it, but neither of us said so. It was just one of those things you didn’t say, like how I didn’t tell her that Bones didn’t really have his license yet. I didn’t say he did, either, just let her assume. I never liked to lie to my mom, and so the less I said about this trip the better.

  Then she was like, “Well, go change then, if you’re going to be digging.”

  And that is why you really shouldn’t have a hard-and-fast policy of not lying to your mom. I should’ve just said I was going to walk down to the pharmacy. But I went and changed like she said.

  As I was walking away, she was still calling after me: “Wear something that’s already dirty. Go get those other jeans out of the laundry, the ones you shouldn’t still be wearing anyway!”

  And then I was outside and it was a little cooler than I thought it was going to be, based on all the sun. It was what the weatherman on channel four would call “clear but cool” or “crisp.” Once I got working, though, I wouldn’t need a jacket. I rolled up the sleeves of my flannel and went and fished the spade out of the bucket on the porch.

  Out back, I kicked away some of the leaves that I’d raked up against the fence until I had a nice patch of dirt and rock to work with. Then I got down on the ground and got to it. I’ve always liked digging for night crawlers, and I’ve dug a lot more than I’ve ever used for fishing. If you’ve never done it, it’s kind of hard to explain. Part of it is I sort of like the smell of dirt: fresh, dark dirt that you just turned over.

  There’s a song called “Digging in the Dirt”—it goes like, “This time you’ve gone too far!”—and even though it’s by some old English guy, and it’s sort of college music and maybe a little gay around the edges, I still sort of like it. I like it because I like digging in the dirt. A lot of times, I ended up sort of humming it when I was digging.

  So anyway, I turned over the first rock and there were some grubs or something on the underside of it. White larva sacks, I guess they could also have been some kind of eggs, so I tossed the rock away. Then I just settled in, breaking the dirt with the spade and taking the first few little scoops out. A lot of times, the worms are right near the surface, and you don’t want to cut them in half, so you go slow with the spade.

  If you do cut them in half, it’s pretty cool. They squirm around and crap dirt out of their bodies, but they don’t stay alive long enough to fish with if you do that, so you try to avoid it.

  Anyway, a few scoops down and I saw the dirt moving, so I brushed it away with my fingers and, sure enough, there was the head of a big fat one, poking around like a finger in the dark. I cleaned a little more dirt away and then pulled it out. Real slow, one long pull, because if you jerk it, it’ll tear apart just like if you cut it. You have to be steady, and I’m pretty good at it.

  This thing was damn near six inches long, a real monster. I pulled it clear and held it up in the air, just sort of admiring it. The worm curled up like an upside-down question mark. I dropped it in my bucket and dumped some dirt on top.

  When you start off the day like that, you know it’s going to be a good morning of digging, and I sort of hoped we really did get a chance to go fishing the next day, fishing for something more than answers.

  Of course, there was a lot of time between Saturday morning and Sunday afternoon. Most of the time, that was the choice cut of the week, and you just sort of kicked back and let it roll by. This week, it was less choice-cut steak and more pigs’ feet or beef tongue or some other thing you didn’t necessarily want to be eating. We’d never done anything like this before. I’d never heard of anyone doing it, not to a teacher, so waiting for it opened up a lot of empty hours for nerves and anticipation and second-guessing. I figured disappointment would fit right in on a list like that, so I got cleaned up and biked down to the town library after lunch. They had computers there, too.

  Benschotten Memorial Library was a big stone library, left over from when the town was bigger and all that iron money was still rolling in. The other towns around here had little libraries, like in the basement of the town hall or whatever, but we had this thing that looked like half a castle. It had a big clock on top that gonged every hour. The numbers on it weren’t 1, 2, 3, they were I, II, III, so you knew it was old.

  The place only had two computers, though, so it wasn’t handling the twenty-first century quite as well as it had the nineteenth. Both of the computers had senior citizens hunched over them when I got there, so I signed up for “next available computer station” and started waiting. I flipped through the local paper for a while. I always liked the “Police Blotter” part on the inside of the front page, where they listed the car wrecks and drunk and disorderlies and domestic disturbances. They were all like: “Joe Dumbass, 37, of North Cambria was cited for driving too fast for conditions when the vehicle he was driving exited the roadway on Route 44, near the Schuykill turnoff…”

  Basically, that meant he hit a tree in the rain and got a ticket, but I sort of enjoyed how formal they made it sound. It sort of reminded me of that book, now that I thought about it. Whenever I read that page, I always pictured this old Colonel Sanders—looking dude with a bow tie and one of those curled-up mustaches plunking away at a keyboard.

  I flipped through a few more stories and then went and stood behind the old dudes at the computers. I stood close so they’d know I was there, like, Move it along, fellas, time to get back to the Home. Finally, one of them stood up, gathered his little stack of books, put his drugstore reading glasses in this little case, and left. He didn’t even look back at me, even though I knew he was kind of pissed. That sort of made me sad, because someday I might be that guy, just looking down and moving on when some young punk is in your space. For all I knew, that guy was real hard when he was young.

  Anyway, whatever, it was my computer now. I skipped checking my e-mail for the little messages that said “New message from…” and went straight to my profile. I mean, that’s wha
t I was there for, right? I looked at my lame page: no picture, no blog entries, no comments, but I scrolled down a little and saw that I had “new messages” and “new friend requests.” Hot damn, I was like Mr. Popularity all of a sudden.

  My heart started beating faster and I got a little lightheaded with excitement. I thought about Jenny #2, and I could picture her eyes looking at me, a little smile on her face. I clicked on my inbox first. There was just one message. I sort of hated the way it always said “new messages” even if there was just one. And it was from frickin’ Reedy. He wrote exactly one word: Dude!

  I clicked over to “friend requests,” and that was from him, too. Great. I mean, I had nothing against Reedy, except that he was a smartass who I wanted to pop in the mouth about once a day. And he wasn’t Jenny #2. Hell, he wasn’t a chick at all. I clicked “accept,” and went back to my profile to look at where it said I had four friends. That was a little better than before, when I had three.

  I sat there letting my pulse slow down. I hated false alarms. Once I’d calmed down a little, I realized that there was someone behind me. I looked over my shoulder and it was that old dude. He’d gone back up and signed up for “next available computer station,” and now he was dogging me. Well, good for you, old dude. I didn’t think you had it in you. I ignored him anyway.

  I went into “pending requests,” and a little picture popped up. It was Jenny #2, sitting sideways on the floor somewhere, with her knees pulled halfway up to her chest. She was smiling and she looked pretty, like I remembered her, but from a different angle. From this one, you could sort of almost kind of see down her shirt. So she’d added a picture to her profile. I clicked on her name and she’d added friends, too. She’d added three friends, two girls and a guy, who I didn’t know but hated. She had seven friends now.

  I sat there and thought about that. She’d accepted other people’s friend requests, just left mine sitting there and clicked “accept” on the ones that had come in after it. Maybe she’d already clicked “deny” on mine, just to clear away the dead wood, so that she could get busy building up her site. Maybe some of those people had sent her messages like, Hey, add me! Just normal messages that they hadn’t sat there writing out on notebook paper and tearing up and starting over. But theirs had worked and mine hadn’t. Not yet anyway. Maybe she was still thinking about it. Yeah, and maybe Tommy was surfing in Hawaii. Climbing Mt. Everest with a team of penguins.

  I logged out and let the old guy have his computer back.

  15

  After I left the library, I still had most of the day and all of the night to go. You’d think I would’ve met up with Mixer and Bones to go over our plans for Sunday one more time. Really talk it out, you know, face-to-face. We really should’ve. Maybe we wouldn’t’ve gone through with it. But we didn’t meet up. We just exchanged quick phone calls later on.

  Like I said before, things were different between us with Tommy gone. We were starting to pull apart a little. I mean, obviously Mixer and me weren’t talking to Bones that much right now. He was in the doghouse, and I think he knew it. But even Mixer and me weren’t talking as much as normal. I think we were all spending a lot of time in our own heads, trying to figure all this out.

  Of course, everyone’s perspective is going to be a little different, and that probably goes double for me. There’s one more thing you should know about me, one other thing to say before things get messy.

  I haven’t explained it up to this point, because it’s not necessarily the first thing I tell people about myself, and I’m definitely not here for a pity party, but it’s sort of important. When I was a little kid, my face got all busted up. It’s not a bad time to get your face busted up, because it’s still moving around anyways, and mine has healed up pretty good.

  The left side is a little lopsided around the eye, and my left eye kind of droops sometimes. You notice it most if you look at me straight on, but since that’s mostly not how people look at each other, I get a lot of double takes. And, yeah, a lot of times I think people are looking at me. They always say they aren’t, but they’d say that either way. When I was younger, especially like fourth and fifth grade, I used to get in a lot of fights about my eye. Some kid would say something, and if there was nothing as bad to say back, I’d just start swinging.

  My mom doesn’t think I remember how it happened, so she tells me it was an accident, that I was on my trike and got going downhill. I remember, though. I’d found something that I wanted to show my dad. It was a shiny hunk of something that I’d turned up in the dirt. I think it was slag or maybe volcano rock, but probably slag, since I don’t think there are any volcanoes around here. Anyway, it was shiny and came to a point and I thought it was cool. I don’t know why I wanted to show it to my dad, but I’d made up my mind, and at that age, you know, that’s that.

  He was out in the garage working. I knew he didn’t like to be bothered when he was working, but I just toddled right in there anyway. He told me to go away and I told him to take a look and it just went from there. I guess I started wailing at some point, so he shut me up. I don’t kid myself about what happened, but I like to think that maybe he forgot his hand wasn’t empty when he did it.

  I never saw him again after that, at least not that I remember. And as I got older, I was basically OK with that. I’d been too young to really know him, and anyway, he gave me this screwed-up eye to remember him by. Also, he told me that dragonflies would sew your mouth shut if they flew by when it was open, and I believed that until I was like nine. My mom always said we were better off without him and I believed that, too.

  Anyway, the point is that I never thought there was anything all that unusual about it. I got hurt bad, and my dad vanished into thin air. It was like the two of us got hit by lightning that day, but he burned up all the way and me only a little. To me it was like, people got hurt, people disappeared, and that’s just the way things were. I think, and I’ve had some time to turn this over, I think it’s part of why I was so ready to believe that Haberman might’ve killed Tommy, killed him and stuck him in a barrel.

  A lot of people wouldn’t believe a thing like that, but I was there within a day. Right from the start, I was connecting dots that might not’ve gone together. And I know it seems like Bones and Mixer were on board, too, but Mixer and I were in the habit of agreeing, and Bones was in the habit of going along. I was the one who said it was flesh and bone in that barrel. I was the one who told them how it could’ve happened.

  Having a messed-up eye, you know, it’ll affect how you see things.

  16

  Sunday. This is where it all went to hell. It was a trip we just shouldn’t’ve made, simple as that. We didn’t mean for it to go down like it did, at least Mixer and I didn’t. Bones, well, it’s tough to say what he was thinking. But he did show up armed, and that’s got to tell you something. As for me, I just wanted to get a straight answer, either to find out it was real or to put it to rest.

  Maybe I’d better just begin at the beginning. We were in Bones’s uncle’s truck. It was an old beater his uncle kept out by the barn on his farm, and he wasn’t going to miss it on a Sunday afternoon. He’d found religion, big-time, and wouldn’t ever tend the fields on a Sunday. That’s how he put it, “tend the fields.” I think maybe that’s in the Bible.

  Anyway, it’s not like we had a lot of options, ride-wise, and Haberman lived kind of far out in Little River. Bones was driving, because it was his uncle’s truck and because he had a learner’s permit, so it was practically legal. His mom thought it was good enough, anyway. We’d already found the place—the address is right in the phone book—and we’d cruised by once, real slow, to see if there were any other cars in the driveway. We knew there was no Mrs. Haberman, but we were just checking to see if maybe he had company or something.

  There were no cars at all in the driveway, but the garage door was open, and we could just see his little MG in there in the shadows. It was late afternoon, kind of a gray day,
and as near as anyone knew, we were all three of us up on the mountain fishing. We stopped at the end of the street, and Bones executed the worst K-turn in the history of driving. Bones was wired and on edge. He was geared up for trouble, maybe even looking forward to it. The truck kicked forward with a groan as he threw it back into drive. But there were only three houses on the whole street, all pretty far apart, so the chances of anyone seeing us, or of another car coming along, were pretty slim.

  We came up on his house again, this time from the other direction. As we got close, Bones cut the engine and we coasted into the driveway. Bones handled this turn much better than the last one, and it was a nice paved driveway, so even the old rattletrap truck was fairly quiet. Unless Haberman was looking out the window, there was a halfway decent chance he didn’t know we were there. Bones pointed the truck off to the right, and we rolled to a stop halfway on the grass, so we wouldn’t be as easy to see from the house. We climbed out of the cab real quiet and just pushed the doors shut behind us.

  Mixer took a rag or something out of his jacket pocket and put it over the rear license plate of the truck.

  “In case anyone drives by,” he said.

  I gave him a thumbs-up, because it seemed like a pretty good idea to me. There was no shortage of beat-up old pickup trucks around here, so without a license number, it would be hard to find one in particular.

  “Thanks,” he said, and he was smiling, but you could see it was kind of a nervous smile. I was feeling the butterflies, too.

  Looking back, I’ve got to say, our plan was not really all that solid. I think we’d sort of talked each other into thinking it made sense, but it started to come apart right from the start. I mean, you pretty much lose the element of surprise when you end up standing on the welcome mat and knocking.