Gentlemen

by Michael Northrop

  “You think—” he went on, his voice shaking. “You think it was your friend, Mr. Dawson, the one who’s been absent all week? You think I killed him and put him in that barrel?”

  Haberman had either finally put it together or he was finally ready to admit it.

  “But that’s,” he said, and he took a half step, “that’s crazy!”

  He looked at me and then over at Mixer. His shoulders were tensed up in case some wood was about to fall between them, and the way he said crazy, I was just like, Oh, crap. Because he meant it. I could tell he meant it. He taught English, not drama. There was no way he was that good of an actor. And then he knocked down a few more of our lame clues at once, like picking up a split in bowling.

  “The trash was for the transfer station and the barrel was from out behind the school; it’s been there all year,” he said. “It was Hank’s”—I put on my dumb face, not knowing who Hank was, and he backtracked—“It was Grayson’s idea to use it. He told me your class—how did he put it?—‘responded’ to that sort of thing.”

  I was thinking a few things here. First: Yeah, that’s where I’d seen that barrel before. Second: It seemed like something Mr. G would do; even at the time I’d thought that. I’d seen those two talking before, had seen them coming out of the teachers’ lounge. They still seemed kind of mismatched to me, like a dog hanging out with an alligator, but what did I know? They were both teachers, about the same age, both kind of weird, when you got right down to it. Haberman really didn’t need to keep talking at this point. The defense could pretty well’ve rested, but I guess he still had one more half-assed theory to shoot down.

  “Where did I get the idea, a student killed in between classes?” he said, and he was sort of pleading now. “Law & Order!”

  Law & Order…Damn…I’d been watching the wrong show.

  18

  Haberman was standing right in the middle of the room, and that’s where Bones attacked him with the club. It surprised the hell out of me, because at that point, my brain was working a mile a minute to come up with some kind of exit strategy. Maybe tell him something like, Sorry for your time, you’ve got a real nice house here, and then a quick retreat. But that’s not how it happened. I guess Haberman saw my eyes go wide as Bones raised the club, because he swung around just in time to catch the first shot on his right forearm. He’d raised it to defend himself, but it didn’t matter. The club made a dull thud that ended with a crack I could hear three feet away. Bones had broken Haberman’s arm with the first swing.

  From there, Bones just went to work. It was a bad scene. Haberman was clutching onto Bones’s left side with his busted arm, and Bones just kept rearing back with his right and letting him have it.

  I was surprised that Haberman didn’t scream, but I guess he was always more of a talker. He blurted out words in bursts. He said, “Please stop” and stuff like that. He talked fast and desperate but not loud until right before the end.

  I stutter-stepped toward him, toward Bones, toward both of them, but not really. I don’t know if you watch basketball, but I watch the Celtics sometimes. In basketball terms, I stutter-stepped and gave maybe a little shoulder fake, but it wasn’t a fake, because I really meant to go. I’d sent the get-going signals to my body; I just wasn’t following them up with the keep-going ones. Something was holding me back, loyalty, I guess, and probably some fear. There was blood now, and that club flying around. Whatever it was, it all added up to a half step with my left foot and a turn of my left shoulder, like I was leading with it, like I was really going to go. Bones wasn’t biting on the fake. He wasn’t even looking.

  I wanted him to stop, I swear to god I did, but wanting wasn’t going to get it done. In order for that to happen, I was going to have to get in there, push him away, maybe tackle him, maybe fight. And that was a big step. Picking the guy who’d been my teacher for seven months over the one who’d been my friend for almost seven years? And fighting about it? That was going to take some working up to, some serious rewiring of my brain.

  I was pretty sure Mixer was pulling out the circuits in his head, too. I looked over at him. He was staring at the action. His mouth was open and his hands were out to either side, like in dodgeball, when someone’s lining you up and you don’t know which way you’re going to have to jump. I couldn’t exactly tell what he was thinking, but I was pretty sure that if I went over there, he’d go, too.

  It was like part of me wanted to do it—to take Bones to the ground and hold him there until he got a grip or at least until Mixer got there to help—and another part of me just wasn’t ready for that. And it’s not like that second part won; it just held out for long enough. It was all over pretty quickly. All I did was shout at him a few times—“Bones!” I’d said. “Bones!”—and he could read whatever he wanted into that. Hell, maybe he thought I was cheering for him.

  Maybe six or seven shots in, Bones brought the club down flush on the top of Haberman’s head. It made a sound like kicking a rotten log, and Haberman fell onto his side. It was hard to tell if he was knocked out or worse. He curled up like a baby, with his face toward me. His eyes were closed, and I could see that there was an angry slash of deep red on the bridge of his busted nose.

  For a second or two, everything was quiet. Bones just stood there, looking down, and I could see that he had a long red stripe cutting down from his neck to his chest and a few little dots on his face. It looked like he’d been slashed, but I knew it wasn’t his blood. That nose must’ve just exploded.

  “Holy…” I said.

  “Jesus,” said Mixer.

  “He didn’t do it,” said Bones.

  Bones knew, just like I did. He knew Haberman hadn’t done anything, and he attacked him anyway—I think he may’ve been trying to kill him. And you know what I was thinking right then? I was thinking I should’ve known. I should’ve known this would happen or at least that it could’ve. Bones’d nearly gone after Haberman right outside the school doors, in the parking lot. What’d I think he’d do a full town over?

  But I didn’t think about what would happen, just about what could happen, how it could all work out if everything went perfect. And that was my fault, because when was the last time that things went perfect for me or even well? And Bones nodding his head and saying, “Yeah, sure,” when we were planning things, well, that obviously didn’t mean jack. I don’t know if he had his own plan the whole time or if he just didn’t have ours. It amounted to the same thing.

  And now Bones had a little smile on his face. I remembered him talking about Haberman in the cafeteria and saying “I hate that guy,” just like he’d said “I hate that kid” after he’d beaten Adam down outside the pizza place. And here’s what I thought right then and what I still think. When Bones saw Haberman standing there, he saw every F that’d ever landed face-up on his desk and every smirking teacher who’d ever put it there. Then he saw Haberman wriggling off the hook, shooting down our stupid theories, and he knew if he hadn’t done it right then, he never would’ve gotten another chance.

  19

  There’s no use crying over spilled milk, and it’s not like I was going to cry, just like it wasn’t milk spilling out of Haberman’s shattered nose. But I was kind of riled up, just the same. I’d felt frozen and torn while it was happening, but my feet had come unstuck now. Bones had screwed everything up, and he was smiling about it. I had a powerful urge to run up and tackle him, just take him to the floor and pound him, Ultimate Fighter-style.

  “What the hell?” I said. “You crazy son of a bitch! What are we supposed to do now? Could we be more screwed?”

  I was just rattling it off, but even then, I had to hold back. Bones still had the club in his hand. He still had blood down his front and a little bit of maniac in his eyes.

  Mixer started in on him, along the same lines as what I was saying, but I reached over without looking and tapped him on the arm. He got the message and zipped it. We just had to let the adrenaline drain out of Bones for
a bit.

  When it did, I stepped forward and bent down over Haberman. I put my hand against his neck, like I’d seen on TV. I knew I was looking for a pulse, but I didn’t know where exactly to find it. I pressed down with all four fingertips in order to cover more territory. Finally, I found something. It was weak but it was there.

  “He’s alive,” I said. “I guess we should leave him on his side like this.”

  “Yeah,” said Mixer. “In case he pukes.”

  I stood up and took a step back toward Mixer. It felt like in gym class, when you pick teams.

  “Well,” said Bones, “I guess we got our answers.”

  “Yeah,” said Mixer, “so what the hell was the beat-down for?”

  “Had to see if he was telling the truth, right?”

  “That doesn’t make one damn bit of sense.”

  “Yeah, well, it worked well enough. And we needed to send him a message anyway. We got nothing on him. He didn’t do nothing, and that means we shouldn’t be here.”

  “Yeah, you’re right,” said Mixer. “You’re absolutely right. I sure wouldn’t want to get, what, detention? What did we really do? What did we really do—until you beat the crap out of him? You want trouble, what do you think is going to happen once he wakes up?”

  “If he wakes up,” said Bones.

  I was going to say something like, No, I just checked on him. He’ll be OK. Then I realized what Bones was saying.

  “No way, man,” I said. “I don’t need that kind of trouble. We’re screwed now, but that’s a whole ‘nother level of screwed.”

  “At what point did you become such a freakin’ psycho?” said Mixer. “You’re not doing anything else, not so much as breathe on him.”

  And I guess I saw it move, because I looked down at the club. There was a little blotch of blood on the side, and right then, Bones tightened his grip on it. Maybe it’d been slipping, but it seemed like he did it because Mixer was telling him what he could and couldn’t do. I looked up at him, and it was like, Just try it, if you think you can club your way through the both of us. We’re not middle-aged English teachers, not talk-first types. I said before that I didn’t think I could match his intensity most of the time, his mean streak. This was one of the times I thought I could. I could, and I was pretty sure Mixer could, that we could tear him apart, that we’d enjoy it.

  It was quiet for a second. Mixer had his hand in his pocket, and I knew he was fishing around for that little orange-handled knife of his. It’d be a pretty lame arms race: fish club vs. tiny knife, but it didn’t come to that. Bones loosened his grip and let his shoulders drop.

  “Well,” he said, “what’s your big plan then? You two want to go get him an aspirin and a Band-Aid or something?”

  I didn’t appreciate the sarcasm but I let it go. I looked down: Haberman hadn’t moved at all since I found that weak pulse.

  “Man,” I said. “I don’t know.”

  “We got to wait on him,” said Mixer, “wait till he comes to.”

  “Yeah, and what are we going to do then?” said Bones.

  “We got to let him know that there’s more where that came from. Got to make him swear not to talk. Say we’ll come back, unless he says he fell down the stairs or something.”

  “Yeah, great,” I said, “except he could just call the cops and get us locked up, and unless he happens to wander within two feet of our jail cell, there’s not much we’d be able to do to him.”

  “Nuh-uh,” said Bones. “We’ve got rights.”

  It was probably the dumbest thing I’d ever heard anyone say, and I just looked at him.

  “Well, I don’t know,” said Bones. “We can say he was abusing us or something. Like he invited us over here to mess with us.”

  “Yeah, and who are they going to believe?” I said, and there was that phrase again.

  “We don’t really have to say that,” said Mixer, testing it out, “just tell him we’re going to say that he was molesting us. Stuff like that goes straight to the news, and he won’t want the trouble. And there’ll be a trial and all that. I don’t think most teachers get beaten by their students. It will, I don’t know, look bad.”

  “I don’t know,” I said, but it was Mixer talking now, so I was willing to listen.

  “Yeah, we’ll say all that, then tell him all he has to do is say he fell down that big flight of stairs. No rumors, no trial, no second beat-down, and we’ll be like model students until we die or graduate.”

  “Yeah,” said Bones. “That could work.”

  “Worth a shot,” Mixer said.

  “Well, I guess we can wait a while,” I said. “It’s not like he didn’t already see us.”

  I looked down, still no movement, but the bleeding had stopped.

  “I got to say, though, it could be a long wait.”

  “We got time,” said Bones. “The fish ain’t biting.”

  And that was it, it’s like the decision had been made. It was the wrong decision. I already knew that. What I should’ve done was get to a phone, make some excuse to shake Bones, and then dial 911. I needed to get an ambulance here. But I felt guilty, involved, just for being there, for not stopping him. And we still didn’t know how bad it was. They record those calls, and I didn’t want my voice sitting there, waiting to get matched up in some police lab. You see that on TV all the time, they play back the audio, and the voices become these squiggly lines on a monitor, and when those lines match up, someone goes to jail.

  Bones should be the one to call, but I knew he wouldn’t. He’d frickin’ laugh at the idea. Instead, he walked over toward the couch.

  “Don’t!” I shouted, and the three of us stood there and waited.

  Odds were, it wasn’t going to matter if we left prints or fibers or any of that other CSI stuff. As soon as Haberman came to, there’d be a witness wearing all the evidence he needed on his face. It would only matter if he didn’t remember what happened. Considering the shots he’d taken to the head, I wasn’t ready to rule that out just yet. Of course, if that was our out, we shouldn’t have still been standing there. The other possibility was that he wouldn’t come to at all. Beatings like that, they were for the young. That’s why the couch was off-limits, because it would really matter then. We all knew the stakes. We were waiting around for him to wake up or for him not to.

  We didn’t talk much.

  “Anyone have a watch?”

  “There’s a clock over in the hall.”

  And then another few minutes of silence.

  “Should we do something?”

  “Like what?”

  “I don’t know, get him one of those little pillows over there?”

  “Nah.”

  More silence.

  “Well,” I said after a while, “I guess we got one answer. We know Haberman didn’t have anything to do with Tommy. Dammit, Tommy. He really should give us a heads-up before he pulls this stuff. But we know that. You guys heard him. He was totally clueless, didn’t know jack. And, man, once that club came out, he would’ve told us anything. So we got one answer.”

  “And we know what was in the barrel,” said Bones, like this was a test and we were getting points per question.

  “Who the hell cares what was in the barrel?” I said.

  “That was the whole point!” said Bones.

  And now that was the dumbest thing I’d ever heard. He was just breaking records left and right.

  An hour later, Haberman still hadn’t moved, and it was getting uncomfortable to stand. I bent down to check his pulse again, to make sure, and also to bend my knees a little. The pulse was still there but still weak. I was starting to think he was more than just knocked out. I put my hand in front of his mouth. Same thing there: not much.

  “I got to take a leak,” said Mixer.

  “Not here,” I said.

  Mixer gave me a quick little look, not mean, exactly, but sharp. And it was true: No one had elected me leader.

  “Well,” he said, “I go
t to tell you, pretty soon, it’s going to be here. One way or the other.”

  “Yeah,” I said. “We can’t stay here much longer, anyway.”

  “Yeah,” said Bones. “I think he got the point, anyhow.”

  I looked at him, hoping that maybe he was right. I was like a poker player, counting my outs. As near as I could tell, I had three: memory loss, intimidation, or death. I was pulling for the first option.

  “I’ve got to do something about this,” said Bones, motioning down his front. “Need some water or something.”

  “Maybe the kitchen,” I said. “But wipe down anything you touch.”

  And that was that. There was nothing left to do except walk out on stiff legs and open the door with the sleeve of my shirt. That, and wonder if this guy was going to make it. If he didn’t, I figured the law wouldn’t much care who’d done the beating and who’d done the watching and waiting.

  We left him there on the floor, half on his nice rug, half off. Outside, it was almost dark. The first stars might’ve been out, but it was too cloudy to see them. We climbed back in the truck and backed out onto the road. No one coming from either direction, just some house lights on farther up the street, and we were gone.

  “You better drive like a frickin’ grandmother,” I told Bones.

  “No problem,” he said, but he was already going too fast.

  Back at the house, Bones had wiped himself off with a kitchen towel. He’d cleaned off his face and what he could of his front. Then he’d wiped down the club and stuffed it in his jacket pocket with the wet towel. It was good enough: darkblue sweatshirt, camo jacket. What was left of the stain barely showed.

  Now he had the heat turned all the way up to dry off, and Mixer and me were cooking in our own sweat. It felt like we were driving straight into hell, and none of us talked much as Bones made the circuit, dropping me off first. We were all lost in our own thoughts, I guess, playing out scenarios in our heads.