Gentlemen

by Michael Northrop

  He went on: “I might as well spare you the trip, though.”

  “What’s up, Mr. Trever?” said Mixer. I was glad he spoke up, because I didn’t trust my voice right then.

  “Archie just wanted to let you know”—Archie was Principal Throckmarten—“that they found your friend.”

  “Where did they find him?” I said after a few long seconds. The way he said “found him,” I thought maybe he meant his body, and maybe I was right after all.

  “The McDonald’s,” said Trever.

  “In North Cambria?” said Bones.

  “That’s the one,” said Trever.

  I knew there were no shallow graves at the McDonald’s and that Tommy was fine. I wasn’t all that surprised. As soon as we knew that Haberman hadn’t done anything to him, I knew Tommy was liable to come waltzing back, no warning, just like he left. But the timing on this one was a real kick in the balls. Would one day earlier have frickin’ killed him?

  “What was he having?” I said, trying to sound like I thought it was funny now.

  “I don’t know,” said Trever. He let out a little laugh. “None of that stuff’s good for you, though.”

  I exhaled and shook my head. I felt a lot of things and one of them was incredibly, record-settingly stupid. We didn’t need the assistant principal to tell us we were wrong, but it really drove the point home when he did. I looked at Mixer and Bones. Their faces were crash sites of different expressions—relieved, hurt, embarrassed—the gears grinding away in their heads.

  “Well, that’s good then,” Bones managed.

  “Yeah, some pretty easy police work. Some troopers were waiting in the drive-thru and they saw him walking across the parking lot. He told them he was on his way home anyway.”

  “Man,” said Mixer.

  “Well,” I said. “Where was he?”

  “Not sure,” said Trever. “But apparently they had a hard time recognizing him from his photo. Seems he’s made some changes.”

  “What kind of changes?” I said.

  “Sorry,” said Trever, “that’s all I know. Anyway, you three can go back to class now. I’ll let Archie know I caught up with you.”

  We were in more of a mood to stay and talk about all this, and he must’ve been used to that, too, because he stood there until I started up the stairs and Mixer and Bones headed back toward shop.

  “That’s a relief, huh?” said Chaney when I walked back into Spanish. Whoever called must’ve told her about Tommy turning up. She said it without any Spanish at all, not teacher to student, just person to person, and I guess that surprised me.

  “Yeah,” I said, returning to my seat.

  The blackboard was full of new sentences. I sat there picking out the words I knew and basically just trying to piece my nerves back together. I felt like they’d gone to hang me and the rope broke. Now I was just waiting to be strung up again. But the last few minutes of class just rolled slowly by. The next thing that rang wasn’t the phone, it was the bell. I gathered up my stuff and headed to English.

  Tommy was alive, I thought, walking alone through the busy hallway. Was Haberman?

  “Mr. Haberman is incommunicado this morning,” said Ms. Yanoff, once we were all seated. “So once again, the powers that be have seen fit to provide me with a day’s wages.”

  English teachers, where did they get them?

  22

  Lunch was a hot ham-and-cheese grinder, and it was still sitting in my stomach like a bowling ball when things started happening. We had math in the afternoon on Mondays. The numbers were still the same, but Dantley was usually in a little better mood by then. He was sitting on the front corner of his desk, flipping through his book and trying to find something, when someone knocked on the door. He must’ve found what he was looking for, because he laid the book down spread-eagle on his desk before walking over.

  I didn’t look at Mixer or Bones and did my best not to freak out too much. I couldn’t keep revving my engine for false alarms, and if it was the real thing, well, there wasn’t much I could do about it. I thought maybe I’d try to look innocent, walk out of the room wearing a halo. Or maybe I’d try surprised on for size, like, I wonder what this could be about?

  Dantley opened the door a crack and exchanged a few words with someone in the hallway. I couldn’t make out what they were saying, and instead of someone coming into the room, Dantley stepped out into the hallway and closed the door behind him. Everyone started talking, and I looked over at Mixer. He just turned and shrugged. He didn’t know what was going on and was too worn down to speculate. I looked over at Bones. His eyes were fixed on the front of the room like he expected the next thing to come through the door to be a tear-gas canister.

  Instead, it was Dantley. He was two shades whiter and pretty obviously shaken up about something. He didn’t say what and just gave us some problems to work out for the rest of the class. I knew he wasn’t going to get around to calling on us for the answers, so I didn’t bother. He didn’t say what he was upset about, but it wasn’t hard to figure out.

  Sure enough, once we were out in the hallway, Mixer said, “Look out the window.”

  I looked in the direction he’d nodded and saw a State Police cruiser parked out front. By the time I got to my locker and back, a second one had shown up.

  “They know,” I said to Mixer. We hadn’t waited for Bones.

  “About him,” he said. “Not about us.”

  Mixer was right about that, because heading toward the locker room to change for gym, a Statie walked right by us. We played it pretty cool, I think. Maybe we slowed up some, but we didn’t turn around or wet ourselves or anything. It didn’t matter anyway. He wasn’t looking at us. He passed by on my left, so I got a good look at his gun. Not a revolver like Throckmorton’s, some kind of an automatic, all black. The Statie was tall with buzz-cut hair and a little bit of a forward lean to his walk. He was heading toward the office.

  “That’s it, man,” I said, pulling on my shorts.

  “We don’t know that,” said Mixer, closing his locker.

  “Come on,” I said. We had to communicate in the fewest, most general words possible, but what I was saying was that Haberman was dead.

  Mixer wasn’t willing to admit that just yet. He spun the dial on his combination lock and said, “I’ll see you up there.”

  “Yeah,” I said. I really wasn’t in the mood for volleyball.

  I passed by Mixer during a game, when he was rotating to the front row and I was rotating back to serve. “We just stood there,” I said.

  “Shut up,” he said, and then he was past me. Someone threw the ball to me, but I wasn’t ready for it and it bounced off my chest.

  When we were changing afterward, Reedy whipped around the corner. His mouth was already hanging open, so you could see he had news.

  “Did you hear?” he said.

  It’s never cool to come up on someone fast when they’re changing, but he had my attention. “What?”

  “Haberman’s in a coma!”

  For a split second, I thought I might join him.

  “I said: Haberman’s in—”

  “I heard you! Christ!” I said.

  “Man,” said Mixer. “How’d it happen?”

  “No one knows!” said Reedy, already turning to tell the next row.

  I thought back to the way that tall Statie was walking, like he was chasing off something only he could see, and I knew that wasn’t true.

  The buses could not come fast enough after that. A coma, I wasn’t sure what that’d mean for us, and I couldn’t work out the angles with all these cops and kids and distractions around. The only thing I knew for sure was that they didn’t know it was us yet. Bones found me at my locker.

  “Coma,” he said. “It’s on the radio and everything.”

  “And?” I said, letting my voice be overpowered by the end-of-day noise.

  “They aren’t saying why yet, just that ‘an investigation is ongoing.’ ”

>   The thoughts that kept me awake the night before hit me again, so close together it might as well’ve been all at once: tire tracks, boot prints, my fishing gear. Bones still hadn’t returned it.

  “Great,” I said.

  “Really?” said Bones.

  “No, you idiot.”

  He shot me a look and headed toward the North Cambria bus.

  “Call ya later,” he said, but I didn’t reply.

  I met up with Mixer at his locker.

  “What did Captain Ass-hat have to say?” he said.

  “Says it’s on the radio: ‘An investigation is ongoing.’ ”

  “Great.”

  We headed out to the first Soudley bus. There was a Statie, older than the one from the hallway, on the steps to the main entrance. He was standing next to Throckmarten and watching the buses load. They were talking, their chins sort of shading toward each other but their eyes on the rows of kids climbing into the different buses. I pointed out the trooper to Mixer, even though I was pretty sure he’d seen him already.

  “Are you nuts?” Mixer hissed.

  “What?” I said. “They’d only expect us to look away if we were guilty.”

  We sat in the back of the bus and talked about how we were going to kick Tommy’s ass when we saw him. My stop came first.

  “Check you later,” I said, meaning I’d call.

  I climbed off the bus and stood there as the door closed behind me and the bus lurched back into gear. I’m not sure I’d ever been happier to see my little yellow house. I was walking across the lawn and trying to remember what snacks we had left when Tommy came around the far wall. It was like Trever’d said, I almost didn’t recognize him at first. His shaggy mop of brown hair was gone, replaced by a short, styled cut. The color was different, too, the brown shading toward blond in places. He had an earring in one ear, and that was new, too.

  “Hey,” he said.

  “Geez, man, look at you.”

  “Yeah, had an argument with a barber,” he said. I looked at his hair. That hadn’t happened at some eight-dollar barbershop. “Listen, man. I know you’ve got questions.”

  “You got no idea,” I said. There were a few things I could’ve added, just to bust on him. I’d said the same things plenty of times before, but I held up now. There was something in his voice—apology, yeah, but something else, too.

  “Can I come in?” he said.

  And it’s funny he’d put it that way, because what he was really doing was coming out. That thing in his voice, it was hesitation. This was hard for him to say, but he didn’t really need to say it to me. I got it now.

  It’s not like, as a guy, you couldn’t get a fancy haircut. It’s not like you couldn’t get an ear pierced. It’s not even like you couldn’t drop out of sight for a while. But you sort of step back and take it all together: It’s not like you couldn’t, but guys like us, we just didn’t. I looked at him standing there, with his highlights and his plain steel stud, and I just wanted to punch him in the face, hard. Did he have any idea what we’d done on his account? And now it was like he wasn’t even him.

  I clenched up my fists, but he just stood his ground. I waited for the anger to lead me somewhere, but it didn’t. I knew if I wanted to clock him once, he’d let me, and I guess that’s how I knew this was the same tough bastard I’d known the week before.

  “Sure,” I said. “But don’t try anything.”

  He let out a small laugh, not much more than a puff of breath.

  “You picked a good week to be gone,” I said, opening the door. I couldn’t find it in me to hate him.

  23

  I didn’t tell him what we’d done while he was off “finding himself” or whatever. I figured it was better for all of us if he didn’t know. That way, he couldn’t be charged with anything, and there’d be one less person to testify against us. Of course, if anyone could keep a secret, it was pretty clear it was Tommy.

  “What about that whole Natalie thing?” I was saying. “All that ‘she’s so hot’ and stuff? Was that just bull?”

  “I don’t know, man,” he said. We were sitting at opposite ends of the dining room table. I think I sort of wanted to have some furniture between us. “I was probably hoping more than pretending at first, but basically, yeah, I picked the hottest chick in class and went around telling everyone I had it bad for her. It seemed like the right thing to say, and it didn’t seem like I’d ever have to put my money where my mouth was.”

  “You’d be surprised the mouths that end up on Natalie these days,” I said, but I didn’t explain that one, either. “Man, you had me fooled. You seemed so nervous around her.”

  “Yeah, well, I guess bad acting looks a lot like real nerves,” he said. “But that’s what it got to be for me, man: acting, pretending. I was pretending every day of my life, first to myself and then to you guys. That’s what I can’t do anymore. I’ve got to…”

  And I knew from the buildup that he was going to uncork some feel-good expression, like “be true to me” or some crap like that. He just let his voice trail off, because he must’ve remembered that I wasn’t the right audience for that kind of thing. This wasn’t Oprah.

  “Well, you know,” he said after a bit.

  “Yeah, I know,” I said, and there was a little more silence. “But why Dantley’s class? Why’d you lose it in there?”

  “ ‘Cause he knew. He’d been hounding me big-time, ‘cause he knew exactly what I was.”

  “I didn’t even know,” I said. “How the hell would Dantley?”

  “Seriously?” said Tommy.

  “Seriously.”

  “Because Dantley’s queer as hell.”

  “No frickin’ way!”

  “Yeah, totally.”

  And I just had to shake my head. It was like, all these years of calling people homos and fags, and I couldn’t tell the real thing when it was two feet in front of me. Man, I thought, these small-town queers, the CIA ought to sign ‘em up.

  And I had other questions. “Manchester again?” I said.

  “Nah.”

  “Same guy though.”

  “Yeah.”

  “Is he one, too?”

  “Yeah.”

  He didn’t offer details, and I didn’t push for them. There’s only so accepting a guy can be expected to be in a day, you know?

  “Listen, whatever you’re thinking, he helped me a lot. He…”

  I cut him off: “What about the guys?”

  “Let me tell Mixer,” he said.

  “You might want to skip Bones for now,” I said. I wondered if he was dumb enough to still have that club.

  “I was planning on it.”

  “How’d you get here anyway?”

  “Biked it.”

  “Oh, man, enjoy the climb,” I said, because Soudley was down the valley from North Cambria.

  “Good for me,” he said. “Builds character.”

  “Just be careful it doesn’t mess up your hair.”

  He flipped me off and let himself out, and I just sat there at the table for a long time. Man, I thought. Tommy was going to have problems in school. Serious problems, and things were going to change between him and us. A week ago, I would’ve felt sorry for him, but right now, I had my own problems.

  I went to the kitchen for a slice of cheese. Tommy was walking his bike across the lawn toward the road. He got on, heading toward Mixer’s house. He was leaving, and I’d completely forgotten to kick his ass. I wondered if Mixer would.

  24

  It took them two days total to come for us. I’m surprised it took them that long. I figured that Haberman’d finally come to, but that wasn’t the case. Bones’d picked up a little knickknack when he’d gone into the kitchen to clean himself off, and he’d forgotten to wipe it down. It was a wedge of amber with a real wasp set inside. It was sitting on the windowsill above the sink, and I guess Bones wanted a closer look. I’d be madder about that, but they pulled a partial of mine off the door frame, from wh
ere Haberman tried to shut it on me. All of our prints were on file from “Missing Children: Don’t Be a Victim” Day back at Soudley Central. I think Mixer was just a case of guilt by association, at least until they found his boots.

  They picked Bones up at the bus stop. He got a State Police cruiser all to himself. It was like he was waiting there for them to arrest him. He said he didn’t even see them until the cruiser pulled right up in front of him, and that’s sort of the way it was waiting for the bus. The cars just bled by out of focus.

  It was Throckmorton who collected Mixer and me. Not at our stops but just after. He pulled the bus over. He lit it up with the flashers and pulled it right over. Mixer and I were talking about Tommy, of course, wondering if he’d be at school and kind of deciding how we’d handle it if he was. I heard the chatter pick up around us before I saw the pale blue light reflected on the ceiling. Then I felt the bus slow down and pull off to the side.

  Mixer was turned around already so I just asked him, “Who?”

  “Sheriff,” he said.

  That seemed better than a Statie to me, I guess because I’d met Throckmorton before. The devil you know, right? What had he said to me then, “I’ll see you around”? I wondered if, after all those years on the job, he could see a kid and just tell.

  The bus driver opened the door and Throckmorton and his deputy climbed on. It was always weird to see adults climbing onto school buses, like how the teachers were always last aboard for field trips. It was even weirder when they were wearing guns. For a second, I thought of hiding, ducking down, and maybe crawling between seats. I knew our schoolmates would give us up, though, not all of them but probably most. They’d rat us out and then wait around to have a gold star stuck to their foreheads.

  The bus got quiet when Throckmorton’s eyes started scanning the seats. When he called out our names, it boomed inside the hollow space, Grand Canyon-style. It was probably the first time anyone had said Mixer’s real name that year. We put on some I-can’t-believe-this body language, but basically we just stood up and walked down the aisle. There wasn’t much else to do.