Twelve

by Nick McDonell

  Chapter Eighty-Nine

  WHITE MIKE WALKS out into the air, and it is snowing. The cathedral towers behind him. He knows that he was in there a long time, and he wants to go home now. He is suddenly very tired and wants to go to sleep.

  In the cab, he wonders why he went to the church. Just more bullshit. That is exactly what I don’t need, he thinks. But that’s what you do at times like this. You walk into a church even though you are not religious. And either it helps or it doesn’t, but usually it doesn’t and so what.

  The cab stops in front of his house, and he gives the man the whole twenty, a huge tip. The guy thanks him profusely, and White Mike says nothing back as he gets out. He just didn’t feel like dealing with asking for change. It was on some weird cent, like he would have had to ask for $11.30 or something to get the tip right. The cab number is 4C46.

  White Mike walks into his front hall and hears his father in the kitchen making dinner. He is standing over the stove, frying steaks in butter and lemon and wiping grease out of the pan with sourdough bread. It used to be something they liked, lemon steak, his father called it. He used to make it for Charlie too. Before either of them says anything, White Mike feels his beeper go off.

  Chapter Ninety

  AT AROUND TEN, Jerry, the only white kid besides Hunter who goes to the Rec, arrives at the party. He is having a beer in front of one of the big TVs with a bunch of other lads. He is recounting the story of Hunter’s fight— a couple of the kids know Hunter and about him being in jail.

  “You think he might have done it?”

  “No way,” says Josh.

  “I heard there were two dead guys.”

  “Why would Hunter kill anybody?”

  Chapter Ninety-One

  LIONEL DRIVES UP to the party in his 1988 white Lincoln Town Car and double-parks in front of the ivy-covered town house. He grabs a backpack from the seat next to him and gets out and locks the car. He rings the doorbell before he realizes the door is slightly ajar, and he walks in.

  Jessica has been watching the door from the stairs. She is quick to beckon Lionel upstairs to the deserted guest bedroom, across the hall from Claude’s room. The room is dark except for the blue light filtering out of the piranha tank and bouncing off the cymbals and metal of the drum set.

  “Let me see the money.” Lionel’s smooth voice floats out from under his hood as Jessica closes the door behind them.

  “Oh yeah, fine, here.” Jessica is nervous. I don’t have enough.

  Lionel counts, and as he is getting through the bills, Jessica interrupts and tells him, “Look, there’s only five hundred there.”

  “I brought a thousand bag,” Lionel says sharply.

  I don’t have enough. Five hundred isn’t enough. I don’t have enough. “It’s enough.” Jessica surprises herself with the anger in her voice. “You can—”

  “No. I told you, I’ve only got thousands.”

  “I’m good for the rest of the money.” She speaks levelly and coldly. Her eyes have deadened, this close to the drug.

  “No.” He turns to leave.

  “Wait,” she shouts, and stamps her foot. “I can give you something else.”

  Lionel looks around the room, noticing how expensive everything is. Good criminal judgment tells him he doesn’t want to be taking anything out of here. It would be him getting busted, not the girl, if it ever came to that.

  “I don’t want anything from the house.”

  “I’ll give you a blow job.”

  Lionel practically busts out laughing.

  “I’m serious.

  Lionel considers for a second as he looks at the girl, up her legs to her breasts where he stares, unabashed. She does not get embarrassed. He becomes slightly aroused, then thinks again.

  “Five hundred dollars is an expensive blow job.”

  “I’ll fuck you.” And Jessica recognizes the voice coming out of her but feels far from it. She doesn’t even look at Lionel, just keeps staring at the bag in his hand. “I’m a virgin.”

  Lionel agrees to give her the bag for two fucks. One fuck before he’ll give her the bag, he says. And then she’ll owe him one.

  “No, the bag first, then we’ll have sex.”

  Lionel knows he can get it back if he needs to, so he hands it to her.

  Jessica sighs and steps back from Lionel, not thinking anything. She holds the bag tight, not quite sure what to do with it for a moment, before she puts it on a dresser.

  She looks at Lionel and takes hold of the bottom of her sweater. She pulls it over her head, and in the blue light her pale breasts appear, supported by a simple white bra. Lionel stares and walks toward her.

  Chapter Ninety-Two

  BEAUTIFUL GIRLS AT the party. Two of them. Achingly beautiful. Smiling and drinking champagne. Who brought the champagne? They brought their own. They tell Sara this is, like, the best party ever. Sara takes a drink straight from their bottle. They admire her style. She spots Sean coming through the front door and waves.

  The party’s getting very loud. Andrew sits on a bar stool at the counter in the kitchen and watches Chris’s eyes flick from the matches he is lighting one by one to the girl dancing over by the ovens, where the light from above the stove is falling down her shirt. All parties live, for a while, in the kitchen. When there are no more matches in the box, Chris moves on to a book of matches from a Thai restaurant two blocks uptown. He bends a match back, lighting it with one hand.

  Chris’s mother kept saying, Chris, don’t play with matches, this house is made of wood, it would go up like a tinderhox. And I hate the smell of that sulfur, please Chris. So Chris didn’t play with matches in their gray shingle country home in Southhampton, at least not when his mother was there. But Claude was present during this exchange, and one night not long after his mother had fired his favorite nanny, Claude sat outside his mother’s bedroom all night long, lighting matches, letting the sulfur smell seep into the room, until he heard his mother asking his father hysterically whether he smelled that horrible smell. It was the middle of the night, and his father said no, and then his mother sounded like she was crying. Good.

  Andrew looks at Chris for another second and goes to the refrigerator to get a beer, and as he is first lifting the bottle to his lips, with his fingers on either side of the neck of the bottle, holding it nonchalant-like, Molly walks into the kitchen with a girlfriend and sits down next to Chris. She is looking for Tobias but can’t find him. Andrew thinks she is the most beautiful girl at the party, maybe the most beautiful he has ever seen. Beautiful like those girls in the movies. She actually looks like one of those girls. Sitting next to Chris.

  “Hi,” Molly says to Chris. “I’m Molly, remember, I was here the other day with your brother’s friend Tobias?”

  “Oh yeah. Molly, hi.”

  “Is this the kind of party where a sixteen-year-old girl can get drunk?”

  Molly’s girlfriend is smiling to see her friend flirt like this, and when she catches Molly’s eye, she is practically laughing. Molly looks away.

  “I’ll get you a beer.” Andrew gets up to get her one. He wishes it were the kind of thing that when he gave it to her, their hands had to touch.

  Molly takes the beer and chugs almost the whole bottle as they all watch.

  “Not very ladylike,” says Chris.

  “Nah, very ladylike,” says Andrew.

  “You some fine booty,” says Mark Rothko, sidling up to Molly’s chair, then turning back and sticking his hand out to Timmy. Timmy sniggers and takes a dollar from his pocket. “Here.” He hands it to Mark Rothko, all the while looking at Molly.

  Chapter Ninety-Three

  WHITE MIKE IS walking fast, away from his apartment. He doesn’t know why, but he had to get out of there. Too much stuff with the greasy meat and his father and Charlie. Out of habit, he checks his messages, as he always does when he goes out. He realizes his phone has been off. He tries to remember when it might have turned off. He is usually more
careful to set the keyguard so this can’t happen as the phone bounces around in his pocket. The lapse has left him with a lot of messages. Mostly beeps, but there is a voice mail from Warren, his old friend, now in Cancún.

  “Hunter is in jail for murder, not joking, some kid from the Rec and a dealer, call me.”

  White Mike listens to the message four times, and then tries to call Warren but can’t reach him. White Mike walks a little faster.

  In front of a lot of the town houses in the neighborhood, there are wrought-iron gates. These fences are black and cool to the touch, and some are intricate, with curved metal and spikes and flowers. White Mike is walking even faster now, beyond his usual loose gait, and his overcoat, unbuttoned, blows out behind him when the wind gusts. The corner catches on one of the spikes of a low iron fence, and White Mike hears a rip and feels the slight vibration in the fabric as the lining tears up into the middle of his back. And now White Mike speeds up, and soon he is running up the street, over the snow in the darkness and pools of streetlight. The sidewalks are empty now, and if you can run and keep running, you will not be interrupted and you need not look both ways before you cross the street, because probably there is no car coming to skid into you, sending you into the air. White Mike feels all this and so he runs, and in his treaded shoes he does not slip on the snow, and when he sees the door of the town house and he hears the music coming out of it, he doesn’t stop; he flings himself against the door. And then he is inside with the door slamming open behind him.

  Chapter Ninety-Four

  WHITE MIKE IS in, surrounded by a crush of kids. He knows the number that beeped him five times in a row. It is that girl Jessica. White Mike starts looking around the house. He does not slide easy past the kids standing and sitting, he pushes them out of the way, and they look at him funny, but even the drunk ones see something in him that looks terrible, and they know he isn’t here for the party. He is moving too fast. He is not being cool.

  White Mike doesn’t like the music. He just doesn’t like it. He has heard one too many Bob Marley songs at these parties. What am I doing here? What do I care if this girl beeps me? But White Mike always does what he’s supposed to do. It is like he is on a mission. Some crazy fucking mission. Charlie’s dead, murdered, Hunter’s in jail for murder. And White Mike is on this mission. White Mike comes to the open closet with the house stereo system in it. And as “No Woman No Cry” comes on and he hears the first voices somewhere in the house singing along, he grabs a piece of the equipment and hurls it from the shelf to the floor.

  “Oh shit,” says a kid who sees him do this.

  “What the fuck are you doing?” Chris appears and is yelling, but he steps back when he realizes who he is talking to.

  “Who turned off the music, mon?” someone yells from the next room.

  “Where’s that girl?” White Mike shouts at Chris.

  Chris is scared. Kids are packing into this hallway off the main hall in front of the stairs. They are standing behind Chris, seeing what will happen. This is going to make an unbelievable story when school starts again. People are going to be sorry they weren’t here to see it. Sara pushes through the crowd and stands next to Chris.

  “Umm, I think you better go,” says Chris to White Mike.

  Chapter Ninety-Five

  WHEN EVERYONE ELSE runs out from the kitchen after Chris, Molly and Andrew both stay at the table. They are looking at each other. Molly takes another sip of her beer.

  “That sounded like it’s going to be expensive,” says Andrew.

  “I don’t think it matters much. Is he a friend of yours?”

  “Chris? Oh, no, Sara Ludlow told me about this. It’s really her party. Is he your friend?”

  “Don’t know him.”

  “I’ve heard he’s sort of a dick, actually.”

  “They always give the best parties, I’ve heard.”

  “What?”

  “This actually isn’t so bad. They’ll all be back in a minute, though.” She grins, and Andrew laughs.

  “Whatev.”

  “Whatev?”

  “Word.”

  “You mean, like, let’s g?”

  “No go’s already short enough, you don’t need to abbreviate it.”

  “No, I mean, you wanna g? Get some pizza?”

  “Uhh, yeah, sure.” Booyah, thinks Andrew.

  And then a bunch of the kids come back into the kitchen, fast. Timmy and Mark Rothko lead the way.

  “Shit! White Mike rocked him!”

  “Word.” Mark Rothko is nodding in excited disbelief.

  “What happened?” Andrew asks a bunch of times before he gets an answer.

  “That dealer White Mike punched Chris!”

  “In the face?”

  “Who?” asks Molly.

  Chapter Ninety-Six

  THAT FELT SO GOOD, thinks White Mike.

  And now White Mike is holding Chris against the wall. Sara is behind him, crying.

  “I said where’s that girl?”

  “Upstairs somewhere, maybe.”

  White Mike releases Chris, and with his coat flying, he takes off up the stairs, two at a time. Chris nurses his bloody nose and feels his cheek swelling. He follows the crowd from behind, all of them following White Mike up and up, checking all the rooms.

  Molly and Andrew come out of the kitchen and look up the stairs.

  “That’s the dealer, in the overcoat,” Andrew says.

  “Mike?” Molly recognizes his back, but White Mike does not hear her. By the time he is outside the guest bedroom, every kid in the house is looking at him, crowded on the banisters, as he slams open the door.

  Chapter Ninety-Seven

  “WHAT THE FUCK?” Lionel says, and rolls, naked, off the far side of the bed. He pulls a small, shiny 38 Special with a bright white pearl handle from his parka on the floor and stands up, pointing it at White Mike, erection wilting fast. His regular gun is in the other pocket. Jessica is covering herself with the sheet.

  White Mike recognizes Charlie’s gun. “Oh man,” he says.

  “Fuck,” says Lionel, lowering the gun. “What do you want?”

  “I don’t know,” White Mike says, but he takes a step toward Lionel, and Lionel is startled by the look in his eyes. He raises the gun again.

  “I know that gun. Charlie’s gun, Lionel.”

  “He was on some shit, and he pulled it on me.”

  “And you killed him and took it.”

  “What the fuck.” Lionel holds the pistol level.

  White Mike just stares at him.

  “You’d a shot him too.”

  And then White Mike launches himself across the room, grabbing for the gun, thinking he is going to kill Lionel.

  Lionel fires two shots. One of the bullets hits White Mike, who falls heavily into the drum set. The other bullet hums just over Jessica’s head and explodes the aquarium, and the water spills onto Jessica and the bed, and the piranhas are snapping their jaws and flopping in the broken tank. Lionel grabs his clothes and is out the door and into the hall, naked. All the kids start running down the stairs. Claude’s door flies open, and he is suddenly huge in the hall, a sword strapped to his back, the Uzi in one hand.

  Claude pulls the trigger of the Uzi, and it is louder than even he has ever imagined. He sees all these kids streaming down the stairs. Then he sees Molly, terrified, coming toward him, looking for White Mike. Claude points the gun at her and fires, and hits Molly many times. Andrew is right behind her and Claude kills him too. He keeps firing down the stairs and several other kids fall.

  One of them is Timmy, and Mark Rothko, right beside him, stops to try and help, but Claude is now walking down the stairs and shoots Mark Rothko full in the face. Timmy sees Mark Rothko’s head fly apart, and for a second he can think of nothing so much as a game the two of them used to play. They would throw rotten tangerines into the wall across from Mark Rothko’s window, where they would explode with these satisfying splats.

&nbs
p; Claude shoots Timmy then. And as he continues walking down the stairs, he sees his friend Tobias going out the door and Claude fires some shots at him but none of them hit, and Tobias slams the door behind him fast. The closed door stops Lionel, who is naked still, carrying his clothes, and Claude shoots him in the back.

  He kills the other kids who are lying wounded on the stairs. Three of them. They are two boys and a girl, and Claude dispatches each of them the same way, with a kind of careful candor in his gunfire that is straight and measured into the middle of their bodies. Claude saw what happened to Mark Rothko, and he doesn’t like the mess that shooting someone in the head makes, because he accidentally stepped in some of Mark Rothko’s brain matter as he continued down the stairs.

  Claude looks back around but doesn’t see his brother, who is still hiding in a corner at the top of the stairs, weeping.

  The house is almost empty now. Claude walks the ground floor by himself, stopping in every room and looking at everything, taking his time. There is so much space. In the living room he looks at his mother’s vases and couches and paintings on the wall, but he can’t decide whether to fire his gun and destroy the room or not. It seems so neat that he is reluctant to disrupt the order. It is so quiet. He starts to leave the room in peace, but then he turns and fires, splintering the walls.

  By this time the police are arriving, and their calls to him to come out float in Claude’s head and he doesn’t really hear them. But he knows they want him to come out, and he does, but not with his hands up. He comes out firing, and they shoot him dead before he is three steps out the front door.

  Afterword

  Chapter Ninety-Eight

  I COULDN’T HAVE told the story any other way. I made some of it up, but most of it’s true.

  I was operated on a bunch of times and am fine.

  It took awhile for everyone to put the pieces together. Hunter’s name was cleared as soon as the ballistics were run on Lionel’s gun. I kept the bullet around my neck on a string for a while, but then I took it off because I don’t like jewelry. Then I kept it in a jar, and in the end I gave it to a girlfriend I had, and so she has it now.