Jackie was trying to say something, to explain, to justify himself, but he couldn’t get past the sneer on Danny’s face, past the barrage of words: what’s the big deal, why would I laugh at you, why would I fight you, why would I give a damn about someone like you? So he gave up trying, and hurled himself at Danny, like a maddened girl, Danny told the guys later, like your sister when you got her worked up good and mad till she can’t be teased any more and loses it. The guys had cracked up at that, he remembers them laughing, for real this time, all laughing at Jackie Bradberry, gathered on their bikes outside Mallatt’s on Kingsley Way later that evening drinking sodas, Dave and Ralph and Gene, laughing at Jackie Bradberry who fought like a girl, who Danny tried to go easy on, but even though Jackie couldn’t fight his way out of a paper bag, he kept on coming until Danny bloodied his nose and blackened his right eye and doubled him up with a punch to the solar plexus that made him bring up his lunch. Danny left him there, hawking his guts up in the dirt. He hadn’t felt like laughing at him then. But later, with all the guys, he told the story, and they laughed and he laughed.
It was the last time he would laugh at Jackie Bradberry.
The next day, Brian and Eric Bradberry were waiting for him when he was cycling along Vilas Park Drive to school. He sometimes wonders, maybe if he had just kept cycling … what? He would never have started the fire, and Brian and Eric, not to mention Jackie, and all the other Bradberrys, would still be alive? That was lame reasoning. You couldn’t run away forever. They were going to get him sometime. May as well be now. He pulled into the side of the road and followed them, wheeling his bike. They had their dog with them, a 57-varieties mutt called Killer. Jesus, Danny thought as he followed them in among the trees of Vilas Park, Jackie wanted Jason and Chad to call him after his brothers’ fucking dog?
The worst of it wasn’t the beating, although Eric and Brian didn’t leave anything out: not content with bloodying his nose and blackening both eyes and making him throw up, Eric and Brian, who were thirteen and fourteen, used their boots. They kicked him in the balls, and in the head, and in the ass, right up the ass, which hurt in the worst fucking way, like a needle or something, and they kicked his shins and his back. They kicked the shit out of him, and Killer danced around, barking with excitement. And when he thought they were finished, when he begged them for mercy, when he wept, they stopped, panting.
‘Now you see, you little bitch,’ Eric said.
‘Squally little brat.’
‘You touch our brother again, you get that ten times over, you hear?’
‘Yes,’ Danny whimpered.
‘You squeal on us, you get it twenty times.’
‘You hear?’
‘Yes.’
‘You swear?’
‘I swear.’
‘What do you swear?’
‘I swear I won’t touch Jackie again. I swear I won’t tell.’
‘Little bitch. Look at the little bitch, weeping for his mommy.’
Danny was kneeling, heaving, crying, trying not to cry, eyes closed. The dog had stopped barking. He wondered if they had gone. He was afraid to open his eyes and check. But then he found out that they hadn’t gone. The dog had stopped barking to take a crap, and Eric and Brian found a couple of sticks and skewered the fresh dog shit and dumped it on Danny’s hair, rubbing it in with the sticks, through his hair, down his neck, around his cheeks, up his nose, down the front of his sweatshirt. It took him weeks before he didn’t think he smelled of dog shit; months before he didn’t think he could smell dog shit.
‘Smelly little bitch.’
‘Bitch stinks of shit, doesn’t she?’
And that wasn’t the worst of it.
The worst was what followed.
Every day, Jackie Bradberry passed a note along the class to him, written for him by Jason or Chad, mostly Jason, because Chad was even dumber than Jackie.
you are dead. killer
and
death ground after school dont be Late KILLER
and
See what a fare fight is like, bitch boy
Once, Danny put his hand up immediately after one of the notes had arrived, to answer a question, except he couldn’t help notice the stricken expression on Jackie’s face, as if he thought he was going to rat him out. Jackie was still scared, and Danny still almost felt sorry for him. Who is Sherlock Holmes?
But whether he was scared or not, it amounted to the same thing: Jackie could do what he liked now, and Danny couldn’t lay a finger on him.
At first, Danny just tried to avoid him, slipping out of school before he got a chance to catch him, taking the long way home and into school, keeping constant watch on where he might be at any time. But you couldn’t run away for ever. He met him one afternoon at the death ground. Jackie’s note had said:
death ground call you out and bring two of yore fag freinds for back up
Dave and Gene came with him.
Jackie was there with Jason and Chad, who looked petrified, and with good cause, as Eric and Brian had said nothing about protecting either of them, and before Jackie could raise a hand, Gene Peterson was on top of the pair of them and actually knocked their heads together, twice, and they took off over the wall like they had jet engines up their asses. Jackie started squealing about his brothers, and Gene, who was a head taller than anyone else in the class, and the guy they’d all have liked to be – not the smartest, or the coolest, but the most manly; the one whose approval you looked for; the guy you tried to make laugh and wanted to impress – Gene looked at Jackie Bradberry and said, ‘Go ahead, Jackie, you can do what you like now, on account of your brothers.’
And Jackie walked up to Danny and hit him hard in the stomach, and in the ribs, and hit him a few times in the face, splitting his lip, and then swung at him with a left hook that knocked him down. When Jackie tried to follow through with his feet when Danny was on the ground, Gene Peterson came in and bundled him out of it.
‘My brothers said …’
‘“My brothers said.” You little sissy boy,’ Gene said. ‘You should be ashamed of yourself. What do you think you’ve got here, target practice? “My brothers said.” Fuck off. Now!’
And Gene lifted a right hand the size of a shovel, and waved it at Jackie, and Jackie took off. But he walked slowly, and resentfully, reluctantly, stopping at the wall.
‘I’m gonna tell Eric and Brian about this.’
‘That figures,’ Gene said. ‘A snitch, a little rat as well as a sissy. Go tell your brothers.’
Jackie told Eric and Brian, and two days later, they caught Gene Peterson in Wingra Park and broke his arm with a tire iron. Gene said he caught them each a couple of good shots, and maybe he had, but everyone knew it didn’t make any difference. That was it as far as the resistance to the Bradberrys went. From then on, it was note after note, threat after threat, all from Jackie to Danny. Danny went back to the death ground twice more on his own, didn’t even tell the guys, because Jackie didn’t want him to, or because he feared they wouldn’t come and back him up even if he asked them, for fear of what Jackie’s brothers might do, and let Jackie Bradberry kick the shit out of him each time, and stopped feeling sorry for him pretty smartly. And then he tried to deal with it in other ways. First, he’d play sick at home, and get off school that way. But the doctor would be called, not all the time, but often enough. So then, what Danny did was, when he’d get the note, he’d start to shake, and he’d feel the heat in his brow, and he’d actually start to cry, and when Mrs Johnson noticed him, or some kid brought it to her attention, Danny’d say he had a terrible pain in his stomach, some kind of cramp, or spasm, and sometimes he’d get to see the nurse, and sometimes he’d just get sent home, and every one of these times, he’d see the stricken, scared face of Jackie Bradberry.
And everyone else’s face was kind of weird, because everyone else in the class knew what was happening, but it wasn’t happening to them, so they didn’t really give a shit, and besides, Danny
was eleven, and look at him, every other day, there he was, crying. Jesus. What a fucking crybaby.
And that’s when Danny decided that there was only one solution: Jackie Bradberry was going to have to die.
Extract from
Trick or Treat
Unpublished manuscript by Ralph Cowley
Danny
A Couple of Swells
While Jeff Torrance does the driving, Danny Brogan wonders if it was the house that had been the root of the problem. The original sin, the worm in the apple. Danny’s grandfather, Old Dan Brogan, had made a lot of money selling land to the University of Wisconsin back in the 1930s, when they were originally establishing the Arboretum, now over 1,250 acres of forestry and horticulture tended to resemble the original wilderness as it would have been before white men arrived in Wisconsin. Pre-settlement Wisconsin. A vision, a dream of Eden. Old Dan kept back a plot of land on which his own house stood, running between the track that would become Arboretum Avenue and Lake Wingra, and enclosed the grounds in a dry-stone wall with high iron gates to front and rear, and retreated inside and drank himself to death while his wife raised Danny’s father, Dan Junior. The house came down through Dan Junior, who in due course pulled much the same kind of exit as his father, to Danny, who bought his sister Donna out and moved in when he and Claire married. It was the only dwelling for a couple of miles. The university had initially tried hard to persuade Old Dan Brogan to relocate but he was reclusive and ornery and had come out to the unsettled West Side to get away from people in the first place and refused to move. And however each successive Brogan male differed from his father, they resembled each other in this, at least: the Brogan house was a part of the woods, and there it would stay.
But Danny knew that if it hadn’t been for the daily charge of Brogan’s Bar and Grill, he would have gone mad out there himself and plugged steadily into the same arrangement as his father and grandfather before him. Maybe he was starting to go that way anyway. Maybe the house was haunted with failure and self-pity, and worse. Maybe that’s what had caused Claire to pine for her old life. Not that he would know. One of the things he and Claire shared, along with an unfashionable dislike and distrust – disdain, even – of technology, was an equally unfashionable discomfort with full and frank conversation. It wasn’t that they wanted to keep secrets from one another, more that neither felt their marriage vows entitled them to be told anything the other didn’t feel like telling.
So Danny had never asked Claire about her relationships in Chicago, and she had never asked what he had got up to while she was away. They had both agreed: the problems in a marriage come when there’s no mystery, no distance, no otherness to the loved one. Familiarity breeds, if not necessarily contempt then certainly a level of disrespect. Their reticence with each other would help keep things alive. And their diligence in this respect was rewarded: the problems in their marriage, when they duly came, had the distinction of not being the ones they had guarded against.
They had headed north on I-39 for about fifty miles last night and stayed in a bed and breakfast place that didn’t quite call itself an ‘Inne’ but may as well have; there were pieces of lace over every available seat back and the antique furniture looked like it was going to buckle if you breathed on it. They rose before dawn and left without waiting for breakfast, partly because they wanted to be at Oxford Federal Correctional Institution by eight a.m., but mainly because the proprietors of the Inne that didn’t call itself an Inne, Larry and Jennifer Pyke, a man and woman of uncertain age and appearance, appeared starved of human society. It had taken Jeff and Danny three-quarters of an hour to get away from the Pykes the previous evening, such was their determination to share details of their past lives in Chicago and New York, where they may or may not have achieved great things in The Theater. Danny found it almost impossible to focus on what they were saying, so fascinated had he become by the look of the couple: Larry thin, almost shrunken, but still vigorous, with a vermilion ascot, a quilted smoking jacket, gray pants, patent leather shoes, a plume of dyed black hair and what looked very much to Danny like eye shadow; Jennifer an overly made-up, golden-haired ex-beauty, like a late-period Gabor sister, or Ginger Rogers in her talk-show phase, coquettish and predatory and grotesquely overweight in black and gold Chinese robes and tiny little red high-heeled Dorothy slippers. Jeff was in no great rush to abandon the conversation, admittedly, which ranged across subjects as various as Ronald Coleman, the Dolly Sisters, the films of Mitchell Leisen and Hollywood actresses who portrayed nuns as opposed to those who became nuns, and would have happily sat up drinking tea with them into the night, thereby slaking his taste for the bizarre and relish of the absurd, not to mention his general preference for the company of old people.
Danny looks across the table at Jeff now. He is so much more reliable than he lets on; even Danny forgets it now and then. It’s like a front he keeps up to fend off the world: the stoner, the slacker, the wastrel. They have found a Denny’s for breakfast, the best they could do, and are on their third refill of coffee. It may be Monday morning but it’s Columbus Day, so they had the place to themselves at six; it’s filling up a little as it approaches seven-thirty. Everyone who comes in, male, female or indeterminate, takes a good squint at Jeff, which is the way it’s always been. He’s looking good as ever as he approaches fifty: his blond hair has not yet faded to gray, and he still wears it just long enough on the curve between youthful and delusional, pushed back from his chiseled, lean, tan face; he has always favored a hippyish, Native American look, with random beads and braids and strips of leather and even, in his hair, a couple of ribbons. At six-four, in Levis, black western shirt and cowboy boots, Jeff looks very well indeed, and you don’t need to take Danny’s word for it: if Jeff spends a night in Brogan’s and goes home alone, it’s because he’s tired, and Danny usually has to commiserate with more than one disappointed customer wondering how she played her cards wrong.
Given the fact that Jeff has never held down a job it’s maybe surprising that he should have kept in such shape. He has lived at home with his mom, a wealthy widow who adores her son and always thought it completely unnecessary for Jeff to go out and work when he didn’t have to. In his twenties, Jeff thought this an excellent plan, since having a job would interfere with his other pursuits, namely smoking pot and staying up all night watching videos and playing computer games and reading three- and six- and nine-volume science-fiction sagas.
For a few years, after Claire left for Chicago, Danny hooked up with Jeff and they lived in a kind of dedicated drift, steadily adding stronger drugs and alcohol into the equation and dallying the while with the kind of women who were sufficiently under-motivated themselves to believe that such a plan was indeed excellent. The Torrance estate was happy to bankroll it all, as long as Jeff agreed to eat dinner with his mother every other night and to simulate a desire to ‘be creative’ in some non-specific artistic or literary way without going to the trouble of producing any actual work.
Then Danny’s father died and Danny stepped up to manage Brogan’s, which meant an end to aimlessness, for him, at least. He stopped taking drugs, even stopped smoking weed, which neither he nor Jeff considered the same thing at all. Jeff saw no need to follow suit, and continued on his merry, aimless way. There was never any shortage of aimless wastrels in Madison to accompany him, each with their own, invariably spurious, ‘creative’ alibi. Jeff’s was writing, not that he did anything so vulgar as actually write.
This was the life Jeff led: the drinking and the smoking, the reading and eating dinner and listening to music with his mom, the sleeping with other men’s wives and girlfriends (because single women, dazed with awe by the scale of Jeff’s lack of ambition, always gave up on him as a potential partner-for-life, but often returned for respite, sometimes for years afterwards). And of course, the letting Danny know he would always be there if and when Danny needed him, because the reason Jeff ended up doing a three-year stretch in Fox Lake and not dead
is because Danny helped him out, and someone else is dead and not Jeff. Danny didn’t need to know what Jeff had done; the fact that he needed his help was enough. It was money Danny helped him with, mostly, money Jeff didn’t want to ask his mother for, and Danny had always had enough money, although of course he doesn’t any more.
Jeff looks him in the eye now, and despite the strain Danny’s under – he slept heavily for about three hours and then lay awake from four a.m., fretting, and planning and, truth be told, crying, just a little, kettle-boiling-over kind of tears that quickly subside and get mopped up – he can feel himself about to lose it, and Jeff grins and says, quietly, ventriloquizing the fluted, fruity voices of their hosts, half Hollywood-Raj, half white-shoe country-club, ‘We of the theater, you see,’ and Danny cracks up. Jeff could always make him laugh at the best of times, simply by catching his eye, and he’s an excellent mimic.
‘Isn’t that extra-ordinary? You came from Cambridge, and here you are in Oxford!’ Jeff arches a lazy eyebrow in tribute to the baroque eccentricities of their hosts at the not-Inne. ‘You are among us here in Oxford, but you are lately of Cambridge! Do not think us strange: we are of the Theater, you see, the Theater.’
Jeff is an old hand at showbiz impersonations, adept at capturing the preposterous bullshit actors spout on chat shows, and Danny has always been a sucker for it. He has wondered in the past if some of his laughter has its roots in anger – anger towards Claire and what he sometimes feels are her illusions about her illustrious past, her talent, her wasted potential. She can still, watching a movie, be moved to tears of what Danny knows is not empathy with the character but envy at the actress, and it’s always an actress, always of Claire’s age, and a quiet couple of days will follow, and while Danny sympathizes, and never says anything, sometimes he just wants to shout, ‘It was never that great to begin with, and it’s over for good now. Do you think you’re the only one whose dreams haven’t worked out?’
All the Things You Are Page 7
