Men from Boys

by John Harvey

  Paddy shrugged and moved over to the table. I stayed where I was.

  The guy at the table dipped a blade into an open Baggie that held some coke. I wondered why he didn’t take it off the Everest that was in front of him. He dumped some powder off the blade and tracked out four thick lines on the mirror without giving it any chop. He handed a short tube of plastic, the cut-down barrel of a Bic pen, to Paddy.

  When Paddy leaned over the table to do his lines, his four-leaf clover pendant fell out of his shirt and hung suspended between the zippers of his Member’s Only jacket.

  ‘Irish, huh?’ said the guy.

  Paddy said, ‘All the way.’ He did a line and made a show of rearing his head back to take it all in.

  ‘They call me Carlos. What do they call you?’

  ‘Paddy.’

  ‘No last name?’

  ‘O’Toole.’

  ‘Wow. That damn sure is Irish.’ Carlos’s voice was almost musical. ‘Been to the motherland?’

  ‘Not yet.’

  ‘Tell the truth, man: that can’t be your real name, right?’

  ‘I changed it,’ said Paddy, real low. The room was quiet, but you could barely hear him. He bent forward and quickly snorted the other line.

  ‘You’re like, fake Irish, then. That’s what you tellin’ me?’

  Paddy cleared his nostrils with a pinch of his fingers. His eyes narrowed some as he straightened his posture. ‘I’m Irish.’

  Paddy said it real strong, like he was looking to make something of it.

  ‘All the way,’ said the guy on the couch.

  Carlos looked Paddy over real slow. Then Carlos smiled. ‘Plastic Paddy,’ said Carlos. The guy on the couch laughed.

  Paddy’s face grew pink, like it had gotten at Kildare’s. The girl came back through the hall with a Baggie in her hand and stood near the table. The cigarette still burned between her fingers; it was down to the filter now. Paddy turned to me, his face flushed, and held out the tube. I waved the offer away with my hand.

  ‘Take it,’ said Paddy. He sounded kinda mad.

  I was frozen. I didn’t want any coke. I was thinking of my parents and my kid sister. I just wanted to get outside.

  ‘What’s the matter with your boy?’ said Carlos. ‘Can’t he find his tongue?’

  ‘Give it to me,’ I said to Paddy. The sound of my own voice was a relief. I walked a few steps and took the Bic from Paddy’s outstretched hand. I did the lines fast, one right behind the other, and dropped the plastic tube on the table.

  ‘Here you go, ace,’ said the girl, speaking to Paddy. She handed him a Baggie that I guessed she had gotten from the freezer. I could see grains of rice in there with the coke.

  ‘This from the same batch I just did?’ said Paddy.

  ‘Yeah,’ said Carlos. ‘It’s good, right?’

  Good. It wasn’t even close. I knew right away that this shit was wrong. A curtain had dropped throughout my body and everything had gotten pushed down into my bowels. I was speeding without the happiness and I had to take a dump. This was bullshit coke. They had stepped all over it with baby laxative and who knew what else.

  Paddy had to be feeling the same way I was. He knew he was getting ripped off. It was like the guy was asking, ‘You don’t mind if I fuck you, do you?’

  But Paddy didn’t complain. He reached into his jeans and pulled out a roll of bills. He handed the bills to the girl, who counted out the money with dead eyes.

  ‘Ain’t you gonna weigh it out?’ said Carlos, chinning in the direction of the Baggie. ‘I got a scale right here.’

  Paddy didn’t answer. He rolled the Baggie tight and slipped it in the inside pocket of his Member’s Only.

  ‘You just gonna eyeball it, huh?’ said Carlos.

  ‘Let’s go,’ said Paddy. He turned and began to walk. I followed him back down the hall toward the front door. We heard the guy on the couch say ‘Plastic Paddy’ in the voice of a game show host, and then all of them laughed. I didn’t care because it looked like we were going to get out of there alive. But I know Paddy must have been hurting inside, ’cause they’d ripped something out of him. Also, it was the second time he’d been shamed that night.

  We took the stairwell down toward the lot. As we crossed the sidewalk, Paddy said, ‘Fuckin’ niggers,’ and right about then the guys I’d noticed in the Ford came out of nowhere, holding guns on us, shouting at us to lock our hands behind our heads and drop to the asphalt and kiss it. I went down shaking, seeing other men running around in the dark, hearing their adrenalised voices and the screech of tires and the closing of heavy car doors.

  As I hit the ground I lost control of everything and crapped my pants.

  You know all those cop shows on TV, where the detectives convince the suspect to talk before the lawyer arrives? It’s bullshit, the worst thing you can do. My father always told me that if I ever got jammed up just to keep my mouth shut and wait for the guys in the suits. Also, ’cause he figured I’d get DWI’d some day, he told me to refuse the breath tests and keep my piss inside me. Judging from what happened to Paddy, I don’t think he ever had any guidance like that. Plus, they gave him some court-appointed attorney who didn’t help his case. My lawyer was a heavy hitter, a friend of my Dad’s, and he did me right.

  Paddy did a few months’ detention up at Seven Locks, and I got a community service thing where I had to wear a jumpsuit and pick up trash in Sligo Creek Park. Also, I was required to attend these classes at an old Catholic school on Riggs Road, where some horse-faced guy talked about the evils of alcohol and drugs, one night a week for six weeks. It was me and a bunch of losers, alkies and spentheads who’d flip the teacher the bird behind his back when they weren’t drawing sword-and-sorcery artwork in their notebooks or scratching their initials into their desktops.

  You’d think it was lucky we walked into that bust before something worse happened to us. That I might have looked around me in that rehab class, checked out the company I was keeping, and realised that I needed to turn my life around. But I guess I wasn’t that smart.

  Soon after those classes ended I started doing the occasional blast on weekends again, telling myself it was recreational. Then, big surprise, I began to hunt for it during the week. One night I got drunk and wanted it so bad that I went into a rough neighborhood down in Petworth, off Georgia Avenue in DC, where this guy in a bar had told me I could cop. I bought a half from some hard-looking black dudes and got knocked out with a lead pipe by the same dudes while I was walking back to my car. I woke up at the Washington Hospital Center, my face looking like a duck’s. I never did another line. My father said that I had to fall down and hit my head to find out I wasn’t normal, and I guess he was right.

  Paddy went away after his jail time, to Florida or some shit, and after that I lost contact with him completely. Scott had this theory that Paddy had flipped on Carlos and them, and was probably too scared to stay in Maryland. As for Scott, him and me drifted apart.

  I saw them both at the twentieth reunion for my high school, held a few years ago at some hotel up in Gaithersburg. Scott was heavy and bald and on his second wife. He mentioned his law firm and something about a new model Lexus he had his eye on. He didn’t really need to boast like that, ’cause I could tell from his suit that he had done all right. But I noticed that most of the night he was standing by himself. Nobody from our high school days seemed to recognise him. Scott had money but he didn’t have friends.

  I caught glimpses of Paddy during the evening, standing near the cash bar or hanging around the buffet table, where most of the food had been picked clean. His image was fuzzy – I was too vain to wear my glasses to the reunion – but I knew from the way he was standing, sway-backed like he’d always been, that it was him. When I’d try to catch his eye, though, he’d look away.

  Our paths crossed in the bathroom later that night. I was taking a leak in the urinal when Paddy walked in. I got a good look at him while I zipped up my fly. He was wearing an il
l-fitting suit and a hat sat crookedly on his head. The hat was one of those plastic derbies, green and covered in cellophane, with shamrocks glued underneath the cellophane. Like something you’d win at a carnival. Paddy’s face was puffy and there were gray bags under his unfocused eyes. He leaned against the wall and looked me up and down.

  ‘Paddy,’ I said. ‘How you doin’?’

  ‘Big store manager,’ he said, drawing out the words. His lip was curled with contempt.

  I figured that someone at the reunion must have told him that I was managing a Radio Shack. But I was doing better than that. I had been promoted to Merchandising Director and I was in charge of four stores. Hell, I was knocking down close to forty-two grand a year.

  I didn’t correct him, though. I just went to the sink and washed my hands. I washed them real good before I left the room.

  Paddy had been my bud for a long time, so I felt kinda bad for a couple days after, seeing him like that. He had taken a long fall. Or maybe, I don’t know, he’d just kept moving sideways. Anyway, I haven’t seen him since, and that suits me fine.

  It’s not like I’m denying who I was. I do think about those nights with Paddy and I know we had some laughs. But for the life of me I can’t tell you what it was we were laughing about. I mean, I used to love to get my head up. But now I can’t remember what was so great about it. Mostly, when I think about it, it seems like it was all a waste of time.

  SHADOW ON THE WATER

  Peter Robinson

  We were meant to be getting some sleep, but how you’re supposed to sleep in a cold, muddy, rat-infested trench, when the uppermost thought in your mind is that you’re going to be shot first thing in the morning is quite beyond me.

  Albert Parkinson handed around the Black Cats to the four of us who clustered together for warmth, mugs of weak Camp coffee clutched to our chests, almost invisible to one another in the darkness. ‘Here you go, Frank,’ he said, cupping the match in his hands for safety, even though we were well below ground level. I thanked him and inhaled the harsh tobacco, little realising that soon I would be inhaling something far more deadly. Still, we needed the tobacco to mask the smell. The trench stank to high heaven of unwashed men, excrement, cordite and rotting flesh.

  Now and then, distant shots broke the silence, someone shouted a warning or an order, and an exploding shell lit the sky. But we were waiting for dawn. We talked in hushed voices and eventually the talk got around to what makes heroes of men. We all put in our two-penn’orth, of course, mostly a lot of cant about courage, patriotism and honour, with the occasional begrudging nod in the direction of folly and luck, but instead of settling for a simple definition, Joe Fairweather started to tell us a story.

  Joe was a strange one. Nobody quite knew what to make of him. A bit older than the rest of us, he already had a reputation as one of the most fearless lads in our regiment. It never seemed to worry him that he was running across no man’s land in a hail of bullets; he seemed either blessed or indifferent to his fate. Joe had survived Ypres one and two, and now here he was, ready to go again. Some of us thought he was more than a little bit mad.

  ‘When I was a kid,’ Joe began, ‘about eleven or twelve, we used to play by the canal. It was down at the bottom of the park, through the woods, and not many people went there because it was a hell of a steep slope to climb back up. But we were young, full of energy. We could climb anything. There were metal railings all along the canal side, but we had found a loose one that you could lift out easily, like a spear. We always put it back when we went home so nobody would know we had found a way in.

  ‘There wasn’t much beyond the canal in those days, only fields full of cows and sheep, stretching away to distant hills. Very few barges used the route. It was a lonely, isolated spot, and perhaps that was why we liked it. We used to forge sick notes from our mothers and play truant from school, and nobody was ever likely to spot us down by the canal.

  ‘Not that we got up to any real mischief, mind you. We just talked the way kids do, skimmed stones off the water. Sometimes we’d sneak out our fishing nets and catch sticklebacks and minnows. Sometimes we played games. Just make-believe. We’d act out stories from Boy’s Own, cut wooden sticks from the bushes and pretend we were soldiers on patrol.’ Joe paused and looked around at the vague outlines of our faces in the trench and laughed. ‘Can you believe it?’ he said. ‘We actually played at being soldiers. Little did we know . . .

  ‘One day, I think it was June or July, just before the summer holidays, at any rate, a beautiful, sunny, still day, the kind that makes you believe that only good things are going to happen, my friend Adrian and me were sitting on the stone bank dipping our nets in the murky water when we saw someone on the other side. I say saw, but at first it was more like sensing a presence, a shadow on the water, perhaps, and we looked up and noticed a strange man standing on the opposite bank, watching us with a funny sort of expression on his face. I remember feeling annoyed at first because this was our secret place and nobody else was supposed to be there. Now this grown-up had to come and spoil everything.

  ‘“Shouldn’t you boys be at school?” he asked us.

  ‘There wasn’t much we could say to that, and I dare say we just fidgeted and looked shifty.

  ‘“Well,” he said. “Don’t worry, I won’t tell anyone. What are you doing?”

  ‘“Just fishing,” I said.

  ‘“Just fishing? What are you fishing for? There can’t be much alive down there in that filthy water.”

  ‘“Minnows and sticklebacks,” I said.

  ‘“How old are you?”

  ‘We told him.

  ‘“Do your parents know where you are?”

  ‘“No,” I said, though I remember feeling an odd sensation of having spoken foolishly as soon as the word was out of my mouth, but it was too late to take it back.

  ‘“Why do you want to know?” Adrian asked him.

  ‘“It doesn’t matter. Want to play a game with me?”

  ‘“No, thanks.” We started to move away. Who did he think he was? We didn’t play with grown-ups; they were no fun.

  ‘“Oh, I think you do,” he said and there was something about his voice that made the hackles on the back of my neck stand up. I glanced at Adrian and we turned to look across the canal to where the man stood. When we saw the gun in his hand, both of us froze.

  ‘He smiled, but it wasn’t a nice smile. “Told you so,” he said.

  ‘Now, I looked at him closely for the first time. I was just a kid, so I couldn’t say how old he was, but he was definitely a grown-up. A man. And he was wearing a sort of uniform, like a soldier, but it looked shabby and rumpled, as if it had been slept in. I couldn’t see the revolver very clearly, not that I’d have had any idea what make it was, as if that even mattered. All that mattered was that it was a gun and that he was pointing it at us.

  ‘Then, out of sheer nerves I suppose, we laughed, hoping maybe it was all a joke and it was just a cap gun he was holding. “All right,” Adrian said. “If you really want to play . . .”

  ‘“Oh, I do,” the man said. Then he pulled the trigger.

  ‘It wasn’t as loud as I had expected, more of a dull popping sound, but something whizzed through the bushes beside me and dinged on the metal railing as it passed by. I felt deeply ashamed as the warm piss dribbled down my bare legs. Thankfully, nobody seemed to notice it but me.

  ‘“That’s just to show you that it’s a real gun,” the man said, “and that I mean what I say. Do you believe me now?”

  ‘We both nodded. “What do you want?” Adrian asked.

  ‘“I told you. I want to play.”

  ‘“Look,” I said, “you’re frightening us. Why don’t you put the gun away? Then we’ll play with you, won’t we, Adrian?”

  ‘Adrian nodded. “Yes.”

  ‘“This?” The man looked at his revolver as if seeing it for the first time. ‘But why should I want to put it away?”

  ‘He fired
again, closer this time, and a clod of earth flew up and stung my cheek. I was damned if I was going to cry, but I was getting close. I felt as if we were the only people for hundreds of miles, maybe the only people in the whole world. There was nobody to save us and this lunatic was going to kill us after he’d had his fun. I didn’t know why, what made him act like that, or anything, but I just knew he was going to do it.

  ‘“Don’t you like this game?” he asked me.

  ‘“No,’ I said, trying to keep my voice from shaking. ‘I want to go home.”

  ‘“Go on, then,” he said.

  ‘“What?”

  ‘“I said go on.”

  ‘“You don’t mean it.”

  ‘“Yes, I do. Go.”

  ‘Slowly, without taking my eyes off him, I backed up the bank towards the hole in the railings. Only when I got there, and I had to turn to squeeze through, did I take my eyes off him. As soon as I did, I heard another shot and felt the air move as something zipped by my ear. “I’ve changed my mind,” he said. “Come back.”

  ‘Knowing, deep down, that it had been too good to be true, I slunk back to the bank. The man was muttering to himself, now, and neither Adrian nor I could make out what he was saying. In a way, that was even more frightening than hearing his words. He was pacing up and down, too, staring at the ground, his gun hanging at his side, but we knew that if either of us made the slightest movement, he would start shooting at us again.

  ‘This went on for some time. I could feel myself sweating and the wetness down my legs was uncomfortable. Apart from the incomprehensible muttering across the water, everything was still and silent. No birds sang, almost as if they knew this was death’s domain and had got out when they could. Even the cows and sheep were silent, and looked more like a landscape painting than real, living creatures. Maybe a barge would come, I prayed. Then he would have to hide his gun and we would have time to run up to the woods. But no barge came.

  ‘Finally, he came to a pause in his conversation with himself, at least for the time being. “You,” he said to Adrian, gesturing with his gun. “You can go now.”