400 Boys and 50 More (25 page)

On the table by his bedside, she saw his English assignment: Ray Bradbury’s
The Martian Chronicles
.

“I’ll call the office in the morning,” she promised her son. “That place is giving you nightmares.”

* * *

Mrs. Sherman sighed when she saw Ricardo in homeroom 408 the next morning. His bandaged nose was the subject of several disputes between first and second bells. As the students punched their new day’s schedules into computer cards and copied each other’s math homework, she watched him gazing into space. Near the end of the period, she checked his schedule and saw that he had no class after home room.

“Would you please come see me at fourth bell?” she asked.

“Yes, Mrs. Sherman,” said Ricardo, and he shuffled away without having met her eyes.

He wandered into the department office at third bell and was waiting for her when she got free of Mr. Ezra and Miss Bachary, who each claimed to have the room for the next period. The scheduling computer was down again.

“Everyone defended Neal,” he said, when she was sitting at her desk. He looked about eighty years old when he said it. She wanted to tell him to look up, to smile.

“They said you started it?” she asked.

He nodded. “I let them give my part away. Newt got it. David Deacon, I mean. He’s even shorter than me. I don’t know why Mr. Dean thinks Banquo’s a shrimp.”

“Have you taken your story to Mr. Magnusson?” she asked.

“He and Mr. Bay go golfing together,” he said. “I don’t want to be in the stupid play anyway.”

“Maybe it’s for the better, Ricardo,” she said. “I thought of you when we chose
Macbeth
. Mr. Dean will need a student playwright, someone who can write, to polish what the actors come up with and read it back to them better than before.”

Ricardo looked up, astonished. “You mean me?”

She smiled. “That could be, but it depends on you.”

“I’d do it! I have an idea about-about Macbeth’s mother!”

“Fine, Ricardo. I’ve talked to David Deacon since he was chosen, by the way. He’s in my science fiction class and he loves Mars. He said he’d be glad to help you learn what you need to know to write a story on Mars.”

“Write a story on Mars,” Ricardo said to himself. “Wow.”

“—gladly share his fine ideas about the angry red planet, that grisly world of war and blood.”

She looked past him, through the filing cabinets, up at the clock.

“And
Macbeth
,” she intoned, “all black and red, dark night and dark blood. A haunted planet, a cursed play. Did you know there was a curse put on the play? It’s bad luck for an actor to hear the Scotsman’s name, unless they’re in the play. If you listen long enough, you’ll hear stories about the strange things that happen when people perform
Macbeth
. ”

Ricardo's gaze followed the path her eyes traced upward, ever upward.

“Use your gift, Ricardo.”

“Okay, Mrs. Sherman, I’ll give it a try.”

“A-plus, Ricardo,” she said. “You’re A-plus material.”

* * *

The new Banquo, David “Newt” Deacon, was a nerd. He even had a bowl-head haircut. When Ricardo found him in the audiovisual room, he had toilet plungers strapped to both legs and was filming himself with an upside-down video camera while extolling the virtues of “Human Housefly Sucker-Cups.” He looked a bit like a housefly himself, wearing bug-eyed glasses with quarter-inch-thick lenses.

Newt shed his plungers and turned off the video recorder.

“Ricky River?” he asked.

“Ricardo Rivera.”

Newt shook his head, as if clearing it. “Thought that couldn’t be right.”

“Mrs. Sherman sent me.”

“Oh, I know. Excuse me a second.” He went poking through shelves cluttered with tape reels and charred copper wire, speaking over his shoulder. “She’s neat, huh? She said I’d tell you everything you ever wanted to know about Mars, right?”

“I guess I know as much as anybody. I read
The Martian Chronicles
. ”

“Oh,” Newt said. “That’s just the beginning.”

When he came out of the cupboard, holding a burned-out electromagnet, his cheeks were sucked in between his molars. He stared at Ricardo’s bandages.

“Neal was my best friend once,” he said. “Back in fifth grade, we did everything together. He got ideas for all these neat things—squirt-gun burglar traps and stuff—and I built ’em. But he kept taking and breaking them. Now it figures he’s president. And going with Cary Fordyce, too.”

“Cory,” said Ricardo.

Newt unwound some of the scorched copper wire from the motor and began winding it around the fingers of his left hand as he talked.

“Here’s what I thought would work for Mars on the stage: all red lights; we’d make big castles out of red foam rubber—sandstone-looking stuff. I wanted to do a sandstorm—they’re really bad on Mars—but Mr. Dean said no, too messy. We get an avalanche at least. The space suits are gonna be kind of a cross between space suits and kilts.”

“How about canals?” Ricardo asked.

“There aren’t any canals,” Newt said emphatically. “Didn’t you ever see
Robinson Crusoe on Mars
?”

“No, but-but I think I know how Mars looks.” He looked up and saw a clock with its hands skipping backward. The office reset speeding clocks several times a day. “It has two moons, a red sky, towers, and Martians who nobody ever sees . . . I bet I could write it so everyone acted like they would if they were really up there.”

“Make it good and bloody,” said Newt, fidgeting with the prongs of an electric plug. The other end of the wire was hooked to the motor, now strapped to his left hand.

“Yeah,” Ricardo sighed, “except they won’t let us have any blood in it.”

“Aw, there’s this great word from horror stories that no one would ever mind.”

Ricardo leaned closer. “Tell me.”

Newt’s hand exploded. He yanked the plug out of the wall socket while Ricardo, in shock, peered at the smoldering hand.

“You did that to yourself?”

Grinning, Newt unwrapped his hand and held it out. The fingers and palm were powdered with carbon but unharmed.

“Mr. Dean’s letting me do the special effects,” he said. “Now, you were asking about a good word for blood?”

* * *

A small flame licked up and seared Ricardo’s heart each time Cory and Neal shared the stage. Two weeks after the primaries, their political sessions were notorious; according to Lisa Freuhoff, they would as soon ogle each other as filibuster. Sunk deep into a folding chair, Ricardo daily watched them declare their sappy Martian version of love while a piano student rapped out accompaniment. When the ruddy stage lighting lingered in their eyes even off the stage, he saw it as the glow of lust and hated it. Cory tried none of the tricks she had played on Ricardo last year. She and Neal were at each other’s mercy.

One afternoon, between scenes, Neal jumped from the stage and sauntered over to Ricardo.

“What a quay-zar,” Neal said.

Ricardo drew up his knees and sank down into the safety of his own lap. “What are you trying to prove, Bay?”

“Nothing you haven’t proved already. That you’re a lying little wimp. If your mouth and fingers are both really connected to your brain, then everything you’re writing is probably a lie, too.”

Ricardo sat up and set the script book down. He was getting hot now.

“Neal, would you just fuck off?”

Of course, of course his voice had to break when he said the worst word he knew.

“Ooooh! What nasty words! They’re just what I’d expect from a nasty little boy like you. Nasty little fag.”

Neal spun away and leapt back onto the stage without using his hands. Ricardo lapsed into a fever of pent rage; he almost smote his breast in public.

“Just because I don’t have a bitch for a girlfriend!”

Sheri DuBose, who was passing behind him, gasped.

He blushed, felt his ears burning. When she was gone, he looked at Cory Fordyce, alone at the center of the stage. He covered her with a hand, imagining the bitch-queen of them all in her place. Lady Macbeth, with long black hair and vampire teeth and bloody lips and hungry eyes. In his mind, the Lady consumed Cory, another bitch, and he began to smile.

“I don’t care if I’m not Macbeth or Banquo or any of you,” he whispered, giggling.

He held his pen up before his eyes, concentrating on it until he went slightly cross-eyed. His thinking also did something like doubling; he suddenly thought of himself as every one of them. He could be Duncan, murdered in his sand castle, and any or all of the three witches who danced across the viewscreen of the starship
Silex
; he could be the comical porter of the air-lock. The whole time the players thought they were creating the play, he had actually been writing new lines and getting the actors to learn them.

Over Christmas break, he was left to polish the script and prepare a final version. He lost interest in the mundane holiday and often had to be coerced to take part in family affairs such as ornamenting the tree and visiting relatives.

For two solid weeks he breathed the sands of Mars and haunted the winding stairs of a crumbling Martian castle. Instead of carols, he heard phantom birds cawing from the high thin air as murder sneaked through the two-mooned night. His dreams were premonitions of laser-fire, in which no blood was allowed. The holes in Duncan’s chest smoldered, cauterized. And always, just before he woke, the sand dunes of the Birnham Waste came humping forward, crawling, alive . . . .

He wrote and rewrote. Sometimes he stared at the wall and the soccer trophies and the Certificates of Merit and the pencils in the
papier-mâché
holder he’d made in third grade. He stared at these objects but all the while saw blood, only blood, blood swirling into sand, spraying in the wind, blood that the school would never allow, everywhere the substance that the Committee had forbidden.

The days passed in a red dream.

(“Merry Christmas, darl— Ricardo, did you even sleep?”)

On New Year’s Day, inspired by the changing year, he took a silver pin and pricked his fingertips; squeezed out bright beads and droplets that splashed the fresh-typed manuscript; chanted, “By the pricking of my thumbs, Neal Bay is overcome!”

He smeared a little blood on each page. For a while he watched it dry, then he licked his fingers clean of blood and ink.

* * *

“Excellent job, Mr. Rivera,” said Mr. Dean the next day. “Sheri turned in the final draft of her songs; I hope you two got together over the holidays? Then I guess that should do it. Listen, if you’re not too busy this trimester, why don’t you lend a hand building sets?”

Ricardo could have cackled and rubbed his hands together, but he had more control than that. He nodded and went looking for a hammer.

That afternoon he worked on the stage, doing quiet tasks with glue and thumbtacks in the dark wings while the actors looked over their new script.

Cory Fordyce said, “But I don’t remember . . . Morris, this isn’t our play.”

“What else would it be?” said Mr. Dean. His word outweighed that of Morris Fluornoy, the student director. “I’ll expect you to have it memorized by Friday. Don’t forget, opening night’s only two months away.”

“But this is scary,” said Lady Macbeth.

“It’s supposed to be,” said Newt, who had already complimented Ricardo on his script. “It’s Mars. Didn’t you ever see
Queen of Blood
?”

Ricardo resumed hammering. In his hands, the first of the Martian towers began to rise. The flunkies in set construction were used to taking orders; it was easy to shape their understanding of Martian architecture. He explained how low gravity and rarefied air required all structures to be warped until they could withstand ion storms and colloidal temperature gradients.

So, under his direction, they built something like a huge Cubist monster with a low, foam-rubber belly, giraffe-long legs, and a vast fanged mouth missing the lower jaw. They painted it red-orange, stapled a slit sheet of clear plastic between the front legs, and finally gave it wheels. Ricardo discovered a talent for painting, and covered it with writhing figures, deliberately crude glyphs of torment.

Portcullis-cum-air-lock. Hell-gate. Beast. It stood like a watchdog, always somewhere on the stage, its upper regions hidden from the audience by hanging backdrops and the proscenium arch.

Another of Ricardo’s talents also came in handy. He proved an excellent mimic, and so created a variety of unusual sound effects once he’d made friends with the sound technician. The obscure bird of night called, when it called, in a high voice familiar to Neal; and each time it called, the sandy-haired athlete grew slightly pale inside his skier’s tan. The bird’s cry, Neal once said to Cory within Ricardo’s hearing, sounded almost like a voice. He didn’t know that the words, Ricardo’s taunts, had been accelerated and run together until no sense could be made of them.

Neal became an ever more haggard Macbeth, in his plastic kilt and rakish cellophane visor. He started crossing the stage to avoid the young playwright and set-builder.

But Lady Macbeth—that is, Cory Fordyce—seemed to grow ever bolder.

Ricardo noticed her watching him as he went about his business in the shadows. One day he climbed a ladder all the way up to the catwalk, where spotlights and unused backdrops hung. He stood directly over her as she read a hologram from her husband who was fighting rebels in space. Ricardo concentrated on the top of her head, and within seconds she looked straight up at him, though he had climbed aloft in perfect silence, unobserved until now. He pretended to adjust a red gel on a spotlight while she continued her speech.

When he descended she walked proudly toward him, seeming to drink up the red light as she came, seeming to swell and tower as it filled her. Her hair caught scarlet highlights, her mouth wettened with blood, her eyes swam in red tears.

“Ricardo,” she said, “what are you up to?”

He backed away and she moved closer, forcing him into a corner.

“What are you doing to us?” she repeated.

Ricardo could summon no strength to meet the red glare in her eyes. Her intonation was that of Lady Macbeth in speeches he had written. She had such power over him. He felt his own power ebbing, leaking swiftly onto the ground, unstoppable.