Brutal Youth (52 page)

Zimmer sat against his parents’ tombstone, his T-shirt wet with sweat, admiring his work. Now unemployed, perhaps he could open a landscaping business. He liked being outside, using his body, tending his garden at home. It was spare work he did for elderly neighbors during the off-school summer season anyway.

The thought had appeal.
Maybe. But somewhere else.

What happened to him at St. Mike’s sickened him. He kept trying to busy his hands, moving old stones by his house, trimming trees, or clipping the grass out here by the graves. Otherwise, those hands shook.

He didn’t want to attend graduation that night, and the school administration didn’t expect him to go either. In fact, he was probably unwelcome. But he had promised someone else he would be there. The two of them would show up in secret. Hopefully, they wouldn’t even be noticed.

There would be a sign—
FOR SALE
—in front of Mr. Zimmer’s house in the next month. He had few friends left in the Valley apart from his faculty acquaintances at St. Mike’s, and they all believed he was leaving to care for a distant ailing relative. Maybe they would hear ugly rumors about him next year. Or maybe they’d actually believe their old colleague was simply the innocent victim of cost-cutting. He would be far away, regardless. “I’m sorry, Mom … Dad…,” he said to the emptiness around him. “From now on, your grass is gonna grow wild.”

*   *   *

Graduation was already crowded, so Davidek’s mom found a seat at the end of an aisle near the back. “Don’t dilly-dally when it’s over,” she told her son as he parted company to join the other altar boys getting ready in the sacristy (formerly the girl’s locker room, when the church was a gym). “We’re leaving right after. I have friends to meet, and we’re going to try to catch the nine-ten showing.”

The graduating seniors lined up in the school hallway leading to the gymnasium church, shimmering in blue robes and angular mortarboard caps, debating over which side the little gold tassel should hang.

The pews filled with parents, grandparents, brothers and sisters, uncles, aunts and cousins. There were girlfriends and boyfriends from other schools. Most of the freshmen, sophomores, and juniors from St. Mike’s also crushed in to see their schoolmates graduate. Davidek saw Lorelei in one of the back rows. Seven-Eighths sat beside her in silence, listening to Lorelei, who was chatting away with her new friend.

Green was with the school choir on the other side of the church, sitting in what were once bleachers when this had been a basketball court.

During the ceremony, Hannah spent most of the time peeking over the shoulders of her taller classmates, trying to get Davidek’s attention. But he kept missing her waves.

His eyes seemed to be fixed on the loft in the back of the church, a balcony where scorekeepers used to monitor the basketball games or stagehands wielded spotlights when the gym was sometimes converted to a theater for school plays. Now, organ pipes rose there like an explosion of fearsome plumbing—so deafening that no one ever attended Mass in the benches up there.

That’s why the figure up in the loft caught his attention. It was a boy, sitting alone.

Davidek stood at the altar, clutching his candelabra alongside Carl LeRose—who held a tall brass cross. Father Mercedes stood at the lectern, reading from Psalms about times to live, times to die, times to reap, and times to sow. Davidek wasn’t listening. He was studying the boy, but couldn’t make out the face from so far away. Still, he was familiar.

The boy’s hair was shorn close, his face was drawn and white—ghostly. His arms and legs were thin in a white button-down shirt and black pants. He held hands folded in prayer in front of his nose, further obscuring his face.

The boy looked ill, like he had been sick for a long time. And that’s when it occurred to Davidek.

Stein.

LeRose nudged him with his elbow. “Davidek, hey…,” he whispered as Father Mercedes droned on from the lectern. “I meant to tell you … I told my dad all about your friend, and all that business with the seniors.” LeRose traced a finger down his cheek to indicate the fake scars.

Davidek nodded. “Do you see him, too?”

LeRose just blinked, “See who?” And Davidek said, “No—nothing,” not wanting to draw attention.

LeRose smiled slyly and said, “Dad thought what Rich Mullen and Frank Simms did was pretty fucked up and horrible. If you’d told me sooner about how Stein helped me that day in the parking lot, maybe I could have jumped in to protect him, you know?”

Davidek looked back up at the gaunt figure in the loft. LeRose smiled knowingly. He said, “I just wanted you to know that,” and winked at him. “You’re picking up what I’m putting down, right?”

“Right,” Davidek said, having no idea.

LeRose said, “Cool … let’s just keep it between us.”

Davidek was very confused now.
Did LeRose see Stein in the loft or not?

But the older boy was trying to get Davidek to notice something else entirely: the two empty seats amid the rows of graduating seniors.

*   *   *

Mullen and Simms had not enjoyed happy lives at St. Mike’s, but they had found some happiness together.

On graduation day, the two boys sat on Mullen’s front porch in West Tarentum, leaning their feet against the wooden railing and tipping back on white plastic chairs. It was their final night as St. Mike’s students, and they tried to reminisce about some of the better times. There weren’t many. All they really had was the vanquishing of Noah Stein, and no one else gave them credit for that.

“You think you’ll ever go to college?” asked Mullen, who was moving to West Virginia in two weeks to start summer school at Wheeling Jesuit University. His parents would only pay for a religious school, and the school would only accept him if he took early remedial classes to account for his lackluster SAT scores.

Simms shrugged. “Naw … Maybe if I ever wanted to know about medieval times or something, I’d take a class or two.” He already had a part-time job as a bagger at Shop N Save in New Kensington. That paid okay for now, but he was still living at home. “Maybe it’ll lead to something more. Got grocery stores all over, in every town. I could go a lot of places,” he said.

Mullen nodded, his finger absently brushing the button-scar on his face.
Asshole Face.
That was a name he hoped never to hear again. He raised a can of Iron City, stolen from his father’s basement refrigerator, and the two boys clinked their beers together. In college, Mullen would join a fraternity, his grades would be above average, and he’d meet a lot of new people who didn’t automatically know him as a loser. He’d tell stories about his days at St. Mike’s, about the various ways he and his buddy Simms outfoxed the Powers That Were. As the years passed, on return visits home, Mullen would see very little of his old buddy. Someday, Mullen and Simms would each wonder what had become of the other. But Mullen could already tell that day would come. He knew it on the porch that night. Simms didn’t. But that was okay.

A black-and-white police car rolled by on the street, and they hid the beer bottles below their chairs. When it was gone, they finished drinking and debated stealing a couple more, but it was getting late, and the graduation ceremony at the church would start soon.

They drove there in Mullen’s Pea Green Love Machine, the windows down and their blue robes fluttering on hangers in the backseat. The same police car that passed Mullen’s house pulled up behind them. It had circled his block a few times, and here it was again—so Mullen was extra careful, halting fully at every stop sign instead of gliding through.

“What’s with all the po-pos cruising around today?” Simms asked.

Just then, the squad car’s red and white lights came on and the cruiser gave a single yelp of its siren. Mullen pulled over to the side of the road, the Tarentum Bridge looming just ahead of them. They were about halfway to the school.

A figure in a black uniform emerged from the police cruiser, and Mullen fumbled for his wallet, ordering Simms to find the registration in the glove compartment because they were already running late.

The cop barked: “Hands on the wheel!”

Both boys instinctively threw their palms against the car’s roof.

The police officer’s belt filled the driver’s-side window, fitted with Mace, handcuffs, a nightstick, and a dull gray .38 pistol with the clasp unhooked. A curly black cord ran up his chest to a squawking radio receiver.

“Saw yinz run a stop sign back there,” the faceless cop said.

“Nuh-uh, we didn’t run no stop sign!” Simms protested, and Mullen shushed him. He didn’t think he had run one either, but his dad always said apologize right away to a cop and beg to get off with a warning.

“Sorry, Officer,” Mullen says. “See, we’re going to graduation, and I guess I didn’t realize I was hurrying. It won’t happen again.” He held his license out, although the cop hadn’t asked to see it yet.

Then the cop asked to see Simms’s ID.

Simms balked, “I ain’t driving,” but Mullen motioned for him to just do as he was fucking told.

The cop peered at the documents and said their names out loud. “Richard Charles Mullen and Frank John Simms,” he said. “You boys are from St. Mike’s, right?”

They both said yes, and nodded politely with nervous, wide smiles.

The cop said, “I know a guy who has a kid at St. Mike’s. Nice guy. Good to the city. A Good Samaritan, you know? He certainly has looked out for me in the past.… He actually warned me there might be some troublemakers on the road today, celebrating a little.”

Mullen gestured to the robes hanging in the back. “Not us,” he said. “Just going to the church.”

The cop stood silently his face still unseen. He said, “You boys been drinking.” It wasn’t a question.

Mullen’s color drained. He said, “No, no…”

The cop leaned down and sniffed deeply, then coughed. He said, “You boys been smoking some illegal substances today, too?”

“NO,”
they said emphatically, their words falling over one another.
“No, no way. Uh-uh.”
The cop sniffed again, looking from one boy’s face to the other.

The cop was in his forties, with a thick, tight mustache and eyes hidden behind silver shades. It was going to be a long night for the boys.

Photos and fingerprints would be taken, and their parents would need to come down to the station, their mothers crying, their fathers cursing in their sons’ faces. The charges would be misdemeanors—traffic offenses and resisting an officer’s orders. They had low blood-alcohol levels, but there was some in their system. They’d get the lesser “driving while impaired” charge, but that was enough to haul both of them in. Plus they were underage. Fines would be levied; a little community service would be ordered by a judge in two months, and then the matter would be logged in their records, complicating school and employment matters for a few years to come. Mullen wouldn’t be starting at Wheeling Jesuit for a while.

Simms, his hands already cuffed, began to cry and laid his face against the roof of the Pea Green Love Machine. “Please,” Mullen said as the cop locked the silver restraints around his wrists. “Look, Officer, what did I do?… I don’t understand! Can’t we … Please,
Officer
!”

The cop grabbed at his badge and shoved it in Mullen’s ear. A little tag pinned just below it read:
CPT. BELLOWS
. “I’m not an officer, Asshole Face,” he said. “Show some goddamned respect.”

*   *   *

The mysterious boy in the church loft knelt there for the entire service, just a pair of eyes behind the back of a high pew.

When he couldn’t stand the curiosity anymore, Davidek handed his wooden staff with the swinging red candle to Justin Teemo, the other candle-bearer. “Hang on to this for me,” he said, his robes swishing as he crossed the altar and disappeared into the changing room, where he pulled the black-and-white altar robes off his street clothes and ducked out the back entrance.

Davidek ran around the side of the building to the main doorways, where he slipped inside the church’s hushed back vestibule. An older man and woman were standing at the interior doorway, their backs to him, looking in at the service. Mr. Zimmer was standing with them.

Davidek crept along the back wall and dashed up the steps leading to the loft. His footsteps caught the worried attention of the old couple.

There was another door leading out into the loft, and it groaned as Davidek shoved it open.

There he came face-to-face with the boy—but it was not Stein. This person was older, taller—he had no scar on his cheek and his hair was dark, but cut so close to the white scalp that it looked gray, translucent. Davidek had seen him before, but they had never met. He knew the face only from a distance, and from photographs in old yearbooks.

It was Colin Vickler. Clink. The Boy on the Roof.

Back then, he had been flabby, but was skeletal now, his face loose with skin and dark lines, the long greasy black hair shorn away to nothing. His eyes watered when he saw Davidek, and his head began whipping around in search of an exit that didn’t involve a thirty-foot free fall.

Davidek said, “I didn’t…,” but before he could finish, the door behind him burst open again, knocking him hard in the back.

Mr. Zimmer was standing there, motioning to Clink—
come here
—and the boy did as he was told, dashing past Davidek and down the steps as Zimmer followed with a hand on his shoulder.

No one in the church below heard the clamor. They were giving out the diplomas now, and each one brought a rise of steady applause as the organ blasted a deafening rendition of “Panis Angelicus” up in the loft.

Davidek looked down to where the boy had been sitting, and picked up a folded piece of white paper. On it was a crayon drawing of an empty jar, with the lid off, tilted against its side.

He raced down the steps and saw the giant church doors sliding shut, cutting off a beam of golden sun. Davidek reached for the door, when he felt a hand grab his arm and pull him back. His mother bit at her lower lip. “Altar boy, my ass,” she said. “I knew you were using this as an excuse to sneak around. The whole church saw you ditch your post at the altar.”