Bullettime (11 page)

Jeremy badgers the nurse. When will he get a room? A private or a semi-private? There were other kids injured today; how can he be guaranteed that his son won’t be put in the same room as one of those animals? How much is this going to cost? What did those pills cost? Fifty bucks a piece or something? And to each question the nurse only says, “I don’t know, sir,” with the
s
in
sir
growing ever more sibilant. Finally, she says she has other patients to attend to and leaves.

Jeremy takes the seat his wife had vacated and sighs. “Would more Tae Kwon Do lessons help, you think?”

“Dad . . . the whole school. Police . . .”

“Well, what the hell are we supposed to do? Buy you a gun?” He runs his hand over his face as if trying to wipe off his features. “Sorry, son. This is just so frustrating. There’s no standard operating procedure for this sort of event. I can imagine that your mother has one. It’s the same as it is for anything else.” He pantomimed drinking from a flask. “I’ll talk to her about it after this all blows over. This has to end now, David.”

“What am I supposed to do?” The pain is fading, but the opiates haven’t yet taken hold. Dave’s alert now and upset, unused to having extended conversations with his father about anything.

“Maybe we’ll move. Sell the house. Prices are skyrocketing. I can find a place closer to work. New school, new everything. But you need to do your part. How many scrapes are you going to get into; how much trouble is there going to be? You have to be doing something to make yourself a target. There are two thousand kids in that school, and they’re not
all
coming home looking that they went twelve rounds with Mike Tyson. If you spent less time on that damn computer and more time making some friends, you wouldn’t be such a target.” Jeremy sighs again, and slaps his palms against his thighs. “I wasn’t like you in school. I had friends, a girlfriend, excellent grades. Did you know I was three-year varsity on the golf team?”

“We don’t even have a golf team. Where the hell would we practice!? This isn’t Long Island, you know,” Dave says. It hurts to talk so much, so angrily. He knows his father will focus on the word
hell
, and of course Jeremy does.

“Don’t talk to me that way,” Jeremy says. “Respect at all times.
Respect
! You know that the specific example of the golf team isn’t the point. You haven’t gone out for anything. Hell, the chess club would be an improvement. Glee club. Towel manager!”

“Now you’re the one saying hell. And—”

“Father,” Jeremy says, pointing to himself. “Child.” He points to Dave. “That’s the difference, and it’s a
hell
of a difference.”

“And anyway, we don’t have a chess club or a glee club or towel—”

“Oh no, now that’s a lie! I’m sure you have towel managers, because Hamilton has a football team. And a basketball team. Oh boy, don’t try to tell me there isn’t a basketball team at Hamilton,” Jeremy says, voice thick and nasty. “You need to get it together, son. I want to hear a plan from you by the end of the week. Something to improve your situation. Understand?”

“Yes, Dad.”

“Good,” Jeremy says. He slides his Blackberry from his pocket and thumbs the keys for a moment. “I have to go. And, uh, find your mother. They’ll probably let you out tomorrow; I’ll be here to pick you up, son. Don’t use or consume anything you don’t have to. Even paper slippers are fourteen dollars, apparently. God knows what’ll happen if you eat a bowl of apple sauce. I bet that’s not covered by insurance.” He stands and, without another word or even a backward glance, pulls the curtain, walks through, and shuts it behind him.

“What an asshole.” Dave thinks that, but it’s Erin who says it, from Dave’s left, behind the other curtain. She pops her head in and smiles. Erin’s smile is always squinty, but it’s warped now because her left eye is sporting a serious shiner. She’s not in her casual school clothes either, but a candy striper outfit. “What do you think?” she says, running her hands down her sides.

“Uhm . . . do you really work here?”

“I started today.”

“When you found that outfit hanging up somewhere, right?”

Erin nods. “You’re pretty smart, eh?”

“Why do you do these crazy things? It’s just nuts. Someone’s going to get in trouble,” Dave says.

“Oleg found me in the hallway while you were being worked over in the locker room. He told me what happened. I pulled the fire alarm. I guess that caused all the fights, eh?” Erin says. She takes a step closer to the bed.

“I guess . . . wait, I wasn’t being ‘worked over.’”

“No? Too bad, it sounded sexy.” She puts her hand on his knee, over the thin cloth sheet. “Say, can I get you anything. Some water? A book? A magazine? Maybe
Penthouse Forum
?” Her palm brushes across his crotch.

“Oh God, stop,” Dave says. “I don’t feel good. How come we didn’t do this before . . . I can barely breathe.” And he can barely breathe. He starts gasping, gagging. He smacks Erin away and grabs the call button. “I’ll call, stop!”

Erin pulls back. “Fine! I’ll find someone who really likes me. Somewhere else. And it’ll definitely be easy. I’m not going to waste any more time with a baby like you.” She storms out. Dave thinks it’s so strange that the curtains have pretty much managed to keep people out. The whole afternoon was like a little play, with one person entering and then leaving, one after the other. But now the play is over and he is alone, without even a television to entertain him. He turns the call button over in his hand, but realizes he has no requests for the nurse. What’s he going to do, ask for a hug? He closes his eyes and cries, then sleeps.

Dave wakes up in another room. It must be at least two in the morning, or that’s his guess. Someone else, an old man, is in the room on the other side of the curtain. He’s on the second floor now, his bed by the window. The parking lot is nearly empty of cars, and there is plenty of light thanks to an emergency pavilion. A woman walks into view. She’s small. Could be anybody, but Dave thinks it’s Erin. Or his mother. They’re roughly the same size and shape. She stops right beyond the pool of light, almost purposefully to remain a silhouette, then raises one hand high. Then she snaps it down, as if pulling a great invisible switch.

M
y job has benefits. I don’t mean the pretty nice benefits of a state employee, but particular benefits. The state lottery is a part of the New Jersey State Department of the Treasury, and that’s what my work ID reads, what my business cards read, and what the voicemail on my work phone explains to callers. Theoretically, I could even get a license to carry a gun with relative ease, except for my high school escapade.

My job’s not a bad one. One would think that there wouldn’t be much call for lottery machine installations—doesn’t every ugly little bodega and liquor store have one already? Well, the stores close and then open again under new management some months later. New ones open up. Machines break or even get ripped off by the special sort of idiot who thinks having a machine means being able to make it cough up winning numbers in advance. So most days I work in the field, which I prefer to the warehouse or my cubicle. I love driving, even in New Jersey.

Most days I don’t run into anyone I know. There was that guy Charles from high school, once, and very occasionally someone recognizes me from the newspaper stories, but that’s only when I’m working in Jersey City. Today, I ran into someone else—Mr. McCann, my old Social Studies teacher. I was working in a new liquor store in Harrison. Harrison’s an odd little town carved out in a small jetty of land by Newark. I lived in North Jersey all my life, but never had occasion to visit there, knew nobody who worked or lived here, and only knew about it at all because it has a PATH station stop of its own. I’ve never even felt the need to get out and walk around to see what’s what. But there I was, driving the lottery van down 3rd Street, looking for the cleverly named 3rd Street Liquors, when McCann stormed across the street. I had to slam on my brakes. He whipped his head around to look at me. It was him. Older and grey, both his hair and his skin, I mean, and he was unshaven. His eyes were wild; he would have killed me if he could. But he couldn’t. His lips quivered for a moment, and then he ran to the sidewalk and into the store. Into 3rd Street Liquors, the very store I’d been looking for.

It’s easy to park when driving an official vehicle, so I parked right in front of the place. It was 10:15 a.m. I had no choice but to go about my business. McCann wasn’t going to come out if I was outside, and he probably didn’t know that I was heading into the liquor store myself. He was the one who had saved my life, and the lives of a lot of other students. After what happened between Erin and my father—between
Eris
and my father, I should say—and the endless insults and injuries of school, I thought I’d put the fear of God into everyone at Hamilton. I had no plans to shoot anyone, and I didn’t shoot anyone. I was just going to wave a gun around, scare some people. I figured that if I had a reputation for being “crazy” people would leave me alone, or I’d at least be thrown out of school.

McCann cared about me about as much as anyone in that school did—not at all. But he had cultivated the bad habit of coming in early and smoking a cigarette while eating his McDonald’s breakfast on the corner about a block from the school. We passed one another on the street that day. I didn’t say hello; in Jersey, you don’t say “hi” to acquaintances you encounter outside. You might nod and raise your eyebrows. Teachers you ignore. The courtesy is supposed to be mutual, but that day McCann spotted me and decided to follow me. I was wearing Oleg’s long leather duster, which set him off. I’d told Oleg I needed the trench coat to hide my kilt, which I was planning on wearing to protest the proposed dress code at the assembly this afternoon. Oleg was always in favour of anything weird and stupid. But it was only three years after Columbine, and a picked-on kid strolling purposefully toward high school was enough for McCann. In those days, cell phones weren’t all that common among schoolteachers and other people who made no friggin’ money, so all he could do was tail me and hope to somehow intervene.

“Mr. Holbrook!” he had shouted at me. For a second, I thought it was my imagination, but then I realized that McCann was behind me. I ran up the steps, toward the entrance nearer the
INDUSTRY
sign. There was a metal detector there, of course, but nobody as yet manning it, and the doors were open. That’s Jersey City for you. I ran in, and in the foyer a fat guard, who had squeezed himself into one of our little plastic classroom desk chairs, looked up from his own breakfast of a bagel and grape soda, then looked back down at it when he saw it was me. What the hell was I going to do? Bring in a gun and shoot everybody? The stupid metal detector wasn’t even plugged in.

“Mr. Holbrook!” I wasn’t in shape, and I had a machine gun under my coat, but McCann was old, and a smoker, and only half-committed to confronting me, so I tore far ahead of him, down the hall and into . . . where? I had no plan, no place to go. Homeroom was locked, and I could hardly go through my day normally with the coat on the entire time. If I went to my hiding place, and my second gun, there was no guarantee I wouldn’t be spotted and my bolthole discovered. At Hamilton, about ten percent of the student body came to school just to aimlessly wander the halls before lunch. Then they’d retire to the curb to smoke cigarettes and listen to music and shout at the passing cars.

So I turned around and looked at Mr. McCann, his face ruddy like an Irish drunk. “What?”

“Uhm . . .” Now he didn’t know what to say. Ask me to open my coat and if I had a gun, then what? Ask me to open my coat and if I didn’t have a gun, well that’s a sexual harassment suit waiting to happen, now isn’t it? “You’re here early today.”

“Yes,” I’d said.

“Well then, I’ll put you to some use. I have something to pick up at the principal’s office, and need an extra pair of hands.” He wheezed as he spoke. McCann was smart. I couldn’t rightly refuse without him getting even more suspicious, and the principal’s office would necessarily trump any dumbass excuse I could think of. So I pulled the gun.

McCann threw up his hands and shouted, “Don’t shoot!” He was half-panicked but still thinking. The security guard extracted himself from his chair and started trotting toward us.

“Get down,” I said. “Get down and nobody will get hurt.” McCann got down, but didn’t take his eyes from me. The security guard caught sight of the gun just as McCann lowered himself to the floor. Minimum wage wasn’t worth it, I suppose, because he just screamed, “Holy shit!” and ran. I ran after him and shouted, “You touch your walkie-talkie, you die!” He kept his hands high and pumping. Behind me, I heard McCann clamber to his feet and run. I ran out of the school and got three blocks before the cop cars found me.

Someone was banging on the window of the car. “Mistah!” a guy was shouting at me. He was South Asian, angry, and probably the owner of the liquor store. “You okay? Do you have the machine?” I wasn’t, but I did. I wanted to ask him if McCann was still in the store, but didn’t. Part of me wanted the confrontation. After my gun was impounded and my mother came to get me, after the psychologists and journalists and the evening news, McCann quit. I never saw him again. Part of me wanted to.

The liquor store was bustling. I’ve long stopped being surprised by anything I see while on the job. The owner had cleared a space for me on the counter and I got to work. Like most liquor stores, this one had security mirrors hung in strategic locations, and I was able to keep track of McCann from three different angles. It was a strange experience. Usually, I’m so worried about what people think of me. The people in that Jersey City bodega, stupid Mindy from across the street, guys in the office, my shrieking mother who never lets me forget anything from her labour pains to her bailing me out of prison to my dead father—you name it. I constantly talk to myself, recite my life story as it happens, because I need to figure out what people think of me, what impact I have on them. But I didn’t care what McCann thought of me. I just liked that he clearly was thinking of me, after all these years. Did I ruin his life like I supposedly ruined my parents’ lives, and like I had certainly ruined my own? Is that why he’s a before-noon drunk in Harrison?