Gentlemen (11 page)

When it was all over, I was like, “Dude, WTF?”

But Bones just shrugged and said, “I hate that kid.”

That's not really a reason for a beating like that, so I said, “Yeah, well, I hate Monday mornings. It doesn't mean I'm going to beat the crap out of them.”

“You would if you could,” he said, and I ended up laughing because he had me there. It was still like that with Bones; one minute you think you should be getting as far away from him as possible, the next, he was the same old jackass you'd known for years. It just felt like the ratio was shifting, like he was getting a little worse, is all. Maybe that's just what sixteen was like, but I sort of hoped not. One way or the other, I was pretty sure I wouldn't end up laughing about this one.

I felt a sharp, stinging pain in the first two fingers of my
right hand. The cigarette had burned down to the filter. I swore under my breath and shook it loose.

I put the two fingers in my mouth to soothe the burning and stood stock-still, like I was hunting and a buck had just stepped into the clearing. Did they hear me? It was under my breath, but only sort of. I had an urge to make a break for it, even though I hadn't done anything wrong this time, either.

I mean, yeah, I'd gotten a free show, but this was like a public place, not their house and not mine. It didn't even have glass in the windows. I could just stick my head in the window and say, “Hey, Bones, when you're done, you should know those cigarettes I gave you are stale.” But for whatever reason, it felt like skulking around was the way to play this, so I was standing real still and listening, but Bones just kept on grunting away, and Natalie was just sort of mumbling something.

I thought I'd better take another look anyway, or maybe, you know, I just wanted another look. I sort of hated myself for having a boner. It just seemed kind of pathetic, standing outside with a burned hand and an erection, but there I was, sticking my head back in for another peek.

Natalie was on her back looking up at the ceiling now, not at Bones but just past him. The look on her face wasn't at all what I was expecting. She wasn't into it, and she wasn't angry, which I'd figured were the two possibilities. She looked as bored as she did in class. Her giraffe legs looked useless and a little sad, lying open on either side of Bones. There was sweat on the side of his face, and I looked down and I could
see that her jeans were undone now and he had his hand most of the way inside. His wrist was bent back in a way that looked uncomfortable but, all things considered, not too bad. I bent my wrist and sort of imagined my hand there. I looked back up, and she was looking right at me. She didn't scream, didn't do anything, just looked me in the eye.

I figured I was caught, flat busted. My first thought was to duck down, but she'd already seen me, and Bones wasn't looking at anything except her. Her left arm was sort of propped against his chest, half pushing at him and half useless, and that arm told me pretty much everything I needed to know about who was driving that train. I looked at the arm, looked at her, turned around, and left.

I'll be honest, that was the first time I'd seen something like that. It was pretty heavy. It wasn't with me, of course, but it was still the first time I'd seen anything remotely resembling sex anywhere other than on TV. In a way, her looking at me like that was kind of hot. I mean, it sort of involved me, if that makes any sense. But it was messed up, too. Her expression, really her lack of an expression—it was like she barely noticed me. It was like she barely noticed him, for that matter. There was that bottle of Boone's, but Boone's didn't fog your eyes over like that. What was going on in there, it wasn't the sort of thing you necessarily wanted to be around.

I turned around when I reached the top of the little slope that led down to the house. I bent down, fingered through the grass, and picked up a rock about the size of my palm. I
winged it at the old beat-up roof. For a second it looked like it was going to make it into one of the holes, but it hit right on the edge and bounced away. I watched as a shingle tipped and fell into the dark gap of the attic. I kind of hoped they heard.

It wasn't much of an effort on my part, I guess, but whatever was going on in there was their deal. I don't know what she was thinking, meeting him there like that. But again: Not my deal. I'm no hero. When I was a kid, I wanted to be Wolverine—kind of a tough-guy hero—but by now I knew I wasn't even that.

You know before, when I said that Bones had to be pulled off people in fights, like he was a dog and you had to grab his collar and maybe a fistful of neck, too, and pull him clear before he could do some real damage? Well, that's a weird thing to realize about someone you've known since they were a little kid, but it's even weirder to realize that you might not be the guy to do it. I mean, we were growing at about the same pace—he was taller and I was wider—but I couldn't match his intensity anymore, couldn't even understand it sometimes. What was so important about anything around here that you had to fight for it? We were still living at home in this crappy little town. I guess I was just sort of headed the other way from him. I was biding my time until I got my license, finished school, got something of my own, and he was still defending his turf like a schoolkid. He was defending it like it was shrinking, fighting over scraps.

You think I was going to go in there and pull him off that girl? Yeah, he might listen to me. He might also tear off my arm and beat me with it. That was a two-man job, and Mixer wasn't around. Yeah, I felt bad for Natalie, for what I was pretty sure was happening in there, but I hardly knew her. I'd never once talked to her one-on-one—like she'd even stay put for that—and Bones and me, we had that history. Add it all up and it amounts to the same thing: not my deal.

Once I reached the thinning grass at the mouth of the path, I took out the matchbook and lit up another crumbling Camel. Only a few left.

So obviously I had a lot to think about on Thursday night. I talked to Mixer, but I didn't tell him about Bones and Natalie. That was too big a bomb to drop over the phone, so I just told him there was something I had to tell him before homeroom and left it at that. I couldn't even bring myself to call Bones about Throckmorton and all that other stuff, and there was no way I could concentrate on reading more of the book. Instead, I watched
Without a Trace
again and
The Mummy
for like the twenty-fourth time.

I was drifting off to sleep and I was thinking about, well, you know what I was thinking about. The Kleenex were still crumpled up in little balls on the floor next to my bed, but I was still thinking about Natalie and Bones. Like, if that was a one-off thing or if he'd been hitting that for a while. I mean, she pretty much seemed like a passenger on that ride, but she
was there with him, and that had to mean something. Then I was thinking, because it's like sometimes I don't sleep that well, and I was thinking about how Bones and Tommy hadn't been getting along lately, and so it was like the lightbulb went on.

All of a sudden I had a whole new idea about what might've happened to Tommy. I mean, hell, I might take off, too, if I'd been sniffing after the same girl for years and Bones beat me to it. I mean, Bones was nobody's idea of Brad Pitt. He wasn't even like some actor's normal-looking brother who ends up on made-for-TV movies just because of who his brother is. No one would watch Bones, not even on TV. The point is, I could see where that'd burn Tommy up.

That'd explain why he flipped the desk, too. Natalie and Bones were both in that class, and he wasn't going to be able to say three right—and you just knew Dantley'd make him repeat it—and maybe they'd both be back there laughing at him behind his back. A guy'd do some crazy stuff to avoid that. And once he'd done it, maybe he just needed to cool off for a while. Or maybe he was off hunting for a .38. Anyway, sleep was coming on and that seemed to make as much sense as anything else. I figured I had to talk to Bones, to corner him and get it out of him, so I made like a mental note and hoped I'd remember it when I woke up.

It came back to me about the second time I hit the snooze bar and that was enough to get me out of bed. Plus, it was Friday. TGI-frickin'-F, people. I got dressed, scarfed down some cereal, and went out and waited for the bus. It was a warm morning, still sort of gray, and I could see fog up on the mountain, hanging there like shampoo in the trees. The yellow dog pulled up and I climbed on, and Mixer was sitting on the seat over the wheel hump.

He didn't always take the bus, because sometimes his dad dropped him off on the way to work, if his dad was working down that way. All things considered, this was a good day for him to be there. Bones's house was at the tail end of the Cambria bus route, and that was fine, too, because Mixer and I had stuff to talk about without him. It's bumpier when you ride over the wheel hump. That's why people like it. But it's noisier, too, so we could talk normal, without worrying about anyone else hearing.

I told Mixer what I'd seen, and when I told him about that, plenty of people heard him. I think the bus driver even heard, but there's only so much you can read into “No freak in' way!” so that was fine. He got quieter when I told him my new idea about why Tommy might've taken off. Mixer smelled like cigarettes, so I knew he'd smoked at least one of his Humpies out at the end of his dirt driveway waiting for the bus. It's not something I'd do, because if the bus arrived early, you'd have to crush it out on the ground and that was a waste.

Anyway, Mixer agreed that it might've lit a fire under
Tommy's ass, and he was sort of mad, too. It hadn't occurred to me to be all that mad about it, but Mixer was like, A) It's kind of a crappy thing to do to Tommy, bad as he had it for Natalie. And I was like, Yeah, like you wouldn't've done the same thing if you had the same chance, but Mixer was having none of it.

He just went on and was like, “B) If that's what happened, then Bones should've clued us in. We're all sitting there talking about Haberman, and he's like, ‘Yeah, what if ?' Meanwhile, he knows full well where Tommy's gotten off to.”

But Mixer wasn't really thinking this through, so I had to call him on it. “Yeah,” I said, “but he might not've known. Maybe he didn't even know Tommy knew.”

I wasn't completely sure that sentence made sense, but I was sure about the next one. “And anyway,” I said, “he wouldn't've known where Tommy got off to, just why.”

“Yeah, well, he should've told us that,” said Mixer. “And it was still a dickhead thing to do.”

“No argument there.”

“All right,” said Mixer, and you could hear he was making an effort to calm down, “we'll catch up with him after homeroom. Might as well get his side of the story.”

“He better not dick us around,” I said.

“Once he knows you saw, he won't try to feed us any bull,” said Mixer. “Man, Bones. I still like him and all, but I'm definitely beginning to wonder about that guy.”

“Yeah, I wonder how he got Natalie to look at his scrawny pale ass without running in the other direction.”

Mixer just shrugged. “Maybe she was wasted.”

“Could be,” I said.

We caught up with Bones at his locker. At first, he was like, “You saw me? You frickin' saw me?”

I was like, “What? I go out there all the time, and you forgot to put the
DO NOT DISTURB
sign out. Looked like you had your hands full, so whatever.”

“How long were you there?” he said. “How much did you see?”

“Enough,” I said.

“Forget about what he was doing there or how long he stayed, he lives across the damn street,” said Mixer. “What the hell were you doing there?”

And so he told us. I'll give it to him, too, either he was a smooth operator or the truth just happened to hang together nicely. And since I knew he wasn't smooth, I went ahead and believed him—except for the parts where I knew he was lying. The way he told it, he just lucked into it. He said he biked down to the trail and walked to the house from there, and I knew he did that sometimes. He said Natalie was already there, pretty much blotto and totally good to go. He said she had another bottle, too, a fifth of Southern Comfort.

“Damn,” said Mixer, “what'd she do, open a package store?”

“Seriously,” said Bones. “Wish she'd saved me some.”

He said it was her idea, that she was talking dirty from
the start. He was lying about that part. Forget about talking dirty—it looked like she was barely able to talk at all. There was no fifth of SoCo there, not unless she'd swallowed the bottle, too. I remembered her eyes. She'd popped something—Percocet, Hydrocodone, or one of those—something prescription and strong.

I didn't bring it up, didn't call Bones out on that point, because if that's what happened, well, they've got a word for that, and it's not the sort of word you want to hear or say. Not with Throckmorton sniffing around. For all I knew, I could be sitting in front of him in twenty minutes.

And anyway, the fact of the matter was that he hadn't been doing anything with Natalie while Tommy was still around. I believed him on that part. He'd stumbled into this one. She'd gone there to chase some pills with some crappy fruit-flavored fake wine and to be out of it for a while, and it was just bad timing. The boogeyman had shown up. I wondered what that must've been like, to be almost out and to have to try to claw your way back. Like being too far underwater, maybe, and not knowing if you were going to be able to make it back to the surface in time—I remembered her long legs lying open—not even being able to kick.

“I was totally gonna tell you guys,” Bones said. “Give me a break, it's not even first period.”

“Yeah, I'll bet,” said Mixer. “You couldn't keep this to yourself if you tried. It's incredible.”

“Unbelievable,” I said, and I'd chosen that word special.