Wicked Cruel (2 page)

Uncle David pulls out a chair and sits down. “Who you talking about?” he asks.

“This kid everybody used to pick on,” Gary says. “He moved away and then he died.”

David laughs. “Yeah,” he says, “you can find a rumor like that in every town.”

“It’s no rumor,” Gary says. “I heard it from … well, I don’t remember where I heard it. But from somebody reliable.”

David picks up his coffee mug. He made himself right at home when we got back from Boston this afternoon. We stopped at the supermarket for expensive cheese and shrimp and olives. Dad gave him a debit card for groceries.

“That’s what’s known as an urban legend,” David says, running a hand through his long, unruly hair and tying it back in a ponytail. It’s streaked with a few gray strands. “In my class it was a kid named Gerald Dibble. They said he had hairline cracks in his skull from getting beat up in junior high school. Then he moved away, and word came back that his skull had imploded and killed him.”

“That sounds like what happened to Bainer,” Gary says.

David gives out a snorty laugh. “I did an online search for Gerald a while back. He’s an insurance salesman in Concord. Alive and well.”

“Then what was Lorne doing staring me down from the computer screen last night?” I ask. “That was creepy.”

David shrugs. “There’s this thing deep in our psyches that thrives on guilt,” he says. “People drum up these myths about somebody they picked on. Somehow, sharing the regret—‘we all killed him, one whack at a time’—makes it easier to tolerate
the shame. That’s what the psychologists would tell you anyway.”

“So you’re saying I imagined that?”

“It happens, Jordan.”

I reach across the table and give Gary a shove on the shoulder. “Who told you he was dead?” I ask.

“I don’t know. Ask anybody. It was like six months after he moved.”

Uncle David laughs again. “Urban legend.”

Gary shakes his head. “This town isn’t exactly urban.”

“Okay—suburban legend, rural legend, same thing. Even in a dinky little town in New Hampshire. These stories crop up everywhere—the kid who drowned in some pond half a century ago that you can still hear thrashing in the water on dark, quiet nights, or the family who found a fried rat in their bucket of Kentucky Fried Chicken. It’s always pinned on some supposedly credible source, like ‘This really happened to my friend’s aunt’s accountant’s brother’s nephew’—some ‘real’ person, but never anybody you can check up on. Some of these legends have a basis in reality, but then they get twisted and exaggerated in the constant retellings. You try to investigate the origin of the story, and it disappears into a myth.”

“You’re forgetting one thing,” I say. “I didn’t know anything about Lorne being dead—or
not
being dead—before last night. That wasn’t even an issue when I saw him glaring at me from the Freewheeler video.”

“True,” says Gary.

“So that had nothing to do with this ‘shared guilt’ theory of yours,” I say to David. “That was no myth that woke me up last night.”

I suddenly realize that me and Gary are late for basketball
practice, so I put my sneakers on in a hurry and we run the whole way there. Today’s the first day. It’s just a rec league at the YMCA; one practice session to get organized, then games on Saturday afternoons.

Turns out all eight guys on our team are short. We’d better run a lot because we won’t be getting many rebounds.

“This should be interesting,” says our coach, a guy named Steve who’s a student at Cheshire Notch State College, across the street. “We’ll go with a five-guard offense.” He laughs, but I don’t see what’s so funny. This is the first basketball team I’ve ever been on, and I’m taking it seriously.

As we’re leaving the court after practice, the next team is coming on. You can’t play in this league if you made the school team, but there are some good athletes who didn’t bother going out for that squad. Callas and Scapes are here. How’d they get on the same team?

“They’ll tell you,” Gary says.

“Tell me what?”

“About Bainer.”

Callas is okay—just large and dumb—but his buddy Scapes is one of the biggest jerks in the school, taking advantage of his size to push people around. He gave Gary a bloody lip behind the bleachers at a high school football game a couple of weeks ago just because Gary made fun of his orange-and-black-checked shirt.

Gary said he’d get revenge, but that’ll never happen unless he gains about forty pounds of muscle.

Gary walks over to Callas and I follow. Callas is standing on the side of the court with a basketball under his arm. He’s about a foot taller than we are. He’s also starting to get facial hair.

“You know about Lorne Bainer?” Gary asks.

Callas winces. “What about him?”

“He died, right?”

“I never heard that,” says Callas. “How could he be dead? He’s only our age.”

“Kids die,” Gary says.

“You’re telling me he did?” Callas’s eyes start flitting around the gym, like he’s afraid Scapes will see him talking to us. “How?”

“From getting beat up,” Gary says. “You never heard that?”

“I haven’t heard nothing since he moved away.”

“He died from a brain thing.”

Callas shrugs, but he’s looking uncomfortable. He beat up Lorne a few times, mostly with Scapes. “After he moved?”

“Yeah,” Gary says, “but the damage was done here. We all contributed.”

Callas holds the basketball up a bit and stares at it like it’s the most fascinating thing he ever saw. Then he looks at the ceiling. “I never heard that,” he repeats, very softly.

“Heard what?” Scapes has come over and he’s towering above us even higher than Callas. He’s got that scowly red face and his armpits stink.

“They say Bainer died,” Callas tells him.

“That’s bull,” Scapes says, taking the basketball. “People always say stuff like that when some geek moves away. I’m sure Bainer’s annoying everybody at his new school, just like he did here.”

“Don’t be too sure,” Gary says. “He’s already haunting Jordan.”

I give Gary a shove. “Shut up. He’s not dead.”

“Bainer was indestructible,” Scapes says. “Believe me, we tried.” He and Callas both crack up.

We hang around for a few minutes and watch them
practice, then head for the door. Just as we’re about to leave, Scapes comes running over. “Hey,” he says. We stop and turn. He looks back at the basketball court, then lowers his voice. “Were you kidding around?” he says to Gary.

“No. That’s what I heard.”

Scapes sticks his finger in his ear and starts scratching, then stares at the floor for a few seconds. “Let me know if you hear anything,” he says. “I mean … it would take a lot to kill a kid, wouldn’t it?”

Gary shrugs. “Depends how you measure it.” He makes a fist and gently punches his own jaw three or four times. “It adds up, you know?”

I follow him down the steps and out to the street. Cheshire Notch isn’t all that “dinky,” and technically it
is
a city. I think there’s about twenty-five thousand people living here, and at least that many more who come here to work every day. Plus six thousand college students for most of the year. Main Street is wide, and both sides are busy with offices and stores and restaurants. There’s manufacturing and tech stuff all around the outskirts.

I’ve never felt spooked in this town before, even though there are signs of death and the past everywhere. Up the street is Chase Tavern, an inn that started operating before the Revolutionary War and is said to be haunted by several ghosts. It’s a museum now, and I’ve seen wispy lights in the upstairs windows some nights when I was sure there was nobody there.

Cheshire Notch has New England’s biggest jack-o’-lantern festival in late October every year, and we make a huge deal out of Halloween, too—skeletons and ghosts all over town. And there are at least eight cemeteries here, with graves dating
back to the 1700s, and very old dirt roads that wind through the woods and go nowhere.

Gary’s dragging his jacket by one sleeve as we walk along Main Street toward home.

“You should put that on,” I say.

“What are you, my mother? I’m hot. I sweated my butt off in basketball.”

I zip my own jacket up higher. That breeze gets cold once the sun goes down.

I step around a pile of gunk on the sidewalk in front of Mario’s; it looks like a wad of pizza or stromboli that got mashed under somebody’s shoe. There’s a diminishing line of globs of it on the next few sidewalk squares, too.

Gary stops under the overhang of the Monadnock Savings Bank and puts his jacket on. “You think somebody really found a fried rat in a bucket of chicken?” he asks.

“Beats me. I definitely heard about that fingertip somebody bit into in a Big Mac a couple of years ago.”

“I thought that was in a cup of Wendy’s chili.”

“Whatever. It was something like that. Maybe in a burrito at Taco Bell.”

“Yeah,” he says. “I don’t remember the details. I mean, I like to deflate hoaxes as much as the next guy, but some of these urban legends really do happen. The severed finger thing was one of them.”

We start walking again and head to the crosswalk. Cars are supposed to stop for pedestrians here, but this time of day hardly anybody does. Too much of a hurry to get home from work. Finally, a pickup truck blasting Lynyrd Skynyrd screeches to a halt and the guy waves us across with his cigarette. We stand on the grassy island in the center of the street,
waiting for the traffic heading the other direction to notice us and stop.

“The Bainer legend is another one,” Gary says. “True, I mean. I even heard one of the teachers talking about it.”

“When?”

He nods a thank-you to the car full of teenagers that’s stopped to let us cross, then turns to me. “I don’t know. Last year sometime.”

I’m not buying this. “Which teacher?”

He shoves his hands into his pockets and looks up at a streetlight, like he’s concentrating. “I think it was … maybe Falco … that bald guy who teaches sixth grade at one of the other schools. He was telling somebody else.”

Right. “Real convincing,” I say.

He smacks my arm. “What difference does it make who I heard it from? I
heard
it. And it was a credible source, as they say. Somebody who wouldn’t be lying.”

The guy who runs the Thai restaurant is standing in the doorway with his arms folded. He gives us a nod. All these food smells are going right through me and making me realize how hungry I am. Next door is another pizza place, then the bagel shop. I’d take anything from any of those places.

“What do you care so much about Bainer anyway?” Gary asks.

“I don’t.”

“The kid was a weasel. It was impossible to even possibly be friends with him.”

“No kidding. So?”

He stops again and looks back at the pizza place. “You got any cash, Jordan?”

“Some.” I’ve got a twenty-dollar bill in my wallet; my dad gave it to me just in case.

“My parents won’t be home till eight o’clock,” he says. “You buy me a slice?”

Uncle David is cooking up a feast at home, but I told him I didn’t know when I’d get back, so I say yeah and we go to the counter and get slices. Gary shakes some dried red pepper on his. This place is tiny—mostly takeout food, but there are two booths, so we slide into one.

“You shouldn’t feel guilty,” Gary says as he chews.

“About what?”

“Bainer.”

That strikes a bit of a nerve, but that’s none of his business. “I’m not guilty of anything.”

“That’s what I said. You were the only one who ever came close to being his friend.”

“I did not.” Who’s he kidding? I couldn’t stand Bainer any more than anybody else. It’s true that I didn’t have many friends until last year, but I’m a lot different now than I was then. I was very uncool, but I changed.

“You hung with him sometimes,” Gary says.

“I did
not
hang with him. Even if I wanted to—which I absolutely, positively did not want to do—then being seen with him would’ve gotten me beat up and ditched just as much as he was.” The same fate as him: no opportunity to ever fit in.

Gary wipes his fingers across his mouth and leaves a streak of grease on his chin. “Very true,” he says. “You were riding pretty close to the edge for a while. People were wondering.”

“About what?”

“Whether you were more like him or us. I wouldn’t have been caught dead being seen with you in fifth grade. Not when anybody thought you might be friends with Bainer.”

“I wasn’t.” I practically spit out the words, and I can feel my face getting red. I get up to leave the restaurant.

He puts up both hands like a surrender, but he’s grinning as we walk out. “Hey, don’t sweat it,” he says. “I know you’re cool; I figured it out. I’m just saying …”

“That you did me some huge favor by becoming my friend?”

“No.” He turns the corner and heads for his house. I stay with him. “Just … we’d see you talking to him sometimes,” he says.

“I couldn’t get rid of him.”

“Everybody else managed to.”

“Yeah, by beating him up,” I say.

“That seemed like the only way.”

Great solution. Cruelty.

I didn’t like Bainer. You’d try to be friendly with him, or at least help him out, and he’d do something stupid in return. He was in my third-grade class and one time we were reading a story in our literature book. Each person read a paragraph out loud, then the next person in the row would read the following one. Bainer was sitting in front of me, and I could see him looking around at everybody’s books to try to figure out where we were, since his turn was coming up. I stuck my arm over and put my finger on the spot in his book, so he’d be ready on time. After I’d read my paragraph, I looked up and he shot a rubber band at me from close range, hitting me in the forehead. It stung. Some thank-you, huh? I also once caught him picking his nose and wiping it under my desk.

“He was a total jerk,” I say as we enter Gary’s house through the back door, into the kitchen. “I’m not buying that he’s dead, but I’m sure glad he doesn’t live around here anymore.”

The yellow lab, Barney, runs up to us, wagging his tail like crazy and licking the pizza grease on Gary’s thumb. “You hungry, boy?” Gary asks. “You must be starving. Me too.”