Authors: Stephen Dobyns
“Hey, he just about ate you up. Fucking babies—you don’t fuck babies. You hear what I’m saying? He deserves something with a lot of pain. It’d be a waste to kill him too quick.” For a moment LeBrun’s face grew still, then he wrinkled his brow and said. “Did I tell you what kind of sheep make virgin wool?”
“Yeah, ugly sheep. I didn’t like it.”
“Picky, picky, picky.”
LeBrun reached for the bottle of tequila and poured them both another shot. It was lunchtime, but he and his cousin Larry alternated lunch duty, and Jessica hadn’t felt like going to the dining room. She wanted to sort out some stuff with LeBrun—her business deal, she called it. His studio apartment had windows on three sides, but the shades were drawn and the overhead light made everything look yellow. LeBrun’s bed was unmade and dirty dishes were stacked on the table. There was a sweaty smell and a whiff of oranges gone bad.
“And we’ve got to work out when we do it. I mean, I can’t just take off anytime. It wouldn’t be responsible. I got friends here. Like, I got talents people want. I can’t just let them down.” LeBrun chuckled contentedly. “Besides, the money’s too good.”
“I don’t know about killing Tremblay,” said Jessica. “I just want to grab Jason and get out of there. If he gets killed and Jason is missing, the cops will be right after me.”
“Hey, two thousand bucks, basically you’re paying me to ice a guy whether you want an ice job or not. Maybe you could take your brother, then I could come back and finish up. Or maybe I could do Tremblay someplace else. Like a golf course, I never did a guy on a golf course.”
“It’ll be December,” said Jessica. Her eyes were running from the tequila and she wiped them with the back of her hand. “Guys don’t play golf in December.”
“They do in Florida.”
“Yeah, smarty, but this is Exeter, New Hampshire. There’ll be snow.”
LeBrun dropped his glass, spilling tequila on the sofa. His hand shot out and he grabbed the girl’s chin between his thumb and forefinger, squeezing it. “Don’t make fun of me, Misty. You just don’t know how mean I can get.” He held her briefly, then let go.
Jessica rubbed her jaw. “I was only joking . . .”
“Don’t talk to me about it.”
LeBrun picked up his glass from the cushion and poured himself more tequila. He stared straight ahead at the opposite wall. A thirteen-year-old calendar hung above his bed. It had a photograph of a covered bridge with snow on the roof and birch trees in the foreground and a blue sky. He had hung it there himself. He liked the picture; it looked like the sort of place he wanted to visit. He didn’t care about the year. What the fuck did he care what year it was?
“Then I’ll just pop him,” said LeBrun perfectly calmly, as if he had never gotten angry. “I’ll just come back the next day and put a nail in his head. Did I tell you why women have legs?”
Jessica had moved to the other end of the couch. She leaned forward, holding her tequila in both hands. Her glass was a jelly jar decorated with two purple dinosaurs. “Yes, you did. I didn’t like that one, either.”
“Come on, tell me. What’s the answer?”
Jessica didn’t look at him. “So they won’t leave snail tracks on the linoleum floor.”
LeBrun threw himself back and laughed. “Jesus, I love it. Can’t you just see it?” His laughter had a grating sound. “I could hear that joke again and again.”
Jessica watched him laughing. “I don’t think we should kill Tremblay,” she said, raising her voice to get LeBrun’s attention.
He turned to face her, surprised. “Why the fuck not? Doesn’t he deserve it?”
“I want to get away. I want to get Jason and disappear. I don’t want cops after me.”
LeBrun lit a cigarette. He offered one to Jessica but she shook her head. “Well, fuck, then the job’s not worth two grand. Maybe one, sure, but not two. You don’t want to pay me that much. You’ll be just throwing your money away.”
Jessica was uncertain whether he was serious. Sometimes she couldn’t tell with LeBrun. It was one of the things that had come to frighten her about him. You wouldn’t know whether he was serious or joking until it was too late. “That would be a help. I’d need money to live for a while.”
“That doesn’t mean there isn’t some other kind of payment I want.” LeBrun leaned forward and poured her more tequila. She looked up at him quickly and a few drops of the tequila spilled on the couch. “Hey, watch it,” he said, “that’s valuable stuff.”
“What kind of payment?” Jessica told herself this always happened sooner or later.
“How come you wear those baggy sweatshirts all the time? They make you look like a rag doll. You don’t look like a girl, you don’t look like nothing.”
“Maybe I like wearing them. What kind of payment are you talking about?”
“I don’t know, maybe it’s not worth the trouble.” He stubbed his cigarette out in a saucer. “It’s another job I’m doing for a guy. One of my buddies.” He laughed again.
“What kind of payment?”
“Stand up and turn around.”
Jessica set her glass on the floor and stood up. She wasn’t sure whether to make a joke of it or to be serious. She turned slowly, trying to imagine all the things she would do to get LeBrun to help her. She wondered who the other person was and what he wanted.
“Jesus, you’re a klutz. I can’t see a thing. Don’t you have a body? Take off the sweatshirt.”
Jessica removed the sweatshirt. She wore nothing underneath. It was cool in the room and her white flesh got goose pimples.
“Keep turning, Misty. Hold your arms out. Not much to you, is there?”
Jessica turned with her arms outstretched. She remembered how men had shouted to her in the club—banana body, tiny tits. She began to feel angry but she tried to give no sign of it.
“Turn faster,” said LeBrun.
Jessica began to turn faster, keeping her eyes focused on one spot so she wouldn’t get dizzy. She could feel her two peroxided braids bouncing on the skin of her shoulders.
“Faster, Misty. Come on. Pretend you’re a merry-go-round. Let’s go!”
Jessica turned faster, trying not to stumble. She didn’t want LeBrun to get mad. The rug seemed to drag at her sneakers. The muscles of her outstretched arms were already sore.
“Okay, stop!” LeBrun clapped his hands once.
Jessica stopped. The room was spinning a little. She bent over with her hands on her knees, trying to catch her breath. She could see her small breasts hanging down. “So you want to fuck me, don’t you? Are you going to do it now?”
LeBrun made a grunting noise. “You don’t fuck babies, didn’t you hear what I said? Wait till you’re grown. There’s something else I want you to do.”
“Like what? You mean I have to fuck somebody else?” She grabbed her sweatshirt from the floor. She felt furious and humiliated.
LeBrun lit another cigarette. “You’ll find out soon enough.”
—
At noon, Hawthorne led Krueger to the dining hall. They were late, and by the time they arrived everyone else was seated. Work-study students in white jackets carried large silver trays of food. The dark oak tables, dark wainscoting, and dark beams on the ceiling made the room appear dim. On the walls, the dark portraits of past headmasters seemed devoid of humor or benevolence: men in stiff suits with white hair and, here and there, a beard. The globe lights hanging from the ceiling were on because the day was so gray. Hawthorne took his place at the head table with Krueger on his right. Skander sat across from them. Three students and two adults were seated in the other places. Krueger shook hands and tried to focus on their names. There was Gene Strauss, who ran the admissions office, and Ruth Standish, one of the two mental health counselors; the students were Scott McKinnon and the two girls in charge of the yearbook. People looked at Krueger from the other tables. There was a lot of talking and general noise, and the smell of furniture polish mixed with the aromas of spices, tomato sauce, and fresh bread. Krueger still felt stunned, even horrified, by the phone call that Hawthorne had received less than fifteen minutes before. What sort of insanity would lead a person to pretend to be Hawthorne’s dead wife?
Unfolding his napkin, Krueger grew aware that Skander was speaking to him.
“I asked,” Skander repeated, “how you found our little school.” He held a slice of bread in one hand and a knife in the other, as if he couldn’t butter it until he had an answer.
“It seems quite lively.”
Skander beamed. “We have Jim to thank for that. He’s made changes that I’d never have dared to make, but then mine was no more than a caretaker government. Keeping the ship afloat was the most I could manage. But I tell my colleagues we haven’t sunk yet. There’s still hope.”
Krueger hardly heard him. He kept remembering the fear on Hawthorne’s face as he had listened to the woman on the phone. Now, however, Hawthorne seemed relaxed and was joking with Scott McKinnon. But Krueger felt certain he could see evidence of tension in how straight he was sitting and how he kept glancing around.
“What else has been going on?” Krueger had asked. “What aren’t you telling me?”
“Practical jokes, that’s all. Nothing important.”
Hawthorne had looked away.
Krueger took a slice of bread and buttered it. The waiter began passing down plates of lasagna and green beans from one end of the table.
“You asked about Clifford Evings,” said Hawthorne, leaning toward Krueger and lowering his voice. “That’s him sitting at the head of that first table on the right.”
Evings appeared elderly and cadaverous in a rumpled brown suit. He ate very delicately, cutting his green beans with a knife and fork, and bringing them up carefully to his small, puckered mouth. Next to him was a man in his forties who was also thin and balding, though he had a mustache and small goatee. He wore a bright yellow shirt and a green necktie. A tan jacket hung on the back of his chair.
“That fellow on his left looks enough like him to be his son,” said Krueger.
“That’s Bobby Newland; he’s the other counselor.” Hawthorne lowered his voice a little more. “He and Evings are a couple. But he’s good in the group discussions and the kids like him.”
Krueger was struck by the evident composure he saw around him: everyone civilized and on their best behavior—Skander chatted affably with Ruth Standish, Gene Strauss spoke to the two girls about the yearbook. Outside it had begun to rain again and gray streaks scarred the tall windows. Practical jokes, Hawthorne had said. To pretend to be Hawthorne’s dead wife, to urge him to join her—surely that went beyond practical joking. It was raw malice. Krueger thought of what Hawthorne had endured in San Diego. Just what reserves of strength did he have left?
“I gather you were a student of Jim’s,” said Ruth Standish, leaning forward over her plate. She was a large woman and wore a dress with a pattern of pink peonies against a bed of leaves, which, to Krueger’s mind, made her seem upholstered like a couch.
With some relief he moved into the neutral topic and spoke about his time at Boston University. That had been less than six years ago, but it seemed that a century had gone by. As he talked, other images from that time returned to him. Hawthorne holding forth from the head of a seminar table, raising his voice above the sound of traffic on Storrow Drive. Hawthorne discussing his plans for books and articles. Hawthorne, Meg, and Krueger crowded onto the T, making their way to the North End in search of the perfect lasagna. He and Hawthorne driving through the Berkshires in a snowstorm to Ingram House, where Hawthorne had a surprise birthday party planned for Krueger. Although Krueger knew these times were past, it amazed him they had gone so completely. Krueger was married with children of his own. Meg and Lily were dead. And Hawthorne was working at a place that Krueger in his wildest dreams could never have imagined.
Hawthorne kept glancing around the room. For a moment he would watch Evings, then turn his attention to someone else. It was hardly more than a fluttering of the eye and he did it while discussing the need for new promotional material with Strauss or talking to Skander about putting someone in charge of alumni relations. It made Krueger more attentive and, as he looked around, he was astonished at how many mistrustful looks were aimed in their direction. If the student body seemed content, the faculty and staff were not. Not only were they unhappy with Hawthorne, they seemed fairly glum with one another.
At one point, Ruth Standish leaned across the table and remarked to Hawthorne, “I wish you’d say something to Alice Beech about her behavior in the group discussions. She’s far too direct. I doubt we need a nurse there anyway.”
“How do you find her ‘too direct’?” asked Hawthorne.
“A young woman—I won’t mention her name—was saying how she liked to purge herself, that was the word she used, after every meal except breakfast and Alice interrupted to say, ‘I find that a completely stupid thing to do.’”
Instead of agreeing, Hawthorne abruptly laughed. Then he stopped himself and took a drink of water. “I’m sorry, I shouldn’t have done that, but it sounded just like her.”
“So you see my point?”
“I can see it could create a complicated group discussion.”
“I don’t like it,” said Ruth, pursing her lips.
“I’d be patient. The students like her. Ask if anyone thinks she’s right or wants to say what’s wrong with her point of view. But it would be best to see her comments as a legitimate addition.”
Ruth Standish nodded but Krueger could see that she didn’t agree; now she was irritated with Hawthorne as well, though she said nothing more.
“So you have a family, Mr. Krueger?” asked Skander as the plates were being cleared. He sat back in his chair and unbuttoned his blue blazer.
Krueger nodded. “We have a son and a daughter.”
This information appeared to make Skander very pleased. “Children are such a happy addition, I find. What are their ages?”
“The girl is six and the boy is four. Actually, the boy—” Krueger was about to say that the boy had been named after Hawthorne, but Skander interrupted him.
“My wife and I have a ten-year-old boy. He loves to play the guitar. As a matter of fact, we’d hoped for a large family, five or six youngsters around the table, but that just wasn’t to be. Not that we’re not delighted with what we’ve got.” He turned to the boy beside him. “Tell me, Scott, do you have siblings?”