Authors: Tanya Ronder,D. B. C. Pierre
Tags: #High School Students, #General, #Drama, #Literary Criticism, #Fiction, #Mass Murder
'Bam,' goes the hammer.
'All-a rise,' says the officer.
Muzak plays near the cells tonight. It fucken lays me out and buries me alongside my friends. It goes: 'I beg your par-den, I never promised you a rose gar-den.' Hot weather always brings these fucked ole tunes, always in the background, in fucken mono. Fate. Like, notice how whenever something happens in your life, like you fall in love or something, a tune gets attached. Fate tunes. Watch out for that shit.
I lay on the bunk and imagine this tune playing at a Greyhound terminal. In the TV-movie of my life, I'd be the crusty, mixed-up kid, all rugged and lonely, older than my years; dragging long shadows to hop a bus out of town, a bus with Mexico written on it. 'Pssschhh,' the crusty ole driver opens the door of his motor-coach, and smiles like he has a secret, that everything turns out fine. The kid's boot steps out of the dirt. His guitar swings low. A cowgirl with blond hair and Levi's sits alone, halfway down the aisle, probably wearing blue cotton panties under. Bikinis, or tangas. Probably bikinis. Nothing crusty about her. See what I mean? It's this kind of strategic vision that separates us from the animals.
My ole lady calls, but I can't make my imagination deal with her. I have until fucken Wednesday to do a little dreaming. That's when the shrink can see me. I survive two and a half days with Jesus' leaden soul in the shadows, and three rubber nights a-twanging with soundbites of his death.
In the end, I pass the time practicing faces for the psychiatrist. I don't know if it's better to act crazy, or regular, or what. If the shrinks on TV are anything to go by, it'll be fucken hard to find out, because they just repeat every damn thing you say. If you say, 'I'm devastated,' they go, 'I hear you saying you're devastated.' How do you deal with that? All I know is what I learned last week, that a healthy life should feel spongy, like a burrito. This Tuesday night, the first-week anniversary of the shootings, my life feels like a fucken corn chip.
I hear Barry's keychain swinging up the corridor, clink-a-clink. He stops by the grille of my door, out of sight, just breathing and clinking. He knows I'm waiting for him to say I have a call. But he starts to walk away, then shuffles back again. See?
'Little?' he finally says.
'Yeah, Barry?'
'That's Officer Gurie to you. You ain't porkin the preacher in there are ya? You ain't tossin the ham javelin all night long, thinkin of your Meskin boy? Grr-hrr-hrr.'
Fuck him to death. He walks me upstairs to the phone, and I fantasize about ramming his baton up his goddam ass. Not that he'd probably even feel it.
The weeping sax from the TV weather plays in the office, just to cheer me up. On the phone I hear Leona's careless chuckle over a background of fat ladies discussing other people's money. The weather plays at their end too. I get it in fucken stereo. Then comes the skidmark of my ole lady's voice.
'Vernon, are you all right?'
Her sniffling feels like she physically has her tongue in my ear, like an anteater or something.
Makes me want to puke and bawl at the same time, go fucken figure. Here's why she's going for gold, let me tell you: it's because now I'm not only in jail, but I might be fucken crazy as well. What a bonanza for her if I'm fucken crazy as well. Then her problem would be that she already spent her best whimpery moves; like, she'd have to shred a tit or something, just to keep up with the Unfolding Tragedy of Her Fucken Life. Out of kindness, I absorb the maximum number of sniffles before speaking.
'How could you do that to me, Ma?'
'Well I only told the truth, Vernon. Anyway young man, how could you do all this to me?'
'I didn't do anything.'
'Well, famous actors put toothpaste under their eyes to help them cry. Did you know that?'
'Say what?
'I'm just telling you for court, in case you look too impassive. You know how impassive you can look.'
'Ma - just don't talk to Lally anymore, okay?'
'Hold on,' she takes her mouth from the phone, 'it's all right Leona, it's the fridge people.' You hear questioning noises in back, about the time of night, then Mom comes on the line again. 'Well it's ridiculous - I've waited days for you people!'
'Goodnight, Ma.'
'Wait!' She presses her mouth to the phone, whispering. 'Vernon - it's probably best not to mention anything about the, er …'
'Gun?'
'Well yes, probably best to keep it between us, you know?'
My daddy's gun. If only my ole lady had let me keep it at home. But no. The fucken gun gave her the tremors. I had to stash it far from the house, way out in the public domain. Nuckles must know it's there. Jesus must've used it as a wild card, must've mentioned it to stop him following, to make him think there was an arsenal stashed away. But then Jesus died. Took the information, the context, all our innocent boyhood times with him. Took the truth with him.
Just my gun's left behind, with all the wrong fingerprints on it. Left behind, just waiting.
Act II
How I spent my summer vacation
seven
The sign on the shrink's door says: 'Dr Goosens.' What a crack. Goosens. Whoever invented the Cold Light of Day sure went to fucken town on it, boy. On the ride over here I had a truckload of ideas about how to act crazy, maybe pull some Kicked Dog, some Spooked Deer and all, like Mom does. I even thought I could maybe drop a load in my pants or something, as a last resort. It's a slimy secret, I know it. I even loosened my asshole in case it came to that. But now, in the cold light of day, I just hope I flossed enough.
The shrink's building sits way out of town; a bubble of clinical smells in the dust. A receptionist with spiky teeth, and a voicebox made from bees trapped in tracing paper, sits behind a desk in the waiting room. She gives me the fucken shiver, but the jail guards don't seem to notice her at all. I have an urge to ask her name, but I don't. I can imagine her saying, 'Why, I'm Graunley Stelt,' or 'Achtung Beed,' or something way fucken bent. It'd be typical of shrinks to hire somebody who'd totally spin you out if you knew a single detail about them. If you weren't edgy when you came in, you would be after you met the fucken receptionist.
'Bloop,' an intercom hoots behind her desk.
'Didn't you get my email?' asks a man.
'No, Doctor,' says the receptionist.
'Please monitor the systems, there's no point upgrading our technology if you don't monitor the systems. I emailed you three minutes ago for the next patient.'
'Yes, Doctor.' She taps at her keyboard, scowls at the monitor, then looks at me. 'The doctor will see you now.'
My Nikes chirp over black and green linoleum, through a door, and into a room with supermarket lighting. Two armchairs sit by a window; an ole stereo rests beside one of them, with a notebook computer on top. At the back of the room stands a hospital bunk on wheels, with a towel over it. And there's Dr Goosens; round, soft, butt-heavy, and as smug as a Disney worm. He smiles sympathetically, and waves me to an armchair.
'Cindy, bring the client's file, please.'
Check my fucken face now. Cindy! It slays me. Now I'm just waiting for her to say, 'Groovy, Wayne,' and bounce through the door in a little tennis skirt or something. She doesn't though, not in the cold light of day. She trudges past in socks and sandals, and hands a file to Goosens. He thumbs through the pages and waits for her to leave the room.
'Vernon Gregory Little, how are you today?'
'Okay, I guess.' My Nikes tap each other.
'Alrighty. What can you tell me about why you're here?'
'The judge must think I'm crazy, or something.'
'And are you?' He gets ready to chuckle, like it's obvious I ain't. It might help if the judge thought I was bananas, but looking at Ole Mother Goosens just makes me want to tell him how I really feel, which is that everybody backed me into a nasty corner with their crashy fucken powerdimes.
'I guess it ain't up to me to say,' I tell him. It doesn't seem enough though; he stares and waits for more. As I catch his eye, I feel the past wheeze up my throat in a raft of bitter words. 'See, first everybody dissed me because my buddy was Mexican, then because he was weird, but I stood by him, I thought friendship was a sacred thing - then it all went to hell, and now I'm being punished for it, they're twisting every regular little fact to fit my guilt …'
Goosens raises a hand, and smiles gently. 'Alrighty, let's see what we can discover. Please continue to be candid - if you open yourself up to this process, in good faith, we won't have a problem at all. Now, tell me - how do you feelabout what's happened?'
'Just wrecked. Wrecked dead away. And now everybody's calling me the psycho, I know they are.'
'Why do you think they might be doing that?'
'They need a skate-goat, they want to hang somebody high.'
'A scapegoat? You feel something intangible caused the tragedy?'
'Well, no, I mean - my friend Jesus ain't around, in person, to take any blame. He did all the shooting, I was just a witness, not even involved at all.' Goosens searches my face, and makes a note in his file.
'Alrighty. What can you tell me about your family life?'
'It's just regular.' Goosens holds his pen still, and looks at me. He knows he just found a major bug up my ass.
'The file notes that you live with your mother. What can you tell me about that relationship?'
'Uh, it's just - regular.' The whole subject drags a major tumor out of my ass, don't fucken ask me why. It just lies there on the floor, throbbing, glistening with gut-slime. Goosens even leans back in his chair, to avoid the heaving tang of my fucken family life.
'No brothers?' he asks, wisely steering east. 'No uncles, or - other male influences in your familial network?'
'Not really,' I say.
'But you had - friends …?' My eyes drop to the floor. He sits quiet for a moment, then reaches over to rest a hand on my leg. 'Believe me, Jesus touched me too - the whole affair touched me deeply.
If you're able, tell me what happened that day.'
I try to dodge the spike of panic you get when you hear yourself fixing to bawl. 'Things had already started when I got back.'
'Where had you been?' asks Goosens.
'I got held up, running an errand.'
'Vernon, you're not on trial here - please be specific.'
'I needed the bathroom on the way back from an errand Mr Nuckles sent me on.'
'The school bathroom?'
'No.'
'You took a leak outside school?' He leans his head over, as if the information might splat in his face.
'Uh - not a leak, actually.'
'You had a bowel movement, outside school? At the time of the tragedy?'
'Sometimes I can be kind of unpredictable.'
Silence fills the forty years Fate gives me to recognize the import of things. This would never happen to Van Damme. Heroes never shit. They only fuck and kill.
A shine comes to Goosens's eyes. 'You told the court this?'
'Hell no.'
He blinks and folds his arms. 'Forgive me, but - forensically, doesn't a fresh stool, situated away from the scene of the crimes - automatically rule you out as a suspect? Fecal matter can be accurately dated, you know.'
'I guess that's right, huh?' You can tell Goosens is giving me extra service. He's only supposed to suck information for the court, but here he is, prepared to take a chance and give me a revelation along the way. He clamps his lips tight, to hit home the significance of it all. Then his eyes fall.
'I hear you say you're kind of - unpredictable?'
'It's no big deal,' I draw circles on the floor with a Nike.
'Is it a diagnosed condition - sphincter weakness, or suchlike?'
'Nah. Anyway, I almost don't get it anymore.'
Goosens runs his tongue over his upper lip. 'Alrighty, so tell me - do you like girls, Vernon?'
'Sure.'
'Can you name a girl you like?'
'Taylor Figueroa.'
He chews his lip, and makes a note in the file. 'Have you had physical contact with her?'
'Kind of.'
'What do you remember most about your contact with her?'
'Her smell, I guess.'
Goosens frowns into the file, and makes another entry. Then he sits back. 'Vernon - have you ever felt attraction towards another boy? Or a man?'
'No way.'
'Alrighty. Let's see what we can discover.'
He reaches for the stereo and presses 'Play'. A military drum beats out, softly at first, but growing in power, threatening, like a bear coming out of a cave, or a bear going into the cave, and you're in the fucken cave.
'Gustav Holst,' says Goosens. 'The Planets - Mars. This'll rouse some glory in a boy's soul.' He walks to the bed and smacks it with the flat of his hand. The powerdime takes a reckless shift.
'Get undressed for me, please, and come lie up here.'
'Un-dressed?'
'Sure - to finish the exam. We psychiatrists are medical doctors first, you know - don't confuse us with your everyday psychologists.'
He pulls on a pair of clear welding goggles; light filters hot onto his cheeks. Folding my Calvin Kleins takes a while, in order to stop loose change falling from the pocket. Even though my loose change is in a plastic bag at the sheriff's office. Brass stomps black and twisted over the drums from the stereo as I climb onto the bed. Goosens points at my underwear.
'Off, please.'
A thought comes to me; it is that a breeze on the butt, in the presence of supermarket lighting, should only be felt by the dead. I'm a naked fucken animal. But even naked animals need bail.
Especially naked animals need it.
'On your stomach,' says Goosens. 'Spread your legs.'
'Ta-t-t-t, TA-TA-TA.' Musical hellfire accompanies the touch of two fingers on my back. They trace a line down my body, then turn into hands, and grab both cheeks of my ass.
'Relax,' he whispers, spreading my cheeks. 'Does this make you think of Taylor?'
'TA-TA-TA, TA-T-T-T!'
'Or - something else?' His breathing quickens with the march of his fingers, they trace a tightening circle around the rim of my hole. A line of violent cussing forms in my throat. The bail thought stops it.