“I'm telling you,” he said. “It was the cheapest shot I ever saw. They were just standing there talking and Pow! I couldn't believe it. He didn't even get off the bike.”
The driver turned to me for confirmation. His name was Cockroach, and he was an ugly kid with squinty eyes, a greenish complexion, and one stray tooth that poked across his bottom lip like a fang. Still, I appreciated his concern.
“He started it?”
“Yeah.” I pulled the undershirt away from my face. “He called me an asshole so I said, 'Fuck you.’ He was bigger, but I didn't care.”
Cockroach's friend Danny peered at me over the passenger headrest. He was normal looking, except for a ring of whitehead zits encircling his mouth. I wondered why he didn't just pop them.
“He suckered you?”
“Totally.”
“I saw it,” Zirko reminded them. He took the undershirt out of my hand and dabbed gently at my lips and chin. “His pussy friend just stood there and watched. He should've whacked that faggot across the face with his shovel.”
The Monte Carlo's engine throbbed like a bad headache. Cockroach hit the gas a split second before the light changed and we roared through the intersection like cops on a chase. Zirko licked his fingertips and rubbed at the dried blood on my cheek.
“Don't worry,” he said. “We'll find the fucker.”
* * *
On a hunch of Zirko's we turned off Grand and snaked our way through the developments on the outskirts of Cranwood. He navigated like a psychic, leaning over the front seat and gazing through the windshield with fierce intensity, directing Cockroach on an elaborate series of loops and turns. We scoured the neighborhood for at least fifteen minutes, but the kid was nowhere in sight.
By that point my nose had stopped bleeding and my head had cleared. I thought about Neil and wondered if he'd made it to the playground. I wanted to be there with him, shooting “horse” and working on my behind-the-back dribble. The fight seemed stupid now, a wrong turn in the middle of an otherwise decent Saturday. It would have been fine with me if I never saw the lifeguard again for the rest of my life.
“It's okay,” I said. “We might as well forget it.”
Zirko was startled by my remark. His head whipped around and he stared at me for a long time, like he was trying to remember who I was. I still couldn't get used to the way he looked with his head shaved. His eyes were huge in his head, but glazed over, lifeless. He touched his index finger to the tip of my nose.
“Don't wimp out on me,” he warned.
“I'm not wimping out.”
“You said you wanted to get this kid, right?”
He smiled when I nodded. Then he reached under the front seat, pulled out a crowbar, and pressed it into my hand. He didn't let go until my mitten wrapped around it.
Three years earlier, Zirko and I had been teammates for a single season of Pop Warner football. He was two grades ahead of me and only played on the Pee-Wees because he was too small and skinny to compete on the Midget level. I remember laughing with him at practice and pounding on his shoulder pads to loosen up before kickoff. One night a bunch of us went to the St. Agnes carnival and Zirko showed off by swallowing half a dozen live goldfish. He told me afterward that he could feel them thrashing around in his stomach, screaming for their mommies.
The year after that, Zirko made his mark on the world. He got busted for dumping paint in rich people's swimming pools. He'd slip into their yards in the middle of the night with a gallon of Sears Weatherbeater, pry off the top, and drop the open can like a depth charge straight to the bottom of the deep end. He fouled more than twenty pools in one summer and might have ruined a few more if he hadn't developed an urge to release the paint in broad daylight. He told the cops he wanted to watch the colors swirl.
After the arrest, some detectives came to Harding with a search warrant for his locker. From what I heard, they found a blowtorch, a shoebox full of hood ornaments, and a stethoscope that had been reported missing from the nurse's office.
Now, in the car, I felt the need to ask Zirko some serious questions. I wanted to know who had shaved his head, what it looked like when the paint blossomed in the water, and if reform school was as tough as people said. I wanted to ask him what a heart sounded like through a stethoscope, and if he really expected me to hit someone with a crowbar.
I wanted to ask him these things, but it was too late. We turned a corner and there he was: the lifeguard in the sheepskin coat, the jerk who'd called me an asshole.
Cockroach hit the brakes the instant we spotted him. He was about halfway down the block straddling his bike at the edge of a driveway, studying a snowman in someone's front yard. They were only about ten feet apart, and the lifeguard's head was cocked at a funny angle, as though he and the snowman were having a conversation.
He stiffened suddenly and turned in our direction. Somehow, after shooting us only the quickest glance, he seemed to know who we were and what we wanted. He jerked his bike around to make a run for it.
“Get him!” cried Zirko.
In the confusion of the moment, Cockroach freaked out. He aimed the Monte Carlo straight at the lifeguard and floored it. Our tires whirred on the sandy ice, then caught. We hurtled forward like we'd been blasted out of a cannon.
The lifeguard had quick reflexes. Instead of continuing into the street, he whipped his bike around at the last second and hauled ass down the sidewalk, heading for the intersection we'd just vacated. It was a bold maneuver. Amidst a chorus of groans and curses, we shot right past him.
Cockroach freaked out again and locked up the brakes. We spun out on the slick pavement, sliding sideways for the length of three houses. All four of us screamed at once as the force of the skid pitched us sideways in our seats, then forward, then back again, and we slammed, with an emphatic thunk, into a bank of curbside snow. It was a thrilling Starsky and Hutch maneuver, a feeling you'd pay money for at an amusement park. No one was hurt, but by the time Cockroach got us backed out and pointed in the right direction, the lifeguard had vanished. Zirko pounded the seat in frustration.
A grim silence prevailed as we resumed our manhunt, prowling methodically along the nearby streets. I pretended to be upset, but deep down I was relieved. I'd lost my stomach for revenge.
“Wait,” said Zirko. “Go back.”
Cockroach glanced at him in the rearview mirror.
“Back where?”
A thoughtful smile broke the tension on Zir-ko's face. He shook his head in disbelief, amazed at his own blindness.
“To the snowman,” he said.
The way Zirko had it figured, we'd caught the kid in his own driveway. All we had to do was go back and wait. He'd have to show up eventually, and then we'd nab him.
“How do you know?” I asked.
“It's obvious. He was in the driveway.”
It wasn't obvious to me, but I didn't argue. If it was my driveway, I would've dropped the bike and run like hell for the front door. Still, I didn't want to underestimate Zirko. He seemed to have a sixth sense about tracking people. It amazed me that we'd found the kid in the first place.
He was smart about the surveillance too. There were lots of empty spaces on the street, but he ordered Cockroach to parallel park in a tight spot between a van and a pickup, across the street and a few houses down from the driveway where we'd spotted the lifeguard. He'd have to be right on top of us to know we were there.
Cockroach passed the dead time lighting matches and extinguishing them with a hiss between his spit-moistened fingertips. Danny took a fake nose and glasses out of the glove compartment and sent Cockroach into hysterical giggling fits with imitations of people I didn't recognize. Even with these diversions, though, the air inside the car quickly grew stale with boredom. Cockroach ran out of matches. Somebody farted, and we all rolled down our windows. Danny turned around, staring at Zirko through the vacant frames of his joke glasses.
“Hey Andy, we gonna sit here all day?” “Yeah
,” added Cockroach. “I'm starving.” Zirko rubbed his stubble. I thought he was going to snap at them, but he kept his cool.
“Me and Buddy can handle this. Why don't you guys go to McDonald's and come pick us up when you're finished. If you don't see us, honk the horn.”
Despite the crowbar in my hand. I felt relaxed and nearly cheerful standing with Zirko in the middle of the windswept street, watching the Monte Carlo fishtail around the corner and out of sight. The worst seemed to be over. I didn't think the lifeguard would be coming back and couldn't see Zirko lasting very long in the cold without a coat.
“Hey Andy,” I said. “Want my mittens?”
He blew on his hands and shook his head. We were the only people in sight.
“Come on,” he said. “Let's check out that snowman.”
Zirko slapped me on the back as we headed across the street. Now that no one was going to be hurt, I could appreciate the morning for the incredible chain of adventures it had been—a fist-fight, a car chase, a near accident, even a stakeout. Neil was going to be jealous when I told him what he'd missed.
“Jesus,” said Zirko. “Look at this fucking thing.”
We'd passed several snowmen on our search of the neighborhood, but none of them even came close to this one. It was taller than we were and lovingly constructed, the kind of thing you'd definitely stop to admire if you happened to pass it on your bike. It had charcoal eyes, a carrot nose, even a jaunty bowler hat. Its smile was a crescent of bright pennies and its buttons a row of Oreo cookies running down its chest. The most striking feature of all was the snowman's heart: a silver valentine of Hershey's Kisses, inside of which someone had set a snapshot of a Labrador retriever, a pudgy black dog with a sad, intelligent face. The picture was wrapped in plastic, carefully wedged into the snow.
“The dog must have died,” I said.
Zirko didn't hear me. He was standing on his tiptoes, reaching for the snowman's bowler hat. He grabbed it, dusted it off, then sailed it like a Frisbee into the street. The hat flew a surprising distance before skipping into the gutter.
“It's like a shrine to the dog,” I said, unable to conceal the wonder in my voice.
This time Zirko looked at me, but he still didn't answer. Instead he plucked the carrot right out of the snowman's face and tossed it over his shoulder. Then he removed the charcoals and erased the smile a cent at a time. I didn't get upset until he pulled the photo out of the heart and crushed it in his fist like a candy wrapper.
“Jesus, Andy. That's someone's dog.”
He dropped the picture onto the ground, then turned to me with his hand out. I gave him what he wanted.
A snowman doesn't stand much of a chance against a crowbar. When Zirko was finished it was nothing but garbage in the snow, garbage and a handful of pennies.
“Come on,” he said. “Let's see if anyone's home.”
I wish I could say I followed him up the front steps to talk him out of it or to make sure he didn't do anything crazy, but the truth is, I just followed him. The door was open and we walked right in. The house was quiet and warm, a nice place to enter.
“Chucky,” a woman called out. “Is that you?”
Zirko cupped a hand around his mouth.
“Chucky,” he sang in a mocking falsetto, “is that you?”
“Who is that?” she asked.
As though he were an invited guest, Zirko marched down the hallway toward the source of the voice, a bald skinny kid with bare arms and a snowy crowbar in his hand. I hung back, trying to find my bearings, unable to believe that we'd walked into a stranger's house without knocking or ringing the bell. All at once, everything in the world seemed possible, the worst stuff I could even begin to imagine.
I watched him turn into a doorway and listened to the muffled sounds of a conversation. Maybe a minute passed before Zirko stuck his head out and beckoned me with the crowbar. I shook my head no. His eyes got big; he nodded yes. My wet sneakers squeaked on the floor.
There must have been blood on my face, because the woman gasped when she saw me.
“My God,” she said. “Did Chucky do that?” “Damn right he did,” said Zirko. All I could do was stare. She was about my mother's age, a semi-pretty woman with cloudy eyes and loose brown hair she hadn't bothered to comb. I felt embarrassed for her. It was close to noon and she was still wearing her robe, a dingy pink thing with a sunburst coffee stain on one lapel. We'd caught her in the middle of Scooby-Doo, She reached for a glass on the coffee table, then thought better of it and pulled back her hand. “Are you sure it was Chucky?” Zirko nodded. “We know Chucky.” She wasn't interested in him. She kept her eyes fixed on me, as though I were the most important person in the world.
“He's a big kid,” I told her, spreading my hands to approximate the width of his shoulders. “A big kid in a sheepskin coat. He cursed me out and punched me in the face.”
Her shoulders slumped when I said that, and her face just sort of collapsed. She closed her eyes and bit her bottom lip. My feeling toward Zirko at that moment was something approaching awe.
“He's not a bad kid,” she told me. “He just doesn't know how to control his temper.”
Chucky's mother leaned in close to me at the kitchen table, washing my face with a warm, soapy washcloth. I could smell liquor on her breath and see way down the front of her robe.
“Poor baby,” she told me. “You bled a lot.”
Zirko snickered, but he looked unhappy and confused. The woman's kindness had stolen his momentum. He pushed his chair away from the table and stood up.
“Come on, Buddy. Let's get outta here.”
I tried to get up, but Chucky's mother pressed me back into the chair.
“Just hold on. Chucky should be home any minute. I want him to apologize.”
There couldn't have been any blood left, but she kept caressing my face with the washcloth, letting me see her nipples.
“Poor baby,” she said again, touching the washcloth to my ear. I imagined myself in a tub of warm water, Chucky's mother washing me everywhere, her robe open to the waist, whispering as she scrubbed.
Zirko wandered over to the refrigerator and helped himself to some orange juice. He chugged noisily from the carton, letting the yellow liquid dribble down his chin. He was just showing off, trying to get her attention, but she didn't give him the satisfaction.
He put down the OJ and walked over to the sink. There was a nearly empty bottle of vodka right next to the toaster. Zirko unscrewed the cap and took a long swig, grimacing as he swallowed.
Chucky's mother spun to face him, clutching her robe shut with one hand. With her back to me, she no longer looked like a woman to have fantasies about. She was a grown-up, a mother who drank vodka and watched cartoons in her bathrobe on Saturday morning.
“Put that down,” she snapped. “What the hell's wrong with you, anyhow?”
Zirko leered at her, tapping the crowbar against his thigh.
“What the hell's wrong with Chucky?”
The woman didn't answer right away. The question seemed to have stunned her. She was a little unsteady on her feet.
“You gedout,” she said, indignantly slurring her words, suddenly sounding drunk. “You and your little friend here. Who the hell do you think you are?”
Zirko grinned. He was having fun now. He took another swig of the vodka. “Maybe we don't want to.” “Come on,” I said. “Let's get going.” Zirko shook his head. She threw the washcloth down on the table. It landed with a wet slap. “I said get out.”
Zirko shrugged. “I don't feel like it.” The phone was on the wall by the refrigerator. She took ästep in that direction. So did he.
“No,” he said in a soft, scary voice. “I don't think so.”
I can't say how long we remained frozen in place, waiting for someone to make the next move. It was probably only a couple of seconds, but it felt longer. I do know that it was the sound of the opening door that broke our stalemate. All three of us turned at on
ce.
Chucky whimpered in the archway, hugging a grocery bag tight to his chest. He was a big kid in a sheepskin coat, but he wasn't the lifeguard. Not even close.
“Holy shit,” said Zirko.
Something was wrong with Chucky. “Water on the brain” was the phrase I'd heard people use. His head was bigger than it was supposed to be, and it swayed like a pendulum as he stood there, as though his neck weren't quite strong enough to hold it steady. He had very little hair and thick glasses that made his eyes seem tiny and faraway.
“Chucky,” his mother demanded, “did you hit this boy?”
She pointed at me and shame filled my body like a dense hot liquid. Chucky moved his lips, struggling to form the words. His voice was high and reedlike.
“My snowman,” he said. The bag slipped through his arms and burst open at his feet. Lots of soup cans went rolling across the floor.
“Chucky,” she said sternly. “Please answer the question.”
“My snowman,” he repeated, choking back a sob.
I dropped to my knees and began gathering up the cans. Every one of them was exactly the same: Campbell's Chicken and Stars, Chicken and Stars, Chicken and Stars.
“Did you use foul language?”
Zirko knelt beside me to help out. We traded a quick glance, and his eyes were wild with remorse. A horn sounded in the street outside.
We burst out of the house and sprinted across the lawn to the Monte Carlo. Zirko got there first and pulled open the door. We froze in unison.
The lifeguard was in the back seat. He had a rectangle of silver duct tape pressed over his mouth and a hunting knife resting against his throat.
“Look what we found,” said Danny. He was holding the knife and grinning like a maniac, still wearing the nose and glasses.
“Yeah,” said Cockroach. “We walk into McDonald's, and guess who's there?”
The lifeguard stared at me, pleading with his blue eyes. I felt like I'd stepped outside the boundaries of my own life and would never be allowed back in.