Pandoras gun, p.4
Pandora's Gun, page 4
Peter and Dante avoided them more from instinct than conscious decision.
“Uh, oh,” said Dante as the four boys strode up the path toward the dugouts. “I think we’re in trouble. We won’t be able to explain this.” He looked at the gun.
Peter, trying to act casual, checked around them. The mud would be over their ankles, and if they ran, then the boys would know they had something to hide.
T-Man spotted them, elbowing one of his buddies. His comment was muffled, but the other boys looked at Peter and Dante and grinned.
“Shit,” said Dante. “What are we going to do?”
“Bluff it out. Put the gun in the bag.” He held open the backpack. “Maybe they’ll leave us alone.”
“Not much chance of that,” said Dante. He pulled the trigger, calling the menu screen to view.
“You can’t,” said Peter. He imagined Dante turning the four boys into human reenactments of the flaming tree from yesterday. They were only twenty feet away.
Dante brought the gun up before Peter could stop him, aimed and fired.
T-Man and the other boys screamed in terror or pain. Peter couldn’t tell. They turned and ran straight for their car, which wasn’t at the end of the path but parked off to the side. They splashed through the mud. One of them fell with a huge splash. The others left him to struggle on his own, slipping down again before breaking free. He looked back at Peter and Dante, who kept the gun trained on him, the trigger compressed.
The car started. Gravel shot from the tires as it careened from the parking lot, clipping one of the gate posts on the way. The boy who fell ran after it, water and mud flying from his coat.
Dante put the gun down. “Well, that was effective. Chases off stray dogs and hoodlums. Who would have thought they would have an app for that?”
Peter closed his eyes in relief, letting his weight rest against the chain-link fence.
“I was afraid you were going to burn them.”
Dante put the gun in the backpack. “That was my next choice.” He met Peter’s eyes, and Peter knew that he looked horrified. “I’m kidding. Really.”
Peter zipped the bag tight. “I know,” he said, but he wondered if he meant it.
Late that night, Peter’s phone buzzed. The screen glowed like a nightlight in the dark room. He didn’t recognize the number on the screen.
“Yeah,” he said, after his head cleared enough for him to find the pick up button.
On the other end, someone breathed heavily. The hairs stood up on the back of Peter’s neck.
“We know where you live, douche bag. You and your skinny friend.” The voice was husky, but not a disguise. Peter recognized T-Man, who sounded like he gargled with whiskey and gravel every morning.
Peter rubbed his knuckle into his eyes, not sure that he was fully awake. “Everybody knows my address. A monkey with an Internet connection can find anyone’s address,” he said, his voice unusually loud in the silent room. “I also know that if I make a single phone call, your probation officer’s going to find out about that pot you sell at the middle school.”
There was a pause at the other end. Peter grinned. He might not have a chance against T-Man in a fight, but in a verbal battle, Peter figured T-Man was practically unarmed.
“We’re going to turn you and your friend into greasy spots. They’ll have to ID your teeth to figure out who you are.”
Peter sighed, suddenly happy that he had the strange gun. It was his nuclear option. Maybe turning it into the police truly was a bad idea. “You’re boring, T-Man. Idle threats don’t worry me, not from a guy who was so scared at the ball field that he had to clean his own underwear so his momma wouldn’t see what he’d done in them. I wished I’d filmed it. You and your buddies looked plenty brave tearing out of that parking lot. It’d probably go viral on YouTube. Did the hero you left behind ever catch you, or did he run all the way home?”
He disconnected before T-Man replied.
Once he was awake, though, sleep wouldn’t come. After an hour with his eyes wide open, he put on his sneakers and a robe, then went to the Fairlane to retrieve the bag.
In his room, he pulled one of the oddly heavy bricks from the bag. When he shined his desk light through it, the complicated network of gold fibers and tiny squares were visible again. It looked a little like a computer’s motherboard, but miniaturized, folded and compressed. No serial number. No logo. No sockets. Just a perfect rectangular brick, about twice the length and thickness of a domino.
He scratched the surface with his fingernail, leaving no mark. A screwdriver in his desk didn’t mar it either, and a half hour later, after having hammered, drilled, sanded and torched it with Dad’s tools, it still looked fresh and new.
Items he’d kept from the dump lined the long shelf above his door, but he didn’t think it would be a good idea to display the brick with them. The stuff on the shelf looked worthless, while the brick felt more like a jewel, and he couldn’t get over the idea that the contents from the bag weren’t thrown away. They belonged to someone. Still, the brick was pretty, and there were a bunch more in the bag. One wouldn’t be missed. He bounced it in his hand, then, standing on his desk, unscrewed the ceiling vent, put the brick in, and closed the vent back up. That left the hundred or so of the bricks that were in the bag and the gun to hide. He didn’t want to leave them in the house, and Dante knew about the Fairlane’s trunk.
By flashlight, he went out the back gate in his yard with the duffle bag in hand. This early in the morning, the neighborhood was almost totally quiet. Not even a breeze stirred tree branches. Nothing moved in the alley. His breath turned to fog in the cold air. He opened the gate into Christy’s yard, lifting it as he moved it, so it wouldn’t squeak. In the back of her property, her dad stored old tools and busted lawn chairs under a carport covered with corrugated tin. During a hail storm, the roof banged and clattered.
Behind a couple of sheets of warped plywood, out of sight from both the alley and the house, stood a rusted barbecue that Mr. Sanders had replaced years ago. Dirt and cobwebs coated it now. It looked like it hadn’t been touched in at least a couple of seasons. Peter lifted the lid to reveal a corroded, charcoal encrusted grill. It was exactly the right size to hide the duffle bag, and it had the advantage of not being on his property. No one would find it here, even if they figured that Peter had it.
When he was ten, Dante saved Peter’s life. In late April, the days had grown unseasonably warm, and they decided they wanted to jump off the dam into Eaton Reservoir, which was an activity they’d done several times the summer before. Of course, jumping off the dam was illegal (there were signs posted warning trespassers to keep out). Swimming also was forbidden. The reservoir was the town’s drinking water supply. That made jumping off the dam even more attractive. In Peter’s neighborhood, among the kids, jumping off the dam was practically a badge of achievement. You couldn’t hold your head high, walking down the street, unless you’d made the jump.
Peter and Dante were charter members of the jump-off-the-dam club. They’d jumped the first time together. Peter remembered the air rushing against his face as they fell the thirty feet from the top of the dam, and the shockingly hard slap against the bottoms of his feet when they hit, but they’d surfaced laughing, high fiving each other even before they made it to shore, laughing even more because they couldn’t both swim and slap each other’s hands.
Christy Sanders jumped the next day, along with three of her girl friends. Of course, she trumped them by doing a front flip the thirty feet into the lake.
The heat drove them to try the April jump. Winter seemed to have broken, finally. They rode to the reservoir, towels wrapped around their handlebars. Peter remembered swinging his legs over the rail at the dam’s overlook. Dante joined him, both of them letting themselves lean out over the water, holding onto the rail behind them. At the time, nothing seemed finer. The spring sun warmed his shoulders and sent tiny diamond reflections back at them from the water below.
Air whistled by his ears just as he remembered it, and the adventure was glorious until he hit the water. Cold! Like hands of death cold. Paralyzing his lungs. His face burned against the cold. Somehow he surfaced, unable to breathe. Then, finally, a gasp, but it was all freezing water. He choked and went under. Looked up at the surface from a yard below, already losing consciousness. I’m dying. He remembered clearly knowing this was the end.
Then Dante grabbed him. His arm wrapped around his chest and Peter was brought to the surface, brought to the shore, where he lay half in and half out, coughing broken glass from his lungs. Dante lay beside him, gasping from the effort.
They didn’t talk about it ever. They rode their bikes home in silence, freezing despite the sun. Peter went to the bathroom, stood in the shower as hot as he could stand it, until the water heater was empty.
He never jumped off the dam again.
Peter saved Dante’s life in the spring too, but it was last spring. They walked home from the high school together each day. Devin Avenue was the only busy street they crossed, a four-lane, divided road that grew busy at rush hour, but most of the time was empty, a monument to the city planner’s belief that retail would move toward the high school. A half mile farther up the road lead to downtown and the business district, but here there was just a stoplight and the crosswalk.
Dante talked excitedly about a girl he sat behind in math class. “She looks at least eighteen,” Dante said. “I hear she’s dating a senior who got his last girlfriend pregnant. I’ll bet they’re doing it.”
Peter had been trying to ignore him. This talk about girls and sex stuff had integrated into Dante’s conversation a lot lately. Peter tried not to encourage him. He longed for the days when they talked about the movies they’d seen, and the computer games, and books. Although, he was sorry to admit to himself, there was something fascinating about girls and Dante’s single-minded obsession.
So, while they waited at the crosswalk on Devin Avenue for the light to change, Peter wasn’t watching the light. He was looking away from Dante, to their right. Coming toward them was a white van. Peter remembered thinking at first that a windshield with a crack that obvious in it must be hard to see through, but then he realized something was wrong about the van. It was going way too fast, and it was driving on the wrong side of the street, coming toward them.
The light changed.
Dante, who was saying, “Sometimes she wears these low-cut blouses . . .” as he looked left, and stepped off the sidewalk.
Peter reached, caught Dante’s shoulder, and pulled him back.
The van avalanched by, inches from their faces.
A paper caught in the turbulence shot six feet into the air, then drifted like an autumn leaf to rest at their feet.
“Shit, Peter,” Dante said. “Shit.”
It was the first time Peter had heard Dante swear.
One of T-Man’s friends was leaning against Peter’s locker. Peter spotted him as soon as he entered the hallway. For a second he considered going the other direction, but what could the guy do with all these witnesses? A math teacher stood in his doorway right across from Peter’s locker, greeting kids.
The boy looked terrible: circles under his eyes, hair uncombed. Dried mud on his shoes and the cuffs of his pants. He hadn’t changed or even cleaned up since yesterday. When he saw Peter, he straightened and took a step back, as if he thought Peter would hit him. The boy’s face clenched in conflict. Peter had never so clearly seen someone making a decision in his life, and it looked like one of the choices was to run. He stepped forward, lifted his chin, and waited for Peter to approach.
“Are you a wizard?” he said. His chin quivered.
“What?”
“Or a beast master? I’ve seen movies, you know. Are you a god?”
Peter decided to let the boy talk his way to sense. “What do you think?”
“At the field, there was that thing.” The boy licked his lip, then glanced around as if afraid of being caught from behind. “I couldn’t sleep. When I tried, I kept seeing it. We weren’t going to do anything to you guys. The ball field’s a good place to hang out.”
“I know.”
The longer he talked, the more miserable the boy seemed, teetering on the edge of tears. “I don’t know about T-Man and the other guys, but I’m never going back there. I want you to know that. I don’t have any problem with you, so you shouldn’t have a problem with me. If T-Man does something, and he might, it wasn’t me. I’m not hanging out with him anymore.”
“What do you mean that T-Man might do something?”
The boy leaned in. “He’s crazy, man. He thinks you tricked us, like with a special effect. An illusion. But it wasn’t fake. I could smell it. I heard it breathing. It looked right at me.” He closed his eyes as if he could stop from seeing it. “I told him he shouldn’t mess with you. I want you to remember that. I warned him, and now I’m warning you. So, don’t turn that thing loose on me.”
Peter nodded, more confused than anything.
“I’ll think about it. Umm . . . thanks for the heads up. About T-Man, I mean.”
The boy’s face sagged with relief. He shook Peter’s hand. “He has a pistol he showed us, stolen from a house he broke into this summer. He brings it to school sometimes. Keep it in mind.”
Peter watched as the boy headed toward the gymnasium. He wondered if the gun had a setting that could convert delinquents to productive citizens. That would be an interesting function! But it sounded more like what Dante discovered was a scare-the-hell-out-of-you app.
Peter kept his eyes open for T-Man the rest of the day. He felt like he was in a prison movie. At any moment, T-Man could come up behind him with a shiv, probably a spoon he sharpened in the metal shop, and shove it into his kidney. T-Man wasn’t in 3rd period Geography, though, which wasn’t unusual. Peter figured he saw him in class less than half the time. He wished he did know T-Man’s parole officer. That was a lucky guess on his part. Peter would call him with the pot information on the spot. Better to get T-Man out of the picture before he did anything. The high school would be better without him, and so would the middle school.
Christy met him in the hallway on his way to 4th period. She wore her Pom uniform today, which generally Peter thought didn’t do any of the girls any good. The school had backed off of the short, short skirt look this year and gone for sort of a retro ’50s thing that dropped the hem lines below the knees, and no matter how hard the girls worked at them, they seemed tailored for people without human figures. Christy, however, somehow pulled the outfit together. Bright red skirt. White, long-sleeved, sweater top with a matching red letter “L” sown in the middle, topped with a red collar. It might be because she wore clothes confidently, which fit her personality, and that when she smiled, most people weren’t focused on her clothes.
“Do you have an illuminating moment from Of Mice and Men for class? I tried when Lennie talked to Crooks in the barn and Crooks said that all ranch hands had the same dream, but that sounds lame to me, and I have no idea how I’m supposed to turn that into an entire paper. I can’t stretch my two-hundred word thought into a thousand-word essay.”
The illuminating moment Peter had right then was that he now completely understood a concept Mrs. Pickerel had tried to teach a couple of weeks ago when they were reading poetry: “cognitive dissonance,” which she’d explained as being the time when two realities you believed in clashed. On one hand, Christy Sanders wanted to know about their English assignment, a perfectly valid reality that Peter normally would participate in without question. On the other hand, he now possessed a strange weapon with capabilities he’d never heard of that he increasingly was beginning to believe was not a secret government project, but an alien one instead, and that it didn’t matter one fig what was the illuminating moment for him in his reading of Of Mice and Men.
Christy added, “I could go with Candy deciding that he should have shot his own dog. I might be able to get four-hundred words out of that. After all, I’d have to spend a page or so talking about symbolism and foreshadowing.”
Still not thinking about Steinbeck, Peter was happy that he didn’t feel like apologizing to Christy as he had earlier, and the blush reflex hadn’t kicked in. Then he realized she was waiting for an answer.
He said, “Did you read the Robert Burns poem Mrs. Pickerel assigned? I’ll bet I could get a thousand words by claiming that illuminated the novel for me. Throw a poetry quote at English teachers, and they go all weak in the knees. I can probably get her to swoon if I say, ‘Wee, sleeket, cowran, tim’rous beastie’ with a Scottish accent.”
Christy laughed. “Was that truly an ‘illuminating moment’ for you?”
Peter was impressed he’d come up with this much, but he couldn’t sustain it, even at the cost of not making her laugh again.
“I don’t know. I just plowed through the reading, most of it during lunch before class. I probably didn’t give the book a fair chance. I know how to write a thousand word essay that sounds sincere, though. I think it’s my super power.”
“You’ll have to show me how to do that when I start my paper,” she said. “At least you didn’t SparkNote your way through the book. It’s only a hundred pages long. One of the senior Poms told the sophomore squad to read SparkNotes so they could both stay eligible and make the extra-long practices they’d scheduled for us.”
Lots of people Peter knew read the SparkNotes instead of reading the book, which was why Mrs. Pickerel always made up test questions that only folks who’d read the book would get. She was ingenious that way. Peter had heard that she’d given a one-question quiz on The Natural to her A.P. Lit class last year, which was, “What happens at Roy’s last at bat?” About half the class described—some of them with genuine poetry—how Roy’s home run shattered a field light, and that he ran the bases in a cascade of golden sparks from above. Of course, that was how the movie ended, not the book, where Roy Hobbs struck out. “Say it ain’t so, Roy,” said a character in the book.
