The November Criminals (19 page)

“I don’t know, man. Because I was pissed off at you. I mean at her, at her. I mean at her. Just about everything. About. Well, you know.” The beads rattled, but she stayed calm.

“Don’t call her that. I don’t even call her that. Maybe you can call her a bitch. But not the C-word. All right? Is that going to be a
problem
for you? How did you cut your head?” I fingered the sticky, tight, wiry comb of sutures, and the thrillingly bald region around them. I hadn’t
seen
the wound. You need two mirrors to see the back of your head. I didn’t even have one.

“From a piano. I cut it on a piano,” I continued.

“What do you mean?” She shifted her eyebrows into the double uptick of incredulity.

“From the keyboard?” I said, suddenly interrogative. She has that effect on me.

“Okeydokey. From a
piano
. Pianos are like
known
for their deadliness. Are you coming back to school soon?” I nodded and she sighed again. “Okay. Okay. You’re probably all doped up. I have to go. And I can’t believe you called my mother the C-word. It’s totally unconscionable to do that. I have a French test.”

“Okay, man,” I mumbled. I’d been so shocked by her appearance that I had no time to feel happiness, and now that she was leaving I was too shocked to feel unhappiness. So I tipped her a salute, two fingers, über-professional. She gave me one of her looks. Like she was a grizzled old gunnery sergeant, and I was a green recruit. Exasperated and amused. Then she returned my salute.

“Digger,” I muttered.

“What? What do you want?” She was poised in the doorway, ready to go to war.

“They’re showing that movie. Like part two? At the Camelot?
The Sorrow and the Pity
. Do you wanna go?”

“Are you asking me out?” This is her standard response. Whenever I suggest we do anything. And my standard response is, “Only in your wet ones.”

This time, I did not say that, but rather: “Yeah. It’s in November, according to the calendar. Near the end of November. We already missed a showing.” She started gnawing on her thumb knuckle. I looked her in the face. I didn’t feel ashamed, although according to our agreement, I should have. But fuck the agreement. I was in the hospital. And if Digger could bend her principles enough to break her vow of silence, I could say,
Yeah
. She gave me a nod, almost imperceptible, frightened, except she’s never frightened. And strode out, back to Kennedy and her French exam. She maintains a ninety-nine average in all classes. I was confident she was going to ace it.
Andromaque, je pense à vous!
That’s from some poem she had to read in French. (You are a classy motherfucker, Addison Schacht!) Except Digger’s fifty times better than Andromache. Who was, after all, a consummate Trojan.

“I’m still not talking to you, by the way,” Digger shouted from the hall. Other than that, I don’t have much to say about hospitals.

XVII
.

T
HEY DISCHARGED ME
the fourth evening, Wednesday evening. Took me out to my father’s car in a wheelchair, which humiliated me. Then we went home. My room seemed strange. I slept, though, which as I said is rare for me. I slept well that night, and the next night, and the next, and the next. Nothing had changed! All the dumb artsy objects still cluttered our house. I don’t know what I was expecting. Some visitation. Who the fuck knows? My father said I didn’t have to go back to school until I felt “up to it,” as he put it. He told me he would write me a note. I ended up missing the rest of that week and all of the next. I didn’t do much on my unforeseen vacation, though. I didn’t sell weed. My pager’s memory was maxed out, so that every new page coming erased the previously oldest one. Some ancient cultures used to think that’s how birth and death work. Over the centuries, that idea was refined into what we call the transmigration of souls. I lay around like a sack of shit. I reread book six of the
Aeneid
. (Holy fuck!) My father kept coming down to check on me. He also asked me if I had enjoyed
Rage
, which I told him I did. He had gotten über into it. I looked through college mail, which had started arriving last year and had continued. Those sumptuous brochures.

My father cooked for me, the same meal every night. Bitter salad and scrambled eggs. Impressive, for a man who never eats. My father is not the best dinner companion. He’s silent and he chews with his mouth open. Two traits you’d think would not occur in the same character. He
did
refrain from giving his suicide-by-bus speech. Mark that in the positive column. And he did not try to get all buddy-buddy with me, to work up some fake friendship between us, to compensate for his usual neglect. You have no idea how grateful I was for that. I mean, it would have just been
impossible
. If you see what I mean.

I still had some business matters to deal with, after my discharge. The disappearance of my money had made these considerably easier. I figured Mr. Broadus had kept it. Otherwise I would have heard something about it from my father. That, ladies and gentlemen, would have been a real fucking disaster. My pager, my safe, even the huge amount of Biggie bags and the scale I could explain away, as long as they were not discovered all at the same time. But eighteen grand? That’s a major piece of evidence. I spent a bad couple of days biting my nails over it. What could I do, though? It was completely out of my hands. It’s not like my father would turn me in to the cops. He might take away my car. But, like I said, I’m not a huge fan of driving. So I stopped worrying. Maybe Mr. Broadus would keep it, as compensation for my idiocy. I had invaded his life. Or launched a lateral assault on it, for the worst reasons. Maybe he thought I owed him. I did. Maybe he’d buy a new car, something other than that age-dulled blue sedan. He never showed up to accuse me, and my father never found out about it.

The first of the remaining to-dos was getting rid of my industrial-size supply of Biggie-brand bags. This was harder than you might think. I had a case of them that I bought at a bulk store with Digger. We’d gone as a joke. I saw this palletload of Biggies, and it was a hundred bucks or something. I’d been using it for two years and had made this tiny dent. The columned boxes, blue and green, overladen with praiseful copy, line the whole left side of my business closet. So I had to sneak them out in leaf bags. In six loads. I did this in the middle of my first night back, rushing back and forth across our backyard to the spot on the alley side of our fence where trash is left for pickup. I was barefoot in the cold. You get, if you’re a D.C. resident, a huge green container for regular garbage and a smaller blue one for recycling. Our green bin was already full. So I just left the bags in kind of a mound at its base, hoping for the best. The chill stung the shaved spot on my scalp, and made the healing lips of the wound pucker. My scale I left that same night on the curb in front of some random house a few blocks away with a note:
Perfectly good scale
. I put on my shoes and coat to make that trip. It had been taken when I looked the next day. I just chucked my plastic tub of orange peel scraps. That was easy. This left only my pager, my weed, and my gun.

My pager. My line of communication. It had sat at my hip for most of my adolescence, at this point. You could say it was the most human thing about me. Through it and through it alone I had traffic with my species. Lacking the pager, my existence looked doubtful. Which may be another reason I’m going on at such length. Getting rid of it was the easiest thing I’d ever done, though I waited, I admit, until the Sunday after my discharge to do it. I wrapped it in an old sock and put it in the garbage. Then I took it out of the garbage and dropped it into the drain of our sink. I checked to see if my father was nearby. He has a real neurosis about the garbage disposal. He’s always fishing things out of it, like eggshells, which he claims are “bad for the machinery.” But he was not nearby. I had no idea where he was. So I shoved the pager down into the drain, down to where I could feel the block-blunt, slimy blades against the back of my hand, and then I pulled my forearm out and with a grope flipped the under-sink switch, letting water flow into the drain from the faucet. That’s another thing my father claims you have to do, to lubricate the crushing process or whatever. Some beetle-crunching sounds came out, under the circular groan of the blades, as the disposal ate my pager. “Is there a
spoon
caught?” my father shouted from his bedroom when he heard the noise. He has good ears.

And you know who was paging me, right when this happened? For the first time in a few days? You guessed it. Noel Eleuthere Bradley. The page arrived just as I shoved it down. Symbolic coherence, right? Oh, I hesitated. Not from uncertainty. To enjoy it more. Noel I’ll never be able to feed into a wood chipper, the way he deserves. Too big! Too corpulent! Even filleting him into small enough steaks to get into a chopping or grinding machine would cost too much effort. So it’s into the garbage disposal with
you
, you fat, grinning, lying shithead!

I have no idea how much experience with drugs you have, ladies and gentlemen. There is a hierarchy of retention. Losing coke or heroin is a tragedy. Losing acid or mushrooms or ecstasy is a major party foul, a depressing albeit bearable event. Losing weed does not rank. Except, of course, for the man who sells it. Who knows it, sells it, who wants to protect it, to see it blossom into pleasure and vapidity. I love my weed. Even though I knew this tag end of the package would be the last, I still cared about its fate. If I’d had enough friends to throw a party, I would have had a last smoke with them. If Digger and I had been on easier terms at the moment, we could have gotten
destroyed
. I theorized about smoking it myself. Just over periods of time. It would last, I extrapolated, until the middle of November. I couldn’t actually, though. I didn’t want to, and when I tried to force myself I just chuckled. I couldn’t throw it away, though. It’s the same with food. You don’t want to throw it away. You want to see it used. I tabled the issue until Friday, nine full days of laziness after I’d been let out, when I woke from a real marathon nap ablaze with what I thought was an über-genius idea. You find that alarming? I don’t know what to say. You’ll just have to trust me. I marched upstairs, up to the second floor, and opened my father’s door.

He was standing there dressed in his Sherlock Holmes costume. I was stunned; I thought he was mocking me, until I remembered that I’d forgotten that this was the night of the October Gala at the Cochrane. The second Friday in October, remember? Because they’re too cool to have it on real Halloween? Which meant that Dr. Watson was either already in our house or soon to be. I wanted to get this exchange out of the way before she arrived.

“Ah, Addison Schacht, I presuuuuuume!” my father declaimed with a weird plummy quasi-English accent, and stared at me through his magnifying glass. I don’t remember Sherlock Holmes ever saying that. I think it was the Stanley and Livingston guy who said it, though I can never remember which is which. I whipped out the bag of weed I planned to offer him.
That
was my brilliant idea.

It came to me in a dream-free sleep. So it had to be sort of valuable, right? I mean, because it wasn’t born out of any romantic self-torture. I just thought of it and did it. No discussion, no plan. “Like maybe you and Fatima would
want
some,” I explained, waving the bag. “For the party. Like after the party. You’re
going
to the party, right?” I’d put fresh orange peels in with the weed. It was a fragment under two ounces, first-rate stuff. Red-haired, dense, tender buds. Good weed is nice-looking. Comforting-looking. Six feet of air between us. His left eye warped by the lens. Beneath his nails, at his cuticles, glittering clay. Ineradicable deposits. My fake smile hurt my maxillary muscles.

“Addison. Where did you
get
that?” He’d lowered the lens from his face, and his shoulders sank in despair. He was looking at the floor, just like he’d done when he questioned me in the hospital.

“I got it from a friend. I was like holding it for a friend. It’s okay, though. You can have it. I thought you might want some. It’s okay, Dad, really.”

He tapped the magnifying glass against his lowered chin. The high collar of the costume shirt pushed its hard wings into his flesh, wrinkling his slight wattle. “Addison, while I have smoked dope in the past—”

I cut him off. “No, really, Dad. It’s like not a problem. Okay?”

My cheeks had heated up and my sinuses began to burn. A sudden fear that I was going to weep made me grind my teeth.

“Can’t you just
tell
me what’s going on?” he asked. “Can’t you tell me? Is this related to the conversation we had at the hospital? I feel as though it is. I feel as though it is and you’re not
telling
me.” His voice was tight, higher than normal. “Where did you get the
drugs?”
That word again. And I had just shown him it was weed, and he had recognized it as weed.

“There’s nothing going on, okay? I promise. I don’t even know what you
mean
. It’s just weed. Okay? It’s not even anything
bad
. Everyone smokes it. It doesn’t even do any
harm.”

“Addison,” he groaned, and hid his eyes with his free hand. He kept them covered for what felt like a full minute. His lips whitened and reddened as he pressed his mouth into a kinked prim demi-smirk. I’d never seen a similar expression appear on his face. I thought he might actually scream at me, might call me out for being a secretive little shit. This thought lifted my spirits. I don’t know why.

But all he said, after unshading his eyes, was: “Can you at least tell me why you threw out all those plastic bags? There were six garbage bags full of perfectly good plastic bags. I found them where you left them with the trash. Were you just not going to
tell
me? We could have
used
them. Some of them.” He spoke as though in visceral pain. I
wanted
to tell him, for a second. To tell him everything. What would have been the point, though? My face was even hotter. My eyelids trembled, the muscles at the top of my cheeks quivered, and horror at the tears I knew were coming constricted my throat.

And then I was saying, “It’s like
all right
, Dad, like it’s all right. I just like don’t think it would be a very good
idea
to tell you.” With a spurt of shame I started weeping, loud and windy sobs. Standing leaning at the threshold of my parents’ bedroom and crying, palming my face. My father wearing his costume, the deerstalker slipping back from the crown of his head. God, it was painful. The crying itself, I mean. Humiliating. Crying at my age is the ultimate symptom of dicklessness. And why is
crying
painful? What sense does
that
make? Though it does lighten your burden, I guess. The pain didn’t subside. He put his arms around me, which is something I can’t even remember the last time he did, and I stood there shuddering and choking back my cries. Of what? I have no idea. I waited until I was calmer to break away, we exchanged a timid nod, and then I ran downstairs and lay in my cold bed until I heard Fatima arrive. They made less noise than usual, getting ready to go. My father was not cracking his desperate jokes. While they were at the party, I slipped the gun out of my now-empty safe and into his kiln. He had it going then, most of the time, attempting I think to re-create his Greek urn, the one that had exploded in the first days of the fall. A real spasm of productivity. And when I went to retrieve it the next morning, as he and Fatima were sleeping off the champagne and my weed, I saw it had been melted and warped into a thumby fist of metal. No longer recognizable as the work of human hands.

That night I could not sleep. Spare me your theories about my wanting to open a new chapter in relations with my father. Wanting things to be different. People are what they are, and wishing them to change is foolish. And insulting. I was not even thinking about
him
, anyway. I was thinking about something Mr. Broadus had said to me. About Kevin’s having a pager. About there being certain “indications” that he had destroyed, before the police could search Kevin’s room. You have to understand that what I’m about to say I mean as a strange compliment to Kevin.
He was a drug dealer
. A fellow of the craft. Maybe he was less of an asshole than I am. I don’t know. I didn’t know him. I do know, however, what all the evidence suggests. So I felt even worse. His death was my fault, somehow, right? Because we both sold weed? I know it’s confusing. Narcissistic, even. But I wouldn’t let go of it. That whole long night. Lying in my bed, hands folded on my chest, forcing myself into guilt. Maybe getting rid of all my business equipment had freed up my mind to focus on stupid shit. I even got a little proud of my guilt. I was a sinner, and therefore all the sin of the world touched on me. I didn’t think of it in those terms. I just kept forcing myself to think of Kevin’s face and then forcing myself to feel awful. You can do that, you know, with enough practice. And then the awfulness wouldn’t come on command, and that’s when it got so ridiculous that I jumped out of bed and smashed my knee into my night table, which knocked over my lamp. The bulb flashed blue as it died.