Mystic River (4 page)

The same kids who’d been with him on the front page started calling him “freak boy” within a week at school.
Dave would look in their faces and see a spite he wasn’t sure they understood any better than he did. Dave’s mother said they probably got it from their parents and don’t you pay them any mind, Davey, they’ll get bored and forget all about it and be your friends next year.

Dave would nod and wonder if there was something about him—some mark on his face that he couldn’t see—which made everyone want to hurt him. Like those guys in the car. Why had they picked him? How had they known he’d climb in that car, and that Jimmy and Sean wouldn’t? Looking back, that’s how it seemed to Dave. Those men (and he knew their names, or at least the names they’d called each other, but he couldn’t bring himself to use them) had
known
Sean and Jimmy wouldn’t have gotten into that car without a fight. Sean would have run for his house, screaming, probably, and Jimmy—they’d have had to knock Jimmy cold to get him inside. The Big Wolf had even said it a few hours into their drive: “You see that kid in the white T-shirt? Way he looked at me, no real fear, no nothing? Kid’s gonna fuck someone up someday, not lose a night of sleep over it.”

His partner, the Greasy Wolf, had smiled. “I like a little fight.”

Big Wolf shook his head. “He’d bite your thumb off just pulling him into the car. Clean off, the little fucker.”

It helped to give them dopey names: Big Wolf and Greasy Wolf. It helped Dave to see them as creatures, wolves hidden under costumes of human skin, and Dave himself as a character in a story: the Boy Taken by Wolves. The Boy Who Escaped and made his way through the damp woods to an Esso station. The Boy Who’d Remained Calm and Crafty, always looking for a way out.

In school, though, he was just the Boy Who Got Stolen, and everyone let their imaginations run as to what had happened during those four lost days. In the bathroom one morning, a seventh-grader named Junior McCaffery sidled up to the urinal beside Dave and said, “Did they make you
suck it?” and all his seventh-grader friends had started laughing and making kissing noises.

Dave zipped his fly with trembling fingers, his face red, and turned to face Junior McCaffery. He tried to put a mean look in his eyes, and Junior frowned and slapped him across the face.

You could hear the sound of it echo in the bathroom. One seventh-grader gasped like a girl.

Junior said, “You got something to say, queer? Huh? You want me to hit you again, faggot?”

“He’s crying,” someone said.

“He
is
,” Junior McCaffery shrieked, and Dave’s tears fell harder. He felt the numbness in his face turn into a sting, but it wasn’t the pain that bothered him. Pain had never bothered him all that much, and he’d never cried from it, not even when he’d crashed his bike and sliced his ankle open on the pedal as he fell, and that had taken seven stitches to close. It was the range of emotions he could feel pouring from the boys in the bathroom that cut into him. Hate, disgust, anger, contempt. All directed at him. He didn’t understand why. He’d never bothered anyone his whole life. Yet they hated him. And the hate made him feel orphaned. It made him feel putrid and guilty and tiny, and he wept because he didn’t want to feel that way.

They all laughed at his tears. Junior danced around for a moment, his face twisted up in rubbery contortions as he aped Dave’s blubbering. When Dave finally got it under control, reduced it to a few sniffles, Junior slapped him again, the same place, just as hard.

“Look at me,” Junior said as Dave felt a fresh burst of tears explode from his eye sockets. “Look at me.”

Dave looked up at Junior, hoping to see compassion or humanity or even pity—he’d take pity—in his face, but all he saw was an angry, laughing glare.

“Yeah,” Junior said, “you sucked it.”

He feinted another slap at Dave and Dave dropped his
head and cringed, but Junior was walking away with his friends, all of them laughing as they left the bathroom.

Dave remembered something Mr. Peters, a friend of his mother’s who slept over occasionally, once said to him: “Two things you never take from a man—his spit or his slap. They’re both worse than a punch, and a man does that to you, you try to kill him if you can.”

Dave sat down on the bathroom floor and wished he had that in himself—the will to kill someone. He’d start with Junior McCaffery, he supposed, and move on to Big Wolf and Greasy Wolf, if he ever ran into them again. But, truth was, he just didn’t think he could. He didn’t know why people were mean to other people. He didn’t understand. He didn’t understand.

After the bathroom incident, word seemed to come down from on high or something and spread through the school, so that everyone from the third grade on up had heard about what Junior McCaffery did to Dave and how Dave had responded. A judgment was arrived at, and Dave found that even the few classmates who’d been his sort-of friends after he’d first returned to school started treating him like a leper.

Not all of them muttered “Homo” when he passed in the hall or used their tongues to push against the insides of their cheeks. In fact, a good number of Dave’s fellow students just ignored him. But in a way, that was worse. He felt marooned by the silence.

If they ran into each other as they left their houses, Jimmy Marcus would sometimes walk silently alongside him to school because it would have been awkward
not
to, and he’d say, “Hey,” when he passed him in the hall or bumped into him on the line heading into class. Dave could see some odd mix of pity and embarrassment in Jimmy’s face those times their eyes met, as if Jimmy wanted to say something but couldn’t put it into words—Jimmy, at the best of times, never having been much of a talker unless he was suddenly itching with some insane idea to jump down on train tracks or steal a car. But it felt to Dave as if their friendship (and
Dave wasn’t sure, in truth, that they’d ever
really
been friends; he remembered with a small shame all those times he’d had to press his companionship on Jimmy) had died when Dave climbed in that car and Jimmy had stayed planted on the street.

Jimmy, as it turned out, wouldn’t be in school with Dave much longer, so even those walks together could eventually be avoided. At school, Jimmy had always hung out with Val Savage, a small, chimp-brained psycho who’d been kept back twice and could turn into this spinning, whirling dust storm of violence that scared the shit out of just about everyone, teachers and students alike. The joke about Val (though never spoken if he was around) was that his parents didn’t save for his college fund, they saved for his bail fund. Even before Dave had gotten in that car, Jimmy had always hung with Val once they reached school. Sometimes he’d allow Dave to tag along with them as they raided the cafeteria kitchen for snacks or found a new roof to climb, but after the car Dave was even shut out of that. When he wasn’t hating him for his sudden exile, Dave noticed that the dark cloud that sometimes seemed to hover over Jimmy had become a permanent thing, like a reverse halo. Jimmy just seemed older lately, sadder.

He’d finally steal a car, though. It was almost a year after their first attempt on Sean’s street, and it got Jimmy expelled from the Looey & Dooey and bused halfway across the city to the Carver School so he could find out what life was like for a white kid from East Bucky in a mostly black school. Val would get bused along with him, though, and Dave heard that the two of them soon became the terror of the Carver, two white kids so crazy they didn’t know how to be scared.

The car was a convertible. Dave heard rumors that it belonged to a friend of one of the teachers, though he never found out which one. Jimmy and Val stole it off the school lot while the teachers and their spouses and friends were having a year-end party in the faculty lounge after school.
Jimmy was driving, and he and Val took it for a hell of a spin around Buckingham, beeping the horn and waving to girls, and gunning the engine until a police cruiser spotted them and they ended up totaling the car against a Dumpster behind the Zayres in Rome Basin. Val twisted an ankle getting out of the car, and Jimmy, already halfway up a fence that led to a vacant lot, came back to help him, Dave always seeing it in his mind as part war movie—the valiant soldier going back to rescue his fallen buddy, bullets flying all around them (though Dave doubted the cops had been shooting, it made it seem cooler). The cops got both of them right there, and they spent a night in Juvie. They were allowed to finish sixth grade, since there were only a few days left in the year, and then their families were told they had to look elsewhere for the boys’ schooling.

Dave hardly saw Jimmy after that, maybe once or twice a year until they reached their teens. Dave’s mother wouldn’t let him leave the house anymore, except to go back and forth from school. She was convinced those men were still out there, waiting, driving that car that smelled of apples, and homing in on Dave like heat-seeking missiles.

Dave knew they weren’t. They were wolves, after all, and wolves sniffed the night for the nearest, lamest prey, and then they hunted it down. They visited his mind more often now, though, the Big Wolf and the Greasy Wolf, along with visions of what they’d done to him. The visions rarely attacked Dave’s dreams, but they slipped up on him in the terrible quiet of his mother’s apartment, in the long stretches of silence during which he’d try to read comic books or watch TV or stare out the window at Rester Street. They came, and Dave would try to shut them out by closing his eyes, and trying not to remember that Big Wolf’s name had been Henry and Greasy Wolf’s name had been George.

Henry and George, a voice would scream along with the rushing of visions in Dave’s head. Henry and George, Henry and George, Henry and George, you little shit.

And Dave would tell the voice in his head that he was not
a little shit. He was the Boy Who’d Escaped the Wolves. And sometimes to keep the visions at bay, he’d replay his escape in his head, detail by detail—the crack he’d noticed by the hinge in the bulkhead door, the sound of their car pulling away as they went out for a round of drinks, the screw with the missing head he’d used to pry the crack open wider and wider until the rusty hinge snapped and a chunk of wood in the shape of a knife blade cracked away with it. He’d come out of the bulkhead, this Boy Who Was Smart, and he’d scrambled straight off into the woods and followed the late afternoon sun to the Esso station a mile away. It was a shock to see it—that round blue-and-white sign already lit for the night, even though there was still some daylight left. It stabbed something in Dave, the neon white. It made him drop to his knees at the place where the woods ended and the ancient gray tarmac began. That’s how Ron Pierrot, the owner of the station, found him: on his knees and staring up at the sign. Ron Pierrot was a thin man with hands that looked like they could snap a lead pipe, and Dave often wondered what would have happened if the Boy Who Escaped the Wolves had actually been a character in a movie. Why, he and Ron would have bonded and Ron would have taught him all the things fathers teach their sons, and they would have saddled up their horses and loaded up their rifles and gone off on endless adventures. They would have had a great old time, Ron and the Boy. They would have been heroes, out in the wild, conquering all those wolves.

I
N SEAN’S DREAM
, the street moved. He looked into the open doorway of the car that smelled like apples, and the street gripped his feet and slid him toward it. Dave was inside, scrunched up on the far side of the seat against the door, his mouth open in a silent howl, as the street carried Sean toward the car. All he could see in the dream was that open door and the backseat. He couldn’t see the guy who’d looked like a cop. He couldn’t see his companion who’d sat
in the front passenger seat. He couldn’t see Jimmy, though Jimmy had been right beside him the whole time. He could just see that seat and Dave and the door and the trash on the floor. That, he realized, had been the alarm bell he hadn’t even realized he’d heard—there had been trash on the floor. Fast-food wrappers and crinkled-up bags of chips and beer and soda cans, Styrofoam coffee cups and a dirty green T-shirt. Only after he’d woken up and considered the dream did he realize that the floor of the backseat in his dream had been identical to the floor of the car in real life, and that he hadn’t remembered the trash until now. Even when the cops had been in his house and asked him to think—really think—about any detail he might have forgotten to tell them, it hadn’t occurred to him that the back of the car had been dirty, because he hadn’t remembered it. But in his dream, it had come back to him, and that—more than anything—had been why he’d realized, without realizing it, somehow, that something was wrong about the “cop,” his “partner,” and their car. Sean had never seen the backseat of a cop car in real life, not up close, but a part of him knew that it wouldn’t be filled with trash. Maybe underneath all the trash had lain half-eaten apple cores, and that’s why the car smelled as it had.

His father would come into his bedroom a year after Dave’s abduction to tell him two things.

The first was that Sean had been accepted to Latin School, and would begin seventh grade there in September. His father said he and Sean’s mother were real proud. Latin was where you went if you wanted to make something out of yourself.

The second thing he said to Sean, almost as an afterthought, when he was halfway out the door:

“They caught one of them, Sean.”

“What?”

“One of the guys who took Dave. They caught him. He’s dead. Suicide in his cell.”

“Yeah?”

His father looked back at him. “Yeah. You can stop having nightmares now.”

But Sean said, “What about the other one?”

“The guy who got caught,” his father said, “he told the police the other one was dead, too. Died in a car accident last year. Okay?” His father looked at him in such a way that Sean knew this was the last discussion they’d have on the subject. “So wash up for dinner, pal.”

His father left and Sean sat on his bed, the mattress lumpy where he’d placed his new baseball glove, a ball wrapped inside, thick red rubber bands wrapped tightly around the leather.