If It Bleeds Page 8

  A few kids groaned theatrically, but most of us applauded, and no one clapped harder than I did. I would not be leaving my love behind. To my adolescent mind, it seemed like fate. And in a way, it was.

  * * *

  I also left Gates Falls Middle behind and started the ninth grade at Gates Falls High. That was where I met Mike Ueberroth, known then—as he is in his current career as a backup catcher for the Baltimore Orioles—as U-Boat.

  Jocks and more scholarly types didn’t mix much at Gates (I imagine it’s true at most high schools, because jocks tend to be clannish), and if it hadn’t been for Arsenic and Old Lace, I doubt if we ever would have become friends. U-Boat was a junior and I was just a lowly freshman, which made becoming friends even more unlikely. But we did, and we remain friends to this day, although I see him far less often.

  Many high schools have a Senior Play, but that wasn’t the case at Gates. We had two plays each year, and although they were put on by the Drama Club, all students could audition. I knew the story because I’d seen the movie version on TV one rainy Saturday afternoon. I enjoyed it, so I tried out. Mike’s girlfriend, a Drama Club member, talked him into trying out, and he ended up playing the homicidal Jonathan Brewster. I was cast as his scurrying sidekick, Dr. Einstein. That part was played by Peter Lorre in the film, and I tried my best to sound like him, sneering “Yas! Yas!” before every line. It wasn’t a very good imitation, but I have to tell you that the audience ate it up. Small towns, you know.

  So that’s how U-Boat and I became friends, and it’s also how I found out what had really happened to Kenny Yanko. The Rev turned out to be wrong and the newspaper obituary turned out to be right. It really had been an accident.

  During the break between Act 1 and Act 2 of our dress rehearsal, I was at the Coke machine, which had eaten up my seventy-five cents without giving me anything in return. U-Boat left his girlfriend, came over, and gave the machine’s upper right corner a hard whack with the palm of one hand. A can of Coke promptly fell into the retrieval tray.

  “Thanks,” I said.

  “No prob. You just have to remember to hit it right there, in that corner.”

  I said I would do that, although I doubted I could hit it with the same force.

  “Hey, listen, I heard you had some trouble with that Yanko kid. True?”

  There was no sense denying it—Billy and both girls had blabbed—and really no reason to at this late date. So I said yeah, it was true.

  “You want to know how he died?”

  “I’ve heard about a hundred different stories. Have you got another one?”

  “I’ve got the truth, little buddy. You know who my dad is, don’t you?”

  “Sure.” The Gates Falls police force consisted of fewer than two dozen uniformed officers, the Chief of Police, and one detective. That was Mike’s father, George Ueberroth.

  “I’ll tell you about Yanko if you let me hit your soda.”

  “Okay, but don’t backwash.”

  “Do I look like an animal? Give it to me, you fuckin cheesecake.”

  “Yas, yas,” I said, doing Peter Lorre. He snickered, took the can, downed half of it, then belched. Down the hall, his girlfriend stuck a finger in her mouth and mimed puking. Love in high school is very sophisticated.

  “My dad was the one who investigated,” U-Boat said, handing the can back to me, “and a couple of days after it happened I heard him talking to Sergeant Polk from the house. That’s what they call the cop-shop. They were out on the porch drinking beers, and the Sarge said something about Yanko doing the chokey-strokey. Dad laughed and said he’d heard it called a Beverly Hills necktie. The Sarge said it was probably the only way the poor kid could get off, with a pizza-face like that. My dad goes yeah, sad but true. Then he said what bothered him was the hair. Said it bothered the coroner, too.”

  “What about his hair?” I asked. “And what’s a Beverly Hills necktie?”

  “I looked it up on my phone. It’s slang for autoerotic asphyxiation.” He said the words carefully. With pride, almost. “You hang yourself and beat off while you’re passing out.” He saw my expression and shrugged. “I don’t make the news, Dr. Einstein, I just report it. I guess it’s supposed to be an extremely big thrill, but I think I’ll pass.”

  I thought I would, too. “What about the hair?”

  “I asked my dad about that. He didn’t want to tell me, but since I’d heard the rest, he eventually did. He said half of Yanko’s hair had turned white.”

  * * *

  I thought about that a lot. On the one hand, if I had ever considered the idea of Mr. Harrigan rising from his grave to extract vengeance on my behalf (and sometimes at night when I couldn’t sleep, the idea, however ridiculous, would creep into my mind), U-Boat’s story seemed to put paid to those thoughts. Thinking about Kenny Yanko in his closet, pants around his ankles and a rope around his neck, face turning purple as he did the old chokey-strokey, I could actually feel sorry for him. What a stupid, undignified way to die. “As the result of a tragic accident,” the Sun obituary had said, and that was more accurate than any of us kids could have known.

  But on the other hand, there was that thing U-Boat’s dad had said about Kenny’s hair. I couldn’t help wondering what might cause such a thing to happen. What Kenny might have seen in that closet with him as he swam toward unconsciousness while pulling his poor old pudding for everything he was worth.

  Finally I went to my best counselor, the Internet. There I found a difference of opinion. Some scientists proclaimed that there was absolutely no evidence that shock can turn someone’s hair white. Other scientists said yas, yas, it really could happen. That a sudden shock could kill the melanocyte stem cells that determine hair color. One article I read said that actually happened to Thomas More and Marie Antoinette before they were executed. Another article threw shade on that, saying it was just a legend. In the end, it was like something Mr. Harrigan sometimes said about buying stocks: you pays your money and you takes your choice.

  Little by little, these questions and concerns faded, but I’d be lying if I told you that Kenny Yanko ever completely left my mind, then or now. Kenny Yanko in his closet with a rope around his neck. Maybe not losing consciousness before he could loosen the rope, after all. Kenny Yanko perhaps seeing something—only perhaps—that had frightened him so badly that he had fainted. That he had actually been scared to death. In daylight, that seemed pretty stupid. At night, especially if the wind was high and making little screaming sounds around the eaves, not so much.

  * * *

  A FOR SALE sign from a Portland realty company went up in front of Mr. Harrigan’s house, and a few people came up to look at it. They were mostly the kind who fly in from Boston or New York (some of them on charter jets, probably). The kind who, like the business folks who had attended Mr. Harrigan’s funeral, pay extra to rent expensive cars. One pair was my first married gay couple, young but clearly well-to-do and just as clearly in love. They came in a snazzy BMW i8, held hands everywhere they went, and did a lot of wow and amazing over the grounds. Then they went away and didn’t come back.

  I saw a lot of these potential buyers because the estate (managed by Mr. Rafferty, of course) had kept Mrs. Grogan and Pete Bostwick on, and Pete hired me to help out with the grounds. He knew I was good with plants and was willing to work hard. I got twelve bucks an hour for ten hours a week, and with the big trust fund out of reach until I was in college, that money came in very handy.

  Pete called the potential buyers Richie Riches. Like the married couple in their rented BMW, they went wow but didn’t buy. Considering the house was on a dirt road and the views were only good, not great (no lakes, no mountains, no rockbound seacoast with a lighthouse), I wasn’t surprised. Neither were Pete or Mrs. Grogan. They nicknamed the house White Elephant Manor.

  * * *

  In the early winter of 2011, I used some of my gardening money to upgrade my first-generation phone to an iPhone 4. I swapped in my contac
ts that same night, and when I scrolled through them, I came across Mr. Harrigan’s number. Without thinking too much about it, I tapped it. Calling Mr. Harrigan, the screen said. I put the phone to my ear with a combination of dread and curiosity.

  There was no outgoing message from Mr. Harrigan. There was no robot voice telling me the number I’d called was no longer in service, and there was no ring. There was nothing but smooth silence. You could say my new phone was, heh-heh, as quiet as the grave.

  It was a relief.

  * * *

  I took biology my sophomore year, and there was Ms. Hargensen, as pretty as ever, but no longer my love. I had switched my affections to a more available (and age-appropriate) young lady. Wendy Gerard was a petite blond from Motton who had just gotten rid of her braces. Soon we were studying together, and going to movies together (when either my dad or her mom or dad would take us, that was), and making out in the back row. All that sticky kid stuff that’s so absolutely fine.

  My crush on Ms. Hargensen died a natural death, and that was a good thing, because it opened the way for friendship. I brought plants into class sometimes, and I helped out cleaning the lab, which we shared with the chem kids, after school on Friday afternoons.

  On one of those afternoons, I asked her if she believed in ghosts. “I suppose you don’t, being a scientist and all,” I said.

  She laughed. “I’m a teacher, not a scientist.”

  “You know what I mean.”

  “I suppose, but I’m still a good Catholic. That means I believe in God, and the angels, and the world of the spirit. Not so sure about exorcism and demonic possession, that seems pretty far out there, but ghosts? Let’s just say the jury’s out on that one. I’d certainly never attend a séance, or mess around with a Ouija board.”

  “Why not?”

  We were cleaning the sinks, something the chem kids were supposed to take care of before they left for the weekend but hardly ever did. Ms. Hargensen paused, smiling. Maybe a little embarrassed. “Science folks aren’t immune from superstition, Craig. I don’t believe in messing with what I don’t understand. My grandmother used to say a person shouldn’t call out unless they want an answer. I’ve always thought that was good advice. Why do you ask?”

  I wasn’t going to tell her Kenny was still on my mind. “I’m a Methodist myself, and we talk about the Holy Spirit. Only in the King James Bible, it’s the Holy Ghost. I guess I was thinking about that.”

  “Well, if ghosts exist,” she said, “I’ll bet not all of them are holy.”

  * * *

  I still wanted to be some kind of writer, although my ambition to write movies had cooled. Mr. Harrigan’s joke about the screenwriter and the starlet recurred to me every now and then, and had cast a bit of a pall over my show biz fantasies.

  For Christmas that year Dad got me a laptop, and I started to write short stories. They were okay line by line, but the lines of a story have to add up to a whole, and mine didn’t. The following year, the head of the English Department tapped me to edit the school paper, and I got the journalism bug, which has so far never left me. I don’t think it ever will. I believe you hear a click, not in your head but in your soul, when you find the place where you belong. You can ignore it, but really, why would you?

  I started getting my growth, and when I was a junior, after I had shown Wendy that yes, I had protection (it was U-Boat who actually bought the condoms), we left our virginity behind. I graduated third in my class (only 142, but still), and Dad bought me a Toyota Corolla (used, but still). I got accepted at Emerson, one of the best schools in the country for aspiring journalists, and I bet they would have given me at least a partial scholarship, but thanks to Mr. Harrigan I didn’t need it—lucky me.

  There were a few typical adolescent storms between fourteen and eighteen, but actually not that many—it was as if the nightmare with Kenny Yanko had in some way frontloaded a lot of my adolescent angst. Also, you know, I loved my dad, and it was just the two of us. I think that makes a difference.

  By the time I started college, I hardly ever thought of Kenny Yanko at all. But I still thought of Mr. Harrigan. Not surprising, considering that he had rolled out the academic red carpet for me. But there were certain days when I thought of him more often. If I was home on one of those days, I put flowers on his grave. If I wasn’t, Pete Bostwick or Mrs. Grogan did it for me.

  Valentine’s. Thanksgiving. Christmas. And my birthday.

  I always bought a dollar scratch ticket on those days, too. Sometimes I won a couple of bucks, sometimes five, and once I won fifty, but I never hit anything close to a jackpot. That was okay with me. If I had, I would have given the money to some charity. I bought the tickets to remember. Thanks to him, I was already rich.

  * * *

  Because Mr. Rafferty was generous with the trust fund, I had my own apartment by the time I was a junior at Emerson. Just a couple of rooms and a bathroom, but it was in Back Bay, where even small apartments aren’t cheap. By then I was working on the literary magazine. Ploughshares is one of the best in the country, and it always has a hotshot editor, but someone has to read the slush pile, and that was me. I liked the job, even though many of the submissions were on a par with a memorably, even classically bad poem called “10 Reasons Why I Hate My Mother.” It cheered me up to see how many strivers out there were worse at writing than I was. Probably that sounds mean. Probably it is.

  I was doing this chore one evening with a plate of Oreos by my left hand and a cup of tea by my right when my phone buzzed. It was Dad. He said he had some bad news and told me Ms. Hargensen had died.

  For a moment or two I couldn’t speak. The stack of slush pile poems and stories suddenly seemed very unimportant.

  “Craig?” Dad asked. “Are you still there?”

  “Yes. What happened?”

  He told me what he knew, and I found out more a couple of days later, when the Gates Falls Weekly Enterprise was published online. BELOVED TEACHERS KILLED IN VERMONT, the headline read. Victoria Hargensen Corliss had still been teaching biology at Gates; her husband was a math teacher at neighboring Castle Rock. They had decided to spend their spring vacation on a motorcycle trip across New England, staying at a different bed and breakfast every night. They were on their way back, in Vermont and almost to the New Hampshire border, when Dean Whitmore, thirty-one, of Waltham, Massachusetts, crossed the Route 2 centerline and struck them head-on. Ted Corliss was killed instantly. Victoria Corliss—the woman who had taken me into the teachers’ room after Kenny Yanko beat me up and gave me an illicit Aleve from her purse—had died on the way to the hospital.

  I’d interned at the Enterprise the previous summer, mostly emptying the trash but also writing some sports and movie reviews. When I called Dave Gardener, the editor, he gave me some background the Enterprise hadn’t printed. Dean Whitmore had been arrested a total of four times for OUI, but his father was a big hedge fund guy (how Mr. Harrigan had hated those upstarts), and high-priced lawyers had taken care of Whitmore the first three times. On the fourth occasion, after running into the side of a Zoney’s Go-Mart in Hingham, he had avoided jail but lost his license. He’d been driving without one and operating under the influence when he struck the Corliss motorcycle. “Stone drunk” was the way Dave put it.

  “He’ll get off with just a slap on the wrist,” Dave said. “Daddy will see to it. You watch and see.”

  “No way.” Just the idea of that happening made me feel sick to my stomach. “If your info’s correct, it’s a clear case of vehicular homicide.”

  “Watch and see,” he repeated.

  * * *

  The funerals were at Saint Anne’s, the church both Ms. Hargensen—it was impossible for me to think of her as Victoria—and her husband had attended for most of their lives, and the one they had been married out of. Mr. Harrigan had been rich, for years a mover and shaker in the American business world, but there were a lot more people at the funeral of Ted and Victoria Corliss. Saint Anne’s is a bi
g church, but that day it was standing room only, and if Father Ingersoll hadn’t had a microphone, he would have been inaudible beneath all the weeping. They had both been popular teachers, they were a love-match, and of course they had been young.

  So were most of the mourners. I was there; Regina and Margie were there; Billy Bogan was there; so was U-Boat, who’d made a special trip from Florida, where he was playing single-A ball. U-Boat and I sat together. He didn’t cry, exactly, but his eyes were red, and the big galoot was sniffling.

  “Did you ever have her for class?” I whispered.

  “Bio II,” he whispered back. “When I was a senior. Needed it to graduate. She gave me a gift C. And I was in her birdwatching club. She wrote me a recommendation on my college app.”

  She had written me one, too.

  “It’s just so wrong,” U-Boat said. “They weren’t doing nothing but taking a ride.” He paused. “And they were wearing helmets, too.”

  Billy looked about the same, but Margie and Regina looked older, almost adult in their makeup and big-girl dresses. They hugged me outside the church when it was over, and Regina said, “Remember how she took care of you the night you got beat up?”

  “Yes,” I said.

  “She let me use her hand cream,” Regina said, and began to cry all over again.

  “I hope they put that guy away forever,” Margie said fiercely.

  “Roger that,” U-Boat said. “Lock him up and throw away the key.”

  “They will,” I said, but of course I was wrong and Dave was right.

  * * *

  Dean Whitmore’s day in court came that July. He was given four years, sentence suspended if he agreed to go into a rehab and could pass random urine tests for those same four years. I was working for the Enterprise again, and as a paid employee (only part-time, but still). I’d been bumped up to community affairs and the occasional feature story. The day after Whitmore’s sentencing—if you could even call it that—I voiced my outrage to Dave Gardener.