Brutal Youth: A Novel Page 3

  Thuck. Thuck. Chunks of brick began to thwack against the facedown kid.

  Davidek and his new friend with the scarred cheek were both crouched beside a Jeep, just a few spaces away. They could see glass mixed with blood on the back of the unconscious boy’s head.

  “Someone should help,” Davidek said.

  The scarred kid nodded. “You know, if that kid hadn’t shoved us aside, maybe me or you would be lying there with our head split open.… You think he’d run out to save us?”

  Davidek shrugged. “He’s bleeding bad.”

  The scarred kid looked around doubtfully. “I’m not sure doing the right thing is the way to survive at this place.” But Davidek was already edging out, getting ready to spring toward the wounded kid. “I could have grabbed that crazy kid in the hall, tried to slow him down,” he said. “But I didn’t. I just got out of the way. I was scared.”

  “Guilty conscience?” the scarred kid said with a laugh. “You’re perfect for Catholic school.” He put a hand out. “Hey, tough guy, before we charge into battle … my name’s Noah Stein. My family calls me No for short. No Stein. That’s weird, right?” Davidek said he guessed it was and shook the kid’s hand distractedly.

  A monstrous, skinny shape, tall and bent like a streetlamp, cast its long shadow over them. It was one of the teachers, a young guy with a stretched, gargoyle’s face. “If you boys are planning a distraction, I could sure use one,” he said, moving forward toward the school without stopping for a response. “Go, Mr. Zimmer!” the girl with the yellow pigtails screamed as Ms. Bromine’s gripped loosened and she pulled free. Bromine staggered forward, watching her colleague steal the credit for saving the day.

  * * *

  Mr. Zimmer had been a student at St. Mike’s more years ago than he cared to remember. He’d been a good kid, a quiet kid, one who never got in trouble—except once. Since he had long legs and stretchy arms, some guys had dared him to climb one of the brass waterspouts on the corner of the school building. The trick was to hold on to some of the brick outcroppings, but no one else could reach them. Nobody except Andy Zimmer and his praying mantis limbs.

  Getting up through the rooftop hatch was impossible—the janitor had proved that—but that old waterspout was another fast way up, provided Vickler didn’t notice until he was already over the ledge.

  The sound of sirens rose in the distance. Police. Firefighters. Zimmer didn’t want to think about what the cops would do if the boy on the roof started shoving statues over on them, too.

  On the other side of the Jeep where Davidek and Stein were taking cover, a chubby black boy poked his head up. “Hey, I’m Hector. Hector Greenwill,” he said, extending his hand, although neither boy was going to move from their hiding spot to shake it. “I’m another eighth-grade visitor, like you guys.” He was dressed in tan pants and stuffed into an orange-and-black striped sweater. “When you do your thing, I’ll help cause another distraction, try to draw his fire,” he said.

  Stein shrugged. “Perfect, dude. You are dressed as a bull’s-eye.”

  Greenwill got into a squat, ready to run. “Just don’t make someone else have to rescue you, all right?” he said, and lumbered off in the opposite direction from Mr. Zimmer, toward the grassy green field beside the school, where the burned-down church once stood.

  “Okay, hero,” Stein said, putting a hand on Davidek’s back. “Let’s go pretend we’re the good guys.”

  A pair of sapphire-clawed hands seized them both by their collars. “You’re too close!” Ms. Bromine growled, pulling them back. “Get down! Now!”

  Davidek squirmed, pointing to the lifeless heap in the center of the lot. “We’re going to help that kid!” Bromine peered in the unconscious boy’s direction. “Carl!” she barked. “Carl LeRose! Stand up now and get over here!”

  The boy was lifelessly disobedient. Davidek kept trying to pull away, but Stein was looking for something to distract her. In the same instant, the fat boy in the black-and-tangerine sweater made his move—running and yelling and waving his arms in the wide grassy field, drawing the attention of the boy on the roof, along with everyone else in the parking lot. On the opposite side of the building, Mr. Zimmer put one hand over the other and began to methodically climb the waterspout.

  This was their moment. Stein watched Davidek struggle helplessly as the guidance counselor held him in place. He reached out and grabbed the blue lady’s face between his hands, thrusting his face against hers in a smacking kiss.

  Bromine opened her hands.

  Davidek bolted free, his lungs gasping air as he dashed toward the unconscious boy, grabbing him by one arm and pulling him across the asphalt. It looked like the facedown kid had an urgent classroom question. Half of a brick cratered into the hood of a Volkswagen Beetle beside them. They’d been spotted again.

  Davidek heaved the unconscious boy onto his own back and stumbled toward the sheltering cars, where Stein now rolled on the ground as a raving Ms. Bromine slapped him silly.

  The wounded boy’s head lolled, like his neck was a kitchen rag. One shoe fell off his foot. His eyes were open, drifting back toward the school. He raised a weak arm and pointed. “Fuckin’ … Spider-Man…,” he groaned.

  Mr. Zimmer, his shirttail dangling free, had reached the top of the school, his ropy arms grabbing for purchase along the stone ledge. The boy on the roof hadn’t seen him yet. He was instead watching with panic as dual fire engines pulled up to the curb and police cars squealed into the parking lot. Hector Greenwill and his bull’s-eye sweater were now close enough to hit.

  Clink had one jar left, and intended to make it count by hurling it directly into the fat kid’s face. There was no fluid in it, so it was light, and he aimed it ever so carefully. He shook the jar slightly, but nothing rattled inside. Clink held out the glass container, turning it at an angle. The world got very quiet for the boy on the roof.

  There was nothing inside this one. The jar was empty—except for the image of the boy he was targeting, who with his black-and-orange striped sweater looked like a very exotic trapped bumblebee.

  Clink unscrewed the jar’s metal lid. He spilled the nothing over the side, where he imagined it was captured by the silent wind and carried away. He put the empty jar back in his bag and adjusted the strap around his shoulder.

  On the other side of the school, Mr. Zimmer had clawed over the ledge and was surging forward, arms outstretched, his feet making gritty pulse-pounds against the surface of the roof.

  Vickler’s eyes were closed. He never even saw the teacher coming.

  Down below, Davidek was cradling the wounded kid as paramedics swarmed around them. A few cars over, Bromine was dragging Stein by the front of his shirt. Then a hush swept over the crowd in the parking lot.

  Everyone looked up to see Clink slip backwards off the ledge.

  PART I

  The Bad Hand

  ONE

  Six months later, Davidek stood again in St. Michael’s parking lot, looking up through gray rainfall at the rooftop of the school. The destroyed saints had been replaced, glistening amid the surviving statues like new teeth in a decrepit smile. Water poured down the rust-colored stone walls of the school, turning the classroom windows into shimmering cascades of light.

  It was the first day of the new school year, and Davidek stood silent and still, his gray slacks, white shirt, and blue blazer growing heavy in the falling rainwater. He couldn’t believe he was here any more than his parents could believe him when he had come home from visiting St. Mike’s with stories of stabbed faces, severed fingers, and projectile animal specimens.

  “Don’t make up stories,” his father had said, showing him the local newspaper story about a janitor who was injured at St. Mike’s in a roofing accident. “No mention of your daring rescue or a kid falling off the building.”

  “He fell, but he didn’t land,” Davidek said, making his father groan and his mother sigh.

  Clink’s attempt at a gruesome end was stymied
by his infamous black bag. When he tipped off the roof, it was that strap Mr. Zimmer snagged as he lunged toward the falling boy. Zimmer’s long, ropy muscles strained to hold the teenager aloft as the shrieking boy slashed at his arms, pleading to fall. In desperation, Zimmer had made a fist of his free hand and thrust it down into the boy’s face—one, two, three, very fast punches. Clink’s face reeled backwards as he went limp, and the teacher grabbed a second hold on his shirt, heaving him back up to safety.

  When the police took control of the scene, Ms. Bromine was still fuming over the kiss Stein had used to distract her so Davidek could break free. She wanted both the boys arrested. “They, uh … kissed you,” the cop said flatly, more annoyed than amused. “Anybody else see this?”

  Bromine demanded to see his superior officer.

  The lieutenant who came over to her later told the ranting guidance counselor, “We got a kid with a stabbed face, a kid with a fractured skull, a guy with no fingers, a guy with a broken arm. And you’ve got—?”

  “I’ve been sexually assaulted!” Bromine huffed. The lieutenant took a deep breath and closed his eyes. He said he’d bring it up with the principal, but Sister Maria had already heard the complaints and didn’t believe them either. “I think Ms. Bromine is suffering a bit of anxiety,” she said. The lieutenant nodded. “She can get in line,” he sighed, and pretended to write in his notebook because Ms. Bromine was watching them.

  Mr. Mankowski was taken away in a stretcher that held his neck between giant red pads. The janitor was wheeled away, moaning, reaching back toward another EMT, who carried a white towel with the old man’s fingers inside.

  After the unconscious boy Davidek had rescued was taken away in an ambulance, the lieutenant came over to talk to the visiting eighth-grader. He wore a silver name tag beneath his badge—BELLOWS. He wanted Davidek’s name and address, but the boy told him he’d already given all that information to another officer.

  “It’s not for the report,” Lieutenant Bellows said. “It’s for somebody else.”

  “Who?”

  The lieutenant shrugged. “Maybe someone wants to send you a thank-you card.”

  * * *

  Davidek began reading the paper every day, knowing there had to be an update, some follow-up, some explanation about what had happened. But there was nothing, not even a week later. “I think I saw something about it on CNN,” Bill Davidek said at dinner. “‘Playground fight at local school,’ right?” The old man scratched his beard with a self-satisfied smile.

  “Come on, Dad! That guy jumped off the roof! He almost killed himself!” Davidek said, his cheeks stuffed with food. “He chopped off a dude’s fingers!…”

  Davidek’s mother clanged her fork and knife flat on the table. “For God’s sake, we’re eating fish sticks,” she said.

  The table went silent. After a while, June Davidek spoke to her husband without looking up. “You know, they say these private schools look better on a college application than ever before. Really helps a student stand out. I just saw something about that in Reader’s Digest.…”

  Her husband frowned. “We pay taxes. And those taxes pay for the public schools. You don’t pay for groceries at one store, leave them there, and then go buy them again at another store, do you? So why would we pay for St. Mike’s? Because they wear little suits and ties? Because they think they’re smarter than everybody else?”

  Davidek’s mother was silent. Then she ventured: “If we weren’t paying though…,” and Davidek’s father stiffened.

  “I said we’re done talking about that,” he said.

  Their son asked, “Talking about what?”

  Bill Davidek pointed a fork at Peter’s plate. “Eat your fish dicks,” he said, which made his son laugh, and made his wife clang down her silverware again.

  Bill had once been a student at St. Mike’s, but it was a sore subject—he dropped out after two years, though nowadays that was the only part he seemed proud of. He finished up at public school only because it was a requirement to get hired at the Kees-Northson Steel Mill over in Brackenridge, which was just down the hill from St. Mike’s. It irritated him to see it every day as he left work, and irritated him more that his wife never stopped fetishizing the place.

  She had always wanted to attend, though her parents refused. (It was one of the only things Bill liked about her family.) When the time came, June had insisted they enroll their older son, Charlie, in the school. Charlie was seven years older than Peter, who remembered those fights well from his hiding place under the dining room table. He even remembered the line his mother would use: “This is how we make our boy into something better than his father.” Bill complained he was paying tuition only so June could brag to her card club. He was partly right. “It’s expensive, but my Charles is worth it,” she used to tell her friends. She always called him Charles around other people.

  Davidek and Charlie weren’t close, partly due to the age difference. Davidek’s most vivid memories of his big brother were about getting pushed around by him. Charlie was always bigger, so all he needed to do was lie on top of his baby brother, smothering him, to win any fight. Then Davidek discovered a foolproof self-defense: The Purple Nurple, aka the Titty-Twister—a tried and true fight move every younger sibling learns after being repeatedly crushed by an overpowering foe. Charlie would rear back, clutching his aching areola, cursing his little brother’s name. “Fucking, Peter … Fuck!”

  Charlie’s name was off-limits in the Davidek house now, except during arguments—which their dinner conversation was now turning into. “I just think private school would give Peter an advantage,” June said. “It’s an investment in the future.”

  Her husband jerked his thumb at the empty fourth seat beside the table, where Charlie used to sit. “That one turned out to be a real good investment in the future, too, didn’t he?”

  After St. Mike’s, Charlie Davidek had spent the next four years getting drunk and fucking up. He flunked out of two colleges. Then he moved back home and spent a couple years working part-time for a landscaping company, and warring full-time with his parents. When they finally made him start paying rent and reimbursing them for whatever he ate out of the refrigerator, Charlie joined the Marines, fleeing Pittsburgh for Camp Pendelton outside San Diego. Enlistment made Charlie someone the Davideks could be proud of again.

  They had Charlie’s military portrait enlarged so it could hang in the center of their staircase. Beside it he hung a snapshot of Bill fishing with a six-year-old Charlie, and Charlie’s scowling senior picture from St. Mike’s. June kept a small version of the military portrait in her wallet, by her credit cards, which allowed her to accidentally-on-purpose show him off to random bank tellers and grocery store clerks.

  Then, a year into his service, Charlie had gone AWOL. The family found out when some men from the local recruiting office visited the house to ask whether they’d had any contact with their missing son. Months later, a letter arrived from Arkansas—no return address—where Charlie said he was working in a garage. He said he was okay, and told them not to worry. He didn’t explain why he’d gone AWOL, but nobody really wondered. Charlie (and another guy from his unit) had taken off in late summer of 1990, just a few weeks after Iraqi tanks rolled into Kuwait, and Americans started tying yellow ribbons around trees. When Davidek’s father turned his son’s letter over to the Marines, they offered to mail back a copy. “Don’t bother,” he said. “I never want to hear from that coward again.”

  All the pictures of Charlie were gone now, even the ones from when he was little. When Charlie’s name did come up, it was usually as a way for Bill Davidek to trash the school he always hated. “Four years at St. Mike’s. Thousands of dollars down the toilet,” he said. “We might as well have burned it to warm the house.”

  Their younger son, Peter, was happy to go to Valley with the rest of his friends—Chad Junod; Billy Fularz; the Peters twins, Matt and Mark. It bothered him that his mother kept talking about the Catholic
school like it was even a possibility. It bothered his father, too. “I don’t want to talk to you about this anymore,” he said.

  June shrugged. She twirled a fish stick on her plate. Bill Davidek nodded at his son, who smiled when his dad said: “Nobody’s going to St. Mike’s.”

  * * *

  The Big Texan changed that.

  It was late July. Davidek noticed the silver Porsche parked in front of their house as he rode his bike around from the backyard. Nobody in their neighborhood drove a car like that, and if they did, they wouldn’t park it in the street. The Davideks lived on a main strip through a part of town known as Parnassus, right along the Allegheny River. There was a sand and gravel company at the water’s edge that sent massive dump trucks rumbling down their street all day, spilling flecks of grit and stones against the windshields and paint jobs of those too stupid not to use their driveways.

  Through the living room window, Davidek could see a large man in an immaculate gray suit, with an open-collar ivory shirt and a tan bald head rimmed by a corona of gray hair. His teeth were huge and white and perfect.

  Davidek immediately thought of him as The Big Texan. No one ever told the boy his real name, and he reminded Davidek of one of those cheerful tycoons featured in a glossy business magazines, one hand propped against an oil derrick and the other waving hundred-dollar bills in the wind.

  When Davidek went inside, The Big Texan was laughing and assuring Davidek’s parents that they were smart people for making a decision like this, very smart indeed. Davidek’s father stood by the fireplace, his arms crossed, looking unconvinced. Davidek’s mother sat on the couch, her hands folded primly in her lap, grinning like someone who’d just won an argument. For some reason, she was wearing the red cocktail dress that she saved for parties or formal occasions. Davidek’s father was in dirty jeans and a UNITED STEELWORKERS LOCAL 1196 T-shirt, which had creases like it had just been taken out of the bottom of a drawer for this occasion.