Don Winslow - A Cool Breeze on the Underground

“I go to school.”

Graham laughed. “When you feel like it.”

“Okay, I’ll go to school, I will. But not that school!”

“The Man wanted to send you to one of those boarding schools in New England. I talked him out of it.”

“Talk him out of this!”

“I don’t want to.”

Neal spun around and walked away-fast. Let Mr. Wizard follow me if he can, he thought. Ain’t going to any rich little snobby fag school.

Graham let him go. Let him hide out for a while and think it over. He pointed his own nose to McKeegan’s for a cold one and a shot.

Neal showed up there two days later. He found Graham sitting on his customary stool. Neal sat down at the other end of the bar.

“Those schools cost a lot of money,” he said.

“A lot,” Graham agreed.

“Time you add in books, fucking uniforms, all that shit.”

“Very expensive.”

McKeegan brought Graham his pastrami on rye, fries, and a fresh beer. “The kid want anything?” he asked Graham.

“The kid doesn’t work for me anymore.”

“The kid has money of his own,” Neal said. “Give me a Coke.” He would have ordered a beer, but knew that failure would be a disaster.

“Diamond Jim will have a Coke,” McKeegan responded.

“So these books and stuff,” Neal continued, “where would I get the money? You won’t let me steal.”

“The Man will pick up your tab. Plus your usual pay for jobs. Also something he called ‘a modest allowance.’ You steal, I break your wrists.”

“Here’s your Coke,” McKeegan said. “Shall I keep the change?”

“Gimme.”

“You’ve been associating with Graham too much.”

“Tell me about it.”

Graham took a break from his pastrami. He knew he should have had the corned beef. “The Man said something about ‘grooming you for better things,’ whatever that means. At first, I thought he was talking about a horse.”

“Maybe he was.”

“Maybe.”

Neal sipped his Coke and set it down-an expansive gesture. He was pleased. “Tell you what. I’ll come back. Same pay. No school.”

“McKeegan, isn’t this kid underage?”

“You’ll never get anyone as good as I am.”

“Probably not, son.”

“So?”

“So, it comes to this.” Graham turned on his stool to face the boy. “You go to this school or you go your own way.”

Neal threw the Coke back as he’d seen the men do with the real stuff. “See you around,” he said, and headed for the door.

“You know what I think?” Graham asked as he inspected the pastrami for fat. “I think you want to go to this school but you’re afraid, because you think the other kids are better than you are.”

Problem was, the other kids thought so, too. Neal felt stupid enough anyhow, wearing the blue blazer, khaki slacks, and cordovans. With the white button-down shirt and brand-new old school tie. White fucking socks.

Then there was that assignment in Mr. Danforth’s English class about your life at home. Neal had scribbled something straight out of Leave It to Beaver and the class had laughed its collective head off at him and Danforth got pissed at him.

What am I supposed to write? Neal thought. That my hophead hooker of a mother has split, and the nearest thing I got to a father is a one-armed dwarf whose idea of a father-son outing is breaking into somebody’s office and lifting files? So don’t ask me for real life, Mr. Danforth, because I don’t think you can handle reading it any better than I can take writing it. Settle for June Cleaver and be happy.

Or how about the usual jokes? Your mother’s like a doorknob. Everybody gets a turn. Your mother is like the Union Pacific. She got laid across the country. When these made the rounds, Neal was the only kid in school who knew for a fact they were true.

And when the talk turned to family vacations, Christmas presents, brothers and sisters and crazy aunts, Neal had nothing, flat-ass nothing, to say, and was too proud and too smart to make things up. Nor could he invite other kids over to his place, because it literally was his place-no mom-and-pop combo, cookies on the table-and his place was a one-room slum.

Neal was a lonely, miserable kid. Then that son of a bitch Danforth made him read Dickens.

Oliver Twist. Neal devoured it in two all-night sessions. Then he read it again, and when it came time to write about it… Boy, Mr. Danforth, can I write about it. Your other students may think they know what Oliver feels, but I know what he feels.

“This is excellent,” Danforth said, handing him back his paper. “Why don’t you talk in class?”

Neal shrugged.

“You liked Dickens,” said Danforth.

Neal nodded.

Danforth went to his bookcase and handed Neal a copy of Great Expectations.

“Thank you,” Neal said.

Neal went straight back to the neighborhood, bought himself a jar of Nescafe and a half-gallon of chocolate ice cream, and dug in to spend the weekend with Pip.

The reading was great. The reading was wonderful. He was never lonely when he was reading-never cold, never afraid, never alone in the apartment.

He returned Great Expectations with a small essay he’d written, and received David Copperfield in exchange.

“Did you like it?” Danforth asked.

“Yeah, I liked it… a lot.”

“Why?”

“I don’t know. It made me feel…” He couldn’t find the word.

“I know what you mean.” Danforth smiled at him. “You’re okay, Carey, you know that?”

Parents’ night was hell. Neal dreaded it with a near-tangible fear: exposure. He could hear the taunts that would follow him around the hallways the next day and ever after: bastard.

That night, he sat in the back of homeroom as the parents drifted in, smiled their dull smiles, shook their wooden handshakes, feigning interest in their daughters’ dumb pastels and sons’ stupid poems.

He looked impatiently at his watch every few seconds and frowned a “Where the hell are they?” frown for the benefit of anybody who might be watching, awash in the adolescent conviction that everyone was watching. He was slumped so low in his chair that he didn’t see her come in, but he sure as hell heard her. Her rich voice dripped class.

“Hello, I’m Mrs. Carey, Neal’s mother. How nice to meet you.”

She was beautiful. She made Mrs. Cleaver look like a carhop. Her auburn hair was perfectly coiffed. Her gray dress was letter-perfect for the occasion. Brown eyes sparkled at the teacher, and as she held her hand out, the poor man almost kissed rather than shook it.

She strode to the back of the room, displaying a warm maternal smile as she kissed Neal on both cheeks and subtly hauled him from his seat. “Show me everything,” she said.

They walked the school together, pretending fascination with the various displays. She oohed proudly over his prize essay on Dickens’s London. She charmed teachers and parents, sipped punch, and nibbled cookies. She apologized for having to leave so early and swept, yea verily swept, out the door.

Neal found Graham at McKeegan’s later on. “Where did you get her?” he asked. “She was perfect.” Graham nodded. For two hundred bucks, he thought, she’d better be perfect.

“You’re faginesque, you know that?” Neal asked Graham. They were in a dark staircase in Neal’s building.

“What do you mean? I like women. Don’t tiptoe. You don’t make noise stepping on the stair; you make it stepping off.”

“That’s what I mean. Fagin was a character in Oliver Twist who taught boys how to steal and stuff.”

“I don’t teach you how to steal.” Graham didn’t have much patience at the moment for this Fagin shit. He was trying to teach the kid something important. “You plant your foot-not heavy, but firmly. You step off lightly, like you don’t weigh anything.”