M Coe - New Veronia

When the dark came, I couldn’t get to sleep because of an empty gnawing deep inside my middle. The ground rustled, and not too far off, something splashed in shallow water. The dark was never quite full, as if half the swampy things phosphoresced.

But Jay could sleep anywhere. After he’d been snoring for a while, I brought out Stella’s panties and fitted them to my hand; I rubbed the slippery material across my face to feel something nice for a change. “Are you okay?” I asked, and the puppet said she was. She told me that she was proud I was taking over, because Jay had never been the leader, not the real leader, of our group. I breathed her in; her sweet smell grew fainter every day. “There’s something in you, Bennet,” Stella told me, “that’s better than him. Remember what he did to you?”

“No,” I said, “no.”

“When you were kids? Nine years old?”

“No.”

“Well, I do,” the Stella puppet said. “You’re ready to remember, now. Jay isn’t all that powerful, not anymore.”

Overhead, a cloud broke into jagged pieces around the sliver of moon. I couldn’t stop this moment.

“He locked you into the closet,” Stella said, “in our parents’ room.”

“I never went in there before recently. Before the day that I got you.”

“And he told you that if you gave yourself away, our father would slice off your toes, one by one, and feed them to you.”

“I don’t remember this at all.” Their bedroom, the rumpled and stained sheets, the weapons mounted on the walls, flashed through my mind. “It must not have happened.”

“And so you sat in that closet for three hours, and in the last hour, you listened to them having sex, only you thought that maybe he was trying to rip off all her hair, and so you looked out where the closet door didn’t quite meet the jamb.”

A bit drilled into my head, plunging deep inside after the first half-inch of resistant skull. In the cave it made, a memory expanded. “I was terrified,” I said, my head throbbing. Sex had looked like murder, like the intestines were spilling out of the woman’s back end, and her cries had made my tonsils ache. The smell in that close space was not unlike the smell of the purple satin.

“You were terrified. You pissed yourself.”

“Only because I had to stay in the closet. I couldn’t get to a bathroom.”

“No. That’s why they called you Soppy.”

“Is it?”

“Because Jay told the whole school.”

I pressed the purple fabric to my eyes.

“That’s how it has always been with Jay,” was the last thing Stella ever said to me.

In the early morning, I sensed that they were closing in. I thought I heard the thud of booted feet and saw a glow from their flashlights.

“Jay,” I said, “Jay, come on.” I shook him awake and we moved off in the direction I thought best. Jay said he could feel his muscles getting thinner, and I told him to nut up.

We came upon an old shed, nothing else around. Its tin siding had rusted through in places. The shelter was a sign to me that I could handle our lives from now on: I had found the shed that would protect us.

Inside, it smelled like canned tuna about to turn. A small animal skeleton lay in one corner, but you couldn’t see it after the door was shut.

“Bennet,” Jay said.

“Whisper.”

“What are we going to eat in here? There’s nothing.”

“It’s only for a little while. I know exactly what we need to do.”

“Okay—what?”

“Tell me something.” I sat down and dug my fingers into the shed’s dirt floor. The press of the ground beneath my nails felt good, like wiggling a loose tooth: that piece of you about to pop. “Was it you who told everyone at school to call me Soppy?”

Jay huffed air through his mouth, and then he spoke cautiously, as if he were answering a teacher. “You know that I did. You were right there. Everyone thought it was funny. I mean, don’t you remember?”

And the problem was that I did remember, now. That memory had unwound itself into a cold ribbon in my brain; it floated around the new space inside my skull, bumping up against the memory of Toshi that final night in New Veronia and of the bolo tie man’s body unfurling from its life.

“Is that why you think I’m not good enough for your stupid family?” I said. “Why you wanted to keep me and Stella apart? Well, what do you think about me now?”

Jay said, “That was forever ago. It was nothing. Are you mad at me or something?”

“Mad?” I said. “Why would I be mad? I just fucking hate you.” I waited a beat, imagining Jay’s taut face in the darkness of the shed. “Just joshing.” The fear and anger and frustration had built up inside me like gunpowder, and I was itching to go off, itching again for that quick click of the trigger to release me: Jay would give me that, I knew. It was only a matter of time.

“Joshing?” he said. “Ha.”

We slept in the shed at opposite ends of the floor—I made Jay take the half with the tiny skeleton—and I dreamed that I had to lift my hands, I had to hold up my hands because someone was changing me into a clean shirt. It felt cool against my irritated skin. Then I returned to wakefulness and realized that a huge voice, magnified by a megaphone, was telling us to come out with our hands up.

I had been waiting for this moment; it was like I’d created it with my waiting. My whole body pounded in excitement: they would never capture me. I crawled over to Jay and put my hand around the back of his neck.

“I have a hostage in here!” I yelled. “Don’t you come one step closer, or he’s dead!”

Jay’s neck tensed. “What are you doing?” he said. “Is this part of the plan?”

“You’re my sacrifice,” I told him. “You’re the reason everything went wrong for me in Delaware from the very start. I would have been fine, if not for you. I would have been happy. I would never have been Soppy, never done all the stupid stuff that I did with you.”

“What are you talking about, Bennet?” he said. “We’re best friends.”

“Surrender,” a voice said. “Surrender now.”

“It’s your fault we’re out here,” I said. “You forced me to run away with you because you were scared, because you were a faggot with Toshi and you were scared of your father and you couldn’t face yourself.”

Jay recoiled as if I’d hit him. “I’m not,” he said. “Come on. We’re best friends.”

“No, we’re not.” I punched open the shed’s door with my foot and prodded Jay out first; I pressed the gun between two knobs of his spine. Something ripe and gaseous gurgled from him.

“I wasn’t kidding!” I said to the blinding sun. When the dazzle faded from my eyes, I saw about five uniformed figures peering out at us from behind trees.

I aimed the gun and shot Jay in the thigh.

As I ran, Jay’s agonized screams echoed. He would distract them; he would let me get away. The one or two officers who had set off after me were too fat, they were falling behind, and so they pulled out their weapons to try and stop me, but I couldn’t be stopped, the bullets they discharged skittered feebly through the air, they were far behind, yards and yards behind me, and as I hurtled over a decaying trunk, I smelled freedom on the other side.

But I landed face-first into the loam: my toe had caught on a root.

When they delivered me to jail, my fingerprints matched up to the ones taken after we’d been booked into the Dover station for piss-bombing the jocks’ party, so they knew my name, where I was from, everything. The gun had my fingerprints and Jay’s, and they could match the bullets right to us. No one ever mentioned that first burglary at the Mobil station, though, or the episode with Toshi that spurred us to skip town in the first place.