Brock Clarke - The Happiest People in the World

This was entirely predictable: Dr. Vernon tended to think pretty much everyone might be a narc. The only person who he seemed to think was not a narc was his wife, mostly because she treated him so fondly, like he was a somewhat mischievous child she couldn’t help but love. Speaking of which, Grace Vernon yelled up from the garage below: “Don’t come to school reeking of pot, you old fool!”

“I won’t!” he yelled back, his voice bright with love. They listened as the automatic garage door went up, the car started and pulled out of the garage, the door closed. Then Dr . Vernon turned back to the boys, his face and voice dark with treachery again. “A narc,” he repeated. “That’s why I’m being so careful these days.” This struck Kurt as the most ridiculous thing he’d heard that morning— Dr. Vernon was possibly the least careful human being he had ever met — but then Dr. Vernon reached inside his billowing orange-and-blue riot of a shirt and pulled out a handgun.

“Is that a gun?” Kevin asked, and then it was his twin’s turn to punch him in the thigh.

“You can’t be too careful, can you?” Dr. Vernon said. This was clearly a rhetorical question, and so Kurt didn’t respond to it. He tried to climb out of the beanbag chair, but the chair resisted, and Kurt ended up having to kind of wrestle the chair into submission before getting out of it. By the time he did so, he felt like something had changed for him. He did not want to smoke pot in that chair in this office with these human beings ever again. It was Dr. Vernon whipping out that gun that had changed everything. It wasn’t that the gun had scared him. It was that it made him feel deeply ashamed. He had an image of his father walking into this stupid room and seeing Kurt stuck in that stupid chair after smoking stupid pot with these stupid people, one of whom was waving around his stupid gun. And how would that make his father feel? He had never thought or cared to ask that question before. But he was asking it now, possibly because his father had asked him to keep his eyes open and had given him that important task, and here he was, getting high with these idiots, his eyes barely open, his lids so heavy, not keeping his eyes open for Mr. L. or the stranger or anyone. And how would this make his father feel? He was asking the question, but he did not want it answered. If you had to ask the question, How would that make your father feel? then you already knew that you didn’t want to know the answer.

Kurt’s skateboard was leaning against the wall next to the door. He walked toward it. “Hey, where you going?” one of the twins said, but Kurt didn’t turn to see which one, and he didn’t answer the question, either. Good-bye, he thought, good-bye, good-bye, good-bye.

“I think his buddy might be a narc, too,” Dr. Vernon said.

“His buddy?” Kurt said. He turned around. Dr. Vernon was pulling a blue linen blazer over his garish shirt, which presumably was once again hosting the handgun. In any case, it wasn’t in Dr. Vernon’s hand anymore. He grabbed the lapels of the blazer and stretched it, then buttoned it.

“Yeah,” Tyler said. “Mr. L.”

“That’s what I was saying,” Kevin said. “The other guy .”

“Mr. L. is the arsonist?” Kurt said.

“What?” Dr. Vernon said. He sat back in his chair, clearly thinking about what he was supposed to be saying. His stomach bulged, testing the moorings of his blazer’s buttons. “No,” he finally said.

No? Kurt thought but did not say. There was something important about Mr. L. that was floating in the outer atmosphere of his memory. But in between him and the memory were all sorts of other memories, plus the pot he’d smoked, and also all the people in this room, talking, talking. He’d never get to the memory if he stayed where he was. So he grabbed his skateboard, told everyone he’d see them at school, and left the office.

Henry walked to work. He had a car, but he preferred to walk because it was not far and because in doing so he often walked by people who liked him. For instance, now: Lee Truesdell, whom everyone called Lugnut. He had just emerged from his car, parked in the lot outside Hammond Lumber, where he worked. Lugnut was a large man with large feet made even more enormous by his tan work boots with their steel toes and foot-long laces. Lugnut’s son, Dana, was a sophomore at the high school, and Henry had just talked Dana through an especially difficult time during which Dana did not feel like doing any homework. Basically, Henry had asked Dana why he didn’t feel like doing any homework and then said nothing, just frowned, arms folded, and listened to Dana figuring out for himself that his reasons for not feeling like doing any homework made some sense and were shared at one time or another by every other student who had ever gone to school at Broomeville Junior-Senior High or for that matter any other school on the planet and so did not make him anointed or rebellious in any way, and by the time he was done talking, Dana felt like doing some homework again.

“Mr. L.,” Lugnut said.

“Lugnut,” Henry said.

“You know, my name is Lee,” Lugnut said. Like a lot of big men, Lugnut’s voice was soft and gentle, and in fact his whole bearing was completely pacific, which had the strange effect of making him seem constantly on the verge of committing some terrible violence. “But everyone calls me Lugnut.”

Henry nodded to indicate that he, too, had been guilty of calling Lugnut by that name.

“People have called me Lugnut since I was fourteen. Do you know why?”

“Because you’re so big?” Henry guessed.

“That’s my theory, too,” Lugnut said. “Except, have you ever seen a lug nut?”

Henry said he never had. “You’re saying they’re small.”

“They’re big,” Lugnut said. “But only compared to other nuts.”

“Have you asked people to call you Lee?” Henry asked, but he didn’t even require an answer: of course Lugnut had, and of course people had not done what he’d asked. You could not just ask people to call you what you wanted to be called if they’d already been calling you something else. He and Ellen had tried this with Kurt. Kurt had always called him Mr. L. But it seemed strange to Ellen that Kurt would call his stepfather by this name.

“What about ‘Dad’?” Ellen had asked, and Kurt had made retching noises.

“Henry?” Ellen had suggested.

“But that’s what you call him,” Kurt had said, as though Henry were not right there, in the room, listening to this conversation.

“Call me Mr. L.,” he’d finally suggested, back then, to Kurt, and he said to Lugnut, now, “Call me Lugnut.”

“Lugnut,” Lugnut said.

“Attach other words to the name, as in a greeting,” Henry said, turning his back to Lugnut. “Pretend you’re greeting me in the morning, afternoon, evening. Ask me if you could borrow my lawn mower.”

“Good morning, Lugnut,” Lugnut said. “Good afternoon, Lugnut. Hey, Lugnut, my grass is getting kind of long, Lugnut,” etc. Each time, Henry made no response. When Lugnut seemed to have had enough of the exercise, he said, “OK, Mr. L,” and Henry turned around and said, “See?”

“But your name isn’t Lugnut,” Lugnut said. “Oh, I get it.”

Then Lee shook Henry’s hand, told him that would probably never work but thanks for trying anyway, and disappeared into the lumberyard. This was why Henry liked walking to work. This was why Henry liked living in Broomeville. Because people here trusted him. But would they trust him once this man he’d said was Jens Baedrup was through with him? The stranger would probably try to kill him, especially once he discovered that Henry had given him the name of the man he was probably going to try to kill. That was bad enough. But what else would he try to do before he tried to do that?