Charles Bock - Beautiful Children

And here I want you to listen carefully. What I am about to say is very important.

7.3

Kenny's hand remained easy on the bottom of the steering wheel, and kept the car steady along the gradually curving road. It didn't take much effort for him to see the passing streetlamps as a succession of lit matches, as burning skulls atop long, thin steel pikes. Newell was numb in the passenger seat, his face glowering, unable to hide its resentment. Tell me what you want to do now, Kenny had said, issuing a challenge as much as a question. Newell had not answered, and had no idea what he was supposed to do, what was coming next. The whipping wind through the open passenger window smashed onto his face and neck. The night kept expanding around him.

Kenny took his silence as permission. For a moment he let himself wander, was distracted by the light reflecting off the asphalt ahead, all the revealed scars where tar had been poured to fix cracks.

“It'll be cool,” Kenny said, as if reassuring himself. “Just wait. You'll see.”

Newell kept decomposing in his seat. If Kenny tried any more pervy stuff, he was going to get a full-on blast of fire extinguisher. Newell would do it, too. He wasn't going to put up with any more bull, and that included the party Kenny was talking about. Newell didn't know whether to believe there even was a rock show, and was worried about being taken out to the boonies for another kind of party, one inside Kenny's pants. Out in the middle of nowhere Kenny would be able to do anything he wanted, Newell thought. Then he remembered Kenny's apology, Kenny promising that he was Newell's friend. This statement held true with everything Newell knew about Kenny. Everything, that is, except one thing.

Newell didn't know what to think. This was new territory, and it had him dizzy.

“I don't have to do more gay shit?”

He meant to protect himself by taking the offensive. But his voice caught. The sentence came out without any spine or certainty. Even so, it hit home. The bad energy inside the car metastasized. Kenny felt the blood leave his face, he worked like hell to keep silent. The Reliant wheezed, lumbering as best its four cylinders would allow: through a yellow light, heading south, in pretty much the opposite direction they had been driving not that long ago.

Whatever response Newell was expecting, it was not coming. The little lesson at the end of the mistake. The attempt to right the ship and get back on course. No assurances from Kenny. No apologies. No arguments. Just Kenny, seething in his seat, not even trying anymore. It was another shattered border between them, one whose dissolution shocked Newell. For an instant he felt responsible, both dumb and chastised. He started to get pissed at Kenny for giving up on him, then made a tremendous discovery: he did not care, either. If you want to shut up, Newell thought, it's not like I give a shit. If he felt bad about anything, it was the hitch that had marred his question. Helpless was the last thing Newell was. Just try me and see.

Dirt and dead bugs splotched the windshield. Strip malls passed at something less than an antiseptic blur, including the cell phone place that used to be a video store, and then the supermarket belonging to the chain Kenny had worked for last summer — for like a week he'd chased down shopping carts, until he'd gotten heat exhaustion and thrown up all over the parking lot.

Kenny's recognition of these places did not go so far as to be recognition, but was just a low hue, a tint in the background of his thoughts.

Everything is fucked, he was thinking.

It seemed to him that he and Newell had been in this car forever; that he'd shown his drawings to Bing Beiderbixxe during a different century. The smell of sweaty clothes wafted momentarily to his nostrils. He tried to rally, reminding himself that Bing Beiderbixxe would not have shown him that pencil grip just to be nice, pros like that just don't give away their secrets, not if they don't think you have something going for you.

It took a Herculean effort for him not to look over at Newell. Kenny felt as if his body were held together by a framework of chicken wire, as if his bones and organs would collapse at any moment. Newell would tell someone what he'd done. It would happen sooner instead of later.

Kenny ignored the goose bumps that came with this realization, and kept trying not to freak. One thing at a time. Let's just get this party thing over with.

In the mob they took people out to the desert and dealt with them.

Yeah. Right.

Then another thought: it would be the boy's word against his.

And Newell wasn't the most believable person, was he.

Extending through the darkness, all the high walls and gated communities joined together, shimmering as if they were the surface of a translucent ocean. Through the passenger window, the colored towers of the Strip appeared to Newell as a distant row of glowing toys. When they'd gotten so far away, he did not know. But the distance felt appropriate. The hotels could catch on fire and crumble into dust for all he cared.

On the playground in grade school, once in a while, he and the other kids talked about what they would do when they grew up. Teachers, too, asked Newell what he wanted to do with his life. And his mom, approaching her breaking point, would challenge him, asking if Newell wanted to spend the entirety of his adulthood digging ditches, because if he didn't, he better get his little rear in gear. More than once Newell answered that he actually did want to dig ditches. In fact, he'd tell his mom, just now he'd started on a ditch to China that would get him the hell away from her. Newell would tell his teacher that he had his future all figured out. He was going to be a mattress tester, that way he could sleep all day. Actually — serious though — he hadn't decided yet. He was torn, policeman or astronaut? Right now, he'd said, his plan was to combine them and fight crime in outer space. First priority, he said, is getting rid of the Klingons around Uranus. The class had roared, and their laughter had been more than worth the trip to the principal's office, and afterward, Newell had added the possibility of being a comedian to his list.

His other possible careers included: jet-setting billionaire secret agent with a heart of stone; superhero who sneaks around in darkness and comes up behind terrorists and slits their throats; international jewel thief on a Harley with mounted laser guns. Newell was going to climb the highest mountain on earth in his special mountain-climbing submarine, and he was going to vomit down on a passing troop as they sold Girl Scout cookies, and if anyone fucked with him, they'd pay, oh yeah, you best believe his enemies would be punished like nobody had been punished before.

Only there was something else, too. Loosely connected but still coming to mind.

When his father would take him to Rebels games at the Thomas & Mack. The part Newell always looked forward to the most. It came after Newell had abandoned his dad in section 119 ( See you at ten, his father'd say, meaning that Newell should be back when the game had ten minutes left), and after Newell had met up with a couple of jackasses from school, kids who didn't pick on him that much while he tagged along with them. When it got to be too much work for Newell to wedge a word into their conversations, he'd mumble an excuse and give a halfhearted wave. Dropping from the end of their pack, he'd then wander the loop around the arena's mezzanine. It was pretty excellent: except for the vendors going back and forth to refill their trays, and dudes heading to the bathrooms to whiz out their beer, Newell pretty much had the whole mezzanine to himself. He could listen to his own footsteps echo off the concrete, and at the same time, was able to hear the roar of the crowd. Sometimes Newell would sneak peeks inside the tinted windows of the luxury boxes, just to see what things looked like when you were living large. Sometimes he went to a concession stand and pretended he was mute and mimed out his order for a medium popcorn or hot dog. The loge level was rarely more than half-filled, and it wouldn't have been too difficult for him to sneak down and snag himself an excellent seat, but Newell never did. Instead he stayed out of sight of his parental unit, away from the bullying reach of any jerks from school. Upper deck was where all the fun was. Some bereft section. Away from the blocks of underprivileged and sick kids here through charity programs. Newell would kick back in an empty seat and take in the spectacle below him, the game and the dynamics of the crowd. Idly picking at his stale popcorn even after he was full, he might get some peanuts from a passing vendor for good measure. Once settled, Newell would rip pages out of his official game program and take the glossy sheets and fold them into paper airplanes and try to float them down. The best got some air under their makeshift wings and rode in delicate, arcing paths. A chosen few even caught a second gust and kept going, beyond the rim of the upper deck, over the plastic red seats of the mezzanine, the politely attired season-ticket holders, the corporate bigwigs. It became a game for Newell, watching his planes glide deliciously toward the edges of the basketball court. Seeing just how far they could go. Old farts sometimes tossed uneasy looks his way, or warned him to cut it out. Newell ignored them, or stared lasers in return. Gathering his stuff, it would be time to get moving, to climb higher, into the nosebleed seats and rafters, continuing his exploration, his adventure.