Charisma Page 5

  He hadn’t, and Lee and Sherman hadn’t, and neither had Destiny. Billy was a bare-chest basketball, cap turned backwards, white wanna-be hip-hop gangsta, and not the type to be satisfied with pursed lips for long. Either Destiny would give up the tongue, or Deep Blue would find his jollies elsewhere. And wouldn’t that be a pity?

  Patrick was confused by his own reactions to her. Heck, it was just Destiny, after all.

  Was it sex? Well, he knew about sex—more about it than his mom did, he sometimes thought. Heck, she couldn’t even help him with his homework. He had Human Development classes in sixth grade, and stole glimpses at his father’s magazines when nobody was looking. The hot-eyed, heavy-breasted women with staples in their navels sizzled with secret, tantalizing knowledge.

  “Can we bring the club to order?” Destiny asked.

  “I dunno—can you?” Lee leaned back to avoid a swat.

  “Hear, hear,” Hermie Shermie said. “The first order of business is a report from the Pat-man.”

  Patrick leaned his bicycle against a tree and sat, his breathing already beginning to slow. The four friends formed a square. Patrick exhaled harshly, his heart beginning to slow. “First, the lawn-cutting business is doing just great. We’ve got two more customers.”

  “Will they pay in advance?” Hermie Sevujian asked.

  “One will, and that’s gas money. Five bucks a pop. We’ve got more lawns than we have people to cut ’em. I think we should hire Raff Slocum and his brother Chili.”

  “Chili’s a dumbass.”

  “Right. We don’t want him smart—he might undercut us and take our customers. But he’s honest, and works hard—and he works cheap.”

  “You got my vote,” Destiny said cheerfully.

  “Let’s talk to them, then. Kick-ass. What else?”

  “We’re getting about twelve hundred hits a day, and just got linked by Kidslife dot-com.”

  There was a round of cheers. With studied delicacy Destiny opened her vinyl notebook, and withdrew a sheaf of papers. She handed them around. “Here,” she said. They all examined the drawings, passing them around as if they were leafs of the Dead Sea scrolls.

  They were beautifully rendered drawings of warriors. Egalitarianly rendered in both male and female form, they wielded improbably heavy swords and staffs. And if they looked a bit too reminiscent of Xena, Warrior Princess, or heroic images on Magic: the Gathering trading cards, so be it.

  They passed them around in a circle, marveling, regarding Destiny herself with awe. Hermie spoke first. “I couldn’t ever draw like that,” he said.

  “It’s just practice,” Destiny said.

  “The Way is in Training,” Patrick said. The others nodded sagely.

  Destiny dimpled prettily. “When can you scan them in?”

  Lee chewed on his lower lip, thinking hard. “Well, tonight, maybe. Dad’s usually pretty cool after six o’clock.” That was true, and no wonder. Mr. Wallace’s print shop owed much to Lee, who had coaxed his alcoholic father into A.A., and then helped him to save the money to open a computer printing shop in a vacant cubbyhole next to City Hall. The first May and most of June had been disastrous, then the city contract for the annual Independence Day celebration paid July’s bills, and within a year, Wallace Printing was a resounding success. Despite (or perhaps because of) that framed photo in the lobby of infant Emmett Wallace sitting on Governor George’s knee at a family picnic.

  Their web page was just a lark, the Warriorkids dot-com page that they branched off Patrick’s AOL account, scanning in drawings and posting stories. It wasn’t until Destiny posted some of her mushroom cartoons that something else had happened:

  The first week, they got seventy e-mails telling them how cool the little mushroom drawings were: Barbie ’Shroom, and Pterodactyl ’Shroom, and Hockey ’Shroom, and Xena ’Shroom, each snazzy little caricature dressing up the fantasian fungi in a rainbow of guises.

  Progressing from there, they used Lee’s dad’s shop to make computer-generated T-shirt transfers, and sold them around the school. Before they knew what was happening, a local craze had resulted, every kid in the school needing a genuine, authentic, autographed Destiny Valdez Mushroom. They had been kept hopping ironing, sorting and managing a business that was now bringing in almost a hundred dollars in profit a week, a mind-boggling sum to thirteen-year-olds.

  What to do with the money? With a startling lack of disagreement, they decided on ten cents of every dollar to charity, twenty cents into long-term banking, and sixty cents into a general expense fund. The remaining ten cents went into the chow-downs at their weekly meetings. Mr. Sevujian, for whom they distributed advertising flyers, often underwrote the scarfing sessions.

  Hermie Shermie passed around bottles of apple juice and gyro sandwiches, and they munched enthusiastically. The beef was crisp and flavorful. Tzadziki garlic-and-yogurt sauce ran with every bite.

  They were mostly pretty quiet while munching, just enjoying the low crackle of the fire and the quiet of the woods. There were distant traffic sounds, and from somewhere to the north, the cough of a motorcycle.

  Hermie seemed pensive, studying his half-eaten sandwich as if he expected it to reveal cosmic secrets. Then, somewhat clumsily, he blurted: “I don’t know why they chose Destiny for the camp.”

  “Maybe they just liked my drawings.”

  “Yeah, well … we helped with those too. It’s not fair.”

  She gazed at Shermie. It was true: the ’Shrooms had been his idea, but Shermie had all the artistic talent of a rock. He just couldn’t see the images in his head the way Destiny could. To put it in Sherm-speak, he couldn’t draw a line with a straightedge.

  Destiny touched his arm fondly. “Hey, man. We’re just going to split the bucks anyway.”

  “It’s a savings bond. Won’t mature until college.” He sniffed, but squinted at her. “I’ll bet they just want you to show ’em your panties, anyway.”

  “Jesus!” she exploded. “You asshole.” And bounced a wax paper ball off his nose.

  Lee stopped his chewing, and gazed out at the woods. He did that sometimes, just forgot anyone else was there and seemed to drift off. That was good when he was working at the computer, but sometimes it could mean other thoughts. Bad thoughts.

  Destiny finally noticed his distraction. “Are you all right, Lee?”

  “I was just thinking,” he said.

  “What?”

  “You know, thoughts just bounce around some time. Shermie says ‘panties,’ and the next thing I know…” his voice trailed off.

  “You’re back there again?” Patrick asked.

  He nodded. “We said nothing happened to us.” He took a bite, and chewed slowly. “And the shrinks and stuff finally agreed.” He didn’t have to be more specific than that. Everyone knew exactly what he referred to.

  Voice rising defensively, Pat said: “Well, it’s true, isn’t it? Nothing ever happened.”

  There was a chorus of “no’s,” followed by silence. “Then why do I still have nightmares?” Destiny asked.

  Patrick stared at her. “You don’t talk to your parents about them, do you?”

  “Are you crazy? If they hear me at night…” she shifted uncomfortably. “If I’m making noise, you know? I’ll just tell them I was watching Scream over at a friend’s house, and dreamed I was being chased by a big guy with a knife.”

  “And they buy that?”

  “They don’t really care,” she said, and looked down. “They just tell me to shut up and go to sleep.” She glanced up at them, and then away, as if she couldn’t tolerate the eye contact.

  Pat looked at Lee. “When was the last time you had a nightmare? One of those.”

  “I mostly don’t remember. Mostly.” He was chewing more slowly now, as if the gyro had lost its appeal.

  Shermie nodded slowly, then looked away. He hadn’t been asked a question, hadn’t really given an answer, but they all knew exactly what he meant.

  “What is this s
hit?” Pat said. “Why the hell won’t it go away?” He didn’t have nightmares—or at least didn’t remember them, more than a couple of times a month now. Fire and blood and women. Dying, in torment. Naked, bleeding. Christ.

  The sick thing was that Destiny had them too.

  “I don’t think it was the school,” Lee said soberly. “That’s been over for a long time. I think it’s us. We see each other twenty-four seven. I think we remind each other, you know?”

  “But it wasn’t just us. Tanesha had the same problems.”

  Destiny spoke, but her voice was hushed and low. “That was her uncle,” she said. “I know. She told me that he used to grab her. That’s why her mom kicked his ass out of the house. Moved them all to California.”

  For a time, there was no sound in the circle except the distant keen of a log boat cruising south on the Cowlitz.

  “So it’s just going to be you and Crazy Frankie out in the desert.”

  “High desert. They say it looks a lot like this. Anyway, Frankie’s not so bad.”

  Lee lowered his voice. “Did I ever tell you about the time he blew up the mice? I swear to God.”

  “You’re lying,” Patrick said.

  Hermie Shermie shook his head. “No, its true. I remember once Frankie went to the Triangle Mall pet shop, and bought some white mice. Said they were for his snake, only he didn’t have a snake.”

  Destiny was fascinated in spite of herself. “So what did he do with them?”

  “It was like July tenth last year, and he’d saved a couple of M-80s from the Fourth.” Shermie lowered his voice to a conspiratorial whisper. “He threw a mouse and an M-80 into a brown bag together. I saw it, man.” His eyes were huge. “I seriously saw him do that.”

  They were all silent, struggling to envision the unimaginable.

  “Jesus,” Destiny finally said. “He’s messed up.” They murmured agreement.

  Patrick was the one to shake free of their spell. “Listen,” he said. “I don’t have any answers. I don’t know why just you two got chosen, but Frankie’s smart as hell, and I guess he deserves it. It’s not real useful to bitch about it. Let’s talk about something that we can do something about.”

  “The Compaq?”

  Destiny seemed to shake herself out of her trance. “I talked to that guy at Office Max. The system’ll be on sale again at the end of the month.”

  “How much?”

  “Fourteen hundred.”

  “And how much do we have?”

  Destiny opened her little book. It was dog-eared and wrinkled, but otherwise spotless, despite the fact that she carried it everywhere. “We have eleven hundred bucks.”

  The kids laughed and high-fived each other. “Pretty good, huh?”

  Hermie Shermie said, “We could have done better than that if we hadn’t had that rule about family.”

  “No,” Patrick said firmly. “Remember what Marcus said.” His voice became older, gruffer as he recited words culled from an interview article. “‘Anybody can sell to his own family. To develop your skills, you have to convert strangers into customers.’ This isn’t about raising money. It’s about practice. We’ve gotta get good at this, or we’ll never get out of this pissant town.”

  “Shit, yeah,” Lee said, and as they nodded, some of the residual tension eased away.

  They sat there in the woods, the four friends, listening to Lee’s tape recorder. It was good stuff, Liszt’s Les Preludes. Patrick could just about see the notes drifting up over the tree line down toward the river beneath them, fluttering out to sea like drowsy gulls.

  It was quiet, except for a distant sound of … what was it? A chainsaw? No, it was another motorcycle starting up, somewhere to the … south this time? A slow feather of alarm brushed his spine, and then vanished. He had heard that sound before, and although it was far too distant for him to be certain, he could have sworn that was Cap’s bike.

  Nobody else noticed. None of them exactly knew Cap, but they saw him around town, and around the trailer park. He was impossible to miss: a red-haired giant lounging out on the deck of his trailer, smoking Shermans, his great meaty forearms propped on the railing, running his fingers through a tangled growth of crimson beard. He smiled speculatively at them, as Patrick might have smiled at a carton of night crawlers before setting the hook. Cap made his skin creep.

  Cap worked a shift at the mill, but there were rumors that he had other business concerns as well, concerns that had more to do with pharmaceuticals than plywood.

  “What are you thinking?” Destiny asked.

  Patrick, who wasn’t ready to share his musings, just shook his head carefully. “I was thinking that I need to get to my mom’s shop,” he said.

  “Kinda nifty with the needle,” Shermie said. “Be flying the fag flag next.”

  “Sit on my sausage, asshole. Real men patch their own socks.” Patrick looked at Destiny, and their eyes locked. He was shocked by the intensity of the contact. Maybe he was reading too much into her expression, or maybe it was just having known her for over half his life. Perhaps the bond of shared experience, of Claremont Preschool and the trial and its aftermath: endless hours of psychiatrists and legal officials peering down their emotional throats, asking them:

  Did anyone touch you? Hurt you? Did anyone expose himself? Where did you get the idea of hurting women?

  Damn it, he didn’t know what dark inner cave had spawned that filth, endless twilight dreams of mutilation, dreams that refused to die at dawn, that crawled into his waking hours like rotting corpses clawing free of the grave. Waking, half-asleep in the middle of the night, afraid, tiptoeing to his mother’s room and easing the door open to see her mutilated body sprawled across the bed, her breasts ripped off, the sheets clotted with blood, and then looking down at his own hands to see the dripping knife—

  Then waking again, knowing it was just a dream within a dream, and sitting awake till dawn, clutching the blankets to his chest, loathing the erection that pulsed insistently between his thighs, that forced him to fondle it until his fear and shame exploded into a galaxy of dying stars.

  The next day he might be angry dawn to dusk, consumed with an unfocused, disorienting rage, wanting to rip the heart out of the world. He knew that those terrible daymares boiled up from somewhere deep inside him, someplace where the iron bands of control were rusting, rotting away.

  And what would happen when they went? He didn’t know, but did know that one day, they would. That thought scared the piss out of him.

  Now.

  But there was another, more deeply disturbing voice inside him that said, Don’t be afraid. When that day comes, when you turn me loose, you won’t mind at all. Just wait for it, Patrick, old boy. Wait until I’m ripe, so ripe, bright and shiny and almost bursting to come out and play. Wait until the town has stopped watching you. Until they’ve forgotten that you’re special.

  Then you and I will have real fun.

  Even more, when he heard those things about Frankie, the puréed mice, he understood.

  While drawing the line at warm-blooded animals, Patrick had burned plenty of bugs with magnifying glasses and matches, had poured salt on slugs and laughed as they contorted and bubbled green. But that was just a kid thing, wasn’t it? And when his mother caught him doing it, and had taken his hands gently but firmly, and held the magnifying glass so that its bright hot point of light singed his skin, he had jerked away, more startled and scared than injured. She had made him look her in the eye, and told him that animals feel pain, too, Patrick.

  He lay awake that night, thinking about it, thinking that animals had feelings, just like him, realizing that until then he had thought of them more like some kind of little meat puppets.

  He was disgusted with himself, but … but kind of excited too. He didn’t know what to do, what it all meant, but that night he had had the first wet dream he could remember. He woke up in the middle of the night, and found his underpants all gummy, had stripped them off in horror, an
d thrown them into the corner of his room, staring after them as if they might crawl back under the covers and into his lap.

  In the morning he woke up, wondering if it had been just another dream, but when he’d reached under the covers, he had been naked. And when he’d crawled over to the corner of the room, and picked up his soiled underwear, they had been covered with fat, black, hungry ants.

  Was it real? Another terrible dream?

  It was real.

  He had spent half that morning with his magnifying glass, in the back yard searching for ants, chasing and killing, chasing and killing, until his mother had caught him and took him to his father, who just laughed and said: boys do things like that, while she glared at him in disbelief.

  So she spanked Patrick and sent him to his room. An hour later she came to him and looked him in the eye and said, Do you understand now? Understand that they hurt, and feel fear, and want to live?

  And he cried and clung to her, confused as he had never been in his life. Confused that his mother was so angry with him. Confused that he was glad that ants could feel. He had wanted them to feel what he was doing to them.

  And decided that until he could sort through his feelings, he would stop the small cruelties. He had wrestled with that part of himself, and the tortures had not continued …

  So far.

  He had drawn a line, and Frankie hadn’t. Sometimes the voice inside his head said that Frankie was having more fun.

  No. He couldn’t think like that. Those thoughts were real, but they were wrong. He had so much, and his bond to these three meant so much. Whenever he and Destiny looked at each other, it was as if a current ran between them. It was similar to the current between Patrick and his mother, but different. Dizzying. Without her saying a word, he knew that Destiny was thinking: real men don’t need to patch their own socks. They don’t need to blow up mice. I’m here, Patrick. See me. I’m here. I would patch up your socks for you. That, and other things. Things I won’t do for Billy.