The Boys of McKinley House
Chapter Seven—Freshly Squeezed
-
Snitch was from Iowa. It wasn't his fault. His father was from Iowa, and his father's father, and his father's father's father. Iowa wasn't something you chose. Iowa chose you.
His upbringing had certain benefits, of course: he grew up with clean air, fluoridated water, and an open-mindedness that could only come from someone who had been raised eating his Jell-O with mayonnaise. Snitch was forthright, honest, kind, and good. You couldn't ask for much more in a friend.
He was also the worst liar in the entire world, and even David, who had been at the school for only a few weeks, could tell in an instant when he was lying. It would take David months to learn how Skittery always bit his lip when he wasn't telling the truth, how the tips of Racetrack's ears turned pink, and how Jack's tongue suddenly seemed to swell to twice its size, but with Snitch, he never had any trouble. So when, one chilly Sunday midway through October, Snitch approached him at the end of rehearsals, it didn't take David long to figure out that he was up to something.
"Why, hello, David," Snitch said, brightly. "What do you say about joining me for a pleasant movie tonight?"
"What's the catch?" David sighed, in as world-weary a manner as someone whose father is a barber can.
"Catch?" Snitch asked, taking a casual step backwards and tripping over his shoelace. "No catch," he managed.
"Snitch."
"Oh, all right. It's eighty straight minutes of zombies exploding and melting and gnawing their own hands off, but no one else will go with me, Dave. Please?"
"No."
"I'll steal your floss."
"You wouldn't," David said, scandalized.
"No, I wouldn't, but will you go with me?"
"Snitch, to be honest, I'd rather—"
But Snitch never did find out what David would rather do, because at that moment Benny Kittridge skipped over, breathless and flushed, her pale eyes shining.
"Hi, Davey," she breathed.
"Hello, Benny," David said uncomfortably.
"Wasn't that a great rehearsal?" she said. "Gosh, I thought it was just…great. You know, everyone thinks Jack's such a fantastic actor, but I think you're even better. When we open this Christmas, everyone's going to be just blown away."
"Thank you, Benny."
Benny just smiled brightly and leaned against David, placing a hand on his chest. It was an unnaturally chilly October, and everyone had layered up against the cold—Racetrack had come to school that day wearing long underwear, snow boots, a down parka, earmuffs, and four identical moss-green sweaters, one on top of the other. David was shivering in his cheap blue blazer, but his ankles, at least, were warm in a pair of his father's old hiking socks. And Benny, as usual, was dressed in the height of fashion: her white-gold hair was tied back with a green satin ribbon, and beneath her green wool coat she seemed to be wearing all of the lovely things she owned, mostly scarves and stockings, with a blouse or a skirt thrown in every once in a while. She was wearing enough layers to fend off the worst cold, but it was all split down the middle, every button and lace left undone. When she leaned against David, he could feel the pulse that made itself known where Benny's heart should have been.
"So," Benny said innocently, "what are you boys up to this evening?"
"We're seeing a movie," Snitch said, with miserable truthfulness.
"Oh, I love movies!" Benny said brightly. "I love the actors and actresses and the costumes and the music and the theaters and—"
"But you wouldn't like it," David cut in desperately. "Would she, Snitch?"
"Oh, no," said Snitch. "It's disgusting."
"It's all…zombies," David added.
"And blood."
"And guts."
"And really horribly gratuitous violence."
"And…bad things," David finished lamely. "That girls don't like."
"Well," said Benny sweetly, taking David's hand in hers, "I think you'll find, Davey, that I'm really not like most girls."
-
There was no dissuading her, of course. Snitch knew that just as well as anyone else. He had first met Benny at freshman orientation two years ago, when he was fresh out of Iowa, his teeth strong and fluoridated, his sneakers glowing with Midwestern innocence. Benny had just left behind her first real boyfriend, a high-school senior named Mike Gottlieb who had been whole, healthy, and charming when he first met Benny, and graduated nine months later a nervous wreck after she left him for a hockey player named Conrad. Mike had been a golden son, the boy everyone loved, kind, intelligent, a straight-A student headed for the University of Michigan in the fall, and he had been ruined by a thirteen-year-old girl. Benny's parents had been almost glad to send their daughter away to St. Helens: at the end of August, Mike climbed on top of his roof, claiming he would jump unless Benny said she would take him back. Benny, who was currently necking in the gym showers with Conrad the hockey player, didn't. Mike jumped.
And so Benny came to Caldwell, cruelly separated from Conrad and with Mike's near-death (he broke his wrist and bruised his ribs) hanging over her head. She swore to seduce the first boy she saw, and that boy happened to be Snitch. He lasted three days, until the last night of orientation, when they christened his narrow dorm bed, and Benny began her career. And now David was what she wanted. Snitch knew it was only a matter of time.
Benny, David and Snitch went to the Columbia Theatre in town, the same place that Snitch went every Sunday night, usually by himself: it was the only place in the county to have earned the dubious distinction of showing absolutely anything it came across. Plus, tickets cost only a dollar and a quarter. Snitch loved movies indiscriminately—he wanted to be a director—and would take in trash and high art together, giving The Girl in Gold Boots the same scrutiny and consideration as Satyricon. He would watch anything, and love anything, but what he adored most were horror movies: Italian giallos, psychological thrillers, Vincent Price B-movies, American splatter films. He would come back to McKinley late on a Sunday night after taking in a Mario Bava triple-feature, raving about a scene where a girl had her heart ripped out or worse, and it never ceased to perplex his friends that this kind, gentle, self-effacing boy from Iowa City would delight so much in so many violent deaths.
On this fine night in October, they went in for a gory new release set in a cabin in the woods, full of chainsaws and blood and demonic possession. David left halfway through to throw up, and when he got back, Benny took his hand in hers and guided it under her sweater. Snitch remained completely oblivious, rapturously absorbed in the stereophonic slaughter onscreen.
"Anybody hungry?" Snitch asked, as they walked out of the theater.
"Starving," Benny said, sidling up next to David.
They went to the Ironside Café; it was late, and they were the only patrons there. The coffee was somewhere between tepid and stone cold, which meant Rexanne, the bad waitress, was happy. It was only if the service was good that you knew something was wrong. They didn't have to wait quite an hour for her to come around to take their orders, and while they waited, they talked about the career of the Swedish Meadowlark—The Columbia was going to do a Sweetheart O'Brien retrospective in November—and Benny played "Memories" on the jukebox and was funny and engaging and tried her best to relieve David of his virginity before the chorus.
"What'll it be?" Rexanne asked, leaning against the jukebox as she sized up David's hard-on.
"I'll have the chicken fried steak, with hash browns and sausage, and four eggs instead of three if you can do it, make sure the yolks are runny, that's sunny-side up, and also I'd like to have a short stack of pancakes, and bacon and sausage as well but I'd like the syrup for that to be heated, and a side order of biscuits and gravy, too…—oh, and coffee." Benny said all this in one breath, handing over the menu as she surreptitiously placed a hand over David's bulging crotch.
"What kind of toast you want with that?" Rexanne asked, unfazed.
"Whole wheat," Benny murmured seductively.
Rexanne snapped her gum. "You want orange juice?"
Benny leaned forward, smiling sweetly. "Yes," she said. "But only if it's …freshly squeezed."
Rexanne smiled just as sweetly. "And for the gentleman?"
"Um…just some coffee," David managed, finally wresting Benny's hand away from his pants.
"Hey, big spender. And for you?" She turned to Snitch.
"I'll…I'll have what she's having," Snitch said, still hypnotized by Benny's every move.
Here he had thought he had this girl all figured out, and now she surprised him again—she acted so shallow and vacant, as if she contemplated suicide by overdose of Alka-Seltzers if she gained so much of an extra ounce, and now here she was, eating like a hog before the slaughter. Sitting there in a liver-red booth, watching her all but straddle David Jacobs, Snitch fell in love with Benny Kittridge for the first time, hopelessly and head-over-heels.
"That waitress," Benny said confidentially, playing with David's hair, "I know for a fact, is sleeping around with just about every boy in town."
"Oh, really?" asked Snitch, interested.
"Complete white trash. Her brother has a meth lab and she's so high half the time she can't tell left from right. And a few years ago," Benny added, lowering her voice, "she was stalking Jack's older brother Jamie, asking him for money, saying she was preggers with his kid. She's practically a prostitute."
"Benny," David said tiredly, "the irony of you saying that is absolutely incredible."
It was one of the only truly mean things David had said in his entire life, and he regretted it as soon as it passed through his lips. Benny sprang back from him, looking as if he'd just hit her. A single tear rolled down her cheek. "David," she whispered.
"Oh, God, I'm sorry, Benny, I didn't mean—"
"You know," she said softly, proudly, her eyes closed so they wouldn't get to see her cry, "people think that just because I always seem happy on the outside, I don't have any problems."
"I'm sure you have problems," David said.
"And you think I don't feel anything, do you, David?"
"Yes, Benny, of course I do, I—"
"No," she said coldly, opening her eyes. "Don't try to comfort me. I don't need your empty sentiments. You know why people like you say terrible things like that? To keep from caring."
David looked at her, devastated. "I care."
"Get out," she said. "Get out."
"Benny, please—"
"No!" she screamed, slapping him hard across the face. "No. I don't know who you are! Please! I just—want—to be left alone!"
As David and Snitch shuffled out, shamed, Benny stayed crouched on the hard plastic booth, watching to make sure they had left. Then, she went back to her breakfast. She smiled, drying her tears, and added some milk and sugar to her coffee. It was still hot.
-
"So she cried on you," Jack said.
"Well, yeah."
"And you fell for it?"
"Of course I did. I mean…her voice got all high, and she slapped me…girls do that." David looked at Jack helplessly. "I don't know."
"Do you know any real girls who actually slap people? Especially now? These are the eighties, Dave. Men hit back now." Jack paused to knock back what seemed like half a glass of beer, and then neatly pocketed a ball. "Your turn," he said, standing up and stretching his arms behind his back.
It was later that same night, and Jack and David were at the Lighthouse Tavern, playing their third game of pool. Or rather, Jack was playing; David was just sort of going along, leaving dents in the felt and getting blue chalk all over his jacket sleeves.
He had been going along a lot, lately, especially with Jack. Because, for some reason that David didn't fully understand, Jack had become his friend—he laughed when David said things that might have been funny, and told him stories about his family, and called him Dave. No one had ever called him Dave before. It was wonderful. And so when David came back from the Ironside with Snitch, twenty minutes before curfew, and Jack asked him if he wanted to go into town again to have a few drinks and maybe play some pool, David didn't hesitate. He just said yes. If Jack had asked him if he wanted to go to the recycling center to sort tin cans for three hours, David would have said yes.
"Well," Jack said thoughtfully, watching David shoot a ball straight off the pool table and into his glass of beer, "maybe we should forget about Miss Kittridge for tonight. Let's talk about something else."
"Like what?"
"Like…homework? The actual rules of eight-ball, which seem to tragically evade you? Dentifrice? I don't know, something."
"Let's talk about your family," said Dave.
So Jack told a story about his older brother Ted, who no one heard from much anymore, as he was doing his best to separate himself from him family legacy as much as possible. But a long time ago, when the family still lived in Central Park East—before Jack was even born—Ted had built treehouses in Central Park.
"He did what?"
He built these treehouses in Central Park.
"I didn't know that was allowed."
Well, it's not.
"Gee."
One summer when Ted was about nine and a half, he and Chris and Jamie and Boo Boo had been out in the park with their new nanny, Erzsebet, T. Senior and Elinor having sent them all out to get some goddamn fresh air. They were wandering aimlessly by the lake, sucking on dreamsicles, the mousseline de soie trim on Boo Boo's seventieth sundress already ruined by the blood from her seventieth skinned knee, when Jamie dared Ted to climb that tree. Except that he didn't, because at three years old he had already adopted his father's way of speaking, so what he said was, in fact, "Climb that goddamn tree, Ted."
"What tree?"
"That one."
So he did. Before anyone could even stop him, he shimmied up the enormous Cedar that Jamie had pointed at. Erzsebet held her breath until she saw his blond head poking out of the top branches. Then she did the math (she had been a perfect student at Heidelberg before she accepted this degrading job), found Teddy to be three hundred and fifty feet off the ground, and nearly fainted again.
"Children, don't—" she began, but of course by that time Boo Boo was already struggling in the lower branches, trying to join her brother. That poor sundress.
They came down, eventually, after being bribed, cajoled, and threatened with military school, but even after they were back at home, the damage had already been done. It was their tree now.
They came back to it the next day, and the next day, and the next. Ted built a treehouse out of plywood and plastic sheeting, and they sat up there all day, reading Marvel comics and dropping pennies on the people who walked on the paths below. At night, they turned on Chris's Tivoli radio, and Boo Boo danced in her ballet class leotard to the Supremes. People below heard the good-time vibrations of Motown, and took the songs to be a native chants. Stories started circulating about a long-forgotten tribe of Indians inhabiting Central Park, with sharpened teeth and yellow eyes. By the time school started in the fall, Ted was hearing about how one boy had disappeared in Central Park on the Fourth of July, only to turn up in the form of a barely identifiable shrunken head, delivered to his parents along with the Sunday Times.
"And what about the treehouse?"
The city found it that fall and tore it down the next day. They decided it had been built be vagrants, not Indians. But Ted kept going back, the next summer, and the next. Every few weeks they'd find the treehouse and tear it down, and the next day he'd find a new tree. He and Chris and Boo Boo and Jamie would sleep out there when the nights got too hot to be inside, and in the morning they'd roll up their sleeping bags and climb down to spend the day in the park. In the warmest part of summer they hardly ever went back home, just to change their clothes and raid the cabinets for soda and candy bars.
"Where were your parents through all of this?"
Their mother, Elinor, a New York Sullivan, summered in Greece.
"And your father? What was he doing?"
Fucking Erzsebet.
"Oh."
But they kept doing it for years—right up until the first summer Ted came back from Caldwell, when he was fifteen. That summer, the tribes of Central Park died out. Ted was nearing thirty now, a successful defense lawyer in the city, already married and with a son on the way. But every once in a while, when the moon was right, he could be found walking through Central park on the way home, looking up at the sky through branches of cedar and oak.
"You're making that part up," David said.
"You're right." Jack drained his glass of beer. "I probably am. Now: what do you say we play some pool?"
-
Whatever confidence David had in his skills as a pool player was destroyed that night. He knew he could never compete with Jack under normal circumstances, but he had always thought that maybe, if Jack was blind, falling-down drunk, so out of it he didn't even know who he was anymore—maybe, David could have beat him then. Or at least the game could have come out in a draw.
But fate didn't even give David that much. He kept on losing, and losing, and losing every game, right up until the moment Jack passed out on the felt.
"Well, Jack," David said thoughtfully, "it's been a fun night. Really, it has. I can't remember the last time I had so much fun. You know…but it's kind of late now, and I have a lot of studying to do, and I'm sure you do too. I don't actually know why I'm talking to you. You can't hear a thing." He paused, staring at Jack helplessly a moment. "Well," he said, pulling ineffectually at Jack's arm, "let's go."
Jack didn't move. He grunted a little, but he didn't move.
Before David could say anything more, he was interrupted by the sound of heavy footsteps behind him. He looked up, didn't see anything, and then looked down to lock eyes with a skinny kid who looked to be around thirteen. He was wearing a beat-up leather jacket, a cigarette dangling out of the corner of his mouth, his lank, dust-colored hair falling over his gray eyes, and hanging off him was Rexanne.
"So," she said. "Where's Miss Benny?"
"Oh. Um, hi, Rexanne. Heh."
"David," she said. "This is Spot. Spot, this is David. He's a Caldwell boy."
David reached out the arm he wasn't using to keep Jack from falling off the pool table, and shook hands with Spot. "I didn't know you had a little brother," he said amiably.
Rexanne stared down at the tips of her cowboy boots, shoulders shaking, trying desperately not to laugh. Spot frowned, clenched and unclenched his fist a few times.
"You, ah…" he said at last, "you a friend a' Race's?"
"He's like a brother to me," David said.
"Well, then," Spot sighed, raking a hand through his hair, "I got no issue with you. Rexanne," he said, handing her a quarter, "go buy a song."
Rexanne smiled and walked over to the jukebox, David and Spot watching her as she went. "She's very pretty," David said, trying to make amends.
"She's not, but she's my girl anyway. You know, between men, she's the best thing that's come to me in a while." Spot turned to David, grinning. "Now just you wait," he said. "She'll bend over, look at all the songs, spend a good minute perusin' the merchandise, and then she'll pick Thunder Road. Does it every time."
David and Spot waited, listening. Sure enough, a moment later, they heard the song's opening strains. Rexanne slipped off her boots and began to dance, faded dress sawing across her skinny legs. She was graceless and unsuspecting, her bright red hair loose around her shoulders, but she danced better than she waited tables, and when she smiled, she was almost beautiful.
"So I see you've met Jack," Spot said.
"Well…yeah," David said, blushing. He kind of has a habit of, um…"
"Of?"
"…Getting a little bit drunk. Sometimes."
"Jack doesn't get drunk," Spot said. "Jack drinks until he passes out. They're very different things." He paused. "You got any drinkers in your family, David?"
"Oh, um…not really."
Spot smiled. "I figured as much. Look," he said, "you seem like a decent kid, and you're a friend of Race's, who's a friend of mine. And there's no way you're gonna get Jack back up there all by yourself. So, listen, um…" he paused, scratching his head, "why don't you just stay with Rexanne and me?"
"I'd…that would be great," David said.
"I mean, don't make a habit of it or anything."
"Of course."
Spot leaned over and slapped Jack's cheek. "Hey, Jacky-Boy."
"Wha…? I don' wanna…"
"Come on. Get up. Time to get up. We're goin' for a little walk."
And then, to David's utter astonishment, Spot grabbed hold of Jack's shoulder and hoisted him up onto his feet. David hurried over and supported Jack on the other side. "Rexanne," Spot called, "go start the car."
David was a little shocked at the efficiency with which Spot handled the whole situation. As they dragged Jack out the front door, David turned and asked Spot if this was the first time he had had to do this.
"First time this month," he said.
"Oh."
Spot lived with his aunt an uncle in a house by the river; after they got there, Spot and Rexanne wished them both goodnight and went up to the master bedroom, leaving Jack and David to shared the sofa bed. It was a cold fall, and they had nothing but a crocheted afghan and a space heater for warmth, but David was still surprised when he woke up at dawn to find Jack curled up next to him, one arm thrown across his chest. He was so close that David could feel the rhythm of Jack's inhalations, and he listened, holding very still as he tried to make their breathing match.
-
A/N: DALTON: An update! She lives!
…Shut up.
DALTON: Yes, it's been more than three months, but the high-class slashfest known as The Boys of McKinley House lumbers on like a dinosaur from the Mesozoic.
Isn't he cute? He learned that word from the dinosaur sticker book I got him for Christmas. And this chapter is my Christmas/Kwanzaa/Hanukkah present to you. And thank you all for your readership and patience, what with the very vague slash coming so late an all. Rest assured: it gets sordid…er. And we don't see so much of Benny, thank God.
And now, Charlie and I are off to throw a party for Bruce Springsteen.
DALTON/BRUCE: REVIEW!
Te adoro
Preppie and the Brain.