The pep rally began as it usually did, with grades one through six sitting in the bleachers of the odd-smelling rubber-floored gymnasium, watching assistant principal Terry Fluster (who, by the way, was dressed as a six-foot-tall red-and-white eagle, the school’s mascot) lead them through a series of cheers, beginning, as always, with: Eagles! Don’t do drugs!
Then Principal Large shushed them and gave his typical inaugural spiel about his expectations for behavior and his zero-tolerance, no-shit-taking teaching philosophy, during which the students stopped paying attention and stared narcoleptically at their shoes, save for the first graders, who were hearing this for the first time and were, naturally, terrified.
The pep rally concluded with Mr. Fluster’s usual: Let’s go, Eagles! Let’s go, Eagles!
And the students yelled and clapped along with him at a level that was roughly one-quarter of the assistant principal’s enthusiasm, still loud enough to mask Andy Berg’s individual cheer, which was audible only to the several people standing around him, Samuel and Bishop included: Kim’s a faggot! Kim’s a faggot!
Directed of course at poor Kim Wigley, standing two paces to the Berg’s left, by all accounts the easiest boy to make fun of in the entire sixth-grade class, one of those kids suffering through every prepubescent disaster there was: thick snowy dandruff, aggressive braces, chronic impetigo, extreme nearsightedness, severe allergies to nuts and pollen, destabilizing ear infections, facial eczema, bimonthly pinkeye, warts, asthma, even an occurrence of head lice in the second grade that no one ever let him forget. Plus he was all of about forty pounds soaking wet. Plus he had a girl’s first name.
In these moments, Samuel knew the “right” thing to do would be to defend Kim and stop the bullying and stand up to the giant Andy Berg because bullies back down when they encounter resistance according to the brochures they were given in health class once a year. This was, everyone knew, a big fat lie. Because last year Brand Beaumonde actually did stand up to the Berg for the constant scorn directed toward Brand’s bulletproof-thick eyeglasses, stood up to him right in the middle of the lunchroom and said “Shut up your big mouth you big jerk!” in a spasm of nervous agitation. And the Berg did indeed back down and left him alone the rest of the school day and everyone who witnessed it was jubilant because maybe they were safe now and maybe the pamphlets were right and this great sense of optimism pervaded the school and Brand was a minor hero until the Berg found him on his way home that day and beat him up so savagely that the police actually got involved and interviewed Brand’s friends who, by now, had learned an important lesson: to keep their fucking mouths shut. Bullies do not back down.
The big rumor about the Berg this year—one propagated by the Berg himself—was that he was, by all accounts, the first member of the sixth-grade class to have sex. With a girl. With, he said, a former babysitter who, quote, can’t get enough of my dick. This of course was unverifiable. Either the high-school girl in question or her interest in the Berg’s anatomy, unverifiable but also unchallenged. Nobody in the locker room within earshot of the Berg’s boasting was willing to risk personal injury by stating the obvious: There was no way a high-school girl would be interested in a sixth grader unless she was mentally disturbed, wicked ugly, or emotionally broken. Or all three of these things. There was just no way.
And yet.
There was something in the way the Berg spoke about sex that made the boys wonder. It was the specificity of the details. The exact and totally unglamorous particulars. That’s what gave the boys pause, kept them up at night wondering and sometimes falling into private rages that maybe he was telling the truth, maybe he really was banging a high schooler, and if this was true it was the only proof they needed that the world was unjust and that God did not exist. Or if God did exist, God must hate them, for nobody in the school deserved sex less than Andy fucking Berg. Every gym class they endured it, how he had to smoke one of his dad’s cigars to cover the smell of pussy, how he wasn’t getting laid this week because the girl was on the rag, how one time when he blew his load, the condom he was wearing exploded because he was just that horny. These visions gave the boys nightmares, these and the larger tragedy that the repellent Andy Berg was having robust sex while most of them had only very recently had “the talk” with their parents and the whole idea of sex with a girl still seemed terrifying and gross.
It might have been the way the Berg taunted Kim at the pep rally that prompted Bishop to act. He would have thought it was too easy, too obvious—the way Kim didn’t fight back, how his passive and slumped-over body revealed his hundred percent acceptance of the hierarchies at work here. Kim stood there reflexively prepared to be bullied. The shooting-fish-in-a-barrel nature of this probably outraged Bishop’s odd sense of justice, his soldier’s desire to protect the weak and innocent via disproportionate violence.
As all the students filed out of the gymnasium, Bishop tapped the Berg on the shoulder. “I heard a rumor about you,” he said.
The Berg looked down at him, annoyed. “Yeah? What.”
“That you’ve had sex.”
“You better fucking believe it.”
“It’s true, then, the rumor.”
“I get so much pussy you don’t even know how much.”
Samuel trailed carefully behind them. He was not usually comfortable being this close to the Berg, but with Bishop between them he felt safe. Bishop’s personality tended to direct all attention to him. It was as if Bishop blocked Samuel from view.
“Okay,” Bishop said, “I have something for you.”
“What.”
“It’s something for people who are a little more mature. Such as yourself.”
“What is it.”
“I don’t want to say right now. Someone might hear. And this is very juicy, really illegal stuff we’re talking about.”
“What the fuck are you saying?”
Bishop rolled his eyes and looked around as if to check if anyone was eavesdropping before leaning closer to the Berg and beckoning him with his fingers to lean down so that his giant head wasn’t so far away and Bishop whispered, “Pornography.”
“No way!”
“Quiet down.”
“You’ve got porn?”
“A massive stash.”
“Seriously?”
“I’ve been trying to decide who here is grown-up enough to see it.”
“Rad!” the Berg said, roused. Because for kids his age, for kids hitting adolescence in the eighties, in those days before the internet, before the web made pornography easily accessible and therefore banal, for this last generation of boys for whom porn was primarily a physical object, possessing pornography was like having a superpower. One that made you immediately legitimate and popular among the other boys. This happened roughly once per semester, some obscure boy locating his father’s collection of dirty magazines and suddenly finding himself elevated socially for as long as he didn’t get in trouble, which might take a day to several months, depending on the constitution of the boy. The ones who were transparently desperate and begging for attention and craving to be liked tended to steal the whole pile in exchange for a one-time flash of celebrity, bright stars who burned out in a day when their fathers noticed the disappearance of all their pornography and put two and two together. Other boys, the ones with more impulse control and less desperation for approval, were more judicious in their porn approaches. They might remove only one magazine from the pile, say the second or third from the bottom, an edition that had presumably been perused, enjoyed, digested, and abandoned. They brought that one magazine to school and let everyone look through it before replacing it in the pile a week or two later, then removing another edition from near the bottom, and then repeating the pattern. These boys maintained a consistent popularity for, sometimes, months before a teacher noticed a group of boys sitting still in a huddle on the playground and came to investigate, because when grade-school boys weren’t running around like spazzes it meant something wa
s definitely wrong.
It was always temporary, in other words, the boys’ access to porn. Which was why it so piqued the Berg’s interest.
“Where is it?” he said.
“Most of these kids would freak out,” Bishop said. “They wouldn’t understand what they’re looking at.”
“Let me see it.”
“You, on the other hand. I think you could handle it.”
“Damn right.”
“Okay, meet me after school. After everyone’s left the building. At the stairwell behind the cafeteria, by the loading dock. I’ll show you where I hide it.”
The Berg agreed, then pushed his way out of the gymnasium. Samuel tapped Bishop on the shoulder.
“What are you doing?” he said.
Bishop smiled. “I’m taking the fight to the enemy.”
Later that day, after the final bell, after the buses had come and gone and the building had emptied, Bishop and Samuel waited behind the school, that part of the school not visible from the road, all concrete and asphalt. It had the look of a regional high-volume shipping facility, industrial and mechanical and automated and apocalyptic. There were massive air-conditioning units whose fans spun inside aluminum shells crusted and emblackened with sooty exhaust, roaring like a squadron of attack helicopters readying for, but never quite managing, takeoff. There were scraps of paper and cardboard blown by the wind into corners and crevices. There was the industrial trash compactor: solid metal, the size of a dump truck, painted that forest-green color typical of waste-disposal vehicles, covered all over with a scum of sticky trash residue.
Just next to the loading dock was a stairwell that led down to a basement door nobody ever used. Nobody even knew where it led. The stairwell was enclosed on one side by the concrete wall of the loading dock, on the other by tall unclimbable vertical bars. There was also a gate at the top of the stairs. This stairwell was a riddle for anyone who bothered thinking about it long enough. The bars obviously communicated a desire to keep people out, except that even if the gate were locked it would be a simple matter to leap down into the stairwell from the loading dock above it. But the basement door at the bottom of the stairs was one of those that opened only from the inside and didn’t even have an exterior handle. So the only real function of the gate was to trap people in, which seemed at least architecturally odd and at most an extreme hazard in the event of fire. Anyway, the amount of dirt and dead leaves and thrown-away plastic wrappers and cigarette butts in the stairwell indicated that it hadn’t been used in years.
They waited for the Berg here, Samuel feeling scared and nervous about this whole thing, about what Bishop planned to do, which was to lock Andy Berg in the stairwell and leave him there all night.
“I really don’t think we should be doing this,” he told Bishop, who was at the bottom of the stairwell hiding a black plastic bag he had produced from his backpack, burying it under the leaves and dirt and debris.
“Relax,” he said. “It’ll be fine.”
“But what if it isn’t?” said Samuel, who was right on the cusp of a Category 2 just thinking about the ways Andy Berg could get them back for what seemed like a pretty stupid trick.
“Let’s just go right now,” Samuel said, “before he gets here. No harm done.”
“I need you to do your job. What’s your job?”
Samuel frowned and touched the bulky metal padlock he was currently hiding in his pocket. “When he gets to the bottom of the steps, close the gate.”
“Quietly close the gate,” Bishop said.
“Right. So he doesn’t notice.”
“I’ll give you the signal and you’ll close the gate.”
“What’s the signal?”
“I’ll give you a look pregnant with meaning.”
“A what?”
“A real bug-eyed look. You’ll know it when you see it.”
“Okay.”
“And after the gate is closed?”
“I lock it,” Samuel said.
“That’s the essential part of the mission.”
“I know.”
“The very most important part.”
“If I lock it, then he can’t get out and beat us up.”
“You have to think like a soldier here. You have to be focused on your part of the operation.”
“Okay.”
“I didn’t hear you?”
Samuel kicked at the ground. “I said hooah.”
“That’s better.”
It was warm and wetly humid, the shadows lengthening and the light a deep orange. Storm clouds gathered on the horizon, those great Midwestern clouds like floating avalanches, which meant an evening of thundershowers and heat lightning. The wind blew roughly through the trees. A tang of electricity and ozone in the air. Bishop finished arranging the bag at the bottom of the stairs. Samuel practiced closing the gate without making it squeak. Eventually they climbed up onto the loading dock and waited, Bishop checking and rechecking the contents of his backpack, Samuel fingering the ridges of the heavy padlock in his pocket.
“Hey, Bish?”
“Yeah.”
“What happened in the principal’s office?”
“What do you mean?”
“When you went for a paddling. What happened in there?”
Bishop stopped fussing with his backpack for a moment. He looked at Samuel, then away, off into the distance. He assumed a certain manner Samuel had begun to recognize, where his body seemed coiled and tightened and his eyes turned to slits and his eyebrows wrinkled into check marks. A posture of defiance, a look Samuel had seen before: with the principal, and Miss Bowles, and Mr. Fall, and when Bishop threw that rock at the headmaster’s house. It was a fierceness and hardness usually foreign to eleven-year-olds.
But it dissolved just as quickly, as Andy Berg rounded the corner of the building, lumbering in his big stupid way, shuffling along, dragging his toes like his feet were too far away from his tiny brain, as if his body were too large for his nervous system to handle.
“He’s here,” Bishop said. “Get ready.”
The Berg wore his usual uniform of black sweatpants, generic white sneakers, and a T-shirt with something juvenilely funny written on it, this time “Where’s the Beef?” He was the only male in the class not made fun of for wearing imitation off-brand shoes. His giant size and proclivity to violence gave him a free pass, fashion-wise. The only acknowledgment he made to current tastes was the rattail he grew, a hairstyle that was en vogue with roughly a quarter of the boys in the class. A proper rattail was achieved when a boy cut his hair short but left a spot in the very middle of the back of his head to grow wildly away. The Berg had so far achieved a frizzy black curly rope that extended several inches down his neck and back. He approached the loading dock, where the two boys sat, elevated, slightly above him, cross-legged.
“You came,” Bishop said.
“Let’s see it, fag.”
“First tell me you’re not going to freak out.”
“Shut the fuck up.”
“A lot of kids freak out. They’re not mature enough. This is hard-core stuff.”
“I can handle it.”
“Oh can you?” Bishop said. His tone was playful and sarcastic. That tone where you can’t decide if he’s having fun with you or insulting you. That tone that makes you feel like you’re one or two steps behind him. The understanding of this registered on the Berg’s face—he hesitated, unsure of himself. He was not accustomed to kids showing any kind of spirit or spine.
“Okay, let’s say you can handle it,” Bishop continued. “Let’s say you’re not going to freak out. Nothing you haven’t seen before, am I right?”
The Berg nodded.
“Because you see it all the time, right? That high schooler you’re banging?”
“What about her?”
“I’m wondering why you’re so eager right now when you have a girl whenever you want her. Why do you need the porn?”
“I don’t need it.” br />
“And yet here you are.”
“You don’t even have it. You’re lying.”
“Makes me think maybe there’s something you’re not telling us. Maybe the girl’s ugly. Maybe she doesn’t exist.”
“Fuck you. Are you gonna show me this shit or not?”
“Okay, I’ll let you see one picture. And if you don’t freak out, I’ll let you see the rest.”
Bishop rummaged in his backpack for a moment before pulling out a page from a magazine, folded several times, one ragged edge where it had been torn free. He handed it—carefully, slowly—to the Berg, who snatched it, annoyed at Bishop’s manner, his theatricality. The Berg unfolded it, and even before it was fully undone his eyes seemed to open wider, his lips very slightly parted, and his face melted from its usual barbaric severity to a kind of giddiness.
“Whoa,” he said. “Oh yes.”
Samuel could not see the image that delighted the Berg so much. He could only see the back of the page, which appeared to be an advertisement for some kind of brown liquor.
“That is awesome,” the Berg said. He looked like a puppy staring at your food.
“It’s good,” Bishop said, “but I wouldn’t call it awesome. Actually it’s pretty par for the course. Even a little droll, if you ask me.”
“Where’d you get it?”
“Irrelevant. Would you like to see more?”
“Fuck yeah.”
“And you’re not going to tell anyone?”