The Nix(28)

“Duty, honor, country,” he said. “Taking the fight to the enemy. That’s my motto.”

“What fight?” said Samuel, who was looking around at the houses of Venetian Village, houses larger than any he had ever seen.

“Whatever fight there is,” Bishop said. “Hooah.”

He was going to join the army as an officer after military college, then become a major, then a colonel, then finally, someday, a five-star general.

“A five-star general has a higher security clearance than the president,” Bishop said. “I’m going to know all the secrets.”

“Will you tell me?” Samuel said.

“No. They’re classified.”

“But I won’t tell anyone.”

“National security. Sorry.”

“Please?”

“No way.”

Samuel nodded. “You’re going to be good at this.”

It turned out that Bishop would be joining Samuel in the sixth-grade class at the local public elementary school, having been recently expelled from his private school, Blessed Heart Academy, for, he said, “not taking any shit,” by which he meant listening to AC/DC on his Walkman and telling one of the nuns to “f*ck off” and getting into fights with anyone who was willing, even high schoolers, even priests.

Blessed Heart Academy was a Catholic K–12 prep school that was really the only local option if you wanted your kids to go to one of the elite East Coast universities. All of the parents of Venetian Village sent their children there. Samuel had never been in Venetian Village before, but sometimes on his longer bike rides he passed the front gate, which was copper and ten feet tall. The homes here were large Roman-style villas with flat roofs of terra-cotta tile, circular driveways curving around dramatic fountains. Houses were separated from each other by a distance at least as great as a soccer field. A swimming pool in every backyard. Exotic sports cars in the driveways, or golf carts, or both. Samuel imagined who could possibly live here: television stars, professional baseball players. But Bishop said it was mostly “boring office people.”

“That guy,” Bishop said, pointing to one of the villas, “owns an insurance company. And that one,” he said, pointing to another, “he runs a bank or something.”

Venetian Village had nineteen single-family units, each of them a standardized three stories with six bedrooms, four full baths, three powder rooms, marble kitchen countertops, 500-bottle wine cellar, private interior elevator, tornado-grade impact glass, exercise room, four-car garage, all of them an identical 5,295 square feet that, due to a specially treated glue used in construction, smelled lightly of cinnamon. The exact sameness of the houses was actually a selling point for families worried about not having the nicest house on the block. Realtors often said that in Venetian Village you didn’t have to “keep up with the Joneses,” even though every family who lived in Venetian Village had been “the Joneses” in whatever neighborhood they’d come from. And hierarchies quietly emerged in other ways. Various backyard additions of gazebos or screened-in two-story lanais or even a lit Har-Tru clay-surfaced tennis court. Each house was built from exactly the same mold but was uniquely accessorized.

A backyard saltwater hot tub, for example, behind one of the villas that Bishop stopped in front of.

“This is where the headmaster of Blessed Heart lives,” Bishop said. “He’s a fat f*ck.”

He made a show of grabbing his crotch and flipping his middle finger at the house, then grabbed a small rock that lay in the gutter.

“Watch this,” he said, and he flung the rock toward the headmaster’s house. It seemed to happen before either of them could even think about it. Suddenly this rock was in the air, and they watched it fly and everything seemed to slow down for a moment as both boys realized that the rock was definitely going to hit the house and there was nothing they could do about this fact. The rock flew through the red-orange sky and it was only a matter of gravity now, and time. The rock arced downward and narrowly missed the forest-green Jaguar in the headmaster’s driveway, striking the aluminum garage just beyond the Jaguar with a percussive, reverberative thunk. The boys looked at each other in elation and terror, the sound of rock on garage door seeming to them the loudest thing in the world.

“Holy shit!” said Bishop, and both of them, as if moved by the natural impulses of hunted animals, ran.

They ran down Via Veneto, the neighborhood’s lone street, which followed roughly the same curvature as a path that deer had made when this place was still a nature preserve, a path that ran between the small man-made pond to the north and a large drainage ditch to the south, these two bodies of water being enough to sustain a modest deer population even through the Illinois winter, a herd whose offspring still lingered in Venetian Village and terrorized various carefully tended flowering plants and gardens. The deer were so annoying that the residents of Venetian Village paid quarterly fees to a deer exterminator who left salt licks laced with poison on posts high enough for adult deer to reach (but, importantly, too high for any of the neighborhood’s twenty-five-pound-and-under dogs to accidentally ingest). The poison was not immediate but rather bioaccumulated in the deer’s body, so that when the animal’s death instincts kicked in, it tended to wander far away from its herd and die, conveniently, somewhere else. And so along with the standardized gondolier-themed mailboxes and front-yard water features, Venetian Village’s other major repeating architectural items were posts with salt licks on them and signs saying DANGER. POISON. KEEP AWAY in a very tactful and elegant serif typeface that could also be found on the Venetian Village official stationery.