The Nix(40)

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.