The Nix(41)

“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 f*ck 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.”

“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?”

“Where is it?”

“You need to promise. You won’t tell.”

“Fine, I promise.”

“Say it with feeling.”

“Just show me.”

Bishop raised his hands in an I-give-up gesture, then pointed at the stairwell below him. “Down there,” he said. “I keep them down there, hidden in the dirt, bottom of the stairs.”

The Berg dropped the page he was looking at and opened the gate to the stairwell and rushed down. Bishop looked at Samuel and nodded: the signal.

Samuel leaped off the loading dock down to the spot where the Berg had been standing. He walked over to the gate and very slowly shut it, just as they had practiced. He could see the Berg at the bottom of the stairs, his long horrible rattail, the fat expanse of his back as he huddled down and swept away the dirt and leaves and discovered the plastic bag that Bishop had planted there.

“In here? In the bag?” the Berg said.

“Yep. That’s it.”

When the gate shut, it did so with a small and trivial click. Samuel slipped the heavy padlock between the bars and closed it. The snap made by the lock’s internal metal mechanism felt substantial and satisfying. It felt final. Irrevocable. They had done it. There was no going back.

A few feet away, fluttering in the wind, was the page Bishop had given the Berg. It spun in the eddies the breeze made around the loading dock, folding over itself at the creases made when it was pressed into eighths. Samuel grabbed it. Opened it. And the immediate impression the photo gave, before all its shapes resolved themselves into recognizable human forms, the dominant textural feature, the thing that seemed to define the photo and would later be pretty much the only thing Samuel remembered about it, was hair. Loads of dark, curly hair. Around the girl’s head, a jet-black cascade that looked physically heavy and difficult to bear, hair in tight curls that reached all the way down to the dirt she sat on, the flesh of her butt smooshing out beneath her like bread dough, one arm behind her and supporting herself with her elbow in the dirt, the other hand reaching down to her crotch, opening herself up with two fingers in a gesture that looked like an upside-down peace sign, revealing this plump and mysterious bright-red spot amid another outbreak of dark black hair, hair that was thick and curly where it almost reached her belly button, but became wispy inside her pimpled thighs, where the hair resembled the desolate attempts teenagers make at mustaches and beards, hair that kept creeping down beneath her to the spot where she contacted the ground, where she sat in some anonymous tropical forest scene, Samuel seeing this and trying to gather all of it simultaneously and trying to make sense of it and trying to enjoy it the way Andy Berg seemed to enjoy it but achieving only this abstract sense of curiosity combined with maybe a mild revulsion or horror that the adult world seemed be a terrible, appalling place.