Bait Dog: An Atlanta Burns Novel Page 4

  Yeah, no. She walks the other way.

  But it isn’t long before she hears the clop-clop-clop of his feet behind her, his little legs pinwheeling to catch up. “Wait. Wait.”

  She spins. “Dude. C’mon. Just trying to go to class here.”

  “I need your help.”

  “Oh,” she says. “Here.” Then she musses up his hair. “High school makeover, complete. Now you don’t look like some kind of rocket scientist golf champion. We’ll call that one a freebie. See you.”

  She turns, but he steps in front of her, desperately trying to put his hair back in its well-ordered place.

  “No,” he says, rolling his eyes. “I need you for something else.”

  “Because me helping you the other day wasn’t good enough?”

  “You’ll get paid,” he says.

  Through her teeth, she hisses: “What is it you think I’ll do for money, exactly? Just because—“

  “Oh! No. No.” A genuine look of panic hits his face like a bucket of ice water. Flustered, he holds up both hands and looks embarrassed. “I wouldn’t—I don’t—no, no, that’s not what I mean—“

  “Calm down,” she says, voice low. Others are starting to look as Shane continues babbling. She says it louder: “I said, calm down. Just go. I’ll follow. I said, go!”

  * * *

  She recognizes the boy waiting for her at the alcove’s end, sitting there on the lip of a planter where a plastic tree “grows.” Chris Coyne. One of the school’s self-proclaimed “Gay Mafia.” Each of them gayer and more fabulous than the last. She knows a few of them—or, knew them once, since nobody seems all that inclined to talk to her anymore—and they seemed nice enough, though gossipy.

  Coyne’s got his legs crossed. His hands steepled in front of him. His chin is up like he don’t give a fuck.

  But when he sees her, that veneer of disaffected pomposity vanishes in a powder flash. His face lights up when she enters the alcove, trailed by Shane. Atlanta’s not used to this kind of attention.

  She is, of course, immediately suspicious.

  “Oh, God,” she says. “What?”

  Coyne leaps up, beaming. He starts to move in for a hug but she recoils as if he’s coming at her with a pair of gory stumps instead of hands. He retreats, but the beaming doesn’t quit.

  “It’s the Get-Shit-Done Girl,” Coyne says. An eager, excited little clap follows.

  “The who?” she asks, incredulous. “The hell does that mean?”

  “I told him what you did for me,” Shane says.

  “And we all know what you did before that,” Coyne says, laying it out there bold and bright as day, putting it on the table the way someone might drop a microphone and walk off stage. As if she doesn’t understand, he goes above and beyond to clarify: “The thing you did to your step-father.”

  Ugh. Was that the story that was going around? Step-father? Jesus.

  “It wasn’t my—“ she begins but then says, “You know what, fuck this. I gotta go.”

  But before she again turns to escape this situation, Shane is exhorting her to stay and begging Coyne to lift his shirt and “show her, show her what you showed me.”

  Coyne takes a deep breath and turns around. He undoes his black-knit sweater vest, and then begins to unbutton his shirt which is an orange so bright she wonders if he’s going hunting later in some kind of gay nature preserve.

  When he lets the shirt fall, her breath catches.

  Dotting up from his lower back and trailing up his spine are a series of small circular wounds. Burns, she thinks. Each the size of a pencil eraser. They’re still crusty and enflamed. One weeps clear fluid as the scab cracks. The burns go up to the base of his neck—around the point of his collar—but not beyond. Like the attacker didn’t want to show off his handiwork. Like it was a message just for Chris Coyne.

  “Cigarette burns,” Coyne says over his shoulder. “They’re particularly, ahh, pesky given the ingredients list in your average cigarette. They don’t heal easy. Did you know in England they call cigarettes fags? Here I am: a fag burned by a fag. Go figure, huh?” His words are glib, brave, but his tone doesn’t match: his voice shakes a little. He’s trying to cork that bottle, keep the fear from coming out.

  It’s a familiar feeling.

  He puts his shirt back on. “They went further. They took my pants off. Shoved a bunch of hot peppers up my butt, spackled it over with peanut butter so it held the peppers up in there. Sounds funny, I know, and if it didn’t happen to me I’d laugh, too.”

  Atlanta’s not laughing. She says as much. In fact, she’s pretty horrified.

  “I pooped blood for a week,” Coyne says, matter-of-factly. Now she sees it: the tears at the edges of his eyes, glistening, filling up, but never falling down his cheeks. He blinks them back, and massages underneath his eyes for some reason. “When they did it, they said… they said that this will teach me that it’s an exit, not an entrance. Ironic given that they were sticking things in my ass, but I don’t suspect that any of these fine upstanding citizens are in line for the Nobel this year.”

  “There was more than one, then,” she says.

  He nods. “Four of them.”

  “And you know who they are?”

  Another nod.

  “And what is it you want me to do about this, exactly? Against four pissed off gay basher bullies?”

  “You took down three bullies the other day.”

  Shane grins. “She did. You did. It was pretty sweet.”

  “You want me to scare them? Hurt them? Get revenge? That what this is about? Revenge?”

  “Maybe,” Chris says. “Yes. I don’t know. What I really want is I want them not to do it again. They told me they would. If I didn’t ‘stop being gay.’ As if that was an option I could select on the menu.” He stares off at a distant point. “Even if they don’t hurt me again they’ll hurt somebody.”

  She’s chewing on her lip. This is a bad idea. No good can come of this. Is this who she is? Is this who people think she is, now, or who she should be? Still. Coyne’s face is back to his untouchable, unfazed façade—any sign of tears are long gone. But his hands are still shaking.

  Her hands shake too, sometimes.

  “I’ll give you five hundred dollars,” he says, finally.

  Wow.

  She lets that pickle.

  She owes Guy $100. The other four would be nice to have.

  “Fine. Meet me at my house. Today. After school.”

  * * *

  Final bell of the day. Atlanta’s at her locker. Putting all the books she should be taking home into her locker because she doesn’t give two rats fucking in a dirty gym sock what homework she has to do tonight, and when she turns around she sees them down the hall by one of the custodial closets.

  Jonesy stands, hips cocked, lips in an amused sneer. Virgil’s next to him. Big beef-cannon arms crossed so hard and tight the skin looks like an over-cooked sausage, like it might split at any second.

  Reason she hasn’t seen them in a week is that they were put on suspension for something or other. Getting into troubles like cock-witted assholes sometimes do. But now she sees them.

  They see her seeing them, and that’s what they want. Jonesy does a little chin-lift, a little head-nod. He might as well drag a comical finger across his throat and point to her.

  Then they turn the corner and go. She hears them laughing. Jonesy. That cackle.

  Great. Just what she needs.

  * * *

  “So,” she asks. “What’s it like being gay?”

  Atlanta walks along the edge of a barren cornfield, a field nobody plows year after year but whose clumpy rows still feature the dead clusters of long-forgotten corn. Chris Coyne walks next to her. He’s twirling a rolled-up comic book in his hand while Shane wades into the field proper, poking the ground with a stick, diligently hunting for, well, something.

  He shrugs. “I think I’m supposed to answer with: fabulous. And then I should do a
back-flip and fire-off pink bottle rockets or something.”

  “Sounds like fun.”

  “What it’s really like is, moments of unbridled delight punctuated by long stretches of misery, uncertainty, and oppression.”

  She shrugs. “Same as any teenager, then.”

  “Say that if you want. And maybe it is. Maybe we all have our own bullshit to deal with. But I can tell you that it sure ain’t easy, sister.”

  “Those YouTube videos would like you know that It Gets Better.”

  “Uh-huh.” He laughs, but not in a funny way. Takes the comic book out and unrolls it, then re-rolls it: a nervous habit. “That’s all well and good, those videos. Nice enough, I guess. But that’s like whispering in someone’s ear as they’re getting raped: oh, hey, gosh, don’t worry, they’ll stop sticking it in you without your permission at some point in the future. Then it’s all ponies and bubble-gum. For now, just lie back and think of England.” He stops walking, suddenly. Eyes her up. Face sad. “Well. You know what I’m talking about.”

  She doesn’t say anything and keeps walking, forcing him to play catch up.

  He continues: “I’m just saying, I could use with a little less, it gets better, and a little more, here’s how to make it better now. Or even, here’s how to stop bullying gay people just because they’re gay, you fucking asshole thug prick-slit Nazi motherfucker.”

  “That sounds a little long for a catchphrase,” she says.

  “I found one!” Shane says from ten feet away. He holds up a small black flinty stone, his face a triumphant moon. But then he holds it close and squints, then sighs. “Never mind.” He pitches the stone away, grumbling.

  “How’d you two hook up?” she asks Coyne, gesturing toward Shane.

  “We’re not butt buddies, if that’s what you’re asking. I’m done with those. The last one did not end well, let me tell you.”

  “I—“ she frowns, sticks out her lip. “I did not mean that, now stop. I just meant, you two seem like odd friends. Most times I see you with the Gay Mafia—“

  “La Cozy Nostra?”

  “Whatever. I’m just saying, you two seem an odd pair of ducks. You’re an agent of fabulosity—“

  “While he sits in his basement building a 64-bit Ubuntu box?”

  She crooks an eyebrow. “I don’t know what the hell you just said, so I’m going to go ahead and assume that you’re as big a nerd as he is, no matter how nice you dress.”

  “Bingo. We met at the comic book store in Bloomsburg.” He shakes his comic book at her, as if to demonstrate. She catches a glimpse of the cover: Captain America. Coyne must note her dubious face, because he adds: “What, did you think we all just sit around reading the homo version of Cosmopolitan? Nine ways to tickle the taint? The Cosmo guide to being a power-bottom?”

  She shrugs it off, but points to the book. “Seriously, though? Captain America? You just find him sexy, don’t you?”

  “Please. I’ll have you know, he’s too muscular for me. I like thin little fey boys. Delicate as a wilting rose. No, I read Captain America because he punches Nazis and fights evil with a shield and because he used to be a little fey boy like me but now he’s an ass-kicking pro-America patriotism machine.”

  “Didn’t figure you for a patriot.”

  “Didn’t figure you for Al Qaeda.”

  “Cute.”

  “Correction: the cutest.” He smiles like a kewpie doll, eyes-all squinty, cheeks puffed out. For added effect he kisses the air around her head. She swats at him like he’s a fly.

  “You’re weird,” she says.

  “Uh-huh. So. You asked me, now I’ll ask you: what’s it like to be you?”

  “It’s fine,” she says, plodding along. “Pretty boring.”

  He rolls his eyes. “Oh. Sure. I bet. The town of Dullsville, population: You.”

  “Now you’re just being sarcastic. That’s not cute at all. My Daddy used to say, Darlin’, sarcasm is the first refuge of bitter men.”

  “Well I say that sarcasm is a mini-mansion in the middle of Awesome-Town and there’s a pool and a room filled with puppies and a kitchen with granite countertops and a double-oven. And a cabana boy named Steve.” He walks in front of her and puts his hands on her shoulders, an act which earns him a malevolent stare. Even still he doesn’t pull away and instead says, “Atlanta Burns, you need to understand something. People are in awe of what you did. Jaw-dropping, pants-shitting awe.”

  She sighs. “I can tell, what with the way that nobody talks to me anymore.”

  “I said awe, honey. In the truest sense of the word.” Way he says truest is tuh-ROO-est. “Like the way people have awe in God or government. Awe is respect, but it’s fear, too. I think people are a little scared of you.”

  “Maybe they’re right to be.”

  He shrugs and smiles. “Maybe they are.”

  Shane totters back over and thrusts an angular piece of rock in front of their faces, first hers, then Coyne’s. “Boom! Check it.”

  He regards both of their ambivalent stares with deepening disbelief.

  “Hello? Arrowhead? These fields are full of them. The local Indian tribe, the Shawnee, used to chip away at—“

  Chris interrupts. “Nobody is ever going to pop your cherry, young padawan.” Then he snatches the arrowhead and tosses it back in the field to Shane's chagrin.

  “You’re a dick and you’re dead to me,” Shane says.

  Atlanta laughs and they keep walking back to her house.

  * * *

  She has to root around her messy room for an hour before she finds her yearbook. As she discards junk behind her—an Oakridge Boys CD (“Daddy used to sing Elvira to me to get me to go to sleep”), a broken lacrosse stick (“I played one game once, shut up”), a box of old Judy Blume books (“Oh, whatever, somebody says they didn’t read Judy Blume is a lying liar-faced liar who lies”)—she finally finds it and plops it down in front of Chris.

  “There. Yearbook. Point out your attackers.”

  He flips through the book. “Only two of them go to school with us.”

  “So show me those two, then.”

  Shane whips around a pair of nun-chucks he found on Atlanta’s floor, damn near knocking over a desk lamp. “So what’s the deal with your Mom?”

  “There’s no deal with my Mom,” she says.

  “She sleeps in the garage.”

  “So she does.”

  “That’s weird.”

  “Not weird. Just her choice is all.”

  Shane frowns. “You get the run of the house?”

  “I suppose I do.”

  Chris—laying on his stomach on her bed, yearbook splayed out in front of him—doesn’t look up when he says, “You should cut her some slack. Let her back in. Figuratively and literally. We look at our parents like they’re supposed to somehow be impervious to stupidity but the reality is, they make mistakes. They’re people like anybody else, and honey, people are dumb as a box of Frisbees.”

  “I said, it’s her choice,” Atlanta hisses through clenched teeth. “Now hunker down over that yearbook before I smack it over your darn head.”

  “Here,” he says, stabbing his finger down on a picture nestled amongst last year’s junior class. Dude in the picture looks like a real skinhead type. Long, lean hound-dog face with hard cheekbones. Hair shorn, showing the ghost of a black widow’s peak. The collar of a gray jacket and white t-shirt underneath.

  John Elvis Baumgartner. Full name listed.

  “I’ve heard of him,” she says. “Skinhead, right? Always thought his name made him sound like a serial killer. Don’t serial killers always have three names?”

  “Yeah, but if you want to see the one that really looks like a serial killer…” He flips a few more pages deep, flicks another picture. “There.”

  Mitchell Erickson. A real pretty-boy. Firm jaw like the swing on a swing-set. Blonde hair, well-coiffed. Big smile with white veneer teeth. Atlanta knows him, too. Or of him. He’s on student co
uncil. And on the morning announcements. And a pitcher on the baseball team.