Bait Dog: An Atlanta Burns Novel Page 5

  He’s one of them. One of the popular kids.

  “No, no, no,” she says. “You’re just dicking around. You mean to tell me that John ‘Fourth Reich’ Elvis and Pretty-Boy Mitchell there attacked you together?”

  Coyne’s face is as somber and sober as a lost puppy. “Them and two others. One of them a girl.”

  The skinhead and the student council member.

  Buddies in hatred.

  Ain’t that just a peach.

  * * *

  She’s not sleeping when she hears her mother’s scream. The Adderall makes sure of that. It’s another night awake, this time cleaning her room for the first time in what may be years. The drug is like a clean, warm finger thrust into the moist, dewy folds of her mind. Once in a while, the finger wriggles, keeps her awake, keeps her focused. Until the scream.

  When she hears the scream it’s like the finger turns to a fist. Her blood pressure goes up: she can feel the tightness in her neck, wrists, temples.

  Atlanta almost falls heading down the steps—her feet are moving faster than her head. But it’s like she doesn’t care, and before she knows it she’s through the kitchen, slamming her hip into the counter, and throwing open the door to the garage, where her mother’s been sleeping.

  Lights on. Mother in the middle of the room, crying.

  Not far from her feet: broken glass.

  In the middle of the glass: a cement block with a dead cat wound around it with barbed wire.

  Atlanta’s first thought is that this is the handiwork of John Elvis Baumgartner and Mitchell Erickson, the Odd Couple of teenage homophobia, but that doesn’t make a spit-bubble of sense. Unless the two of them have honed their homophobia to such an edge that it grants them psychic powers, she shouldn’t even be on their radar.

  No, suddenly she has a pretty good idea. That chin-lift. Those dark eyes. Jonesy and Virgil and maybe that other one with the big teeth.

  Mom backs up, feels the cot at the back of her calves and sits down on it hard and heavy. She’s struggling to light a cigarette but her lighter isn’t catching a spark.

  “Someone threw a dead cat through our garage window,” she says, blubbering.

  “Yes,” Atlanta says, her voice sharp with sarcasm: “Thanks for figuring that out, detective.”

  “Detective,” mother says, as if it pings something inside her thought process. “We should call the police. Is this about what happened? Oh, Atlanta, this might be about—“

  “Shut up, Mom!” Atlanta barks. “Jesus Christ on a cruise ship.”

  Her mother gasps. Nothing like a little blasphemy with which to slap her Mama around. At least it quiets her down.

  Atlanta cannot quiet her own heart, though. It’s like an itchy jackrabbit thumping its back legs. She can hear her own blood. A tremulous rush in the deep of her ear. It’s like a song. A really unpleasant, utterly without harmony, song. Sung by a choir of demons.

  “Poor kitty,” she hears her mother say, just a peeping whimper, and she thinks, poor kitty, indeed. Atlanta’s not a cat person, not at all, in and fact she’d much rather have a dog, thanks. If only Mama weren’t allergic. Even still, those two killing a cat like this—well, that means they’re a lot more serious than she thought. She figured their antics the other day were pretty much amateur hour karaoke: slap a kid around, make him eat dog shit? Ain’t nice, but it also isn’t the calculated bullying of, say, kidnapping a gay boy, burning him with cigarettes, then sticking Thai chiles up his ass until his anus bleeds.

  Killing a cat, though, takes it to a whole other—

  Oh. Oh.

  That’s when Atlanta sees. The cat’s a black cat, black as crow-feather, black as a midnight specter, but even still she can see the smashed flat tail and the tire tread on the back half of the animal. The guts are poking out, too: or, rather, squished out, like from the tire that ran over it.

  It’s then she knows she’s seen this cat: she saw it on the road a couple days before, hit by a car. Probably one of the cat lady neighbor’s kitties—that woman is running a whole feral colony next door, accepting any and all felines regardless of demeanor or disease, and this one’s probably just an escapee from that kitty-cat cracker factory.

  Those idiots just scooped up some roadkill and wrapped its mortified carcass around a brick.

  Not exactly a sociopath’s plan.

  Even still, it means she’s got to handle this. She can’t have people throwing dead-cat-deliveries through the windows of her house. And this on top of the thing with the Coyne bullies.

  Atlanta glances over at her mother, and the woman’s got out her clam-shell cell-phone and with trembling fingers is trying to punch in numbers. She takes two long strides over and snatches the phone out of her mother’s hands.

  “No cops,” she says. “It’s just a prank. Go to bed.”

  “It’s gonna get cold out here with the broken window.”

  Atlanta clenches her jaw. Thinks, so fucking what you fucking scag hag jerk bitch I don’t care if your goddamn titties freeze into snowballs and fall off, but she’s not sure how much of that is her and how much of that is the angry Adderall squirrel that’s doing laps around her brain.

  Instead, she says through clenched teeth, “Fine, go inside, sleep on the couch or whatever.”

  Mama slinks inside like a guilty cat. One that didn’t get run over and thrown through a window.

  Though she deserves that, too.

  Shut up, brain.

  No, you shut up.

  Atlanta goes back inside to finish cleaning her room.

  * * *

  Next day she finds that someone has put a Hello Kitty sticker on the outside of her locker. They’ve drawn comical, oversized dicks surrounding it. Some of the dicks are jizzing little jizz bullets. Hello Kitty black marker bukkake. Underneath is the text:

  DADDY WANTS DICK PUSY

  PUSY presumably meaning PUSSY, but with these jackholes, who can say?

  * * *

  She about falls asleep in Mrs. Lewis’ class. Which does not endear the teacher toward her any more, but the Adderall is fading fast and the woman is going on and on about someone named Wilfred Owen. Even the strongest drugs cannot resist the soporific lure of World War One British poetry.

  After class Mrs. Lewis tries to flag her down but Atlanta mumbles something about, “Oh, heck, I’ve got a… tooth… vasectomy… can’t stay, sorry, bye now.” And she ducks out.

  And runs bodily into Chomp-Chomp.

  She shoves him back and cocks a fist.

  “Wait!” he hisses, wincing, ready for the hit.

  Instead she grabs him by his ratty Brooks and Dunn t-shirt and drags him into the nearest open door. Which is, of course, the girls’ bathroom.

  A girl with pink hair—Atlanta recognizes her, her name’s Susie but she spells it weird, Suzi or Soozie or something—yips like a spooked coyote and hurries out when she sees what’s going on.

  Chomp-Chomp yelps as she jacks his buttbone against the sink.

  “I didn’t do it!” he says.

  “Do what, big mouth?”

  “The cat. The brick. I didn’t do it.”

  “But you knew about it.”

  “I was there! But I told them not to. Look, here—“ His hands goes into his pocket and pulls out a fistful of dollar bills. She thinks there might be a five sticking up out of there. “This is twenty-three dollars. I wanna help pay for the window.”

  She snatches the money. “Twenty-three bucks? Dang, do you know how much windows cost?”

  “No.”

  Of course, she doesn’t either, but she’s not going to tell him that.

  “You’re not very bright, are you?”

  Again he answers: “No.”

  “Why do you hang out with those fuckwits, anyway?”

  “I dunno. Because they let me.”

  Things start to click into place. Tumblers in a lock. She’s always heard that there’s a kid who will do stuff for money—nothing kinky, but he’ll eat na
sty stuff, he’ll headbutt things, he’ll say crass shit to teachers, all for a couple bucks. She looks down at the wad of ones in her hand.

  “They make you do stupid shit for money. Is that right, Chomp-Chomp?”

  “My name’s Steven. And yeah. But I like doing it.”

  She shakes her head. “Then you’re a dumb-ass, dumb-ass.”

  He shrugs. “Well. We kinda already figured that out.”

  It’s hard not to laugh.

  “Well-played, Chomp—er, Steven. I’m going to shit onto their heads for this. I am not a happy girl and I am eager to take out my unhappiness on those who piss in my cereal.”

  He winces again. “Okay.”

  “Either of your buddies got a car?”

  “Uhh.” He hesitates, but then sees her face. “Jonesy’s got a Mustang. A ‘67 1/2. Green like a pine tree green. Why?”

  She doesn’t say. She just winks and leaves.

  * * *

  Atlanta has a free period in the afternoon. She sneaks outside in the parking lot. Goes row by row until she finds that green Mustang. A restored classic muscle car.

  She takes a piece of limestone gravel off the lot and keys a message into the driver-side door:

  BEAR MACE.

  She heads back inside.

  * * *

  She has a whole plan concocted where she’s going to sneak into the administration office and Shane’s going to run interference because everybody there knows him and loves him and then she’s going to use someone’s computer or get into a file cabinet and find home addresses for both John Elvis and Mitchell, but Shane tells her that plan is dumb.

  “Haven’t you ever used the Internet?” he asks.

  He shows her that, if you know on what digital door to knock, you can find out pretty much anything. Finding out addresses is, according to him, “Easy like Sunday morning,” which she’s pretty sure is a Lionel Ritchie reference and strange coming out of Shane’s big round head. But then he reminds her that she knew the reference, which makes her strange, too.

  “My Daddy used to like him,” she says.

  Regardless, they get the addresses. John Elvis doesn’t live all that far from her. Mitchell’s way on the other side of town. Deep past the first ring of suburban houses. Up in the wretched nest of mini-mansions on Gallows Hill. The Internet doesn’t have more information on John Elvis, but it has some more of the 411 on Mitchell: his father’s Orly Erickson, and he along with most of the other mini-mansion inhabitants, is a transplant. Not from local farm-stock but rather, comes here from Dayton, Ohio. Heads up some new “biologics plant” north of here, in Springtown. Some 50,000 foot facility. TNC Biologics. She’s not sure what biologics is, so Shane works more Google-fu.

  “Looks like TNC does all kinds of stuff,” he says. “Recombinant DNA. Stem cells. Vaccines.”

  She shrugs. Fine. The elder Erickson is a productive member of the business community. His son’s still a gay-bashing bully piece of shit and he has to be taught a lesson.

  Still, though: those mini-mansions at Gallows Hill are a gated community.

  Which means the first order of business is paying a visit to John Elvis Baumgartner.

  * * *

  It’s Saturday when they head over there. Chris drives: he’s got his mother’s mini-van, a 1996 Chevy Lumina whose front-end calls to mind the monorail at Disney World, a place Atlanta hasn’t been to for well over ten years but that she still remembers like it was yesterday.

  Shane sits in the back, ensconced in a cocoon of kiddy toys. Chris isn’t an only child. He’s got two little brothers and one little sister, all eight years old and under. Atlanta’s not sure if both of his parents are really each his parents or if there’s a remarriage thing that went on. Figures it’s not worth it to ask.

  She’s up front. The shotgun in her lap. The barrel cracked in half, just waiting for a shell—of which she has many rattling around the pocket of her camo pants.

  John Elvis Baumgartner lives further out than even she. Up Mill Road, past the “clean Amish.” Left on Wagon Hollow, past the so-called “dirty Amish.” (There exists this notion that a subset of the local Amish are somehow of a lower class than their peers. Atlanta thinks it smacks of prejudice, but she has to admit that the dirty Amish do live on properties that look rotten and run-down. Old barns. Uncut lawns.) Finally, up the winding Indian Run Road, past the Blissful Acres Trailer Park, whose acres are blissful only in the heads of the meth addicts that frequent the place.

  All the way at the end is the farm on which John Elvis lives. Sits at the base of Grainger Hill. The poor, podunk side. Gallows for the rich. Grainger for the poor. Maker’s Bell sitting smack in the middle.

  They park on Indian Run road, off to the side. The farm sits down a long straight driveway, not all too different from Atlanta’s own house. The barn is brown, not red, and has a roof that looks like it could come tumbling down at any point. The house is a smaller affair: water-stained buttercream siding, a seafoam green wraparound porch whose paint is seen peeling even from here. The fields around are not fallow: they’re freshly tilled for planting, in contrast to the rest of the property, which looks dried up and forgotten. Must be that someone else rents the fields from the Baumgartner family.

  A dog lays chained out front to a tractor tire. Snoozing.

  They hear music, though one might not strictly call it that. It’s a clamor of guitars, a speed-pulse of bass drum and inconsistent cymbal-smashing. Some kind of thrash metal.

  “We go up the side,” she says, pointing along an irrigation gulley. “You sure you’re coming?”

  “I would very much like to see their faces,” Chris says.

  “I’m staying,” Shane announces as if this were news. It’s not. They told him he had to stay before they even got in the mini-van. Then he says, “This doesn’t seem like much of a plan. You’re just marching up there with a shotgun? Isn’t that illegal?”

  Chris’s face paints a wicked grin. “I think it’s pretty bad-ass.”

  “You know what’s also illegal?” Atlanta asks. “Burning someone with cigarettes. Worse, it’s downright wrong is what it is. I’d say it’s even a little bit evil.”

  She thumbs a shell into the shotgun. Snaps the breach shut. That ends the conversation.

  Together, she and Chris creep up the side, toward the barn. Toward the music.

  * * *

  Looks like John Elvis has a band. If the black spray-paint on the kick drum is any indication, that band is named Warshed. She’s not sure if that’s “war-shed,” or “wars-hed” or just a mispronunciation of “washed,” and she’s not really sure it matters.

  The band—three members deep—plays loud, calamitous thrash music in the open back bay of the barn. The two doors are pulled back, and the earthen ramp up (where one would drive a tractor into the belly of the building, if the Baumgartners owned a tractor) is where she and Chris walk because they don’t see any other way.

  The trio of Warshed doesn’t notice them at first, so absorbed are they at making intensely shitty music. The guy behind the five-piece drum-kit is another student from Mason High: a metal-head who Atlanta’s pretty sure is named Travis, but she can’t stop thinking of him as Manboob given the fatty peaks rising behind his sweat-stained t-shirt. On the bass is a skanky skinny chick in a torn white Swastika-emblazoned t-shirt and a pair of acid-wash jeans slung so low you could tuck a fistful of pencils in her well-exposed ass-crack. She faces away from them, thrashing her short bob of white-blonde hair, giving them a good look at the top of her moon-cheeks.

  John Elvis, he’s on guitar. A cherry-red electric fresh out of a late-80’s hair-band video. It’s got all the angles found in a bolt of lightning. It’s pristine. He plays it with long, spidery fingers, but the grace of his playing doesn’t match the sound that’s coming out, which to Atlanta sounds more like someone is throwing their instruments into a wood chipper. RAR RAR RAR JUGGA JUG JUG.

  His one arm is inked from wrist to shoulder. Even from
here she can see that it looks like a giant tattoo of a Hitler youth rally. You stay classy, Neo-Nazi douche-nozzle. A cigarette hangs pinched between his lips.

  Her heart’s in her throat.

  They don’t stop playing. They don’t even see the two of them standing there fifteen feet away.

  Fuck it, she thinks, and fires a shot toward the rafters of the barn. The gun barks. What’s probably a handful of asbestos dust comes raining down.