Bait Dog: An Atlanta Burns Novel Read online

  But the gun’s blast is lost to the music.

  They don’t stop playing.

  JUG JUG JUGGA GRRAOW GRRAOW RAAAAR

  “Aw, what the heck?” she says, but her voice, too, is swallowed. In fact, her ears are starting to ring. Chris has his ears plugged up with his fingers.

  She pops the breach. The shell pops out, hits the ground. The smell in the air crawls up her nose: expended gunpowder. It’s suddenly like she’s falling sideways toward a memory she hopes dearly to avoid right now (smell is the most potent conjurer of memory, she thinks, I bet you didn’t consider that little facty-fact), and so she pushes through it by popping another shell in the chamber, taking aim over the barrel, lining the bead just right—

  And blasting one of the drummer’s cymbals right off its stand. The birdshot sends the cymbal spinning into the wall. The stand wobbles but doesn’t fall.

  Manboob stops playing.

  That gets their attention. Not noise but rather, the absence thereof.

  They all look first at the cymbal as if it might’ve been possessed by a ghost or the Devil or the spirit of Adolf Eichmann.

  Finally, they turn and see Atlanta and Chris standing there.

  “Took you long enough,” she says, and then she realizes she’s yelling. Can’t help it. Ears are still ringing.

  The skinny skank with the ass-crack is like a rattler ready to strike: she’s already got her bass guitar down on the ground and a baton in her hand that, with a whip of her arm, extends into a three-foot-long polycarbonate beat-down stick.

  Manboob has fetched the symbol—the golden metal is now pock-marked with bird-shot. He holds it and looks sad. Like he just lost a friend.

  John Elvis is nowhere near that fast. He’s still throttling the neck of that Steve Vai special like it’s a chicken, or his dick. His jaw is tightening and relaxing, teeth grinding: tell-tale signs of an addict. Meth, probably. Not odd for this area. Not anymore.

  “What the fuck is this?” he asks.

  “A friendly visit,” she says. Atlanta cocks her head toward Chris. “Remember him?”

  “Yeah,” Chris says, voice shaking like he’s going to lose it. “Remember me?”

  Skinny Skank hisses at them, further completing the visual of the viper.

  “I remember you,” John Elvis says. “The Jew. And now, apparently, his Jew-loving bitch.”

  Atlanta scrunches up her face, looks at Chris. “You a Jew?”

  He shakes his head and gives an uncertain shrug as if to say, no?

  “Uh, yeah, he’s not a Jew,” she calls. “Not that it’d be a problem if he was, but we just figure, if you’re going to hate on somebody, then hate them for the right reasons.”

  “Not a Jew?” John Elvis says, confused.

  Skinny Skank fills in the blank: “That’s the faggot.”

  She’s guessing now that Skinny Skank was one of the four that did a number on Chris. Certainly the way he’s staring at her—as if he’s burning her up with his own mental cigarettes—tells that tale.

  “The faggot,” John Elvis says, nodding, nodding, chewing on that information. “Yeah. Yeah. Uh-huh. Okay. Fuck you doing, coming up into my barn with that shotgun—”

  Manboob suddenly clutches the damaged cymbal to his chest. “I’m not with them!” he yelps, then barrels across the wooden floorboards—shaking the whole barn—and bolts out a side door.

  “Pussy!” Skinny Skank shrieks after him. Voice like a fork scraping across teeth, that one.

  “So whaddya you want?” John Elvis asks. “Bitch wanna get burned like homo boy?”

  Chris recoils a little, takes a hesitant step back, but Atlanta hooks his elbow and pulls him back forward.

  “No, thanks,” Atlanta says. “I’m trying to cut down. I’m just here to get a little payback for my friend. And also to deliver a warning that this shit won’t fly. You leave him and everybody else around here alone or—“

  “You gonna shoot us?” Skinny Skank asks with a laugh. “That’s a one-shot shooter, you little dyke. Take your shot, one of us will be on you like white on rice. And if it’s me, I’ll take this baton and stick it so far up your coochie you’ll gag on the end of it.”

  “I’m sorry,” Chris calls out. “Who’s the dyke here?” It’s like he can’t contain his sass, but once it’s out, he pulls back, turtles in once more.

  Atlanta ignores that. Decides to clarify. “I’m pretty fast putting another shell in the breach, if that’s what you’re asking.” She really is; she practiced in the mirror. “Maybe I get off a second shot fast, maybe I don’t. So, in the words of my favorite fictional cop-on-the-edge, what y’all gotta ask yourself is, do you feel lucky, punks?”

  The looks on both their faces says, yes, they do in fact feel lucky.

  Seems high time for a demonstration, then.

  John Elvis has both hands off his guitar—it hangs by a black leather strap, the neck exposed.

  She aims fast, pulls the trigger. The birdshot takes off the neck of the guitar right at the fingerboard. John Elvis about looks like he’s going to piss his pants. He howls a withering lamentation.

  Skinny Skank doesn’t flinch, though. Baton raised like a Valkyrie sword, she comes bolting forward.

  Atlanta, though, already has the barrel spitting out its empty shell and is tucking another into the chamber—the barrel closes, her thumb pulls back the hammer, and she thrusts the gun up right in Skinny Skank’s face. The Nazi twat skids to a halt.

  “You wanna eat birdshot?” Atlanta asks. “Because I’m talented with this shotgun. I’m the surgeon, and this here is my motherfucking scalpel.” It’s a lie, really. It’s mostly because she’s in pretty close quarters and a shotgun is called a scatter-gun for a reason: you don’t have to make one bullet count because you have a whole swarm of little lead bees that dance when you pull the trigger. That’s what’s great about a shotgun: no need to be surgical. “Unless you want your face erased, drop the baton, step back into the gosh-darn barn. Go on!”

  Another hiss from the Skank, but she does as told. The baton drops. She slinks backward.

  Atlanta tells Chris to pick up the weapon. He does.

  “Now,” Atlanta says, “we’re gonna leave now. Like I said, this friend of mine is under my protection. Whole fuckin’ school is under my protection. You come at us, I’ll make shotgun gravy out of your tender vittles. Tell your friends, too. Mitchell Erickson and whoever else. This ends here.” Skank and John Elvis don’t say squat, but when she says Mitchell’s name they share a panicked look.

  Atlanta can’t help getting in one more barb: “And by the way, your music’s like someone set fire to my ears then pissed on ‘em to put ‘em out. Talentless assholes.”

  Then she and Chris back away from the barn.

  They go back the way they came. All the while Atlanta keeps her gun up and out. She sees John Elvis and the Skank standing there, watching them leave.

  They don’t look happy, understandably.

  Oh fucking well.

  * * *

  In the van ride back, it’s like someone uncorked a bottle of high tension and happy gas. Everybody’s laughing. Giggling. The rush of courting danger. The uncertainty in the thick of it. The release of triumph, of pitching a stone into the eye of giants, of still being alive to tell the tale. It’s all, did you see his face? and I know, right, what a skank, did you see that butt-crack? and Shane’s leaning forward from the backseat over the center console, the eager beaver looking to hear the tale and live it vicariously.

  “Guess I owe you five hundred smackaroos,” Chris says, cheeks pink, face giddy. “I like that word. Smackaroos. Sounds like… underwear filled with heroin. ‘Hey, Mom, can I wear my smackeroos today? Can I can I can I can I?’”

  “Call it a hundred,” Atlanta says, laughing. “Dang, I enjoyed that too much to take any more than that.” And it occurs to her then that she did enjoy it. She feels higher than the Adderall made her, and like she accomplished something, like she really
truly accomplished something.

  * * *

  That night her mother says, “Atlanta, you want for me to go out and get some dinner? I’m fixin’ to eat, darling, and we still haven’t tried any of those… whatever those sausages are.”

  She means kielbasa. Polish sausage. Lots of spice. Thing is, this area is a big Polish area. Not just Polish, either. Lithuanian. Hungarian. Ukranian. That means at all the diners you can get blinis and koshe and pierogies and pickled pig’s feet and all that good stuff. But the king is kielbasa. You go into town, you’ll find three kielbasa shops within walking distance of one another. All run by old families, each with their own recipe, each with their own little old babushka-wearing ladies in the kitchen. It’s not a competition. They encourage you go try each one. The area doesn’t have much by ways of tourism, but foodies come up now and again from Wilkes-Barre or Scranton or even Philly just for the kielbasa.

  Sausage tourism.

  Being up north is weird, Atlanta thinks. Still, she’s feeling—what’s the word? Magnanimous. She tells her mother, sure. Go for it. Bring back some kielbasa. Which she does. They both eat the sausages—bright red from the paprika within—in silence, and when they’re done, they go their separate ways. It’s their first mealtime together in a long time. For better or for worse.

  * * *

  It’s 9PM when her head hits the pillow. No Adderall. She thinks, don’t need it, feel pretty good, fuck it. Sleep comes fast. Rushes up on her like a train. She goes down, it’s like she’s been shot in the head.

  It’s 3AM when she wakes up to find Skinny Skank standing next to her bed.

  Baton in hand.

  Oh, shit.

  She scrabbles to stand but Skank has a hand over her mouth, and she shushes her. “Shhh, girl. Shhh. Don’t cry out. Don’t call for your mother. Don’t wanna have to hurt her.”

  Skinny Skank runs the tip of the baton up Atlanta’s naked calf, up the inside of her thigh, and teases along the hem of her cut off sweat pants—everywhere the baton touches it feels like fire ants biting, and suddenly Atlanta feels dizzy and sick and afraid in the way you get at the top of a too-tall roller coaster peak, the fear of falling fast, the fear of what’s coming.

  “I’ve been wanting to do this for a while,” Skank says, smiling like she’s doing Atlanta some kind of damn favor. “I think you’ve wanted it too.”

  She thrusts the baton up Atlanta’s pant leg and she gasps, her spine bowing so hard she feels it might snap—

  And then there’s a sound like a Champagne cork blasting off the bottle, and before Atlanta knows what’s happening the Skank is staggering backward, her arm across the chest of her ratty t-shirt—she pulls the arm away and it’s sticky with blood, and the shirt’s torn open and so is the girl’s chest.

  The air stinks of gunsmoke. It burns Atlanta’s eyes.

  “You shot my tits off,” Skank says, her voice quiet and bemused. “Shot ‘em right off. What man’s ever going to want to suck on them again? Oh, God. How am I ever going to have babies? How am I ever going to feed them with these ruined tits?”

  Skank makes a cry like a cat being kicked.

  The blood flows hot, fresh, over the girl’s hands.

  And then Atlanta wakes up.

  * * *

  She pissed the bed.

  That’s what she thinks at first, but then she thinks: it’s just sweat. No way she could piss that much. It’s up and down the length. Even the top-sheet is soaked through.

  Doesn’t smell like piss, either. Thank the Lord for small comforts.

  First thing she does is feel around the floor for the Adderall and pop one.

  No more sleep. Sleep can eat a bag of dicks is what it can do.

  * * *

  The next week goes by without event. She sees her old best friend Bee in the hall, and sees that Bee is hanging out with a new crew. Not the popular crowd but the second rung on the ladder—the B-Team to the popular crowd’s A-Team. Soccer players, theater junkies, rich kids, smart kids. She gets Bee to look at her, though. Atlanta smiles at her because she’s having a good week. Bee smiles back—or, a ghost of a smile, at least—and then it’s gone, and Atlanta figures, that’s all I’m ever going to get.

  Even still, it doesn’t do much to damage her mood. Things are good. She feels strong. In control.

  The Adderall certainly helps. She even sits down to write that paper. Housman’s poem. “To An Athlete Dying Young.” She doesn’t need Shane’s Google-fu to get to the point: sometimes it’s better to go out at the top of your game, the poem’s saying. The poetic version of live fast, die young, leave a pretty-looking corpse. All with a lot of extra hoity-poopy fol-de-rol thrown into the mix.

  Chris sees she’s doing the paper. He tells her that Housman was gay. She doesn’t know what to make of that in terms of the poem, only that, hey, maybe he liked looking at boy athletes. No harm in that.

  But then she wonders: maybe the poem is about someone. Some boy who died. And maybe Housman loved this boy. And used the poem to justify it, to find peace and meaning in death.

  “You’re probably just making shit up,” Chris tells her.

  She shrugs. “Ain’t that poetry?”

  “True that, sister.”

  * * *

  Later, they’re hanging out at Chris’ house. Just her and him. Shane says he doesn’t like to go by Chris’ house. Got caught in the cross-fire of some rant by Bill Coyne, Chris’ father, about how at the factory where he works the “Mexicans” came in and took a bunch of the jobs, and worse, now they sent a bunch of jobs to Mexico as if that weren’t enough, and y’know, whatever.

  They go into the house through the garage—the house isn’t much to look at, certainly doesn’t match Chris Coyne’s own fireworks dazzle and winky panache—and it’s there that Atlanta meets Bill Coyne. She almost runs bodily into him as he comes out into the garage, overalls gunked up with motor oil stains.

  He sees her and smiles. His eyes flash. This isn’t lust. She knows the lust look. This is something else.

  “Chris,” he says, not taking his eyes off her. “Aren’t you going to introduce your friend?”

  And then she gets it. That look is hope. He thinks she might be a girlfriend. Or at least a heterosexual experiment. She’s not really sure how much Bill Coyne knows—Chris doesn’t like to talk about it—but it’s not like the boy’s homosexuality is particularly repressed. Two days ago he got detention for making out with Danny Corley outside the math wing.

  Even still, hope springs eternal.

  Chris introduces her. He says nothing more than “This is Atlanta Burns,” but it’s got that sullen teen sub-layer, that hidden text of, God, Dad, shut up, no, she’s not my girlfriend, so don’t even ask.

  Bill Coyne’s mental antenna clearly doesn’t receive teenage sub-text. He just keeps smiling. Shaking her hand too long. “Atlanta Burns. That’s a… unique name.”

  She’s surprised he doesn’t recognize it from the news.

  “Thank you?” she says.

  “Where’d you get it?”

  “My parents gave it to me,” she says, in a fit of unmitigated obviousness.

  “That’s great,” he says, nodding, still shaking her hand. “Just great. You two kids go on and play.” Like they’re going to whip out Monopoly upstairs. Or maybe he thinks they’re going to get all sex-monkey—a far looser definition of play, but there it is. And Bill all but confirms that: “Don’t worry, I won’t bother you two.”

  He then pats her on the shoulder with a creepy smile. And he heads over to a workbench whose tool-laden corkboard is bordered by a series of colorful license plates. Most of them for NASCAR or football teams. One stands, out though. Black and white. No color. Stamped on the plate is the text:

  14WORDS.

  Doesn’t mean much and she’s not sure why it would.

  Chris pulls her inside.

  In the kitchen, Chris pours her a glass of sun tea. Bitter. She hates the way they make tea up here. Tea sho
uld be sweet. Gritty with sugar. Up here it’s like the Yankees want their tea to taste like wash water.

  “He knows you’re gay,” she says. “He’s gotta.”

  “He knows.”

  “But the way he acted—“

  “He thinks being gay is like a… decision. Like I choose that way now because I’m a rebellious teenager. But eventually the vagina will overwhelm me with its miasmic vapors.”