The
Boy in the Tunnel
by
18.
Avery Barlow hung up the phone. Barlow, though just
21, maintained the weathered, no-nonsense demeanor of a much older man, and a
successful one at that. It helped that he was so big: 230 pounds but not fat,
just square and solid. Literally big-boned. His hair
had started to go grey in high school, and now he kept it short, a thin layer
of silver wire. He wore a suit at all times, even to class, and what had at
first seemed a pretentious affectation now seemed an essential part of his
being, the suit rumpled but not dirty or ill-fitting. It was very much like his
skin, like maybe he slept in it every night and showered in it every morning.
Barlow’s size and maturity had enabled him to buy
cigarettes, no questions asked, when he was eleven years old, and he had smoked
a pack a day since then. The smoke had prematurely lined his skin and imparted
a Tom Waits-ish growl to his voice. When he was
eleven, people thought he was twenty-one; now that he was twenty-one, people
thought he was forty. This had never really helped him with women, but it did
have its advantages.
Barlow turned in his desk chair from the phone to
the man standing behind him at the office door; he had been standing there,
silent and alert, waiting to be recognized, for nearly ten minutes. This was
how things were done in the Nine Dead Men. You respected your superiors,
because one day you would be in their shoes. And this was not the kind of false
respect fraternity officials demanded of their pledges; no memorizing lists of
brothers’ names and hometowns, no drinking buckets of unidentified liquids (and
the occasional solid) because your superiors told you to. The philosophy of the
Nine Dead Men was as simple as this: when a superior makes a reasonable request
of you, you fulfill it to the superior’s satisfaction. It was all in that one
word: reasonable. The Nine Dead Men were nothing if not reasonable.
The Nine were so reasonable, Barlow thought, that
here they were allying themselves with St. James and her creatures, putting
aside decades of well-earned enmity, all to save UNWG from the likes of Ron Marston and his loathsome, perfectly acronymed
Department of University Housing; it would be just like DUH not to understand
what was best for anybody, let alone the University that gave them the land and
license to continue their little experiments, not to mention (and somewhat
ironically) a home of their own.
“You may speak,
Quartermaster,” Barlow said.
Chet stepped
forward and nodded curtly to Barlow. “I find myself in a quandary, Secretary.”
“And you would
tell us?”
“I feel that I
have become privy to information I am not yet supposed to know.”
“And this
information is?”
“I saw your
communication with the woman in the JFK Room last week.”
“Tell us how.”
“I saw the
surveillance video in the University Housing offices.”
Barlow’s face
finally registered something besides disinterest. “You were in the DUH
offices?”
“I found a secret
entrance.”
“And you did not
tell us?”
“Until recently, I
did not know you would be interested.”
“We shall discuss
this further.”
“Last night, I saw
Ron Marston meeting with another man on the West
Campus quad.”
“We are aware of
this meeting.”
“I saw the
Sergeant-at-Arms follow the man Marston was talking
to.”
“You see quite a
bit.”
“Was this meeting
in response to your meeting with the woman?”
“Yes.”
“Was she who I
think she is?”
“We would
imagine.”
Chet had had his suspicions, but still he was
unprepared to have them confirmed. The Nine Dead Men, in league with Charlie
St. James. Chet didn’t really know what to think about that.
“May I ask why?”
“You will all know soon. It was imperative that we
keep this secret at first; we couldn’t risk dissension in the planning stages. This
is too important. Sometimes you have to stand with your enemy against a common
foe.”
That sounded kind
of melodramatic, Chet thought, but by now he had learned to keep his mouth
shut.
*************
That fly was there for like three hours, buzzing
uselessly against the window screen. Like it couldn’t get it
through its little fly head that you can’t get out that way. It didn’t
even try to fly away. It just buzzed wobblily up from
the windowsill, banged into the screen, and flopped back down again. For like
three hours. Three hours straight of this. Maybe it
broke a wing or something. It really wanted to get out of this room; it just
didn’t have the means to do so, or the capacity to understand why it couldn’t.
Dave watched the fly from his chair next to the
mini-fridge. For the first ten minutes or so he was just annoyed by it and
wanted to swat it, but he couldn’t bring himself to get out of the chair. The
chair was comfortable, low and soft and cubicular. He
had bought it at the Goodwill thrift store three years earlier, the day he
moved in to Wintertree. His dad had driven him to
campus, helped him unload his suitcase and his many boxes of books, then taken him to Goodwill to furnish the room. The Tafts had money
enough for new furniture, but Mr. Taft wanted Dave to have the same amazing
college experience as he had, and a big part of that experience was ratty
thrift-store furniture. They bought a rickety bookcase and this hideous
lime-green chair (not even really lime-green; more like someone had eaten a
bunch of limes and then vomited them up) that smelled vaguely of dog; but not
too far into fall semester the chair had started to smell like Dave or Dave had
started to smell like the chair, and either way it meant that Dave would never
part with the chair, no matter what the cost, and it had followed him to this
apartment and, fates willing, would follow him to many more.
This all seemed vitally important for Dave to
remember as he watched the fly. It staggered around on the windowsill,
punch-drunk; maybe it had a broken leg too. What had started as annoyance
became intense interest as Dave started to take a rooting interest in the fly;
he wanted it to succeed, to find the hold in the screen up in the upper left
corner, just a little higher than the fly seemed able to reach.
Dave dug his left middle finger into the torn hole
on the arm of the chair. The chair had been the focal point of the living room
of his first off-campus duplex after leaving Wintertree,
which apartment he had shared with Avery Barlow. Avery had been a great
roommate, because though he was just nineteen he looked well over thirty, and
received no guff from package-store employees when he purchased kegs of PBR.
Parties every Saturday in that apartment, parties that drew friends and
strangers from all factions of the UNWG population to drink weak beer and
strong drinks—vodka mixed with unfrozen blue Otter Pops, Sprite mojitos, a delicious though nausea-inducing concoction
Avery called a Dreamsicle—and to take turns sitting
on the green chair, jumping on the chair, dancing on the chair, having sex on
the chair, shooting up on the chair, coming down on the chair. That’s where the
rip on the arm came from, some tweaker
friend-of-a-friend-of-a-friend-of-a-friend clawing at his skin, at the walls,
at every piece of furniture in the room before running naked out into the
cul-de-sac, which turned out to be the last straw for Dave and Avery’s
(admittedly cool, in non-naked-tweaker situations)
neighbors, who called the cops. Everybody disappeared when the cops showed up,
even the tweaker, but they had to do something, so
they slapped some handcuffs on Dave and let him sit in the back of the squad
car for thirty minutes.
The fly was trying to climb up the screen now,
taking tentative steps between the little intersections of crossed wires. Dave
wanted to help it but he couldn’t get out of the chair. The fly reached up but
lost its grip and fell back to the windowsill. The Abduction Ceremony was
supposed to start in two hours. Dave thought the fly was dead, but then it
wriggled back onto its feet. There was a big chunk of the last twenty-four
hours just missing from Dave’s memory but he could only recognize that fact if
he sort of looked at it sideways. Two fingers on his right hand were bent at angles that looked kind of impossible, but wasn’t feeling
any pain. When Dave told his dad about the handcuffs, the older man’s voice
swelled with a pride that Dave had not heard in many years. Dave’s favorite
memory of college was seeing one of his parties mentioned in a Student
Handbook, the one that belonged to Stacy Ellis, the girl to whom he had lost
his virginity after one of those parties; when it was over they had taken turns
reading aloud from the relevant passage in her handbook, with dramatic voices
and everything, until he was reading stuff like “Dave is reading stuff like
‘Dave is reading stuff like ‘Dave is reading stuff like...’’” and pretty soon
they were narrating their own first fight. “’You yell at Dave to stop,’” Dave
said, and Stacy yelled “Stop!” and Dave said “Here, you read it, then,” and he
handed the book to Stacy, and she said “’Dave says ‘Here, you read it, then,’
and hands the book to you.’ I can’t do this,” and she threw the book across the
room, but Dave picked it up and read “’You throw the book across the room but
Dave picks it up and reads ‘You throw the book across the room but Dave picks
it up,’’” and they wanted to stop but they couldn’t stop; they had to know how
it ended. The book flattered them, made them feel that their rushed, awkward, drunken
encounter meant something to someone beyond the two of them.
The fly hopped a couple of times; it looked like it
was gathering strength. That wasn’t really a “favorite” memory, Dave thought.
There was a beer in the mini-fridge that he should drink. He had to go to the
Abduction Ceremony. It would look bad if he didn’t. Something had happened
yesterday but he couldn’t see it. It was in a dark room and he just felt the
presence of what had happened, just what had happened breathing behind him, a
flicker on his peripheral vision. His dad lived with him in the duplex. They
lived together and threw parties that everybody came to, even Milo Kirby came
once and stood in the corner and only danced when somebody put on James Brown.
Dave’s dad made
Everyone was at the party. Dave’s dad, Avery,
Stacy, Milo, even the fly, wearing a baby-blue sweater and with his hands
stuffed in the pockets of his jeans and a big bright smile on his face, and the
fly took Dave’s hand in his and leaned close and smiled and said “You’re going
to do something for me, Taddlington.”
*******************
You climb
through the hole in the wall of Room 79A and pull yourself into the crawlspace.
You crawl through it, trying not to remember the time you crawled under your
porch to find Baron von Barksdale, his body stiff and balloon-full after four
days trapped. You hear the people walking the floor above you, but try not to
think of how Barky heard you walking on the porch above him, Walkman headphones
jammed in your ears, deaf to his whimpers.
The
crawlspace brings you to another hole in another wall. A rope is tied to a stud
and leads across a chasm to an iron ladder on the opposite wall. You test the
rope; it feels strong. You step out through the hole, a firm grip on the rope,
and swing hand-over-hand to the ladder. Though it only takes four seconds, your
shoulders ache from the strain and you are relieved to reach the ladder. Don’t
look down; try not to think of the dreams in which you were falling, or the
times you woke up in twin puddles of sweat and urine. Brian fell from the
monkey bars; you didn’t push him. Remember.
You climb
down the ladder to the basement level. You turn left, toward the source of a
faint light. You walk until you come to the open door of what looks like a
library. There is someone in the library, reading a UNWG Student Handbook. He
is not surprised to see you, but he is surprised to be reading that he is not
surprised to see you. You look at the cover of the book he is reading: it has
your name on it, stamped in gold. You say
“Drew?”
© 2005 Gardner Linn