The Boy in the Tunnel

by Gardner Linn

 

32.

 

            “What is doing in auditorium in middle of night, huh?”

 

         “Dragan, listen to me, we weren’t doing anything. Just getting some costumes.”

 

“Dragan is knowing you are lying. It is taking Dragan a minute to recognize, but Dragan is knowing Peter Kirkland. Kirkland is Ron Marston’s favorite, when special things need to be doing. Dragan asks, ‘Can Dragan be doing special things?’ but Ron Marston say no, is for Peter Kirkland. And here is Peter Kirkland being tied up with resident Andrew Boyd in makeup room in middle of night, doing what? Special things? Dragan is thinking he is finding out. Is showing Ron Marston that Peter Kirkland is being not so special.”

        

Dragan’s steps echoed hollowly on the floor of the stage. He was sweating in the spotlight. He had tied Drew’s hands together with nylon tights, but Drew was pretty sure he could extricate himself if need be.

        

“You don’t like Kirkland?”

        

“Is not Dragan’s place to like him or not like him.”

 

“I don’t like him either.” Drew wondered why, all of a sudden, he was involved in so many interrogations. His Handbook hadn’t said anything about that, beyond a general warning to avoid such situations if possible. “Why’d you tie me up, Dragan? I thought we had a good RA-resident rapport.”

 

         “Rapper? Snoopy Dogg? Flavor Flavor?”

 

         “Rapport. Relationship.”

 

“Oh. Is not Andrew. Is Peter Kirkland. Dragan is keeping eye out. And when Dragan is seeing Andrew with Peter Kirkland, Dragan is wondering why. We have good rapper, no? Andrew tells me why.”

 

         “What did you do with Kirkland?”

 

         “Is safe. Why are you being with Peter Kirkland?”

 

Drew had known this guy Ivan in high school, this Eastern European exchange student, the football team’s placekicker. Drew hadn’t liked him either. “I told you. Just getting some costumes.”

 

         “I am being sorry, Andrew.” Dragan punched Drew in his unprotected stomach. Drew heaved, his breath short. “You are telling me.”

 

“What the fuck, Dragan? What the fuck?” Ivan was the only of Drew’s former teammates who had given Drew shit for quitting and becoming a cheerleader. “Is woman now, yes?” he would say. “Is woman!” For all the compassion that Drew strove to show toward all of God’s creatures, he couldn’t bring himself to show very much to those with such a limited grasp of English. He recognized the problem, though, and had been working hard to correct it. “Come on, Dragan,” said Drew. “What the fuck is this?”

 

         “You want to stop, you tell.”

 

         “Julian’s going to hear about this, Dragan. You’re going to be in such shit.”

 

         Dragan cracked Drew in the jaw. “Is Andrew working with Julian Washington? Is working with Ron Marston?”

 

         “What? Dragan—you work with them, you fucking—“

 

         “Is what? Dragan is fucking what?”

 

         A strand of bloody saliva drooled from Drew’s mouth. “Fuck you, Dragan. Seriously.”

 

Dragan brushed his hair from his forehead, then rubbed the top of his head, hard, and let out a wordless moan. “Why is Andrew being so stubborn? Dragan is not being your enemy. Dragan is not being Ron Marston’s bitch no longer.” Dragan reached behind his back, then brought a hammer back into the light. “We are not having to do this the hard way.”

 

************

 

         Audrey woke up when she fell off the couch onto the business end of a PBR bottle.

 

“COCKFUCKER!” she said to the bottle, which had struck her just below and to the left of her belly button. “Jesus Christ fucking assholes leaving shit everywhere.” Audrey rubbed the purpling bruise on her belly. “Fuck!”

 

         “Hey, shut the fuck up in there,” said a voice in the kitchen.

 

Audrey stood up on wobbly legs, the left of which was numb from sleeping on the couch. “Oh goddamn it,” she said as feeling returned in sharp bursts to her left foot. The recliner next to the couch was empty—the half-naked guy had left, at least.

 

Audrey hobbled into the kitchen, KRUMMFAUVEN! crumbs only exacerbating the pins-and-needles foot problem. “Fucking assholes can’t clean up shit.”

 

“Hey, Audrey, keep it the fuck down.” It was Renee in the kitchen, Renee sitting naked at the red Ikea table drinking coffee from a #1 GRANDPA mug, right leg crossed over the left. Her skin was pure pale white, except for a pink and orange coating of cereal dust on the sole of her right foot, with which she absentmindedly traced a circle in the air, flexing her ankle, and a tendril of black that coiled around her shoulder from the tattoo on her back.

 

“God, Renee, put some clothes on.”

 

Renee shrugged noncommittally.

 

“Seriously, you’re getting your junk all over my chair.” Audrey found a relatively clean red plastic cup and filled it a third of the way with coffee.

 

“My ‘junk’ is perfectly clean. Cleaner than this chair.”

 

“Not if you were in there with Alex.”

 

“Well, I wasn’t.”

 

Audrey filled the rest of the cup with Bailey’s and generic amaretto. “You drink that,” said Renee, “and you call me disgusting.”

 

“It’s good.”

 

“You have the taste of a six-year-old. Add some whiskey, at least.”

 

Audrey took a swallow of the drink, wincing at the sweetness. “A cocktail should not be like candy,” said Renee.

 

“Shut up,” said Audrey. “Doing a study-abroad thing in Paris doesn’t make you an expert on the sophisticated life.”

 

“It’s amusing to be lectured on sophistication by someone who lives in this house.”

 

“Jesus Christ, put some fucking clothes on.” Audrey tossed back another mouthful of her drink. “Is Alex in there?”

 

         “Alex had somewhere to be.”

 

         “Where’s Xander?” Renee looked up at Audrey for the first time. Audrey thought she saw panic on her face.

 

         “How the fuck should I know?”

 

         “Just asking. You’d think he’d want to be here to see this.”

 

         “The fuck does that mean?”

 

         “The boys just have very similar tastes, is all.”

 

Renee dropped the mug on the table and stood up, a tall, slender column of negative space in the center of the room, busy with filth. “I’m going to get dressed,” she said, and turned to enter Alex’s bedroom, revealing her tattoo to Audrey:  a full face portrait of herself covering her entire back, the chin of the portrait hitting just above the sacral dimples to either side of her sharply concave spine. Audrey had heard on too many occasions both Alex and Xander praise the topography of Renee’s lower back, its dips and ridges, which were usually visible between the tops of her jeans and her too-small wifebeaters. Audrey had never really gotten it before, but now, watching this giant face float away from her, all lines leading down to a knotty V of muscle and bone smoothed over by paper-white skin glowing in the dim kitchen, she understood, saw the potential coiled and waiting there to strike. Alex, the asshole, called the dimples “thumb rests.”

 

The thick black lines of the tattoo seemed solid, but as Audrey moved closer to Renee, stepping carefully on the KRUMMFAUVEN!, she saw that the lines weren’t solid at all, but made of densely packed strands of words, sentences snaking all over her back. She wasn’t close enough to read what they said. She took another step and reached forward to stop Renee as she opened the door to Alex’s room, and her hand fell on Renee’s hip, her thumb landing right in Alex’s beloved dimple.

Renee twisted out of Audrey’s reach. “What the fuck are you doing?”

 

Audrey didn’t know. “I couldn’t see what it said.”

 

“Stay the fuck away from me. Drink your disgusting coffee.”

 

Renee slid into Alex’s room and slammed the door. The squalor of the kitchen rushed to fill the space she left behind.

 

***************

 

Charlie was still locked in her office. The last of the Everybody had filed into the Suttledge Room and the doors closed and locked behind them. No sound penetrated those doors and the glass walls of the Student Activities Office.

 

Kenya was tired of sitting here waiting for nothing to happen. Chet wasn’t going to call. Neither that guy who said he was his roommate nor the asshole with the Tom Waits voice were going to pass on the message. For all she knew, Chet was right upstairs, playing Area 51. Maybe she’d just go check.

 

         “Come on, Kenya. We’re going on a field trip.” Charlie emerged from her office, a long gray coat belted tight around her waist.

 

         “Where are we going?”

 

         “We’ve got a meeting. Come on.

 

         “With who?”

 

         “Where’s the Queen of Knives?”

 

         “I haven’t seen her since yesterday.”

 

         “Call her.”

 

Kenya dialed 2386 on the phone. The phone on the other end rang twelve times before the answering machine picked up. “This is Joanie and Kenya!” two voices said. “We’re probably at the gym, so leave a message and we’ll get back to you if we feel like it.”

 

         Kenya hung up the phone. “She’s not in the room,” she said.

         “Wait here.” Charlie went back to her office and returned with a purple phone book. “Look her up in here.”

 

         “What is this?”

 

         “Just look her up.”

 

         Kenya flipped through the Purple Pages and found the entry: “Joanie McKittrick...2386. Where she is now...Commune.”

 

         “It just says ‘Commune.’”

 

         “It’s ‘Commune.’ It’s a verb. You got your gunpowder on you?”

 

         “I think Joanie has it.”

 

Charlie pulled a glass vial of the black powder from her coat pocket. “Here.” Kenya took the vial and shook out a small mound of powder at the joint where her left thumb connected to her hand. She raised her hand to her nose to snort the powder. “Wait a second,” said Charlie. “Let me get mine ready.” Charlie took the vial back and dipped out a dose with a long curved fingernail. “We go together.”

 

Kenya and Charlie lifted their hands to noses and snorted simultaneously. Anyone watching would have seen the two women suffer what appeared to be epileptic seizures, which ended as abruptly as they had begun; and then the observer would have seen the tall black woman nod to the petite pale one, an action which, apparently, prompted them to leave the Student Activities Office, at which point the observer, reaching the bottom of the stairs from the second floor, would have shouted “Kenya?” and Kenya would have turned, shocked, and the observer would have seen hope in her eyes for a moment before she realized that the observer was not who she wanted him to be.

 

 

© 2006 Gardner Linn