by Art Taylor
Art Taylor is a fiction writer, book critic, and assistant professor of English at George Mason University. His short stories have appeared not only in EQMM but in other national magazines, such as North AmericanReview, and in various regional newspapers, such as the Raleigh, North Carolina, News and Observer’s “Sunday Reader.” He’s a contributing editor to Metro Magazine and a semi-regular reviewer for the Washington Post Book World, with a focus on mysteries and thrillers.
Mere seconds after Evan told his secretary to send the call to voicemail, the extension buzzed again.
“I’m sorry, sir.” His secretary’s tone was plaintive. A new secretary, but she’d already learned that he didn’t like to be disturbed be-fore meeting with a client. “The man says it may be urgent.”
Evan continued to thumb through the materials he’d gathered for his ten-o’clock: the American Funds 2004 edition, last quarter’s statistical update, BB&T’s standard application and client disclosure, a few more items—top to bottom in the order he would present them, lined crisply along the left and bottom margins. He squared the material on his desk calendar. Organization shows respect, his father had told him, a banker himself. Preparation is control. Respect, power, control. First steps to success.
“What was the name again?”
“A Mr. Dexter Hollinger. He said he knew you in school.”
On the far wall hung two diplomas from the University of Virginia—undergrad and M.B.A., the Darden School. Just above, the clock stood at 9:54 a.m., the second hand gliding past the six.
“A friend from college?”
“High school, I believe, sir.” And then, tentatively: “Boarding school is what he said, actually.”
Hollinger? Dexter Hollinger? Still not a name he recalled, but something nagged at the edges of his memory. Football? he wondered. He hadn’t kept in touch with everyone on the team, but at least he would have remembered the name. Was it already time for annual fund-raising? Passing the cup for Roll Call?
“I’ll handle it.” He picked up the handset just as his secretary clicked off. There was a dry emptiness as the transferred call patched through. “Good morning, Mr. Hollinger. How may I help you?”
“Mister Hollinger,” said the man on the other end, the voice high-toned and spry, just the trace of a Southern accent. “Now that’s a switch.” He gave a small snort. A fuzziness in the connection, slightly tinny—a cell phone, probably. “Twenty years ago, I’d be trembling just to have the Head Monitor pass me in the hallway—or any of the Old Boys, really. And now.... Mister! I mean, I’m not the Dex I was, but still...”
Head Monitor. Old Boys. New Boys. Evan hardly thought about those phrases anymore. The “Rat” System. Upperclassmen initiating the incoming students. Hold the door. Stack the plates. Hierarchies established, humility encouraged—spoiled teenage boys coming in with smirks on their faces and swagger in their steps and slowly molded into Southern gentlemen. So Hollinger had been three or four years beneath him? A Rat? No wonder Evan couldn’t place the name.
“Been a long time,” Evan said. “Dexter, of course. Dex. Sorry about the mister. Just habit”—though it wasn’t his habit at all. First names—that was how you established a firm relationship. “Guess I was just surprised to hear from you.”
“Well, wasn’t like we were close, was it? Would have seemed odd for us even to talk then, much less be calling one another now....”
“You speak the truth,” said Evan, unintentionally echoing a catch phrase that had been bandied about the school back in the day.
Yes, the call was “out of the blue,” Dex admitted, and “a lot of water under the bridge since then, thank God,” as he chatted briefly about where the last two decades had taken him, a jittery patter of information and interjections and platitudes: back to Alabama first—”Roll on, Crimson Tide”—and then out West for a while, Seattle actually, with a new wife, a new business, success better some years than others. “The road is full of...”
Some of Dexter’s words were lost as the cell phone’s signal drifted, and Evan only half listened to the ones that made it through. In his files he’d found some graphs comparing five-year and ten-year performance in various growth and income investment funds, and he arranged these on small easels on the corner of his desk. The second hand continued to sweep through the minutes on the clock opposite his desk. Finally, he couldn’t take it any longer.
“My secretary said that there was something urgent you—”
“Well ... urgent is...” said the voice, fading in and out, “...about you and your family, of all...” and then crisper once more: “Just a dream, I know, but, I thought, why would I be dreaming about Evan Spruill after all this time? And so I said to myself, well, why not give him a call just to be sure, you know?”
“A dream, you say? I lost you for a moment. You had a dream of some kind?” The clock’s hands now stood at ten precisely. Promptness is a sign of respect, too. Outside the window, a row of dogwoods lined the bank’s parking lot, and over to the right a young man in shorts strutted down the sidewalk, rushing the season, the city still a little cool this late April day. Evan took a deep breath. “Well, yeah, I guess that’s odd. But hey, Dex, I gotta say, it’s still good to hear from you, and I wish I didn’t have this meeting to—”
“...only because it was so unsettling,” Dexter went on, and Evan understood that the connection was no clearer in the other direction, that Dexter hadn’t heard him at all. “Like when you wake up with a start and you’ve had some kind of nightmare about your mom or your brother or something. First thing you want to do—three in the morning, whatever time—you want to pick up...” the sound of traffic, the roar of a truck “...in premonitions or whatever, but something about the, I don’t know, the tone of it if nothing else, struck me as disturbing, and ... well, just in case, that’s what I did. Called the alumni office and got your number.”
Somewhere down the street, a siren wailed—for a moment, Evan wasn’t sure if it was coming toward him or fading away, but then it stopped abruptly, as if strangled. “Well, Dex, I appreciate your calling and letting me know, but everything’s okay here, and I hope we can catch up again soon.”
The static continued to course and crinkle, but through it, Evan could hear a sudden, gnawing void. For a moment, he thought Dexter might have hung up, but then the other man’s words—and his disappointment—came through clear:
“Don’t you want to hear the dream?”
“I’m late for an appointment. I may have a client already waiting outside.”
“I’ll be quick, I promise,” came the reply, and Dexter sketched out the contents of his nightmare: A car breaks down, Evan’s car, Evan’s wife and family aboard—a daughter perhaps, at least in the dream a daughter—a dead battery the cause; Dexter is there too, at the top of a hill, and he calls down to the family stranded at the bottom, then someone tosses a book down toward them. “I don’t know the title of the book,” said Dexter. “And I don’t know who threw it, but when I called down to you, you said that it was good to see me and that you’d changed your name to mine for some reason. Ha, ha! Imagine...” And then more people gather to try to help the family: people manning cell phones, calling from pay phones, trying to reach help; Dexter finds a gas station nearby, but instead of simply asking a mechanic for help, he tries to search on a computer for possible assistance. Suddenly, ads for pornographic Web sites begin popping up on the screen, and Dexter struggles to hide them, closing new windows as quickly as they open. “I know it’s all fairly random,” Dexter said. “But still ... well, it was just unsettling, and I woke up feeling that something,” and here his voice grew more somber, “that something terrible, truly terrible might happen.” He laughed again, a hint of some nervousness, self-consciousness. “I wouldn’t even know if you have a daughter—or a wife either for that matter—but still...”
“No, you were on the money,” said Evan. “Wife and daughter both.” He looked at the photographs on his desk. A picture of his family taken the Christmas before: his wife Karen in a red knit sweater with a green Christmas tree across its front, five-year-old Heather wearing a pair of reindeer antlers and a red plastic nose, and Evan there too, beginning to gray. He hardly recognized himself. Another photograph of his daughter in a tire swing, from his own parents’ house, the rope above twisted tight and the photo caught in mid-spin, Heather’s hair flying out in strands as the rope uncoiled itself. That’s the kind of future you’re investing in, he sometimes told clients, pointing to the picture. The only investment that counts. And it was true: His family was his greatest asset. “But you can rest assured, Dex, we’re fine. Just a dream, I guess.”
“I’m glad to hear that,” said Dexter, and Evan thought he heard a sigh, the sound of some genuine relief. “Well, sorry to take your time,” he said, “but if the car breaks down, I guess you know who to call! But seriously, lemme give you my number in case you ever want to catch up again someday. I actually just moved back to the area—old haunts, even if not just like the old times, thank goodness. Trying to kick-start my business out here and...” Again, a fading in and out. “...I hate to say it, but given all that happened back then and all, I thought that maybe...”
“Always a possibility,” Evan said, but he didn’t write down the number, and he rushed with some relief through his goodbye.
Evan’s client had indeed already arrived but hadn’t minded waiting. The two of them discussed investment options, short- and long-term strategies. The client completed a quick survey to determine his financial type—ultimately more conservative—and then concluded the meeting by purchasing just over twelve thousand dollars in Class A shares divided over the Growth Fund of America, the Capital World Growth and Income Fund, and the American Balanced Fund. The remainder of the day continued at a similar pace—a handful more clients and two midday meetings—and Evan didn’t give his phone call with Dexter another thought until later that afternoon when his wife Karen called to say that she and their daughter were stuck in the parking lot at Crabtree Valley Mall, the battery dead on the Land Cruiser or perhaps something else wrong, she couldn’t quite tell.
* * * *
“It’s just eerie, that’s all I’m saying,” Evan told his wife as they finished dinner that night—several hours after the Roadside Assistance crew had started the SUV once again. As they ate, Evan had related to Karen parts of the story, editing out parts for Heather’s sake, and though he agreed that it was just coincidence (“a fluke,” she had said), his frustration deepened when she didn’t show even the smallest evidence of some amazement—which prompted him to further overstate his case, even to raise his voice. “I mean, what are the chances? It’s ... it’s almost supernatural or something!”
Karen edged a nod toward Heather and widened her eyes at him—the same expression she gave when someone on TV said a “grown-up word” and she wanted Evan to change the channel. He hadn’t noticed how rapt his daughter’s attention had become. She held her fork upright in her little fist and stared at him, her mouth just slightly parted.
“Finished, honey?” Evan asked, and when Heather nodded yes, he turned back to Karen and cocked his head into a question.
“How ‘bout you go put your plate in the sink?” Karen said. “Go play in your room while Daddy and I clean up.”
“Find a good book,” Evan called after her, but he knew that when he went back later, she’d be watching Finding Nemo for the umpteenth time or taking another trip under the sea with the Little Mermaid CD-ROM that she’d begged them to buy her. At least the latter was educational.
They cleared the table in silence, then stood together at the sink, Karen rinsing the plates, sending a few scraps down the garbage disposal before handing them to Evan to load into the dishwasher. She turned to the pots next.
“I just don’t want you scaring her,” she said finally. “Eerie? Okay, sure. I understand. But maybe she doesn’t, you know, Evan? And after all, it was just a dead battery, and it’s running fine now. Just let it go.”
“But why’d the battery die?” he asked, the same as he’d asked earlier. He’d checked the Toyota himself once he got home: opened and closed the doors to watch the interior lights come on and go out; started the engine not once but twice, sitting in the driver’s seat the first time and then stepping outside the second, just to listen to it run.
Karen set down the sponge. “I don’t know, Evan, and I’ll admit that I think there’s something weird about it.” She glanced toward the doorway of the kitchen, as if to make sure Heather hadn’t returned, and then, elbows propped on the sink’s edge, turned to face him head-on. “And you know what I’m thinking?” she said, her voice softer, more somber. She leaned in closer, and for a moment he felt a shiver at how steady her gaze was. “I’m thinking—” her voice almost a whisper now—”that it’s gremlins.” And with that, she finally winked and then gave him a quick kiss on the nose. She picked up the sponge again and the pan she’d been scouring. “I’ll tell you what,” she said, a quick nudge with her elbow, “if you can’t get it off your mind, why not give the guy a call back, and talk to him about it. Talk it out a little bit, laugh over old times. It’ll ... demystify the whole thing, maybe.”
“I don’t even remember him. He was a few years behind me.” Not abnormal, Evan knew. He’d been required to memorize the names of old boys during his own Rat year, all of them looming like titans over his freshman activities: Curtis Bartlett and Dick Oglethorpe yelling at a group of first-years to “cheer harder” at a football game, and then having them run laps around the football field when the team fell 14-10. School spirit or else. Or Crispin Smith, who’d made Evan eat a half-dozen peaches when he’d grabbed one at dinner without offering the bowl to the Old Boys first. Years later, he’d run into Smith at a cocktail party and had gone over to tell him that he still couldn’t stomach the taste of peaches, but the other man couldn’t recall the incident—or Evan either, he eventually admitted.
“Hard to laugh over old times,” Evan said now, “since the two of us didn’t really share any times.”
Karen shrugged, then handed him the pan to add to the dishwasher. “Then let’s just get back to normal, okay ?”
As soon as they’d finished in the kitchen, he headed back to his daughter’s bedroom, stopping along the way to skim through an old yearbook from a bookcase in the living room. Dexter’s picture was bland enough—he wore a tangle of blond hair and that awkwardly boyish look, thick eyebrows over dull eyes, broad lips pulled into a slim grin, a slightly jutting lower jaw—and nothing in the brief description yielded much either: straightforward information about Dexter’s hometown, an address in Alabama, perhaps still his parents’ address; and extracurricular listings that showed him running cross-country in the fall, going out for track and field in the spring, computing club all year. As he returned the book to its shelf, Evan regretted that none of it jogged his memory any further.
He was surprised to find Heather neither watching a video on the TV in her room nor playing Little Mermaid on the small Dell that her grandfather had passed along to her. Instead, she had gathered a half-dozen animals in a semicircle around her and was reading to them from one of her Little Bear books—not able really to read the words but repeating the story from memory as she turned the pages. Evan sat down Indian-style beside her and joined in the group of quiet listeners, then read another story himself to the assembled audience. Afterwards, he and Heather sat together at the computer and checked her e-mail for the daily message from her grandfather (“Just keeping in touch,” he always said, “write back soon,” the real reason for his generous gift), and then she clicked open one of the games, moving the mouse with glee as she helped Ariel dive deep into the ocean to gather precious treasure. Soon, Karen peeked in to check on them, leaned her hip against the doorway, smiled. Evan remembered an early beach vacation with Karen, the two of them swaying in a hammock and the moon over the water, and another night, years later, with Karen rocking Heather to sleep when she was just an infant, and then more recently, the three of them reading stories together. These were the moments that Evan treasured—a sense of peace and togetherness, each thing in its place, all somehow right with the world.
When he and Karen finally pulled the covers over themselves for bed, neither of them had mentioned the incident again. But after Karen had drifted off, Evan still found himself nagged by restless thoughts about the day’s coincidence.
Irrational, he told himself finally, thinking of both his own overreaction and Dexter’s overeager phone call. “Something terrible, truly terrible,” he’d said—and over what? A dream? It was more than irrational. It was absurd.
Wasn’t it?
* * * *
Despite himself, Evan called the alumni office between prospects at work the next day. He was on the school’s board of directors now, and he asked the board liaison for some information about Dexter Hollinger. “Haven’t talked to ol’ Dex in a while,” he told her, “and don’t remember seeing his name in the alumni mag. Do you all have any idea what he’s up to these days?”
“Looks like it’s been recently updated,” she said. “And you’re in luck. He lives right here in town.” He could hear her smile on the phone as she gave out his addresses, both physical and e-mail, and a phone number—very likely the same number Evan had failed to write down the day before.
A quick Google search yielded little more, except for the name of Dexter’s wife, Pam, cross-listed with an address in Seattle—proving that part of the story was true as well. He also discovered the name of Dexter’s business: Spectrum Security. A sunburst image at the top of the homepage touted “For the Full Spectrum of Security, Always Go With Spectrum Security,” and a list below sketched out their specialties: home, business, car. Evan paused at the word car. Wouldn’t it be easy for a man who knew car security to bypass one himself?
That led him to call the mechanic about the Land Cruiser. Was there any chance it had been tampered with? Any chance at all? He could almost hear the mechanic’s confusion and distraction over the phone.
“Dead battery’s a dead battery, I reckon,” he said. “Was there a problem with the way I jumped it off, sir? Is it giving you more trouble? They’d probably replace it for you, but you might need to speak to my manager....”
It was a dead battery, he told himself. A fluke. Put it out of your mind.
He did manage that for a while, and at the end of the afternoon, he had garnered three new clients and nearly sixty-two thousand dollars in investments. At home, all seemed positive as well: meat loaf for dinner, and afterwards Heather went to play while Karen took a quick trip to Crabtree Valley Mall.
But then Evan returned to his study and pulled out the old yearbook again to stare at the picture. When nothing came to him, he called Neil Copley, his boarding-school roommate, now living in Georgia.
“Hollinger, you say?” asked Neil. “Vaguely. Somebody from down here?”
“From school. He was a Rat the year we graduated.”
“Dexter Hollinger,” repeated Neil. “Wait. Blond kid? Pointy chin?” and when Evan told him yes, Neil chuckled. “Sure, how could I forget him? He was on my hall his first year. Stretch Flex Dex—don’t you remember?”
“Nickname like that, you’d think I would.”
“He got it running soap races,” said Neil, and Evan pictured the game: new boys lined up two at a time on the dorm’s coarse industrial carpet, racing to push bars of soap from one end to the other of long hallways—pushing the soap with their noses only. “Dex was like a spider, legs spread out and that skinny ass up in the air, elbows at these wild angles and his head down on its side. Never won a race; always ended up with these huge rug burns on his nose, down the side of his face. Then we started calling him Carpet Flecks Dex. How’s he doing, anyway? You run into him up there?”
“Got a call from him yesterday.” Evan stared at Dexter’s picture in the yearbook and tried to imagine carpet burns along the nose, down the side of that jaw. “He’d had some kind of nightmare about me, if you can imagine.” Evan told Neil parts of the dream, explained about the dead battery on the Toyota.
“Little freaky, huh?” Neil said when the story was over.
“I didn’t even remember the name, remember him at all. But I guess if I’d been there for the soap races on your hall, it might have stuck in my memory a little more.”
“Well, you oughta remember him, too,” Neil said, in a voice that struck Evan as somehow accusatory. “Dex got sent up a couple of times. You were there at least once.”
“Sent up?” said Evan—another phrase he hadn’t heard in nearly two decades—but before he could respond any further, he felt a tugging at his sleeve. Heather in her Strawberry Shortcake pajamas.
“Daddy, how long are you gonna be on the phone?”
“Just a few more minutes, honey. Go play in your room, and I’ll come in and read you a story soon, okay?”
“But I want to show you something now.” Her eyes widened with impatience. She wiggled her hands at her sides, the fingers tensed.
“I’ll see it in a minute, okay? Just set it all up for Daddy and I’ll be there in a minute.”
Heather left the room pouting. Evan returned to his call.
“So Dexter got sent up?” Evan pictured the midnight runs, the senior monitors pulling some wayward new boy out of his bunk, standing in a circle to sling curses at him or making him run naked laps around the football field, whatever it took to straighten him out.
“More than once,” said Neil. “A complete screw-up. Fifteen years old and already on the way to being about half alcoholic. Caught him the first time sneaking off campus, coming back drunk. ‘A hundred demerits, if you get caught.’ That’s what I told him. ‘Can you even count that high, Stretch Flex?’ He didn’t need it. I didn’t need it. That was the first send-up.”
“And what was the next one?” Evan asked, but as soon as Neil told him about the uproar over the pint bottle of Jim Beam they’d found in Dexter’s room, Evan had already begun to remember Dexter on his own: a cold night in early December, snow in the air, some of it just barely beginning to stick. A group gathered out beyond the new soccer fields, behind the squash courts, several of the other hall monitors standing in a circle, the formal ceremony done, the cursing and shouting begun, and then the circle parting for Evan, the head monitor, to enter the ranks. The grass had crunched under his feet. A dumb Rat—Evan hadn’t even known his name, only his offense—down on the ground doing push-ups, his head over a puddle of bourbon one of the other boys had poured onto the dirt. The empty pint bottle lay nearby. “Put your nose in it,” Neil had said as the other boys counted: 51, 52, 53. “Sniff it up now, because you won’t be smelling it again.” A chuckle all around, and then another of the monitors had called out, “I’ll give him a smell he won’t forget.” That monitor—Jim Moring, had it been? Evan thought he could still see that mischievous grin, remember the swagger that he walked with. Yes, it must have been Jim who’d asked that question, and then had paused just briefly as he unzipped his pants, turning toward Evan, the ranking Old Boy: “If you approve, sir,” he said, half mocking. And with a grin, Evan had assented: “It’ll be a lesson he won’t forget. Carry on, good man.” Evan had watched it happen, the hoots and high-fives of the other Old Boys. “Bravo, good sir,” Evan had said then. “Excellent aim.” And he had walked off after that, leaving it to the rest of them. An exam to study for? Just tired and ready for bed? He couldn’t remember those details any more than he had recalled the boy’s name. And he hadn’t even seen his face that night, hadn’t asked the next day for any of the monitors to point out the offender. But now it came back to him: the pant and wheeze of the blond-haired Rat struggling to keep his face held just high enough, the dull spattering of urine against the already moist ground.
“Daddy,” said Heather, tugging at his arm again. “I need to show you something.”
“Not now, honey,” said Evan as he listened to Neil tell the story. “In a few, I told you.”
“But there are people on my computer,” she said, pouting, and then whispering, red-faced: “People without their clothes on. And I don’t know how to make them go away.”
* * * *
“You know,” said Dexter, “when I gave you my number on the phone, I kind of thought I got the brush-off. So I’ll admit I was a little surprised when you invited me over for a drink.”
“It seemed the right thing to do,” said Evan, careful to keep the edge out of his voice, keep his breathing regular.
They were sitting on the back patio now. Dexter was sipping a bourbon. “Still your drink?” Evan had asked earlier, standing at the liquor cabinet, and when Dexter had replied, “Oh, no. Just ginger ale,” Evan had said, “Old times’ sake,” and Dexter had finally agreed. Evan had studied his features carefully for some hint of the boy he’d seen in the yearbook photo, to ferret out what Dexter was thinking about that night behind the squash courts or spur some hidden memory of his own from the halls of the high school. Dexter’s features betrayed nothing significant, but Evan noticed that the hand that held the bourbon twitched occasionally, and each time it did, Dexter swirled the glass, as if trying to mask the tic. He hadn’t even sipped it yet.
Dexter carried the conversation with the same bumbling, nervous enthusiasm that Evan had heard on the cell phone, now admiring Evan’s house and patio and taste in bourbon, commenting on the weather in North Carolina versus Seattle, asking what there was to do around town, chatting about residential real-estate prices, commercial real-estate prices—covering everything from the meteorological climate to the business one.
The tangle of blond hair the younger Dexter had worn was now closely cropped and tightly combed and darker than the picture had shown, and while that lower jaw still jutted firmly, some monument to the fact that things still stood the same, a thick moustache now balanced out the bottom half of his face and helped to accentuate the fact that most of the boyishness was long gone. Small furrows stood at the top of his cheeks when he smiled. Fine lines radiated from the corner of his eyes behind his sunglasses. The eyes will betray a liar, his father had once said, but Dexter hadn’t taken off those glasses, hadn’t dropped the smile.
Everything was hidden, Evan thought, even as he tried to hide all the images replaying in his mind from just a few nights before. Scrambling to shut down the pop-ups filling his daughter’s computer screen with lewd pictures. Telling Heather again and again to go play in the living room, honey, just go and her just standing there, watching, asking, Is everything all right, Daddy? Did I do something wrong? And thenhim finally just ripping the cord from the wall, the outlet’s plastic case snapping viciously as he yanked the plug free, and his daughter erupting into tears.
“My wife and I are in an apartment for the time being,” Dexter said. Twitch, swirl. “Better to settle in a little and then figure out where to buy, you know. Get the lay of the land. Get the business going.”
“Security, right?”
“Did I mention that when we talked?” Dexter’s forehead wrinkled. “I guess I must have. You really were paying attention, weren’t you? Yes. Spectrum Security is the name.” He leaned back, orating now: “‘For the Full Spectrum of Security, Always Go With Spectrum Security.’ My wife’s idea, actually. She’s...”
Evan nodded, not listening. He knew the slogan, had seen it when he went back to the Web site to get Dexter’s number. And seen more then too, studying it more closely. “From your home to your car to your business, we keep you protected throughout the day.” And lower down: “If someone’s watching, let it be us ... watching out for you.” And then another starburst graphic with the words “Internet Security a Specialty!” Home, car, Internet—all of the details standing out in sharper, more sinister relief. Evan had felt a chill run down his spine as it all came together.
“...and she also suggested that you might know some business organizations around here, networking stuff. Chamber of Commerce, sure, no-brainer there, but how ‘bout the Jaycees here or anything like that? And it doesn’t have to be just business. I mean, my wife would love to meet some more gals around here, I’m sure. She said so herself. In fact, I was sorry your wife couldn’t join us. I would’ve brought Pam over and introduced them.”
“Karen’s at her mother’s,” said Evan, bristling inside at Dexter’s aw-shucks ramblings. “She doesn’t get the chance to see her mother much, so I encouraged her to make a visit.” His father’s words this time: Preparation is control. First steps to success.
“Do tell her I’m sorry I missed her.”
“I will,” Evan said. But he wouldn’t, of course, since Karen didn’t know Dexter was there at all, and wouldn’t have liked it if she’d known.
So you’re saying it’s revenge? Karen had asked after she’d come home and calmed Heather enough for bed. A grown man moving across the country to engineer a dead battery in my car? And to hack into Heather’s computer? All because one of your classmates made him do some push-ups twenty years ago?
His company is all this security stuff, Evan had said, not elaborating on the coarser details of the incident, not wanting to try to explain or defend that. He was in the computer club in school. You know the old cliche, Karen. It takes a thief. That’s all I’m saying.
And what was the next part of the dream? Seen any books coming down the hill?
The yearbook I looked through. That could have been it, couldn’t it?
You’re reaching, Evan. You really are.
And who says it’s a real dream and not something he made up? He talked about the two of us trading names, Karen, trading places. You’ve seen those movies. The babysitter that wants to take the mother’s place in the family. The neighbor who admires the family next-door a little too much. And what about that Robin Williams movie we rented, huh? The photo guy? This Dexter’s got something planned. Who knows what’ll happen next.
His concern had grown so great that night that he had double-checked the locks on the front and back door, and he’d checked the nightstand for his gun, too, waiting until Karen was in the bathroom to avoid an even sterner look from her. He had the gun in his jacket pocket now.
“Well, I look forward to meeting her another time,” said Dexter. “Maybe Pam and I could have the two of you over, huh? Our place isn’t much yet, like I said, but—”
“You didn’t mention what brought you two back.”
Dexter reddened, looked away. The longest break yet in his constant banter.
“Change of pace, I guess,” he said finally. A small shrug—clearly evasive. “Seattle had become a little ... claustrophobic somehow. Beautiful city, don’t get me wrong, but ... all that rain and—” He stopped himself, and Evan saw something breaking loose in Dexter’s expression. “Well, that’s not entirely true. It’s my wife, you see. We’ve been trying to have a child, you know? Well, of course, you don’t know, really. I hardly mentioned it on the phone. But we have. Unsuccessfully, I should add. Doctors, treatments. Just doesn’t work. And all of our friends, sympathetic, sure, but sympathy ... After a while, all that pity from them, and then the reminder of their own kids, and us just feeling ... envious.” His expression had darkened, his nervous energy had smoothed, and as he spoke that last word—a word brimming with raw emotion—Evan felt that he was finally seeing Dexter’s true self.
Trouble having a child. Envy for other families. The dream that they’d trade places. Evan thought of his daughter laughing in that tire swing—the only investment that counts—and then crying inconsolably a few nights before—the only investment worth protecting.
Dexter brightened again, abruptly. “Like I said,” he went on, with a fragile smile, “change of pace. Tough to make friends, get the business kick-started in a new place...” On and on, but Evan had had enough—he had more than enough. “My wife’s actually the one who suggested I check and see if anyone was around from the old school and if they might—”
“Have you stopped by campus since you’ve been back?”
Dexter flinched. “No,” he said, a wary look on his face. “Can’t say I’ve found the time.”
Evan laid down his drink. “Want to take a drive over there now?”
* * * *
The year after Evan graduated, the Rat System had been abolished—an Old Boy pushing the limits too far, an ugly incident with a double-edged razor, parents involved, controversy, condemnation, the end of an era.
Evan couldn’t condone the incident, but he was sorry it had shut down the whole system. Some abuse was inevitable, but excusable. Soap races, those rug burns—the Old Boys loved the sport of it, but at least you could argue that it was a bonding experience for the Rats, an initiation of some kind. Minor abuses at worst, and despite them, Evan had believed in the system and the ways it had helped many of these boys become men. So many of them had come in with a sense of entitlement, as if the world belonged to them and should stoop to their wishes, and the system taught them to respect a world that was bigger than they were—to respect community or school or family. Or other people’s families. The system punished them when they stepped out of line—put some fear in them when they needed it.
Respect, power, control.
The problem wasn’t in pulling out the double-edged razor, or even in pressing it against the skin. The problem had come in actually drawing blood. You just had to know how far to go.
“You passed the front gates,” said Dexter from the passenger seat. Evan hadn’t even slowed down. Beside them, the brick and iron fence rushed past.
“They’ve upped security,” said Evan. “After eight p.m., no entry on campus without authorization.”
“I guess having been Head Monitor two decades back doesn’t carry much weight these days, huh?” Dexter laughed hesitantly, and Evan didn’t mention being on the school’s board or the pride he took in still being recognized and respected on campus. He didn’t mention that he could have gone through the gates with just a wave of his ID. “Oh, well,” Dexter said. “Can’t say it really matters much.”
“Oh, we’ll get there yet,” said Evan, turning down a side road into a small neighborhood.
“Don’t put yourself to any trouble.”
“Too late. We’re already here.”
Houses had always surrounded the school—pictures on the walls of the school’s main building showed the campus and community as far back as the Civil War—but that neighborhood had gone through a series of ups and downs over the years: farmers’ houses and fields, small suburban homes, expanding city limits. Now it was experiencing a regentrification, a reinvention of itself, with developers coming in and tearing down older single-family homes to build condos. But the more things changed, the more they stayed the same. Through it all, legions of students had escaped the rigors of the school schedule by crossing those fences toward the rear of the campus, escaping into that neighborhood. And now Evan was going to use it in reverse, hoping that security back here was no tighter now than it had ever been.
“I think I snuck off campus once this way myself,” said Dexter as they tromped through the woods, leaving the car parked in a dusty construction site for what looked like a series of apartments or townhouses—just the studs, the framing, a skeleton of whatever it would eventually be. “Imagine us now, both of us in our thirties, like kids sneaking back on. We must be crazy or something.”
“Or something,” said Evan, reaching into his coat to make sure the gun was secure enough for him to climb the chain-link fence. As he jumped down, it jostled but didn’t dislodge. He paid more attention to the pain in his leg. Not the boy you once were, he thought, ruefully. Those shock absorbers are beginning to wear out.
Dexter was still on the other side, staring at Evan through the links of the fence.
“You know, sneaking out this way got me in trouble more than once a few years back,” he said, his expression uneasy, even behind the sunglasses. “Maybe we should go back to your house, have another drink there.”
“It’s summer. There’s no one back here,” Evan said. “Think of it as a bonding experience.” He turned and walked away, and soon heard Dexter clambering over the fence.
They walked deeper into the forest, tall oaks and pine trees shadowing the setting sun, making the day appear dimmer than it really was. The air was filled with the smell of honeysuckle from a bank of vines. Hummingbirds flitted toward the flowers. Something rustled through the undergrowth—likely a squirrel, maybe a snake.
“Where does this come out again?” Dexter asked, slowing his step just slightly.
“The old squash courts up there,” said Evan, just as the building came into view. Some old maintenance equipment was piled against its walls—an aging red mower, some rusted shears, a coil of wire fencing. “Remember now?”
“I never played,” said Dexter, grimly.
“Well, we’re not playing today either,” said Evan.
As they reached the center of the small, mossy clearing, he turned and pulled out the gun. It felt heavy in his hand, but he pointed it directly into Dexter’s face.
The squash courts blocked a view of the full campus, the lush grounds and stately buildings that Evan knew were just around the corner and across the soccer fields. Afternoons during the school year, those fields would be echoing with the shouts and cheers of kids chasing victory—Evan could hear those echoes in his memory now. But after dusk, it was a lonely, desolate spot—a far cry from campus. Literally.
“What the hell is this?” asked Dexter, involuntarily lifting his arms, by reflex it seemed. He struggled to support his faltering smile.
“I’m sure you recognize this place, Dex. What more do I have to say? ‘For your transgressions, Dexter Hollinger, you are being sent up before a higher power....’” Though Evan spoke the words mockingly, they rolled smoothly off his tongue, and his mind recited the rest of it as if automatically: You will submit to the school whose authority you shunned, you will bow before the code you have dishonored, you will recognize the weight of our history, of all the men who have come before you, of all the boys who will follow in your path. He could still picture some of the new boys who’d come before him and his fellow monitors—each with the same panicked, unbelieving expression that he saw in front of him now. But Dexter should have known better. “You threatened an Old Boy’s family, Dex,” said Evan, “and there is a price to pay.”
“What the hell are you talking about? Threatened somebody’s family?”
“My family,” said Evan. “And you’re going to leave them alone.”
“Is this a joke?” Dexter dared a small laugh. “I’ve never even met your family.”
“Take off those damn glasses,” Evan said, his anger bubbling forth, and when Dexter hesitated, he shouted, “Do it now!”
Dexter removed his sunglasses, and Evan looked into his eyes for the first time. He watched them, looking for the lie, and looking as well at the sides of his face. Had the soap races left any scars there? He almost hoped they had.
“Your dream,” he said. “You dreamed about a dead battery, and my wife’s car battery went dead just hours after you called.”
“And that’s my fault?” Dexter met his gaze, challenged it.
“Car security’s one of your specialties, right? And Internet security? That filth you put on our computer—on my daughter’s computer.”
“Your daughter,” Dexter said, and something in his expression shifted slightly—just the smallest glance to the side, but Evan knew that he’d caught him in the lie. “I never wanted—”
“But what did you want, Dex? Revenge for what happened all those years ago? Envy that you couldn’t have a child of your own? I’ve been trying to figure it out myself.”
“You’ve gone too far,” Dex said, and the shift in expression deepened, some small collapse in the cheeks, a sagging at the corners of his lips. “Bringing me out here. You’ve gone too far.”
“I’ve gone too far? What was the next step for you, Dex? You and me trading names? Wasn’t that it? Where was it going to end? I’ll tell you where it’s going to end. Right here.” He took a deep breath, jiggled the gun, and then steadied it. He could see the fear in Dexter’s eyes, the respect for the gun. A good decision to bring it, just the scare tactic he needed. Respect, power, control. “You have violated the rules,” he said, the words coming back to him as if it were yesterday. “You have broken the code. After tonight, you will not step out of line again. After tonight, you will always remember your place.” He pointed the gun toward the ground. “Now get down there.”
Dexter hesitated.
“Don’t make me ask twice,” said Evan, leveling the gun at him. “Kneel, Rat.”
At the word, Dexter’s posture shifted. His eyelids narrowed and the corners of his lips tensed upward again. He straightened his back, and as he did so, his chest moved forward, stood out in pride. He seemed to be reinflating, and to grow about a foot in the process.
“No,” he said.
“Get on the ground.” Evan waved the gun. “I’m not afraid to use this.”
“You won’t use it,” Dexter said, and his voice was different now, calmer, more focused, more assertive. “You can’t even drive through the gates. You’re not about to let that gun go off here for everyone to hear. Your car is back in the cul-de-sac, the neighbors back there could have seen us.” He stepped forward. “Just admit that and put down the gun.”
Evan moved back. “Don’t tempt me.”
Dexter stepped forward again, and Evan stumbled briefly over some tree roots that had twisted themselves out of the ground and arched across the soil. He caught his balance just in time, aiming again, at Dexter’s chest this time.
“Think about it, Evan. We’re not kids anymore. I’m not a Rat anymore. That’s a gun, not a game.”
Double-edged razors, Evan thought then, and he wondered about the boy who’d used them, about why they’d actually been used. Maybe the Rat simply hadn’t been scared by the sight of them. Maybe he’d challenged the Old Boy, refused to bow down appropriately. If you didn’t gain the respect in the first place, then where was the power? Where was the control? The only choice then was to prove you were willing to go all the way.
But if you’re not ready to make good on the threat.... If you’re not ready to draw blood, then you might as well put the gun away.
Profit and loss. Investment and return. The photo on the desk—his wife and daughter watching him. He had been doing this for them. But the next step would be too far.
Evan closed his eyes, sighed, then let his grip relax.
“Your turn,” Dexter said, and Evan opened his eyes, surprised to see that Dexter had taken the gun from him. He’d been lost in thought. Dexter motioned toward the ground with his free hand.
“What do you mean?” Evan said. “This isn’t a game, you said that yourself.”
“You said it yourself,” said Dexter. “Where’s it going to end? If I sabotaged your car and your computer, then where would I stop?” There was a glint of evil in his eyes as he raised the gun. “You want me to leave your family alone, then you better do what I say.”
* * * *
The ground smelled sour, a dank, deep smell, as if the earth here had been shadowed so long by the squash courts and the tall oaks on either side that sunlight had never touched it. Evan felt his breath being almost pulled from him, as if all the oxygen had been cut off by the rank, earthy odor. The blades of grass brushed roughly against his face, and he thought about his daughter, spinning in the tire swing. I’m doing this for her.
“I didn’t mean for you to lay down,” Dexter said from behind him, out of sight. “In fact, you better not let your chest touch the dirt.” Evan raised himself up on his hands. “You know what to do—same as you were gonna make me. And I want to hear you count them.”
Lifting himself into position, Evan forgot about the dream that Dexter had told him and about the flat tire and the vulgar images that his daughter had been exposed to. Instead, he found himself remembering the bowl of peaches from twenty years before and the grinning face of Crispin Smith tilting it toward him. “Rats like sweet stuff, don’t they?” he’d asked with a smirk, and Evan had eaten them all.
Slowly, bitterly, he began to count out the push-ups: “One ... two ... three...” Despite working out three times a week in the exercise room that he and his wife had set up—the room that would eventually be their second child’s—Evan could feel an abnormal strain in his arms, a weakness in his joints. As he counted, he could hear himself wheezing slightly, out of breath. Listening to the pacing behind him, he tried to picture the look on Dexter’s face, but all he could see was the boy from the yearbook and the grinning face of Crispin Smith, the two overlaid one across the other.
At twenty-five, he stopped counting, steadied himself at the top of the push-up’s arc. “Are you satisfied now?” he asked, tilting his head. Sweat stung his eyes, but he caught Dexter’s outline in his peripheral view, stilled for a moment, high up above and behind him.
“You know they killed the Rat System the year after you graduated?” Dexter said simply. “I never got the chance to pass along the fine treatment that you fellas gave me.”
“So you’ve been after revenge all along?”
“I don’t hear any counting,” Dexter said simply, and he kicked the sole of Evan’s shoe lightly.
Evan’s muscles tightened—the stress of the push-ups, a jolt of anger pulsing through his arms. Suddenly, his body seemed to replay the sense of dread and revulsion he’d felt eating the peaches all those years ago, a sickness in the stomach.
“Twenty-six,” he said through gritted teeth, lowering himself toward the ground, pushing up once more. Behind him, the pacing resumed.
At forty, Dexter spoke again.
“You know what’s funny? All I wanted was to sell you a security system. That was all. We move out here and my wife says, ‘Wouldn’t some of your old friends be good customers?’ and she nags me until I call the alumni office and get the list. And when I saw your name ... ‘Why haven’t you called yet?’ Pam kept asking, ‘Foot in the door, bills to pay,’ and I couldn’t tell her the truth. And then I started having these ... nightmares about it. Middle of the night. Cold sweat. The dream was real. I don’t know where the hell it came from, but there it was. And then I thought that I shouldn’t run from it again, thought maybe I could use it to my advantage, make a joke out of it, something like, ‘Well, after what you guys put me through, the least you could do is send a little business my way.’ Because you did owe me, I thought. But I was nervous even asking that. And every time I worked up the nerve to come around to it, you cut me off.”
Evan had stopped his push-ups again and was propped up awkwardly in the air. He could feel the sweat coursing down his chest and the center of his back, the nausea persistent.
“I’ll buy a security system,” he said. “If that’s it, if that’s all you wanted. I’ll even pay full price. And give me some business cards. I’ll—”
“You think we can just go back and have a business relationship now? Work out a deal? And maybe my wife could come over next time and meet your family, too, huh?” His laugh had a hollow, bitter edge to it.
“It was a mistake, Dex,” said Evan, feeling another surge of anger—at Dexter? at himself? But he struggled to keep his tone even. He thought again about his daughter, reading a story to her teddy bears, and about his wife, leaning against the doorway. Whatever it took to get him back to them, away from this. He wouldn’t press charges, couldn’t tell anyone the story of what had happened. “I see that now. A misunderstanding, and—”
Dexter shoved the muzzle of the gun behind Evan’s ear, roughly enough that he could hear the cartilage crinkling inside his head.
“Maybe you didn’t hear me earlier,” he growled. “I want to hear counting. Rat.”
When the metal touched his skin, the nausea surged once more, sickening shudders of it that he’d felt only once before, sitting on the cold tile of the bathroom floor of his freshman dorm, vomiting every few minutes into the toilet and then resting his cheek against the frigid tile. “I hope Crispin Smith drops dead,” he’d said to his roommate, sitting beside him. He whispered the words for fear that one of the monitors on his own hall might hear them, that it would mean other consequences. His roommate was empathetic but amused too—something they’d laugh about one day. But Evan had meant it. “I hope he drops dead,” concentrating with all his might in hopes that the wish might come true.
The last memory flashed across his mind and through his gut in the second that the gun rested against the back of his ear. Evan turned then, twisted himself over and lunged upward toward the gun. Dexter looked startled, stepped back, stumbled on the same roots that Evan had tripped over before. As he did, the gun went off. A scattered, wild shot, but it found its mark nonetheless, cutting through Evan’s neck and clipping an artery.
He died with the taste of peaches, like some bittersweet bile, still lingering on his lips.
“And you’re sticking with that story?” the policeman asked, the hint of a sneer at one corner of his lips. Detective Walters, he’d introduced himself—his third time now with some version of the same question.
“Everything I’ve told you is the truth,” Dexter said, hoping the evidence would prove it. He still had the voicemail with Evan inviting him for drinks. The car out there was Evan’s, and the gun they’d just bagged.
“And you say he pulled the gun on you because...?”
“Crazy talk. He thought I was trying to hurt his family. He thought I’d killed the battery on his car, can you believe that?”
“Did you?”
“Of course not.” He made sure to meet the detective’s accusatory gaze, as if the two of them were in a playground staring contest and not in the midst of a crime scene, with various officers and officials bagging evidence, taking photographs, or holding the growing crowd just beyond the yards and yards of yellow tape. Finally Walters turned away.
“Don’t go anywhere,” he said, pointing a finger back at Dexter. An accusatory gesture there too, Dexter knew, but he’d already fought the impulse to flee when he saw Evan fall to the ground and the blood begin to seep. He’d fled this place before, and he wasn’t going to make that mistake again.
“Run!” he’d heard the monitors yelling at him that night in the snow. “Run like the Rat that you are!” And he had, the stench of the bourbon and urine still filling his nose, the snow falling harder, mixing with the tears he’d held inside as long as he could, blurring his vision. I won’t look back, he’d sworn, no matter what, trying to block out the cheers and jeers and then block the sensation of the snowballs pelting against his back and then the roar of laughter. But all of it kept echoing in his mind even after he’d made it back to the dorm, and for days later—the taunts and sniggering, the hatred he felt for them and for himself, and the little voice that woke him in the dark of the night, urging him, “Just get them back somehow. Just make them pay. You’ll feel better. You will. Just be a man.”
But there were consequences to choices like that, of course.
More people pushed against the police tape—people crowding up from the neighborhood where Evan had parked and others emerging from within the campus, faculty members from the school most likely. On both sides people held their hands to their mouths in shock or talked frantically on their cell phones or pointed those phones toward the scene of the crime or the body at the center of it.
Detective Walters stood with a tall, imposing man in a blue sport coat—the headmaster, Dexter thought, seeming to recognize him from pictures in the alumni magazine. Walters pointed his way, and as the man stared toward him, Dexter felt humbled, like a student once more, waiting to be punished.
As much as he’d tried to grow past the high school, he’d never gotten far from it—that fear of stepping out of line, that desire to make a good impression, always trying to establish himself, always dreaming that this time it would be different, or else trying to make a fresh start somewhere else, hearing the desperation in his own voice as he struggled to impress some stranger and bringing that other voice back into his ears once more, nagging him for his insufficiencies, his weakness, his impotence. Recently, it had returned even more frequently, as business troubles mounted and then as he and his wife struggled with their inability to have a child—his inability, his, yes, that voice from the past melding with his wife’s nagging, pleading. Not just choice and consequence, but something even crueler to torment him now.
And moving back to Raleigh—fighting the voice of his insignificance by confronting his fears and the past—twenty years past—wouldn’t it be easier now? Choice, consequence, and coincidence—all of it cruel this time.
Still, everything he’d told Detective Walters was true—even back to the dream that had started it all, or parts of it. No reason, after all, to tell the whole truth.
No reason to talk about having made Evan do those push-ups—or about those other push-ups from twenty years back. He wouldn’t admit that he was just using Evan to get a business deal, either, and he certainly wouldn’t arouse suspicion by telling how he’d broken into Evan’s computer. Stopping outside the house to sketch out ideas for a security system, the proposal he was going to pitch Evan. Pulling out the laptop to make notes, seeing the wireless network “Spruill” pop-up, remembering his own dream. A quick breach to underscore the need for security. No real harm done, at least if the daughter hadn’t been there. He regretted that part.
And no reason to tell about the voice and how it had come roaring into his ears again when Evan pointed the gun and called him a Rat. A deafening sound, that voice from the past, louder still as he felt the gun in his own hands and then as he forced Evan down on the ground. He would never have answered it, though, would never have pulled the trigger, never actively taken that final, fatal step. But now that revenge had arrived on its own—unbidden, unexpected...
The voice was gone at last, he knew, vanished back into the walls of that squash court and the woods back there and deep down into the soil where Evan lay, facedown in the same spot where Dexter had done his own push-ups all those years before, but Evan looking as if his elbows had simply buckled.
I did them all, Dexter thought then, shame mixed with pride this time. Seventy-five of them. And over a puddle of liquor and piss.
Detective Walters came back up. “We need you to make an official statement downtown,” he said, a grim look on his face. “And if I find out you’re lying, I swear I’m gonna throw the book at you.”
Book? Throwing a book? Something about the phrase sent a sudden shiver through Dexter, but he couldn’t say why.
“Everything I’ve told you is the truth,” he said again, because what could it hurt, the things he had left out: the fear and trembling that his old Head Monitor still inspired in him; the joy he took in seeing him do those push-ups; the fact that, after all these years, Evan Spruill’s death was in some ways like a dream come true.