Bones are Made to be Broken Read online

  Up on the porch, Billy slammed his fist into one of the panes in the door and I froze as the musical tinkle of falling glass drifted into the night air, awaiting the whoop of a home security system.

  Billy reached in and undid the lock. He opened the door and disappeared into the darkened foyer.

  I staggered after him, tripping up the concrete steps, sneakers slapping on the boards of the porch. He stood just inside the door. A small table lamp had been left on, doing nothing but making the deep shadows seem deeper. Billy looked like a cut-out of black construction paper.

  I grabbed his arm in some confused attempt at stopping him. He brushed me off like someone swatting a fly and I went flying, crashing into the wall.

  “Nicholas Tormentato!” he screamed. “Eduardo Tormentato! È merda sulla tua famiglia e li distrusse!”

  This is approximate. He spoke in tongues; later I figured out that it was Italian, but with stars still exploding in my head he appeared possessed. He’d walked to the foot of the steps against the wall, shouting up at the darkness. The small table lamp threw his face into grim, troll-like relief.

  They’ll call the cops, you asshole. Did I say this? Or think it?

  I heard the creak of floorboards above me.

  He yelled something else in Italian as I struggled to stand, my bad knee refusing to lock. My balance was on ball-bearings. My head thudded.

  An old man’s querulous, sleepy voice drifted from the darkness above. “Who is that? What are you doing here at this hour? How do you know Anthony?”

  Billy stepped onto the first riser. “I served with Anthony, you bastard,” he said. “Come down here.”

  I got to my feet using the wall. The spit in my mouth was like motor oil. “Billy, stop—”

  I heard footsteps, coming down. The voice sounded more alarmed, but still sleep-addled. “Why are you here this late? Were you a friend of Anthony’s? Why—”

  Billy reached into the darkness and yanked a man roughly our age—but wider, shorter—into the dim light, slamming him into the wall. The man goggled at him. He wore a pin-striped nightgown. It added the final lunatic touch.

  Billy brought his face close. “Are you Nicholas?”

  The man continued goggling at him. His mouth worked.

  And then, from above, another man’s voice called, “Nicholas? What is it? Nicholas?”

  Billy had turned at the sound of the other voice, and when he turned back, his face had frozen in a rictus of hate and rage, as if Anthony Tormentato’s vengeance was truly his.

  “You allowed it to happen, Nicholas,” he whispered. “You helped.” He brought the knife into view. The lamp’s glow slid along the edge like liquid gold.

  Nicholas’s father called in that rickety voice reserved for the very old, “Nicholas! What are you doing?”

  Billy slammed the knife into Nicholas’s gaping mouth.

  Nicholas gagged, blood spilling over his lips.

  Billy’s face didn’t change. He wrenched the knife out, a trail of blood following like a grisly comet’s tail, reversed his grip, and sliced across the man’s waddled throat. More blood gushed—an arterial spray. He let go and Nicholas rolled down the steps, his throat spraying blood like a broken lawn sprinkler. He slammed into the floor hard enough to shake the house.

  Billy stared at the body disdainfully, his entire front covered in blood. “Lucky,” he said to himself. “He gets off lucky.”

  And then he did a curious thing—he looked to his right, to the dark archway opposite of me.

  “I remember,” he said. “I’ll pull them out, make him see it before he goes.”

  He cocked his head, as if listening, and I realized he was seeing Anthony Tormentato at that moment.

  I threw a terrified glance to the archway, but saw nothing, of course. In the immortal words of Bullwinkle—no ghoulies or ghosties or long-leggedy beasties.

  “Per le tue sorelle,” he said, and turned back to the stairwell. From the darkness above, a soft light clicked on, and the elder Tormentato cried out, “Nicholas! Why don’t you answer? Rispondere a tuo padre!”

  Billy started up.

  I pushed myself off the wall and lunged at him, tripping over Nicholas’s body. My knees crashed against the stair rises. I howled, but managed to grab his legs.

  Billy stumbled and I used him roughly, yanking him down the steps, pulling myself up. My bad knee wouldn’t support me at all.

  “Stop this, you son of a bitch,” I panted. “You’ve gone too goddam far—”

  Billy twisted around and landed a heel in my gut. I fell against the wall, my weight coming down on my knee. Green, acidic sheets of pain roiled up and down my leg.

  He grabbed me by the shirt. He looked me in the eye one last time and it was worse than when he’d come back from Balti-more—there was nothing left of my best friend in his gaze. I stared into twin black holes.

  “Billy—” I started to say, and then he shoved me.

  It felt like time slowed down, like I hung in the air, with Billy’s nothing-eyes locked on me. None of that was true, of course, but the idea held for as long as it took my body to turn, to see the foyer floor rushing to meet me, for my bad knee, the one that kept me out of Vietnam, to slam into the newel post.

  I shrieked, but it lasted only until I landed astride Nicholas’s body and the wind whooshed out of me. I sunfished against his corpse, gag-gasping.

  I flopped onto my back and Billy was still standing on the stairs, watching me. In a dim, academic way, I realized not just how old he was, but how frail he looked, how emaciated. When was the last time he’d slept? Eaten?

  And then he turned away, and climbed the stairs.

  No—I sucked air into my chest and crawled over the body, covering my front on grue. Every inch of me, mental and physical, screamed and screamed as I clawed up the stairs, towards Billy and that soft light. My body was cold, freezing. Shock, although I thought—for just an instant—I saw my breath plume out.

  I reached the top as Billy reached the bedroom facing the street.

  He paused in the doorway, backlit by a nightstand lamp.

  I climb-clawed the wall to stand on my good leg, biting my lower lip till it bled, and limped after him.

  Billy—I don’t know if I thought or said it.

  “Did you like the little girls, Poppa?” he said, but it wasn’t his voice; it was thicker, rougher, yet somehow higher, with just a touch of slickness over the vowels, giving him an accent as he ran the words together. The result of fighting, I thought then. “Did you like how they squealed? How about when I bled? Did you like that, Poppa?”

  Billy started into the room.

  I lunged with my good leg. “Billy, DON’T—”

  And then this wind blew, this blindingly cold wind.

  I have no rational explanation for it. It was summer. The house did not have central AC—or, at least, a vent right above my head. It blew around me, through me, so cold I swore I saw ice-crystals forming on the backs of my bloodied knuckles, could feel my skin tightening.

  The wind slammed the door on my face and, as abruptly as it’d commenced, it ended with a little whistle in my ears.

  I fell against the door; it took every ounce left to remain standing. The ice-crystals were gone, replaced by hot sweat. I could feel the bounce-back of my hot breath against the cold—cold!—wood, hear the labored lub-dub of my heart.

  I grasped the knob, but it was locked.

  And then, like a pane of glass breaking, the old man screamed. I staggered back, nearly falling, holding onto the top of the stair banister to keep my balance.

  An errant thought popped into the dim window of my remain-ing consciousness: I am standing in the middle of a crime scene.

  I straightened and stared, walleyed, at everything. The blood. The body of Nicholas Tormentato at the foot of the stairs.

  I imagined sirens, police cruisers careening onto the avenue, and I was lunging-stumbling down the steps.

  I cleared Nichola
s Tormentato’s body with a single jump I think some of my former track-star students would’ve been proud of. I landed hard, hearing a pained shriek that took me an instant to realize was mine.

  The front door was still open and I dashed through. My sneakers pounded across wood, down concrete. The world was a blur in which I was only distantly aware that no cops had arrived. The air smelled sweet, but I could still smell the metallic undertone of spilled blood.

  I hit the side of the car, my upper-half splayed across the hood, and then I went away for a while. I welcomed it.

  I only remember bits of what came later. I allowed my body to do the work, my subconscious to do the thinking. Later I discovered I was gone almost a month. This alarms me to some extent, but not much, given the circumstances.

  Billy put me into my car. My car ended up in the driveway. I must’ve driven home, but Christ knows how.

  I remember some things, trivial things—a shower, an open book, washing a dish in the sink. I don’t know if Billy ever visited or, if he did, what happened. One day, I found myself sitting in my wife’s sewing room, in front of her old Singer. To this day, I have no idea how long.

  I also have no idea how long this might’ve gone on—how much I would’ve wrestled with what my best friend, the man who’d saved my life, had done—and I don’t care to.

  It ended when I found out my best friend had died.

  It was a former student of Billy’s who found him, three weeks after the horrorshow in Buffalo. A final seizure. I’m told they are quite common in victims of high-grade glioma, which Billy had—a juicy little bastard above the cerebellum, impossible to destroy, increasing the pressure in the skull. He was possibly dead before he hit the linoleum.

  I was listed as Billy’s emergency contact.

  I have no memory of picking up the phone in my kitchen—but the fussy-sounding hospital official on the other end at St. Michael’s I talked to said he’d tried calling me for a week.

  I didn’t explain myself, although I could tell he wanted me to, but instead got the death machinery started; the same chugging, creaking machine I’d used when Maggie died. Claiming the body, making arrangements for it, settling his affairs—I was the executor of his will, I also discovered. I felt the tidal pull of the functional catatonia I’d existed in. A part of me wanted very much to forget all this—forget Billy Kinson and the cancer he’d told no one about and his dead eyes and the blood on his face and the impossible wind. I was an old man. I was alone—now more than ever.

  A week after his funeral, I set about emptying his house and putting it up on the market.

  One afternoon—this would’ve been late July, I think—I was in his office. His desk was one of those industrial metal ones he’d taken when Ben Franklin High had updated its furniture.

  Buried underneath bills and notes and book requests and old graded papers, was a file marked CANCER BUG in Billy’s anally-tight writing. Within, he’d organized every print-out, every test, every bill, every calendar page that marked an appointment with his G.P. or his oncologist or some other specialist.

  It was a timeline of his death sentence.

  The first date in the file was marked August of the previous year, roughly two weeks before the first day of school.

  Did I remember that date? We would’ve been back at work, preparing for the new crop of kids, but I had no memory of Billy being missing.

  The next date was early September. I did remember that one—Billy wasn’t typically known for taking days off; his number of stored personal days was a thing to behold—and then the ones following it (three in October, two in November, four in Decem-ber, six in February, one in March). I realized I hadn’t realized then that something was off.

  The mental ground with me resounded with tremblers of an impending quake, the tomb of everything I hadn’t thought of, hadn’t wondered about, or pretended not to notice. Why had I done that?

  How much had I known about Billy Kinson? We’d been friends, but he’d been more of a stranger to me than I’d realized—not in a sneaking way, but because of blindness. We’re such a social species that even when someone is exhibiting a dark side right in front of you, like a purloined letter, we choose not to see it, for whatever reason fits.

  I chose not to see it because Billy saved my life.

  He was diagnosed on October 13th.

  The survival rate, one year from diagnosis, is fifty-percent.

  Two years and it drops to twenty-five.

  Billy Kinson knew he was going to die in less than a year.

  And he didn’t tell me.

  “You son of a bitch,” I said. Burning tears pricked my eyes.

  And, for the first time since the fussy official at St. Michael’s reached me, I cried.

  How did Billy knowing his death was imminent connect with what he did in May and June?

  I looked at the facts:

  He’s diagnosed in October.

  In May of the following year, when he’s weakening and getting close to the end, he sees the ghosts of the four Marines who saved his life. He becomes convinced he must settle their “unfinished business.” That’s common when someone’s dying, after a fashion. They want to shuffle off the mortal coil with a clean slate. I’d seen it with Maggie. Two months before she died, she buried the hatchet with her sister, whom she’d not spoken to since 1977.

  But how did he come up with the “unfinished business”? Not with ghosts, goddammit. I didn’t believe that.

  Check the papers, he said. And I did.

  And it was all right there, secondary comments at the bottom of news articles I pulled off the Internet, the “tip” of the inverted pyramid I taught my Journalism I students. Spuken’s sleazy brother-in-law. Daryl Espirito’s abusive brother, Darren.

  Larry Haloran’s unfinished business was harder to find—it occurred during those three days after Billy and I talked. All I could find was one notice, in the Toledo Blade, out of Ohio: Mr. and Mrs. Thomas Haloran, eighty-five and eighty-six, were reported missing from their home in the suburb of Sylvania. Nothing was stolen, there were no signs of forced entry. Their car, a 1992 buick, was still in the driveway.

  I clicked through article after article, but no mention was made of finding them.

  That left Buffalo, New York, and Anthony Tormentato’s father and brother.

  I didn’t want to know. I knew enough, you see?

  Billy’s voice—altered, different, really not his voice at all and I refused to think that was anything but the effects of the fight—in my head: “Did you like the little girls, Poppa? Did you like how they squealed? How about when I bled? Did you like that, Poppa?”

  I didn’t need to look up Buffalo.

  Billy’s unfinished business was true.

  But how, goddammit? How?

  I shut it out. I didn’t know how and wouldn’t. Billy Kinson was dead.

  I went back to work, buried myself with classes. Administ-ration arranged my classes accordingly—accelerated classes and the cream of the electives—and everyone left me alone. I let the pages from my little Word of the Day calendar on my classroom desk fall into the trash. I wasn’t sleeping, but that was okay. I was crushingly alone, but that was okay, too.

  Maggie was dead. Billy Kinson was dead. I do not believe in ghosts.

  But I’m writing this now.

  My father died of a heart attack. My maternal grandmother, too. A scattering of extended relatives.

  Off and on for the past three weeks, it sometimes feels as if there’s pressure, like a cinderblock weight, on my chest. A tingle, like the pins-and-needles feeling you get when feeling is restored to a numbed appendage, zips down my arm. I get chilly-cold, and I can’t get warm.

  This all subsides. I should go to the doctor, but I know he can do nothing for me.

  It’s March now, which explains the cold. If I want it to.

  At night, wind screams around my house, making it creak.

  Where did that wind come from in Buffalo?
>
  These past few weeks, I’ve been watching my feet when I walk. I’ve refused to look up from this notebook since starting to write.

  Outside, the wind’s howling. A good spring storm is brewing, although there was no mention of it on the news.

  I do not believe in ghosts.

  But I do not want to know what Billy Kinson’s unfinished business is.

  And I am so damn cold.

  Baby Grows

  a Conscience

  it was easier to aim a gun at a little girl’s head than Richie thought.

  Putting the black pistol to the dark-haired girl’s temple as she ate cereal at the kitchen table was, in fact, the easiest thing he’d done in the past twenty minutes. Because, of the three people he’d already shot, he knew that killing the little girl, here in this Leave It to Beaver kitchen, would mean he’d be free. Ollie-ollie-oxen-free. He held onto what the white card had said. Forget everything else.

  “It’s not polite to point a gun at someone,” she said, not even looking up from her cereal, “and not pull the trigger.” Her voice was matter-of-fact; a little girl who knows, at the age of seven, how the world works.

  Richie jerked and staggered away, ass smacking into the rim of a side counter. He looked around the room, looking for something and not knowing what it was, his eyes ticking off the retro cabinets, the rounded edges of the 1950s refrigerator to the table’s right. The little girl continued eating, as if the window behind her really looked out into her side yard, as if three people didn’t lay dead in the “living room” down the hall.

  As if, not two seconds before, Richie hadn’t held a gun to her hollow little temple.

  “Aren’t you scared?” he asked her before he could stop himself. His voice shook in a way that he hadn’t heard since he was thirteen. “Didn’t you hear the shooting? Don’t you care? Who are you?”

  She didn’t answer; a little girl in a pale green nightgown, her feet dangling a few inches above the linoleum. She might’ve forgotten he was there and he felt ridiculous for even asking her.