Top Three Atrocities, Chronologically. #2: The Unspeakable

Sippy sat up in the hospital bed, face pale and blotchy, dark circles under his eyes. He hadn’t said a word when I told him about my mother. Normally he interrupted every second word. This time he let me talk. He nodded when Lonnie told him about Mark Toland and Dr. Field. No questions, no exclamations. It was as if he already knew. Or maybe nothing could surprise him anymore. He never told us what happened to him that day, but he’d been awake for a while and he’d been thinking.

When we finished the three of us sat there listening to the beeping machines, and the squeaking shoes going by and the PA system calling Dr Vorhees to ICU, stat. The room smelled faintly of the cleanser they used to mop the floor. We breathed it in.

Finally, Sippy grabbed my wrist. “Here’s what I’ve learned living my short crumby life on this fucking island,” he said. “When someone does something crazy and you can’t understand why, the reason is money. Whenever you have a question about how fucked up things are, the answer is money. When you have a problem, the solution is money. And, most of all, when you want to hurt someone, the weapon is money.”

Lonnie gave him a worried squint. “You – want to hurt someone?”

“Fucking right. And so do you.”

I figured it out. “You’re going to rob Mark Toland.”

His mirthless animal smile scared me. Those bared teeth meant someone was going to get bitten. “No. I’m not going to rob him. We’re going to rob him. And not just him. Delavane, too.”

“Wait, how -- ?”

“Actually it’s going to be the four of us. We’ll need Krakauer. He wants to redeem himself for sucking up to those assholes, and he has the keys to his dad’s Waggoneer. We’re gonna need an off-road vehicle for this plan.”

I stared at him. “You have a plan?”

His laugh came out as a sardonic grunt. “Oh yeah, Frakes. You know I do.”

Sippy had followed Ed out to Coatue several times over the last few years, trailing the Delavane Ford Explorer on his mountain bike.

He caught my dubious look. “It’s no big deal. You just keep your hands loose on the handlebars, sit back in the sit so you don’t sink the front wheel, set your gears before you hit the soft patches -- and keep moving as straight as you can. Sharp turns can be a bitch.”

It turned out that Ed kept all the money from his drug deals and petty thefts in a steamer trunk buried in the sand near Second Bend. 

“Like a pirate,” Lonnie said.

“Yeah well, those fucking pirates knew what they were doing. Delavane can’t put this dough in the bank, he can’t fence the jewelry on island, and keeping the stuff at home is too risky. It makes so much sense that Toland started hiding his drug money there, too. I saw him handing over the loot. After a few times, I went back alone and checked it out. Delavane locks the trunk with a padlock. Very hard to pick. Took me almost thirty seconds. I went back tons of times. I’ve been stealing from that miserable prick for years … little things – one fifty dollar bill from a roll. Or a whole pack of silver coins out of a pile of them. Nothing obvious, nothing he’d miss unless he took inventory and that’s not Eddie boy’s style. He’s more the run-the-coins-through-your-fingers-and-gloat type. Toland leaves the details up to him. So it’s an easy score. And tomorrow night we’re going to take it all.”

Lonnie gasped. “Tomorrow? Why tomorrow?”

“For the same reason that you’re freaking out right now. No one will expect it. Me just out of the hospital, the two of you reeling from Janice dying.  Plus, Krakauer’s parents are off-island and we can use the Jeep.”

He was right about us. We were reeling. I couldn't even grasp what had happened. I still can’t. There are still days when I start to pick up the phone and call my mom and have to stop half way through her number. She’s still on my email contacts list! I see her name every time I scroll through it and it always makes my eyes sting, and yet I still can’t delete it. 

Mom! 

It’s the same for Lonnie, I know that. You’re supposed to recover and move forward. Well, you have to keep moving, and you can’t move backward, but neither of us ever recovered. I don’t even want to recover. I don’t want it to be OK that some slimy entitled amoral snake took advantage of my mother’s pain and grief  -- and weakness, yes she was weak at that moment, fine, I admit it – and killed her with drugs.

That day, Sippy had my number. He always did. Lonnie’s too – we were both too numbed by grief and self-pity and anger and sadness and loneliness and confusion and fear and a million other emotions to do anything but clip-clop along like horses, following the tail of the horse in front of us. And if that lead horse walked across busy highway? So be it. Anything would be better than this clenched relentless inert misery of loss.

Or so I thought.

We made a tough looking crew of thieves the next night, dressed in black, armed with shovels to dig up the treasure and contractor bags to carry it away, each of us toting a big mag light, wearing thin plastic gloves to prevent fingerprints. We had water bottles and snacks, steel-toed boots. We dressed in layers because we knew we were going to work up a sweat.

Lonnie bailed on us. He said he had stomach flu but we all knew the truth. He chickened out. Sippy didn’t care. The nerves would turn Lonnie into a liability, even a danger, if things went wrong and we had to improvise.

I remember standing by the air pump on Wauwinet Road, adjusting the tire pressure, saying “Go wrong? What could go wrong?”

Sippy shrugged. “Cops and life guards patrol Coatue some nights, on those ATVs. Or guests from the hotel might be hiking out there. Slipping out for a little grab ass on the beach.  I’m not saying it’s gonna happen, but it might -- and the last thing we need is some stupid kid panicking when we’re trying to bullshit a cop or chill out a tourist. Okay?”

I glanced down the empty road. No cars visible, and no sound of approaching ones. Just crickets and the wind in the trees. I nodded, wound up the air hose and climbed into the Jeep.

We were fifty-one minutes away from the end of the world.

That’s how long it took us to make  the long drive over sand, past the Wauwinet houses all the way to Great Point, down Coatue, along the harbor to Second Bend, and start digging up Ed Delavane’s steamer trunk.

They were waiting for us.

They knew we were coming. They had big halogens hooked up to a generator and we heard the harsh metallic clang a second before the caustic wattage flooded us – an unblinking eye, a lightning flash that kept on burning.

The thunder was Ed Delavane’s laugh

“Uh oh,” he said. “Looks like you kids got caught with your hands in the cookie jar. Too bad you didn’t know a rat was living in there. Ouch! Oh, and speaking of rats – you’re free, to go Krakauer.”

Mark Toland stepped out of the nimbus of shadow, into the spot-lit glare. He flipped a coin to Haden, who caught it reflexively. “Thanks for the magic silver dollar,” he said. “Worked like a charm." He turned to me with a sly grin. "Didn’t it, Mr. Peanut?”

I couldn’t answer, I couldn’t talk, I could barely breathe. The urge to leap at Haden Krakauer and start pounding him with my fists was almost greater than the terror as I stood cringing in that glaring light and the stomach flipping dread of whatever they had planned for us. Haden Krakauer. A Judas for one piece of borrowed silver. No, no, no, that makes no sense – Judas I understand. He betrayed the Lord for money. All Haden got was a wink of approval from his new master. He was popular at last. He had bought his way into the cool group. He was in with the in crowd. He went where the in crowd went. 

He didn’t know they were going to Hell. But he’ll find out when he meets me there.

Haden scampered away. It’s a long walk back to town but I’m sure he was happy to take it. He never found out what happened that night. No one ever told him and he never saw Toland’s video. As far as he was concerned he just traded one set of friends in for another. Winners for losers. New lamps for old.

Delavane gave us a choice: take the beating of our lives or go down on each other. The nausea hits me like food poisoning, just writing the words. Once years before a bully was dunking me underwater at a public swimming pool and I stuttered “I can’t breathe underwater.” He thought that was hilarious. That night on Coatue I said “We’re not gay!” and Toland laughed just like that thug who had almost drowned me when I was seven years old. 

“Of course you’re not gay! This wouldn’t be any fun if you were gay.”

I slammed him with my shoulder and took off running on the packed sand of the path. Sippy tried to run but he caught his foot on something and slipped. I heard footsteps pounding behind me and then the impact behind my knees as Delavane took me down. The tackle face-planted me in the sand. He yanked me up and dragged me into the circle of light, panting and bleeding.

“Pants off, both of you. Who wants to go first?”

“No way,” Sippy said. “You can't do this. We’ll report you! We’ll tell the cops.”

“And admit what you did?”

“No one will believe you,” Toland added.

Delavane nodded. “We have alibis.”

“Friends who’ll say we were at their party tonight.”

A pause, then Sippy took a desperate swing at Delavane. He blocked it the way someone might flick a gnat away from their eyes and then drove a straight punch into Sippy’s stomach. Sippy doubled over and dropped to his knees, groaning. 

Delavane laughed. “I guess you go first, fish face. You’re in the perfect position.”

That’s all I’m going to say here. But know this: we did it, we did everything they told us to do, and I never recovered from that night and I knew that I never would, no matter what revenge I took, no  matter how badly I hurt Delavane and Haden Krakauer who betrayed us and all those friends who were willing to lie for them, that whole rotten corrupt incestuous world -- the evil empire of Nantucket High School, with its sick strutting princes and princesses with all their pride and privileges and perversions.

I could never heal myself. But I had to try.

I decided to get rid of them all at once, like  torching an old house to kill the termites. The image is precise and perfect. It came to me in a dream. I woke up the next morning knowing exactly what to do. I would purify their tainted domain in the classic way.

By fire.