wagon. Its horn echoed down the street. Bung-Eye flipped the driver the bird and chucked the empty can out the window. Then the truck passed us. Bung-Eye’s good eye found us. The heat disappeared from the sun and chills went up my back. He pointed out the window, right at us, and formed his hand into a gun. Bang, he mouthed and winked his milky, dead eye.
Then he took a left and disappeared into the back of the sheriff’s station.
I shook off the chill. Shook off that look in his eyes. That look that said, I know who you are. I know what you’ve been doing.
‘Should we go back?’ Jenny said.
‘No, we shouldn’t,’ I said and she didn’t argue. I didn’t want to be in the same room as that man. Everyone knew Bung-Eye and knew to stay out of his way.
Rudy didn’t come to the Roost that evening but we all four met up at the Backhoe first chance we could. Sunday afternoon. The diner windows were thrown wide and the streets lined with people watching the parade, waving flags, blowing whistles, cheering as the Fourth of July floats slid down Main Street. The high school marching band following behind the last float – the Larson Lions, decked out in blue and gold uniforms and shining helmets – tooting ‘Oklahoma’ and twirling batons. The fireworks were set to go off from the football field at nine but the four of us didn’t feel much like banging the drum.
Rudy showed off a shiner and a limp from his father so Gloria bought us two milkshakes to share as apology for telling Mandy about the body. Our momma, when she found out, didn’t much care, never even scolded us. I felt for Rudy, always did when he turned up bruised. Momma could make a slap sting to high heaven and her words could crack bones, but Bung-Eye was something else, some horror kicked right out of Hell for bad behaviour. We got through it. We didn’t talk about it, not really, and that was for the best.
It didn’t matter, not in Rudy’s big-picture thinking, because it wouldn’t last. The four of us were on a fast track out of Larson, that’s what Rudy, Gloria and Jenny kept saying. Few more years and it’d be sayonara to all those fists and snipes. Only snag in Rudy’s great escape plan was me. I didn’t want to leave.
The diner was jammed. The four us squeezed around a two-person table, Jenny and Gloria sharing a chair, Rudy on a stool.
Gloria said something but it was lost in the noise from the band passing.
‘I said we should do something!’
‘About what?’ Rudy shouted back.
We leaned over the table, heads almost touching, the only way to be heard.
‘You know …’ she said, leaned further in, ‘about her.’
‘What can we do?’ I asked. It felt wrong to be talking about this. Here.
The person who killed her was probably in this diner, or on the street, or in the parade. I choked back a mouthful of milkshake.
‘We could …’ Gloria’s words were lost as a dozen mill workers poured into the diner singing and spinning football rattles.
Behind them, Gloria’s mother appeared in a tight red dress. The mill workers whistled, spun their rattles faster. She ignored them. Her eyes found Gloria and she waved, holding a paper flag, her hand laden with rings and bangles.
‘I’ve got to go,’ Gloria said, stood up then ducked back down to whisper. ‘Come to my house tomorrow after school, I have an idea.’
School on Monday buzzed with talk of the body. Whispers filled the halls and corners of the yard at recess. Even the teachers were gossiping between classes. The four of us were attacked with questions soon as we stepped through the doors. What’s a body like? Did you touch it? Does it smell bad? Who was she? How’d she die? And on and on. The worst though, was the one they murmured behind our backs, the one that changed the way they looked at us; did they kill her?
Through the day, the rumours swarmed, gained life and solidity, they grew into full-blown accusations and theories that, somehow, Jenny and me had killed the girl, dumped her body and then gone back to admire our handiwork before the cops found her. At the final bell, the doors to school flung wide and we poured out onto the front lawn where parents would be waiting. Some kids ran but slowed down to pass me and Jenny. They stared. I stared back.
‘Freaks,’ someone shouted and everyone laughed. A collective roar of giggling and jeers. Freaks, losers, weirdos.
‘Johnny, let’s go,’ she said, grabbed my arm.
Then I saw little Timmy Greer, runt of the class, try to make his name. He picked up a rock, wound back his skinny arm and hurled it at Jenny. I grabbed her, turned her away, and the rock struck my back. I cried out. The little shit had power. But the pain disappeared when I saw, across the lawn, away from the doors, Rudy and Gloria staring at us. They’d left by the side door, right where Gloria’s locker was.
Another rock hit the back of my leg and with it a chilling cry, ‘Killer!’
That stung the worst, the first time it’d been said out loud, given breath and life. Then Jenny screamed as a rock caught her shoulder. They all joined in. Laughing and shouting.
‘Freak!’
‘Perv!’
‘Murderer!’
Tears burned my eyes. They threw stone after stone and Rudy and Gloria didn’t move, like they didn’t believe what was happening. Neither did I.
Jenny dropped to the floor and me on top of her, covering her, protecting her best I could. It was hail. It was storm. Crack after crack. Sticky feel of blood in a dozen places. My head, my hands, my legs. Make it stop. Make it stop. Every time Jenny yelped, heat rose in me. Rage. Anger. The rocks kept coming, handfuls of gravel from the path, every strike cut my breath short.
Then mercy. The voice.
‘Stop it! Hey! Cut it out!’ Rudy. Charging in. A god in middle school. ‘Leave them alone!’
The laughing kept going but the rocks stopped. Caught doing something wrong, the pack scattered, a few parting shots but nothing hit hard. Just another school day done. An act of violence giggled through, it’s okay to throw stones when the targets are freaks and weirdos. Ain’t that right, Mom and Dad?
Make me a bird, I thought, that I may drag them all sky high and let go. Who would be laughing then?
Rudy helped me up. Gloria helped Jenny. My face stung in a hundred places. Jenny had cuts about her arms and legs but, mercifully, her face remained untouched.
‘They’re saying all sorts about you both, the bastards,’ Rudy said. He tried to sound older, like a pa telling off his boy, but the worry on his face at the blood on mine gave him away.
‘I heard,’ I said, my ears ringing with killer, murderer, my eyes boiling with tears. ‘They don’t know shit.’
Gloria picked out a piece of grit from Jenny’s arm with one hand and held her hand with the other.
‘Mandy
