'How do we know when? Where? Who?'
'We don't.' Karl looked down. Al looked up, smacking his tail on the floor. It wasn't a happy wag, more like a nervous one.
'What do you want to do?' My head throbbed at a pretty steady rate now.
Karl paused. I wondered if he thought of killing himself. I had a little dose lately about what your mind can do to you. I was at the point where such decisions didn't seem illogical.
'Duff, I'd rather die fighting these bastards than giving in.' Karl looked up, right in my eyes.
'You sure?'
'As sure as I've ever been at anything.' I nodded and looked down at Al, formerly 'Elvis.'
'You don't have to be a part of it, Duff. There's a good chance we'll die. They're better at this than we are, have more resources, and they have the advantage of knowing all the details.'
'Yeah, there's that.'
It got quiet for a few seconds, except for Al's tail action.
'Well, what else is there, Duff?'
I smiled and laughed, mostly to my self.
'Karl, I don't like being sucker-punched and having someone get away with it.'
'Me either,' Karl said.
I called Jamal, who still worked as a hall monitor and assistant football coach, and asked him if I could come visit him at school and bring my buddy Karl. He said it would be no problem and to come around lunchtime when we could talk. We skipped the main office, even though there were signs imploring us to stop and badge up before we went any further. I figured as an alumnus I had special rights. It didn't, of course, but I kind of went through life believing I had special rights.
'You really think Newstrom would come here and not back to his alma mater?' I asked Karl as we turned down a corridor toward the cafeteria.
'Strange as it sounds. I gotta believe he's still rah-rah on all the football crap and class presidency shit,' Karl said.
'I don't get it Karl. Was he straight up back in the day or crooked and looking for greedy angles even then?'
'Duff, he was truly the all-American boy, pure as the driven snow.'
'What happened?'
'War, killing people, people trying to kill you, and the corruption of the military can get in you and become you.'
'Yeah, I guess.'
'Truly the All-American boy in that sense, too.' We came up on the noise and chaos of a high school at lunch. I caught a whiff of the cafeteria smell, and my high school years came to me through my nostrils. I tried to decipher the aroma. The best I could come up with, fried frozen food and the horrible gravy that seemed to be there every day, in one form or another. Here it wasn't hard to believe Karl's theory about evil food conspiracies.
The cafeteria doubled as an auditorium. Kids ran around yelling to each other, some wore ear phones connected to IPods, while others hunched over laptops staring at their computer screens rather than doing any human interaction.
'Can I treat you to a Salisbury steak with Maybeline's famous yellow gravy,' a voice said to us from behind. It was Jamal.
'Please, just the mention of it gives me the shits. 'Ol Maybeline still in charge of the kitchen?'
'Yep and still fuckin' up everything she can.'
'You know, Jamal, I thought old black southern women were supposed to be able to cook.'
'Ah shit, Duff, and I can tap with Sammy Fuckin' Davis Jr. You white people kill me.'
'Hey, this is my buddy, Karl.' Up until now Karl had been standing, turned three quarters away from us, surveying the cafeteria. He turned to shake Jamal's hand.
'What's up, man' Jamal said. 'Hey, you played for VHS awhile didn't you?'
'Yeah, halfback,' Karl said.
'I remember you. You had some hop.'
'For the Suburban League.'
'Yeah, I'm glad you said it,' Jamal said. Karl went back to looking around the room.
'Yo Duff, I love you like a brother from another mother, but you mind telling me what coming here is all about?'
'Ah, well, we're kind of looking for someone or, more accurately, some thing.'
'You wanna explain?'
'Uh, do I have to?'
'Hey, man, you call me to come visit the school, you bring your friend here, who's been doin' some sort of surveillance thing and I'm not supposed to know. I think not, my friend.' Jamal raised his eyebrows in the impossible way that gave him one of the most expressive faces I've ever seen.
'Okay, everyone else in town thinks I'm nuts, why shouldn't you. We're looking for kids, maybe kids who are a little fucked up. Depressed, disenfranchised, angry, maybe even violent kids who might, you know, be angry with the world.'
'You just about describe all of adolescence, Duff.' Jamal starred at me. 'What the hell are you really talking about?'
'We're looking for kids who might want to go Columbine.' Jamal put his hands on his hips and starred at me. I looked back at him and kept his eyes as long as I could.
'Duff, what the f-'
'Them,' Karl said, softer than his usual voice. 'Them, what's their story?' He pointed with a nod of the head. In that direction was a group of kids dressed in black, with the requisite black boots, dyed black hair and dark tattoos.
'C'mon, fellas. Those are the resident Goths. They're the wannabe angry teens trying to make a statement by being different-all of them being exactly the same different at the same time,' Jamal said.
'Duff, I got a feeling.' Karl turned toward Jamal. 'You remember Chipper Newstrom. He was the quarterback on my VHS team?'
'Yeah, sure. He could play a little ball. It's weird you bring him up because I-'
'He was here wasn't he?' Karl broke in.
'Yeah. I saw him in the parking lot before class. How did you know?'
Karl looked up at me. So did Jamal.
'Holy shit.' It was all I could think of saying.
35
We followed the kids in black after school. Eight of them and they smoked cigarettes behind the bowling alley, five blocks from McDonough. We sat in the El Dorado, two blocks away, watching the area they disappeared into through the woods and broken-down cement half wall that used to be part of a garage years ago. After 45 minutes, three of them came out, and looked like they were headed home. They laughed and walked like any other kids, except they all dressed in black and all had the same tattoos on their forearms. The one in the middle had another tattoo on the back of his neck.
'Karl, how long are we going to sit here?' I said after another 45 minutes of watching kids through the trees and bushes.
'I don't know, but it feels like we've got to do something,' he said.
'So far the most nefarious thing we got them doing is smoking cigarettes. You want to call Richie and Potsy and tell their moms?'
'Either Newstrom has intervened already or he's still working on them. This thing could be going down tomorrow.'
