Exley, p.14
Exley, page 14
There was more barking and squawking around the other side of the house. I followed the sounds until I saw a man with a shotgun. I know there are different kinds of shotguns, but I don’t know what they are, and I didn’t know what kind this one was. I’d never seen anyone hold one before. But I wasn’t scared, mostly because it looked like it was broken. The man was holding it by the handle. The handle was parallel to the ground. But there was a mouth-shaped crack between the handle and the rest of the gun, which was pointed directly at the ground. The gun wasn’t scary, broken like that. The man wasn’t scary, either. He was wearing blue khaki work clothes, and work boots that were untied, with the tongues outside the pant cuffs. He was old and skinny and looked sick. I mean, he looked like he was going to be sick. He spat in the dirt in front of him. It was a big glob of spit and didn’t dissolve when it hit the dirt. Then I saw why he might be sick. In front of him, between the house and us, was a big dirt patch. There were two chickens pecking at it. There was one dog looking at the two chickens. There was another dog a few feet away. It was slowly eating something. I guessed it was a chicken, because I could see at least six dead and bloody chickens scattered nearby. The dog ate the last bit of whatever he was eating, seemed to almost throw it up, then swallowed it.
Just then the man noticed me. He smiled, and I could see that he had a couple of teeth left and that they were gray. I smiled back, and then he stopped smiling. He looked inside the shotgun, where it was broken, and then fixed it with one flick of his wrist. He kept one hand on the handle, the other under the barrel, put the whole thing up near his chin, and then pointed it at me. Then I got scared. I was so scared I didn’t have time to decide whether to start calling this man Exley in my head, or to wait until he proved he was Exley before calling him that. I put my hands up and shouted, “V. sent me! A guy named V. sent me!”
When the guy heard that, he lowered his gun a little, so that it was pointed at my feet and not at my face. “Why didn’t V. come himself?” he wanted to know.
“V. didn’t say.” I was about to volunteer to go back to the Crystal and ask V. why he didn’t come himself when the guy nodded, spat, and said, “Pussy.” I didn’t think he was talking to me, but even if he was, I wasn’t exactly in a position to be offended. He then flipped the gun around and pointed it, grip first, in my direction. I knew what he wanted me to do: he wanted me to take the gun. I didn’t even stop to think about whether I should do it. Because this was the kind of situation in which you did what was asked of you. Because if I didn’t want to do what was asked of me, I shouldn’t have put myself in the situation in the first place. Because if I didn’t do what this guy wanted me to do, I wouldn’t find out if he was Exley or not. Anyway, I took the gun. It was the first time I’d ever held a gun that wasn’t a BB gun. This gun was heavier than that gun, and smelled of oil and old smoke. Not woodsmoke, but the smoke from a bottle rocket or a firecracker. Now that I had the gun, though, I wasn’t sure what the man wanted me to do with it, exactly. The man must have sensed this, because he pointed at the dog nearest me and said, “I guess shoot him first.”
I didn’t say anything back, because I was afraid the man would hear how scared I was. I held the gun like the man had held the gun a second earlier, then turned to face the dog that had just finished eating the chickens. I curled my finger around the trigger, then paused. I can’t do this, I said to myself. Sure, you can, I said back. Think of it as a test. You’re good at tests. I stood there for a few seconds more, looking at the dog over the top of the gun, until the gun started to shake a little, then a lot. No, I won’t do it, I said. But what about your dad? I said back. I thought you’d do anything for your dad.
“For Christ’s sake, go ahead,” the man said, and I thought, Exley! and then pulled the trigger and shot the dog that had just finished eating. It was so loud at first and then wouldn’t stop being loud: it was like the noise was doing laps around my ears, and I wanted to put my hands over my ears, except they were holding the gun. The dog coughed out a weak, wet bark and flopped on his side in the dirt. The other dog yelped and sprinted off, away from the house and the chickens. The two live chickens squawked and ran into each other and made noises like they were about to get into a fight, but then didn’t. They started pecking the dirt again. I handed the man the gun, and the man broke it, and something that looked like red plastic but must have been a bullet fell out of it, and then the man put another bullet in and fixed it again. We didn’t talk. I don’t think I could have said anything if I wanted to. I was too busy listening to the sound of the gunshot in my ears. It was an echo somewhere deep down where you weren’t supposed to stick the Q-tip. I wondered what had hit the dog if the red plastic bullet was still in the gun after I’d fired it. I wondered what kind of guns my dad had fired in Iraq and whether it had hurt his ears the way me firing the gun had hurt mine. I wondered if my dad had been shot, and if that was why he was in the VA hospital in the first place, and if him being shot was more painful for him than me shooting the dog was for the dog. And then I wondered how my dad would feel about me shooting the dog if he’d been shot, too, and I almost started to cry. But I didn’t want Exley to think I was soft. So I made myself go hard inside and thought that there was no reason I should feel bad for the dog because I’d seen him eat the chicken.
“Poor King,” Exley finally said.
“I’m sorry,” I said. “But you wanted me to shoot King, didn’t you?”
“That’s not King,” the guy said. “That’s Petey.” He rocked back and forth on his heels and held his stomach with both hands and looked at the dog, who seemed to be a German shepherd mixed with a smaller kind of dog. Petey was bleeding a little bit from the mouth, but his eyes were still open and he was still breathing.
“Why’d you say ‘Poor King,’ then?” I asked.
“Because King heard what happened to Petey and he knows it’s gonna happen to him, too.” Sure enough, I could hear a dog whimpering somewhere on the other side of the house. “V. thinks I don’t feed the dogs, but I do try,” Exley said. “I do try to feed them.”
“What do you feed them?”
“That depends on what I’m eating.”
“What are you eating?”
“I can’t eat nothing because of my stomach.” Exley looked sheepish when he said that. I had the feeling that Exley’s stomach was something he and V. had talked about. King yelped suddenly and loudly, and the man said, “It hurts my stomach to hear him cry like that.” Then he started coughing. It was a weird cough; it rose and broke, like a wave, and then started over again. I’d never heard a cough like it before. Exley was shaking, and his hands were covering his face, and that’s when I realized he was crying, not coughing. That made me mad because I tried so hard not to cry myself, and also because I was starting to figure out that V. was Exley’s son. Exley had twin sons in his book, and so V. could have been one of them. Except if V. were Exley’s son, he would know whether his father was Exley. Unless Exley had kept his identity secret from V., and I couldn’t come up with a reason why he’d do that. But I could come up with a reason why V. said he might be Exley: so he wouldn’t have to come out here and shoot his dad’s dogs for him. Any way you looked at it, it meant that this man wasn’t Exley and that I’d shot Petey for no good reason. I hadn’t done a very good job of that, either: Petey was still alive, lying in his own blood and making small whimpering noises. The whole thing just made me incredibly mad. So mad that I took the gun out of the man’s hands, walked over to where Petey was, and shot him again. Petey bounced about an inch off the ground, and when he’d landed he wasn’t breathing anymore. The chickens didn’t squawk this time; they just kept on pecking. Meanwhile, the noise from the second gunshot was chasing the noise of the first gunshot around and around in my ears. When I finally cleared my ears a little, I could hear King howling from behind the house. Meanwhile, the man was still crying, except louder, and this made me even madder than I was before. “‘Listen, you son of a bitch,’” I said. “‘Life isn’t all a goddamn football game! You won’t always get the girl! Life is rejection and pain and loss.’”
“It hurts my stomach to hear you talk like that,” the man said. He sniffled a couple of times, hugged himself, and then looked at me with big eyes, like he’d just recognized me. “Jesus,” he said, “you sounded just like Exley.”
“You know Exley!” I said.
“I haven’t seen that crazy bastard in years,” he said. “I thought he was dead, for some reason.”
“No!” I said, and the man nodded.
“You’re right,” he said. “Guys like him who should die end up living forever. He’s probably out in Alex Bay. That’s where he was living last I heard.”
“Alex Bay,” I repeated. Alex Bay was Alexandria Bay. I’d been to a beach there with my parents once. It wasn’t far from Watertown, but it was too far for me to walk or ride my bike. I’d have to figure out how to get there. But now that the man had said this, it made perfect sense. After all, my dad had told me I wouldn’t find Exley in Watertown. At the time, I thought this was just one of those vague things adults say to remind you that you’re a kid who doesn’t know what adults know. But it seemed now it was one of those specific things adults say to remind you that you’re a kid who doesn’t know what adults know. “Thanks a lot,” I said to the man.
The man didn’t say, You’re welcome. He reached his hand out and I handed him the gun, except I handed it to him barrel first. “Jesus, not like that,” he said, and I apologized and turned it around and handed it to him that way. He flicked open the shotgun, dumped out a bullet, put another one in. “If you can’t find Exley in Alex Bay,” he said, “then you might want to ask this guy V. drinks with down at the Crystal. He’s a crazy bastard, just like Exley. And while you’re down at the Crystal, tell V. his father said he was a pussy.” Then he fixed his gun and went to find King, the other dog.
The Spanish Word for “Because”
You might want to know how I got to teach my dad’s Great American Writers class at the community college in the first place. I got the idea on the twentieth of March, 200–, the day my dad left to go to Iraq. I’d come home from school. It was the last day, like I told Dr. Pahnee. Like I told Dr. Pahnee, Mother was in the driveway, crying. But my dad wasn’t in his car yet. He was standing in the driveway with her. I guess I misremembered that part. And I wasn’t hiding behind the bushes. I must have gotten that wrong, too. I was just walking down the sidewalk. As I turned into the driveway, I could hear my dad say, “Poor K.” At first I thought my dad was saying the Spanish word for “because.” I’d just learned that word in my Spanish 1 class. Except my dad didn’t know any Spanish. That’s when I realized what he was saying, and I also realized, since I knew my dad liked to refer to some people by their first initial, because Exley did, that K. was probably the first letter of someone’s first name, and not the name itself. But I didn’t know who K. was, and I didn’t know why my dad said “Poor K.” like he did: like he wasn’t really sorry for K., whoever K. was.
“Who’s K.?” I asked. Neither of them had noticed me until then. When they heard my voice, they both turned to look at me. But they didn’t say anything. There was a weird feeling around all of us, like something was missing in the air. It was like the feeling you get right before or after a thunderstorm, or the feeling you get when someone’s just been talking about you. Except my dad and Mother hadn’t been talking about me. They’d been talking about K. Or at least my dad had been. “Who is K.?” I asked again.
Mother looked away from me and at my dad. At first I thought I recognized the look, because I’d seen it so often: she was angry at him. And then the look changed, like she was about to cry again. And then that look changed again, like she was asking my dad a really big favor. It was a complicated look. I remember thinking that, and I also remember thinking that you had to have known someone for a really long time to be able to look at him like that, and he had to have known you for a really long time to be able to understand it.
“K. is one of my students at the college,” my dad finally said. He said it to Mother, not to me. Mother smiled and then started laughing, but the laugh was dry, more like a cough than a laugh, like Mother didn’t exactly think what my dad had said was funny. And sure enough, then she started crying again. That’s when my dad got into his car, turned it on, and said, “Maybe I should go to Iraq, too.” And that’s when Mother said, “Please,” and then my dad drove away, and then Mother told me wherever my dad was going, it wasn’t Iraq. I didn’t know then if she was right or not. But I did know that my dad had a class, and in it a student whose first name began with the letter K., and someone was going to have to teach it, and her, while he was gone.
The First and Tenth Days
The first day of my teaching my dad’s class, Tuesday, the eleventh of September, 200–, I’d waltzed right into the room like it was my class and had always been my class. I was carrying my backpack. Inside was the syllabus and the first book I wanted them to read: The Blithedale Romance, by Nathaniel Hawthorne. I would have had them read Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter, but I’d read them both when I was seven, and it had taken me longer to read The Blithedale Romance, which meant it was a better book. I was going to tell them that on the first day of class. I put my backpack on the table in front of the room, stood behind the little lectern that was also on the table. It wasn’t even half a lectern, and I wasn’t even half a professor: the class could probably see only the top of my hair from where they were sitting. I stepped to the side, but it was too late. They were looking at me. I tried looking back at them, but I couldn’t see any of the students clearly: they were just a blur of faces that said, What the... ? I didn’t know what else I could do except take attendance and let them go. I’d done that once a week for six weeks now. The whole thing had been a disaster except for K. K. was the last person to leave the room on the first day, and before she did, I told her that my dad had mentioned her, which was true, and that he had asked me to take good care of her. This was not true. But I figured if I was taking good care of her, then my dad, when he came back, wouldn’t feel like he’d have to, or want to, or should. Anyway, K. and I had never had any problems until she’d kicked me out of her apartment. That had been two days earlier. I wondered if there was something I could do or say to convince her to let me back in.
AFTER LEAVING V.’s father, I walked back home, got my bike, and then pedaled out to the college. I got to the class a minute early, but all seventeen of my students were already there. It was the tenth day of class. Like I said, I’d never really been able to see them clearly; up until now, they’d just been seventeen people who couldn’t believe I was their teacher, maybe because I couldn’t imagine what I would teach them. But now I could see them. Some of them were eighteen years old; some were forty-five. They all had their coats on. They were all still wearing their backpacks. All except for K. K. was sitting in the front row. She had just come from the gym. Her gym bag was on the floor next to her chair. K.’s hair was wet. She was wearing her soft blue fleece jacket. It was zipped up to her chin, and she was chewing on the zipper. K. held a pencil in her right hand; a notebook was open on the desk in front of her. She looked at me expectantly. Everyone else looked at me impatiently. They wanted to get this over with. At my school, teachers always talked about teaching to the test. Well, I had taught to the test. The test was attendance. The question was the students’ names. The answer was, “Here.”
I tossed my backpack and bike helmet onto the table. I cleared my throat. I could see W., whose last name was A., prepare himself to say, “Here.” But I didn’t call his name. I closed my eyes.
“ ‘Between getting smashed and cracking up your hot rods,’” I said, “‘initiating each other into your sex clubs and having your rumbles, you little dears are looking to me for direction.’ ”
I opened my eyes. K. had stopped chewing on her zipper and was smiling at me now with her mouth and with her eyes. No one else was smiling at me, though. Some of them looked like they hadn’t heard a thing. Maybe because the only thing they ever listened for was their name, and their name came later in the alphabet. But A. through L. had heard, all right. They looked at me with hate. That made me happy. They hated me just like Exley’s students had hated him.
“What I just said is from a book,” I said. “Who knows what book?”
K. raised her hand. I smiled and shook my head in what I hoped was a fond way. This was the way you handled the smartest kid in class, who wanted to answer all the questions. This was the way so many teachers had smiled and shook their heads at me. “Does anyone besides K. know what book?” I asked.
No one did. F. glared at me. He was wearing stained work boots. He was in the front row, and I thought I could smell what they were stained with. He stomped one boot, then the other. His son, F. junior, was sitting next to him; his dad looked at F. junior, and he sighed and stomped his boots, too. I guessed they were farmers. I guessed their stomping their boots meant they had work to do. I guessed they wanted me to call attendance already. I ignored them.
