Olympia

Chapter 1

The Lot, Sunday night, the place is dead. Here and there kids sit in their cars and smoke pot but there aren’t many cars, and a small group shuffles around the entrance to the Taco Bell. Nothing happening. On weekend nights, kids from all over town converge here to hangout, get high, get drunk, fight, fuck, whatever. Saturday nights are the best, some crazy shit between a riot and a block party, but Sunday nights are usually pretty geriatric, you could say—slow, annoying, and without much of a pulse. It rained a little earlier too, so that drove even more people away.

The place is almost desolate.

Carla, in the driver seat of her Civic, one foot up under her ass, picks at her fingernails with a file. She says, Shit, this feels like it’s infected.

David clicks on the interior light and she shows him her finger. He shakes his head. Keep picking at it and it will be. Why do you do that?

Carla drops her hands and half-whines, Let’s just fucking go, David.

Looking out the windows, keeping an eye on the entrance, annoyed by her whining, David says, I told you, we’re waiting for Tommy to get here.

Yeah, but why? She rolls her eyes. It’s getting late.

David drops his window down a bit and flips the butt of his smoke out. I don’t know. He looks around. It’s like time has stopped. There isn’t any traffic on Sycamore Street. Granted, it’s close to two in the morning, but you’d expect something, like an occasional semi, or a cop, but for half an hour now, nothing but dead wet leaves and wind blowing tree branches.

There’s a definite strain of accusation in Carla’s voice now. Why don’t you know?

It pisses David off. He says, I didn’t ask. But he did, and Bryan didn’t answer—the first time Bryan ever refused to answer him, about anything, and it bothered David. Let me know when Tommy shows up. Sure, but why? Just do it for me, all right? He shrugged like it was no big deal. Okay. I’ll keep an eye out. He says to Carla, We’re hanging out, aren’t we? Who cares what we’re doing?

Carla sighs. She’s bored. She’s been bored for the past half an hour, only now it’s nearly intolerable. She thinks about telling David she’s just going to leave, with or without him, because she’s tired of sitting here doing nothing, tired of watching nothing happen, and because it’s two a.m. on a school night for Christ sake, and she can certainly find more interesting things to do. Like sleep.

David jumps, sits up in his seat, and she notices Tommy pulling into The Lot in his Jeep. David hops out of the car, slams the door and walks fast.

When he gets inside he sees Bryan in a booth with Troy Mackey, a kid that neither of them especially like, but with whom they sometimes have reason to do business. Troy’s not like them, but he’s always got good drugs. David says to Bryan, Tommy’s here.

Bryan stands up, takes a breath, wipes his hands on his pants, and Troy gets up too, casual, and says, Show time.

David almost cringes—another jock trying to act like a badass. Bryan’s behavior, though, is exactly as it always is right before he beats the shit out of somebody.

But it doesn’t make sense. Why Tommy?

David follows them outside, wondering about Tommy, wondering why Bryan didn’t tell him about it, made him a fucking errand boy, a lookout, without even telling him why. Some best friend.

Carla gets out of her car and joins them.

Tommy gets out of his Jeep and waves at Troy, starts walking toward the group. When he sees Bryan approaching him, his expression changes. That look on Bryan’s face—everybody knows that look—means bad things are about to happen. But Tommy’s confused, doesn’t seem to know Bryan’s got a beef, so he looks around, makes a quizzical look and says, Hey, what’s up, man?

By now Bryan’s just a few feet away from of him.

Bryan is a hulking seventeen year old, stocky as hell, six foot three, two hundred twenty pounds, about the toughest motherfucker The Bottoms ever produced and The Bottoms routinely produces extraordinarily tough and dangerous individuals.

He says, You, and runs the rest of the distance between them.

Tommy stops dead, freezes, if given half a second longer he might run like hell, but he’s got no time to think—it’s all too fast—and Bryan’s on top of him, his fist connects with his face, stuns him, swings him around and down to a knee.

You couldn’t count the number of fights Bryan has been in, and he hasn’t lost one since he was eleven years old, when he realized that the initiative and the willingness to do the most harm were the two attributes that always determined the winner of a fight.

It’s all blurry, fist cracks and groans and cartilage breaking. Bryan beats Tommy for about ten seconds, until Tommy’s face is smeared with blood, his nose is broken, and who knows what else is fractured, who knows how many teeth are gone. Tommy begs him to stop between bloody gasps and when Bryan does stop, he stops abruptly, turns around and walks back toward the group. Tommy, no doubt suffering a concussion, starts off slowly for his Jeep.

David and Carla are standing near Troy. They’re close to Troy’s little sports car, his jazzed-up Mitsubishi. When Bryan gets back to them, he isn’t beaming, like he usually is after assaulting someone. He’s usually exultant, king of the fucking world. But now he’s shaking his head, his head’s down, his brows are pushed together, like there’s something, something he can’t get over.

He says, Fuck this. Where’s that bat?

David says, What? Makes a movement toward Bryan and stops.

Troy, almost giddy, says, In the back seat!

David looks at him. What the hell is going on here? He looks back over at Tommy, Troy’s best friend Tommy, whose just almost been beaten to death, going off quietly to his car, and he looks back at Troy—who just told Bryan there was a baseball bat in his backseat.

Bryan reaches into Troy’s car and comes out with the bat, runs after Tommy, who’s opening his own car door now, slowly, obviously in pain, and obviously dazed.

David wants to yell for Tommy to hurry or duck or run, but he can’t. It won’t come out. None of this makes any sense.

As Bryan closes the gap between himself and Tommy, he raises the bat like he’s about to hit one right out of the stadium, like it’s going to be the hardest grand slam of his life, and Tommy doesn’t know a thing, until it’s too late.

David whispers, I should do something. But he just stands there, and he can’t believe what he’s watching. The sound is a crack that echoes off the buildings across the street and comes back at them like a gunshot.

After it’s all over, everyone is silent. Some girl starts to cry. It isn’t Carla. David looks at Carla and he knows she’s just as stunned as he is, and he looks at Troy, who’s stunned as well, but in a slightly different way. There is something not entirely unlike pleasure on Troy’s face.

Somebody inside the Taco Bell opens the door and yells something, somebody else yells, They called the cops! Everybody scatters. Carla and David run like hell—it’s pure panic. They run up Sycamore, toward the bridge. David looks back and sees Bryan standing there with the bat in his hand and he would swear that he sees blood on it, but maybe he’s just imagining that. Bryan just stands there, staring down at Tommy—who isn’t moving anymore—staring down at what he’s done.

Chapter 2

It’s just the two of them under the bridge, and they chain smoke, and are both shaking, even though it isn’t very cold out.

Carla says, Somebody’s going to have to tell the cops what happened.

David says, They’ve got cameras. Nobody’s gonna have to tell anybody anything. Believe me.

Well, if they’ve got cameras, then we’re on the cameras too.

David paces around. It’s dark under there but after a while he gets used to it, and besides, he’s spent so much time hanging around under that bridge that it doesn’t matter how dark it is. He kicks a bunch of stones into the water, and listens to them splash across the surface. The cameras, the tapes. Yeah, they’re on there all right. He says, But, so are a lot of other people.

Carla has her arms wrapped around her, with just her cigarette-hand exposed, right up close to her face. I can’t believe we just left my car there.

I know. David nods. He’s pretty sure they aren’t the only ones who did that. It was senseless chaos. He considers going back. He doesn’t want to. Shit, he’d rather walk than deal with that. Who wants to deal with cops and all that shit. Fuck it. He says. We didn’t do anything, right?

That’s right. Carla sucks on her smoke. But isn’t there something like a Good Samaritan law where if you don’t save somebody then you’re guilty too?

Not if your life is in danger. That’s true enough. Bryan wouldn’t have listened to him. He never listened to anybody. He’s always been that way. Every fight he ever got into, no matter how bad it got, you just couldn’t stop him—you just had to wait for him to finish. If he decided he was gonna beat the fuck out of somebody, or just smack somebody around, for a good reason or for no reason at all—all you could do was wait, and hope it didn’t get too bad. If Bryan wanted to do something, he damn well did it. And when he was in that blind-rage fight-mode of his, you’d have to be suicidal to get in front of him. And tonight, he was in that mode. But why? David still didn’t know why.

Maybe he’s all right. He offers. It’s lame, of course he’s not all right.

I don’t think so. Carla says.

They look away, look into the darkness, try not to think about it, try not to remember, try not to make it real.

You could have stopped him. Carla says quietly, almost a whisper.

David stops and stares at her. He can make out the silhouette of her face, barely. He can’t see her expression. He can’t believe she’d blame him for this, or try to anyway. He says, a little louder than her, Don’t fucking say that!

You could have! She screams, loud, so goddamn loud anybody on the street could hear her.

Shut the fuck up, David says, whispering hard, growling. What is she, nuts? Just stop it.

There are sirens. They can hear the sirens now. Ambulance, cops, David doesn’t know, all of them probably, on their way to Taco Bell.

You even said…

David grabs her by the jacket and pulls her toward him, shakes her, I know what I said, but it doesn’t mean anything. Just shut the fuck up. I couldn’t have done anything. You know that.

He lets her go. He walks away from her. He knows what he said. When it was clear that things weren’t normal, when he knew for certain that Bryan was going too far, he said, I should to do something, but he didn’t do something. He just stood there and watched, just like everybody else. Besides, there wasn’t time! He says to Carla, I did exactly what you did. Nothing.

And it hits him—the hard, intolerably ugly force of it—Tommy is dead and Bryan killed him. It hits David so hard it takes the breath out of him, as if he didn’t just watch it happen, as if he just heard about it for the first time, as if... He tries to breathe, and he feels like he’s about to pass out, and Carla’s back there talking fast again, but he can’t hear what she’s saying—more shit about it being his fault and he loses it.

David turns and smacks her in the face, not hard but hard enough. Carla covers her face with her hands and swings around, runs away, up to the street, and David can hear her foot falls as she runs down the sidewalk.

It’s so quiet. The cops and everybody must be there now. It’s so quiet down there under the bridge, David can’t hear anything. He sits down on the rocks and leans against the concrete wall. He wonders if Bryan got away. Last he saw, he was just standing there, looking down. He didn’t even try to get away. He’s probably handcuffed right now in the back of cruiser. Tommy—Jesus, Tommy’s in an ambulance, or still lying on the ground and they’re not hurrying him off to anyplace and there’s only one reason for that. He’s fucking dead. Bryan murdered him. He’s queasy. He groans.

Bryan is David’s best friend and he hopes he will never see him again. He