Chapter 9
Nine
It wasn’t all digging around in Llewellyn’s Cabinet of Curiosities and scaring themselves silly with ghost stories. That fall
they watched a lot of Unsolved Mysteries together. The McBrides had a passion for it, couldn’t bear to miss an episode. Donna fixated on the subhuman creeps who hurt
children. She had a yen for cruel retribution. She didn’t just believe in the death penalty—she thought sex murderers should
be castrated first, with a rusty machete. Van, on the other hand, had a fascination with people who got away with it: Jack
the Ripper, D. B. Cooper, the Unabomber.
It could give you whiplash, listening to the two of them. Van thought college should be free and national health care a law.
Donna wanted the Central Park Five executed by firing squad. Arthur had always assumed twins would agree on everything. It
was a source of amusement to all of them that Donna—who was president of Rackham College’s young conservative club—was the
identical twin of a hayseed socialist who thought the Democrats were too far to the right. Van had claimed he was going to
vote for Willie Nelson as a write-in candidate in the 1988 presidential election. Willie would legalize pot and the taxes
on marijuana sales would pay for national day care. Donna said she would vote for George Bush twice if she was allowed. In
the end, though, neither of them voted—they forgot to register in the state of Maine.
“What are the chances they’ll ever get him?” Arthur asked. “The Unabomber?”
“They’ll get him,” Colin said. “They’ll use a computer to construct a database about him.
Everything he does reveals who he is: the people he kills, the way he writes the address on the package, the materials he uses to create the bombs.
People leave information behind them like snails leave slime. You can follow it right to them.”
Colin had a Commodore 64, which he could use to talk to people scattered all over the world. He used a device called a modem,
which made an awful squeal and shriek as it tried to connect with other computers through the telephone line plugged into
the back. That shrill grinding sound was, Arthur thought, the voice of the future: inhuman, idiotic, and loud, so loud it drowned out all other sound. But then Arthur had spent a fair amount of the fall copying catalog information
into the library’s IBM, a task of obliterating dullness, and came by his dislike of such machines honestly.
“Do you think you’re going to do something smart with computers someday?” Allie asked Colin.
Colin said, “I’d like to use them to predict the future.”
“I don’t think computers are going to develop ESP anytime soon,” Arthur said.
“I think they’re more likely to develop reliable ESP than people. Pretty soon they’ll be able to recognize us. Your computer
will point a camera in your face to figure out who you are. It’ll be able to recognize if you’re dangerous in one glance.”
“I bet,” Gwen said, “it’ll take one glance and if you’ve got a Black face, it’ll call the cops.”
Arthur held out his hand and Gwen slapped him five without even looking at him.
“Computers can’t be racist,” Colin said with a quizzical smile. “How could they be?”
Allie said, “You inspire me, Colin. I want to learn to do things with computers too. I want to know what people do before
they do it too. I want to know what they aren’t telling me. That’s why I love statistics.”
Van said, “No one’s keeping secrets from you. I’m not. I’m an open book.”
“Everyone keeps secrets,” Allie said. “We can’t help ourselves. And I’m very nosy, even if the secrets aren’t important. Like who wants to have sex with me, for example.”
“Everyone,” Van said. “Especially me.”
Allie ignored that. “I want to know if I’m going to be fat, if I’m going to be sad. I’d like to know what all of you are going
to do after college and if we’re going to stay friends, or if I should harden my heart and prepare for losing you.”
Gwen said, “It’s easier to imagine you shaving your head than hardening your heart, Allie, so I guess we’d better all stay
friends.”
“Allie is going to do clever things with math,” Donna said. “Colin is going to do clever things with computers. I’m going
to be on TV and famous. Van is going to be on drugs and broke. What are you going to do, Arthur?”
Van answered for him. “He’ll do what he does best—bore people to death. He’ll become the world’s expert in ancient Hungarian
and memorize ancient Hungarian texts about the best way to grow potatoes. All of us will graduate from college but Arthur
never will, not really. He’ll just go from wanting to molest the co-eds to teaching them.”
“He’ll still want to molest them,” Donna said.
“No,” Van said. “He’s too boring to be insidious. At thirty he’ll begin to smell like cobwebs. By forty, rumors will spread
that he’s a ghost of himself. Eventually he’ll just be another ghost haunting the stone catacombs of Oxford University.”
“Oxford?” Gwen asked, slanting her eyes to look sidelong at Arthur.
“Mm,” he said, surprised by the sudden eye contact—surprised and confused. He had the wild idea, in that moment, that Gwen’s
gaze had an unhappy quality, as if the news disturbed her.
“His father studied there. Arthur is secretly British, didn’t you know that?”
“Funny, I missed the accent,” Gwen said, smiling now.
“He only talks like an American to fool people, but don’t believe it: Marmite runs in his veins. I once caught him masturbating
over Anglo-Saxon word roots in the Oxford English Dictionary.”
Of all of them, it was hardest to see what Gwen might become, or how she fit in—or even if she was one of them at all.
She was the only one of them who wasn’t attending Rackham; she was a high school student, for Chrissake.
Arthur had finally worked up the nerve to ask her age, posing the question to Colin on a walk across campus.
Arthur had inquired in a tone that suggested a random curiosity.
He fooled no one. The McBrides were strolling along behind them and immediately began to howl and shove each other.
“Jailbait! Arthur wants to bang some fuckin’ jailbait! I knew it!” Van yelled, grabbing Arthur’s shoulders from behind and
shaking him back and forth.
“Gwen is eighteen,” Colin said. “Legal in this state. But I wouldn’t let that be a salve to your conscience, Arthur. The law
is no replacement for a moral code.”
So Gwen was in high school, and the rest of them were in college, but that was by no means the only complication. Gwen Underfoot
was also a townie. You could tell it just looking at the enormous men’s flannel shirts she got from the free box at the Episcopal
church. She lived in Gogan, a place no sensible Rackham College student went unless they were looking for pills, pussy, or
trouble (no free rides in Gogan, Arthur reflected; gas, grass, or ass). There had been incidents, clashes, between Rackham students and the local kids, going back decades. Arthur was uncomfortably
aware he would’ve never even met Gwen if her mother wasn’t cook and housekeeper at The Briars.
Gwen usually turned up at the house after school got out, to do homework in the peace of the Wren kitchen until her mother
finished making dinner, at which point Gwen would drive her home. Often, when Arthur wandered in, Gwen was already at the
kitchen island with her schoolwork and the newspaper scattered around her, the crossword puzzle two-thirds finished. She liked
crosswords, said it was like playing Tetris with language and you didn’t need to own a computer. Sometimes they sat and did
the crossword together.
“You working on your college apps yet?” Arthur asked her one day, while they were polishing off the easy USA Today crossword. (He filled in the answer to “prisoners and problems”: CONS. She filled in the answer to “visually loaded 38s”: brA.)
“I’m going to apply to Kennebec.” She shrugged.
“Kennebec has a college?” He already knew it couldn’t be a good one.
“Community,” she said. “But they’ve got EMT training. That’s what I want to do. I think I’d be a steady hand at that sort
of thing—ambalance work—and I like the idea of being there for someone when they’re at their most frightened. Seeing someone
across the fear, and on to where they know they’ll be okay. I don’t scare easy myself, I’m not grossed out by blood, and my
family aren’t what you’d call excitable sorts. Also, I hate waiting in traffic and when you’ve got an ambalance you can run
all the reds.”
The six of them were flopped on pillows in front of Unsolved Mysteries when he found the backbone to ask her about applying to Rackham. She frowned and began to feel around in the pockets of her
baggy jeans.
“Hang on a minute,” she said, brow creasing with concentration.
“What are you looking for?” he asked her.
“A quarter of a million dollars,” she replied, then turned her empty pockets inside out. “Nope. Didn’t think so. Don’t suppose
you got a couple hundred grand to spare?”
Arthur did not. What he did have was the trust his father had established for his education, a trust funded by an insurance
policy that had paid out nearly three hundred thousand pounds upon his father’s death at the age of thirty-nine. The best
thing Oliver Oakes had ever done for Arthur was not visit the A Van kept nothing from his sister; Donna and Allie were roommates; and the information
would’ve passed effortlessly, like a head cold, on to Colin and Gwen. Gwen looked around, eyes bright, worried for him. Her
hand found his and squeezed, while her eyes said: Are you all right?
Arthur opened his mouth to reply—and laughed. It was such a fabulously Allie Shiner thing to have said. She spoke of Gwen
becoming his mother’s parole officer as if this were a delightful bonding opportunity, like going shopping for shoes. Arthur
cackled and set the rest of them off. All except Allie, who frowned in a pretty sort of way, no idea what she had said that
was so funny. They fell all over each other, the pack of them roaring together, no one laughing harder than Arthur himself,
who suddenly found himself choking on something close to sobs, tears running down his face.
As he laughed—harder and then harder still—the others began to drop into silence.
His lungs couldn’t get enough air. He wasn’t sure when he began crying, but at some point, Gwen let go of his hand and began to rub his back.
Donna put a hand on his knee. Allie slid across the carpet and gently wrapped her arms around his neck.
“Ah, shit,” Arthur said. “Shit, shit, shit. I’m sorry.”
Van was the first to reply. He cleared his throat and said, “It’s all right, man. For what it’s worth, if my mom got locked
up for the bullshit your momma got locked up for, I’d cry like a pussy too.”
There was another stunned silence . . . and then they were all laughing again, even Arthur. Laughing while big, fat tears
plopped off his chin. Gwen gave Van’s head a playful shove.
“You carry around a lot of weight,” Colin said to Arthur when the howls died down. “And you never show it. I wish we could
take some of it off you. I hope you know, if there’s anything any of us can do to make it easier . . . and I don’t know what
that would be . . . we got you.”
“We got you,” Allie said, squeezing him hard.
It was one thing to be hugged by Allie . . . and another to feel Van put his arms around him. Donna slipped in between Allie
and Van both and embraced him around the waist. Somehow, they were all hugging him. He didn’t know which of them kissed the
top of his head. He lowered his face so none of them could see him fighting fresh tears, although probably they knew anyway.
One by one they began to release him until only Gwen remained pressed to his side, her head on his shoulder. That felt good.
Better even than he imagined, which was saying something.
“That’s right,” Gwen said. “You need us to break your mom out, we’ll start digging the tunnel tomorrow. My daddy has all the
tools we’d need.”
“I don’t think we have to go that far,” Arthur said, relieved his voice was steady and not choked with emotion. “She’ll walk
out on her own two feet in twelve months. Maybe four if she catches a break at her parole hearing.”
Unless he fell out of favor with Jayne Nighswander and someone up at Black Cricket stuck a sharpened spoon in Erin’s throat.
In which case she would come out of prison a lot sooner.
On a stretcher. Or in a bag.