Badd (12 page)

“Don’t get in a panic,” Mr. White says, following right behind me. “He’s okay. He’s just messed up.”

“What are you talking about?” I don’t bother looking back. “How can he be frigging okay if he’s messed up?”

“I mean, he’s not hurt bad physically, but he’s either really drunk or on something.”

Behind the truck, Captain Crazy is fixing one end of a rusty chain to the bumper. The rest of the chain leads to the bumper of Chuck’s pickup. With the high weeds and the trees you couldn’t even see it from the road.

“Hey, there,” says the captain, sunny-eyed and smiling. “We’ll get this big boy hauled out and back on the road in no time.”

I’m not in the mood for smiles, though. “Where’s Bobby?” I ask, heading for Chuck’s pickup. “Bobby, Bobby, are you okay?”

Now I can see where the truck plowed through the weeds, missing several trees by inches before coming to a narrow ditch. The front end is lodged in the dirt on the far side of the ditch, and the back tires are slightly off the ground. The bumper and grille are crumpled but not too bad. “Bobby, Bobby, where are you?” I’m frantic.

“He’s in the back of the truck passed out,” Mr. White says. “I think he’ll probably have a knot on his forehead, but other than that he’s not hurt.”

I peer over the truck’s tailgate. Sure enough, Bobby’s lying there on his side, fast asleep. He’s breathing fine. He looks as peaceful as the days when I used to watch him sleep in his room at home.

I turn to Mr. White. “What the hell happened?”

“I don’t know exactly.” He brushes his long hair back from his face. “The captain and I were gathering blackberries for some wine when we heard this loud
wham!
When we got here, Bobby was already out of the truck stumbling around, looking all confused, yelling, ‘There was an IED in the road. There was a goddamn IED in the road.’ ”

Behind me, Brianna’s like, “An IED? What’s an IED?”

Mr. White looks at her like she should know what it is. “An improvised explosive device. You know—a bomb like they make in Iraq to blow up military convoys?”

“A bomb?” Brianna says. “What would something like that be doing in the road here?”

“Nothing,” Mr. White tells her. “There wasn’t any IED. There wasn’t anything but a branch sticking out in the road about two feet.”

“God,” Brianna says, “maybe Bobby got hold of some magic mushrooms or something and hallucinated it.”

I’m like, “Oh, Jesus, Brianna, shut up. Bobby’s not into that crap.”

I climb into the bed of the pickup and kneel next to him. A knot is already rising on his forehead, but he isn’t cut anywhere. I nudge his shoulder, trying to wake him, but he only rolls over on his side. He’s like a wounded animal, which is just too weird. Bobby’s the one who helps wounded types. He doesn’t get wounded himself.

“This isn’t good,” I say, stroking his hair. “Maybe we should call an ambulance.”

“Yeah, actually that’s probably not a good idea,” Mr. White says, leaning over the side of the truck. “You might get him busted. At the very least he’d get a DUI, but it might be worse than that. I didn’t go through his pockets. No telling what he might have on him. Maybe he does have some mushrooms.”

Looking back at Bobby, I can’t help but think of the time he ran off the road into that golf-course water hazard. No way can I have the cops getting hold of him again. I check his pants pockets and sure enough there’s a small pill bottle with nine or ten OxyContin tablets left in it. I’m like, “Crap, maybe he OD’d.”

“No,” Mr. White says in his matter-of-fact way. “He was messed up, but not that messed up. He just passed out while we went back to get the chain to haul him out of there. The best thing to do is get him to the captain’s and pour some coffee in him. He’ll be all right. He couldn’t have been going too fast or the truck would be more busted up than it is.”

I look him in the eye. The way he looks back at me, it’s like he’s got everything under control. I pat Bobby’s head gently, and when I climb down from the truck, Mr. White helps me. For such a skinny guy, he’s pretty strong, his grip on my arm warm and confident like his voice. It’s as if he’s passing that confidence on to me, making me feel like things aren’t so bad.

For a while it looks as if we might not get the truck pulled from the ditch, but after a few more heave-hos, it finally pops out like a bad tooth. Bobby sits up and gazes over the tailgate. “What the hell?”

“Damn you, Bobby,” I yell at him. “Don’t you scare me like this anymore.”

“Ceejay?” He stares at me like he can’t quite focus. “What are you doing here?”

“I’m helping to get your sorry butt out of a ditch. That’s what I’m doing.”

He surveys the scene around him and scratches his head. “Wow,” he says. “Freaky.”

The pickup runs fine, so I drive it over to Casa Crazy with Bobby still in the back. That’s about the last place I want to go, but we need the captain to pound the bumper and grille back into some kind of shape before Chuck gets a look at it. Plus, I don’t want to drag Bobby back home where the parents can see what kind of shape he’s in right now. It’ll mean a lecture from Dad about missing dinner, but I figure I’ll face up to that when it comes.

When we get to the captain’s, he takes the truck around to the barn while Mr. White goes inside to whip up some instant coffee, leaving me, Bobby, and Brianna sitting on the wooden front porch. Right now, it’s hard to pry much that makes sense out of Bobby, but from his slurred rambling, I gather he and Dani threw themselves a pretty serious private party at her place, which sounds like all kinds of trouble.

“Jace didn’t come home while you were over there, did he?” I ask.

Bobby doesn’t answer. Instead, he sits there staring at Brianna with one eyebrow cocked like he’s an undercover cop and she’s his prime suspect.

Finally, she’s like, “What?” And he shakes his head and goes, “Who the hell are you?”

Her eyes go all disappointed. “What are you talking about? It’s me, Brianna.”

He stares a little longer. “Brianna Caster?”

“Yeah.” A smile starts on her lips.

“Well, goddamn, Brianna,” Bobby says. “Who the hell went and painted you all black?”

The smile turns into a big hurt zero.

“No one painted her black,” I say. “That’s just her look now.” Brianna didn’t have the Goth thing going last time Bobby was back on leave.

“Shit,” he says. “You look like a bowling ball. I liked you better when you were just plain fat.”

“Well,” Brianna spits back, “I liked you better when you weren’t such a drugged-up asshole.”

She’s trying to be tough, but I know she’s hurt. “Don’t pay any attention to him,” I tell her. “He’s too wasted to know what he’s saying.”

Bobby smiles, loose-lipped and droopy-eyed. “Wasted again!” he yells. “Hallelujah!”

The front door swings open, and out walks Mr. White with a cup of coffee.

Bobby’s like, “Coffee? I’ve always been partial to beer,” but he goes ahead and takes the cup and sips a little. “Instant, huh? That’s some pretty bad stuff.”

Mr. White sits next to me, and I ask him if the captain’s really qualified to work on the pickup. He gestures toward the sculptures. “Anyone who can make those won’t have any problem on a bent grille.”

“Maybe he’ll turn Chuck’s grille into a sculpture,” Bobby says, “like a dragon or something, swooping low across the road.” He starts to take another sip of the coffee but just then a loud metallic pounding starts as the captain goes to work—
Bam! Bam! Bam!
—and the red tin cup drops from Bobby’s hand and clanks onto the wooden porch.

His head whips around like he’s expecting to see someone coming at him. His shoulders hunch up to his ears, and an expression I’ve never seen before twists across his face, a combination of rage and a sick kind of fright like his life is in danger.

“Goddammit,” he cries, looking at the spilled coffee on his pants. “Where’d that noise come from?”

“It’s all right,” says Mr. White. “It’s just the captain working on your buddy’s truck. He’ll have it fixed up better than new in no time.” His voice is mellow and soothing, the way a doctor might talk to a patient. I’m not sure whether to appreciate that or find it annoying.

Brianna doesn’t take the same tone, though. “Wow,” she says. “Paranoid much? You’d think someone was shooting at you.”

Bobby glares at her. The fright is gone from his face, but
some of the rage still boils in his eyes. “Don’t talk about shooting, goddammit.” There’s no kidding around in his voice. “You don’t have the right to talk to me about that.”

“God,” she says. “When did you lose your sense of humor?”

He looks away. “Some things aren’t funny.”

“A little coffee stain never hurt anybody,” Mr. White says as he kneels down to get the tin cup. “I’ll fix you another one.” He gives Bobby a gentle pat on the knee. “Then we’ll go watch the captain work. The dude’s a wizard with tools.”

“Yeah,” says Bobby, still simmering. “That’s what we need—a wizard.” He stares toward the tree line as if he thinks something might be hiding there, something that might come charging toward us at any moment.

When Mr. White gets back with more coffee, Bobby takes it and heads off toward the barn with Brianna right behind him. I start to follow, but Mr. White grabs my arm. “Why don’t you stay here for a second,” he says softly. “I want to talk to you alone.”

Brianna looks over her shoulder. “Are you coming?”

“You go on,” I tell her. “I’ll be down in a minute.”

“Well, hurry up,” she says. “I don’t want to be left alone with two crazy guys.”

She and Bobby disappear around the side of the house, and it’s just me and Mr. White, one on one. “So,” I say, sitting back down on the edge of the porch, “what’s so private that you need to talk to me alone?”

He sits next to me, almost touching me. “It’s about your brother,” he says.

And I’m like, “Look, don’t lecture me about my brother. An accident like that can happen to anyone. He’s just blowing off steam. He’s been in a war, you know? Besides, he’s probably just not used to driving anything that doesn’t weigh a couple of tons and doesn’t have a machine gun mounted on it.”

“Don’t worry,” he tells me. “I’m not putting your brother down for anything. I’m thinking about him and the captain. The captain really likes him. He told me he did.”

“Yeah, so?”

He pauses to adjust his glasses, like he needs them to focus on what he has to say.

“Well, I think it’d be good for the captain—and your brother too, actually—if they hung out some, worked on the aero-velocipede and all. And of course, you’d come with him.”

“Are you kidding me?” I have to give him a long, hard look after that. “Why would my brother and I want to spend our summer hanging around a place like this?”

He tucks a stray strand of his long hair behind his ear. “Oh, I don’t know. It could be the perfect place to launch the misfit revolution. After all, you’re the only one I ever met who didn’t act like that idea was too weird.”

“Yeah, but that’s only because I liked thinking about getting the hell out of this town and—I don’t know—having a cause or something.”

“Hey, revolutions have to start somewhere.” He smiles, and then he does something really unexpected—he puts his hand on my knee. It’s not like he’s suddenly going all Gillis horny on me, but it’s still strange. Not just because it’s Mr. White’s hand, but also because I don’t really have all that many guys putting their hands on my knee.

He doesn’t leave it there for long. He pulls it away and starts talking about how important Bobby and the captain will
be for our revolution. “Of course, you’ll be the general,” he says, “but you’ll have to admit—even if you don’t like the captain—he’s definitely a misfit.”

“I can’t argue against that,” I say, but my mind is still going over the hand-on-the-knee thing. First, Mr. White tells me I’m beautiful, and then he sits here on the porch with me, practically shoulder to shoulder, and puts his hand on my knee. I’m starting to think all this talk about Bobby hanging around the captain is just a way of getting
me
to start coming out here. Maybe he even has a crush on me. How stupid would that be? I mean, me and Mr. White? It’s ridiculous. If there was ever a bad boy’s girl, it’s me. Mr. White—he’d probably faint if someone challenged him to a real fight.

He goes on talking about how I’ll probably start liking the captain sooner or later and how fun it is working on the sculptures and the aero-velocipede. I let him ramble. He’s not really bad-looking once you get used to him, but he’s so skinny. And the white overalls and painter’s cap—no one dresses like that. I can just imagine the crap I’d catch from my friends if they saw me sitting around with Mr. White’s hand on my knee.

This whole time the captain’s hammering has kept up pretty consistently, but suddenly it stops, and Mr. White looks off in that direction. “They must be about done,” he says. “Come on. Let’s go over to the barn and see how they’re doing.”

He hops up and walks ahead while I follow a few steps behind. It’s not like I want to show up at the barn—where Bobby and Brianna are—practically walking arm in arm with the likes of Mr. White. But watching him ahead of me, I’m shocked and almost disgusted with myself. I mean, who would’ve thought a skinny, stringy-haired dork could have a sexy walk?

Back by the barn, Brianna sits on the ground with a bored expression. Mr. White sits a few feet away from her, and I have to wonder if he’s hoping maybe I’ll plop down in between them. No way. Instead, I stand next to Bobby.

He sips at his coffee, all fascinated by the captain’s skill with tools and his nonstop stories. He almost looks hypnotized. It reminds me of how we used to catch horny toads when we were kids and rub their stomachs. They’d get these satisfied little smiles on their faces and lie there all stretched out and stiff. My dad said that was their way of protecting themselves—playing dead.

I have to admit there’s a big difference between the way Bobby acts out here with Mr. White and the captain and how he acts with the likes of Dani and Jace. It’s like a peace comes
across him. I’m just not sure why. Maybe it’s the sound of the captain’s voice, because I don’t see how anyone can hardly follow the stories, the way they jump from topic to topic. At one point, he’s telling us about hanging around with rock stars in L.A., and the next thing you know he’s in a strip club.