Like We Care (12 page)

She smiled, ready to cry again, but from a different place. “It’s just that. . . I’m out here on the road, and I like it. I think I can do good work from here. But there has to be something more important I can bring to the net. You know? There are stories out here that maybe aren’t—”

“Annie, look,” Hutch interrupted. If he could keep cutting her off mid-vision, he could string this along for months. “You need to sit down with yourself and really figure out what it is you want to do. When you’ve got it, when you can articulate it, my door is open to you, any time, any place. You bring me something that resonates with the R
²
Rev philosophy, and I’ll make it happen.
We’ll
make it happen.”

“Okay,” she smiled softly, now contented and hopeful. “Thank you, Hutch.”

“But you might have to sleep with me again,” Hutch thought.

“Thank
you
, Annie,” he said. “And get me those releases.”

He hopped off.

Annie slipped the phone into her pocket, a whole new world awaiting her. She fought every urge to look skyward, feeling almost as if a helicopter would descend within the instant to whisk her away to a better place. She’d just leave Casey and the crew there to figure out who to assault next.

She sidled over to her boys, sad at the notion of leaving them but pleased for them because they would never run out of victims of their assholery. They’d see each other again when the crew passed through Manhattan, share a laugh at the Christmas party over the trouble they caused. Much of this, Annie told herself, would seem a lot less despicable with the passage of time.

The crew was gathered around a small monitor, watching the playback of the day’s fun, and Casey was up now, eager to critique his work. Annie grimaced at the prospect of reliving this, but she could tell by the tone of Hutch’s voice that this material would be designated for air. It was her job—at least for now—to assess its potential.

On the screen, Casey and Mr. Jubel stood at the ass-end of a cow, the other farm folk trying to squeeze into the frame. They were still in what Annie had come to think of as “the nice place,” that convivial, doomed period in which Casey was on his best behavior, all the better to trick the hayseeds into not anticipating the knife to the gut.

They had no cable, you see? They couldn’t have known.

“Huh. . .” Casey said, wide-eyed and eager to learn as he considered the cow’s anus. It was his gift, really, to turn his dimwittedness into a charming, child-like innocence. With his scrawny, scarecrow frame and his knotty mess of hair, the locals invariably took a liking to him, intent on having a little harmless fun with this odd-looking waif from the big city.

“That’s right,” Mr. Jubel said, never thinking he’d find a televised forum on which to share his expertise on bovine bowel obstructions. “Sometimes, the bowel itself gets twisted. Now
that
can be a mess.”

Mr. Jubel shared a sly wink with his farmer friends as the fellah from the tee-vee blanched.

A long rubber glove and a big sloppy can of lubricant were suddenly in the frame. Mr. Jubel prepared to suit up.

“Hey, you know what?”

(It always began with “Hey, you know what?” Annie wished she could make it stop.)

“How about if I do it?” Casey offered, just as eager and well-intentioned as you please. Mr. Jubel actually seemed to consider this for about a fifth of a second, until he got that first vague whiff of trouble.

“Well, now, I ’ppreciate your interest, but I don’t think—”

“Look! My hand’s smaller than yours. I’m just thinking of the cow’s comfort.”

The farmer’s mind began to race. Things were getting confused, all the more so with that camera trained on him.

“The boy really does seem sincere,” he thought to himself, “but I wonder if maybe this whole thing was a bad idea. Guess it’d be rude to back out now.”

“And I’ve seen this in gay porno,” Casey went on. “You work the hand in, a finger at a time, right?”

Oh God, oh God, oh God. When air was wrenched from a scene this violently, oxygen masks should fall from the ceiling. Or cyanide pills.

Annie felt that familiar queasiness as the farm folk on the screen stood dumbstruck, all of them hazily convinced that they couldn’t possibly have heard what they just heard. They blinked reflexively, and smiled hopefully.

Into this stunned void, there was always plenty of time to tee up the kill shot. Casey never failed to play it perfectly.

“I mean, you get to do it all the time. Right, Mrs. Jubel?”

Annie had to turn away. Casey and the crew marveled at this car wreck of their own making as she listened to working men, just trying to eke out a living, having given up an afternoon to indulge this pretty gal and her friends from New York City, set to beating the snot out of her star.

There was lots of swearing, she was trained to note. Hutch would approve. Bleeped-out profanity, together with digitally-scrambled faces, genitals, and breasts, meant that R
²
Rev was delivering on its promise to the viewer.

Pushing the envelope. Burying the needle. Coloring outside the lines.

Balls-out extreme.

There had to be a place in there for Annie somewhere.

“F
or the first one hundred and twenty years, it was comprised primarily but not exclusively of totems and oligarchies informed by the practices and beliefs shared most commonly by Teeters and similar mindsets established in the Yahtzee compact of 1643. Noonan, Burgher, and Tet, first among the Ablers, established as their mandate the notion of equal balance before the law. First among these—and this will be on the test—were numbers, non-numbers, and subsets thereof.”

Joel’s skin ached. His head grew heavy from the tinfoil twang of a migraine. The sky outside had gone pure black as rain painted the windows of the classroom.

And Mr. Kolak droned on with his typically arid discourse on ancient bullshit which nobody could’ve possibly cared about even while they were living it, let alone a happening teenager in America of the 21st century who felt confident that things were going to break pretty spiffily, future-wise, without having to commit to memory the purposeless facts and figures apparently crucial to the forward progress of lesser humans.

Usually Mr. Kolak’s enthusiasm for whatever the hell he was talking about kept Joel alert, if not actually educated. But today, Mr. Kolak seemed just as pained as his student.

“Primarily through the largesse of the lesser colonies, the government’s purview almost exclusively was incumbent upon—and this will be on the test—1812, 1813, and 1808.”

Joel looked at his notes: “
Teeters?
” Did he say “Teeters?”

His careless hand-writing, combined with the fact that he really, truly didn’t need to know any of this, had left a non-committal scrawl of words and word approximations, all of which added up to nothing but the certainty that he was going to be caught bare-assed on the quarter exam scheduled for the end of the month.

God, he needed a cigarette.

He extended an eyeball across the aisle to Todd’s desk, where the insufferably able teenager was transcribing everything the teacher said. Todd knew he was being observed—had an unerring detector for the unlikely moment in which he was the focus of anyone else’s attention—and he discreetly cloaked his writings behind his hand.

Joel scowled. Todd turned and shrugged sheepishly, his hands coiled protectively over the knowledge he had written down, as if the words were butterflies captured in a jar.

“This is all I have,” the look said. “You have so much. Can’t I keep this?”

Joel let it go. Todd was changing, growing some balls, like when he stood up to that swami dick at the Happy Snack. Joel wondered where
that
came from.

Joel was circling the drain, academically speaking. He had to do something.

To his own surprise, and that of his classmates, he raised his hand. Mr. Kolak, who had drifted off and was caught staring into the rain, didn’t see it.

“A’hem,” Joel said. The teacher turned and blinked doubtfully, as if a leprechaun had just appeared before him.

“Mr. Kasten?”

“Yeah,” he said grimly, as if about to launch the first question on
Meet the Press
. “Is this gonna be on the test?”

The room snickered. Most times Joel was revered for his charisma and athleticism. Sometimes it was because he was just the right kind of dumb.

Mr. Kolak noted the boy’s freshly undone jaw. “You speak. And yet you say nothing.”

There was a tired, embittered tone to Mr. Kolak’s voice. Todd noticed that the teacher, now glowering at Joel, was holding his white board marker like a cigarette.

Usually Mr. Kolak seemed to give Joel a pass.

“I’m just. . .” Joel fumbled. “Look, I’m not getting this. I’m not needing this. Nobody here needs this. We’re outta here in a few months. We need to know how to get jobs and stuff.
Your
job is to get us ready for what’s out there, and all you do is drill us with ancient crap that has nothing to do with the way the world is
now
.”

The room rustled approvingly. Mr. Kolak, as ever, felt out-numbered. He stared at the back wall, contemplating something.

“The past is all I’ve got to work with,” Mr. Kolak shrugged, resigned but not without pride. “I mean, I can’t interest you in the present. None of you read newspapers, watch the news. . . pay attention.

“You all stare at me and want the
future
from me—‘Which job should I pursue?’ ‘Which fact will I have to call upon ten years from now?’—but I can’t give you that. Wouldn’t if I could. It’d take all the fun out of it.

“So I got this.” He shook his textbook limply, like a filling but dull bag lunch. “Things go wrong. Societies fall apart. That’s what they
do
. You want to know the future? There’s a great, big foot hovering up there somewhere, heading straight for our little anthill here.

“Wanna see it coming?” he asked, punctuating the question by slamming his open palm into the cover of the book. “So did they. They were going to get around to paying attention.”

The sound of the book startled Bobby Slopes out of his nap. He wasn’t sure, but he thought Mr. Kolak had just said that they’d be studying ants.

“Ants are messed up!” he giggled to himself.

Mr. Kolak began retreating to his desk. “It’s like the man said: Those who don’t learn from history. . . must’ve copied off Joel Kasten’s notes.”

It took a couple seconds for the gag to penetrate the gathered apathy, but then the class chuckled appreciatively. Mr. Kolak, his back to his charges, smiled shyly.

“Hey!” Joel barked in protest just as the bell rang. Todd stifled a derisive laugh as he rumbled out of the room along with the others. In a matter of seconds, it was just Joel and his teacher.

Joel held up his page of notes. “Are
any
of these words anything you actually said?”

Mr. Kolak had already gathered his coat and was heading out the door.

He grabbed Joel’s paper as he passed.

“‘The.’ I definitely said ‘the.’” He zeroed in on another word transcribed. “If I said
that
, I’d be arrested.”

He let Joel’s paper flutter back to the desk as he hustled for the door. He didn’t care who was gathered in the Happy Snack’s parking lot. He needed a cigarette.

But he looked back at Joel before he left, and noted his genuine despair.

“You’ll pull it out, Joel. Just like you always do.” There was envy in Mr. Kolak’s voice. And disapproval. “But time is running out.”

Then, Joel was alone in the classroom. Education, abandoned by generations of students, hung in the air.

He remembered a movie he’d seen. After a disastrous accident that left them with no way home, astronauts walked for the first time on the surface of a new planet. The team leader, refusing to concede that all was lost, slowly removed his helmet. He hesitated for a profound beat or two, then breathed in deeply, not knowing if the atmosphere would kill him but knowing he had no choice but to find out.

He lived. They made it home in the lame-ass sequel.

Joel looked up to the smudgy corners of the classroom, and wondered if he shouldn’t just inhale greedily, accept into his body whatever was contained here.

Absorb it. See what would take, and where it would take him.

He double-checked that he was all alone, and heard only distant voices and rumbles down the hallway. Then, sitting statue-like, knowing that even in isolation his style gauge was diligently monitoring him for behavior that betrayed his coolness, he delicately sipped at the air. He pretended that his brain tingled when welcoming fresh knowledge, felt the kind of icy rush he thrilled to that summer he worked stocking the freezer case at Piggly Wiggly. It was invigorating, almost illicitly so, to subject the body to such a violent shift in attitude.

A Neanderthal shout came echoing up the hallway. It was no one in particular, but just enough to shake Joel out of his reverie, to force him to note, with chilling clarity, how
gay
it was to be sitting here like this.

He gathered up his things and bolted. Like a haunted house, there were vibrations here that you wouldn’t want to be left alone with.

“F
uck you,” Joel sneered as he tore from the parking lot.

“I’m just saying. . .”

“Who are you, my mother?”

Todd sank into the worn embrace of the passenger’s seat. This was already beginning to feel like his spot, Robin to Joel’s Batman.

“Forget it.”

“You know, if you’re gonna hang with me, this holy-ass shit has gotta go. The fuck you doing, keeping me from seeing your notes?”

“I was doing you a favor. You have to figure this stuff out for yourself.”

“Hey, thanks,” Joel said. “Next time you’re takin’ a dump, I’ll drop on by and kiss your ass for being so good to me. I’ll wipe while I’m back there, too.”

Todd smiled. Joel smiled off Todd’s smile. Their riffs were falling into a groove. They could hang.