BAD GUYS, GOOD GUYS by Peter Grimes
You don’t even know what crime is. You are an upper-middle-class white boy, ten years old. It is 1986. You live beside a lake in a quiet part of town. The traffic across the water moves in a silent glide. Subarus, Volvos, Saabs, minivans of all types. The winking chrome blinks between sycamores. The Blue Ridge Mountains cradle the lakeside park, families tossing Frisbees across the grass.
* * *
You know few sorrows. Your parents almost got divorced once. But you didn’t hear about that for decades. You all live together in a Cape Cod with a front and back yard. You ride bikes, eat dinner around 6:00, have Christmas, blow out birthday candles, rake leaves. He’s a lawyer, and she’s a family therapist, and you have two younger blonde sisters whom you save from kidnappers in your dreams.
* * *
That year, little do you know, 40% of Americans are afraid to walk home at night. You don’t know that 20,613 Americans will be murdered by December 31st. 91,459 will be raped. You don’t know – and neither do your parents – that one of your babysitters has a secret. Mrs. Hester is an elderly woman from Madison County who rounds out pastel dresses, wears her steel-gray hair in clips, hugs you like a granny. She smells unwashed in a comforting way. You like to sit next to her stool in the kitchen while she preps the “southern style” chicken you tell her is better than the Colonel’s secret recipe.
* * *
Years ago, Mrs. Hester took a shotgun and blew her cheating husband’s colon all over Main Street. He’d been abusive and had a young girlfriend he flaunted around town, deriding her publicly. She had sympathy from the jury, went to prison for a short time, and never remarried.
* * *
Your mom will learn the cruel details from Marvin, the handyman with the squinty eye, who recommended the babysitter in the first place. Marvin and Mrs. Hester are both from the country, people who help each other out, but the unspoken knowledge will have been sitting heavy on his overalled chest. He must decide to tell Mrs. Hester of his disclosure because she will never show up on your doorstep again. Your mom will never have to decide whether she can trust her children with someone willing to murder. Perhaps such a woman would make the best babysitter of all.
* * *
This is what you do know about crime in 1986:
Before you moved to the suburban lake, into the Cape Cod, you lived back in the woods near the Blue Ridge Parkway in a house your parents built, a house of sharp gray angles. You loved the house. It was your body outside your body. And once thieves came in the night and stole your father’s shotgun. And once, the bus driver lady – who was also your first-grade teacher’s assistant – emptied out her trash bucket on your land, the last stop, before turning the bus back to town. And once your mom piled you into the Malibu station wagon to chase a pick‑up truck off the mountain because she thought he’d stolen firewood.
* * *
Your own crimes, too, started in the woods. You were seven. You and your four-year-old sister were walking up the dirt road, past the neighbors, toward the sharp-angled gray house. Maybe you knew your parents were planning to uproot everything and move you to town, to the lake and the white house with dormer windows. Maybe you were angry about being snatched from this paradise where the creeks ran, and the salamanders hid, and the world broke out in red and gold and green, and wood-stove smoke announced autumn. Maybe that’s why, when you walked past your neighbors’ mailbox that afternoon and saw a toy dump truck parked there, you said, “Hannah, do you want that? Because if you do, I’ll take it for you.” Maybe you wanted to show her your control over the situation, your power. Hannah looked at the truck, her storm-blue eyes still learning to measure the world, and said, “No.”
* * *
Another time you followed through on your own, stole a Star Wars action figure from a popular kid while you were separating your toys after a play date. You slid Darth Vader under your leg. And you became a Bad Guy.
* * *
Over the next few years – in the new neighborhood far away from the woods, next to the lake and the sycamores and the silent cars, the streets with humming lamps and unlocked doors, nature tamed into rows, lawns, planters – your criminal tendencies grew.
* * *
1983, 1984, 1985. By ten, you’ve got a rap sheet.
(1) You’ve made hundreds of prank calls to random residential listings in the phone book. Weird requests in a muffled voice:
“Can I still borrow that lawnmower?”
“How’s Monty? Your grandfather. Monty. The man I hunt moose with.”
“I wanted to tell you how much I enjoyed those warm nuggets you sent me. So good. So so good.”
One late afternoon, you called a woman named Mrs. Ingram, and you could tell by her scratchy voice she was old. Somehow she mistook you for her son or grandson, believed you were coming over for dinner soon, and she was so excited, and you knew no one was coming to her house for dinner, and you didn’t make prank phone calls for a day or two after that. Maybe you wondered then what had ever happened to Mrs. Hester.
(2) Once you and your best friend, Michael, stalked around a K-Mart, discreetly plucking items off shelves and winging them over the aisles so that no one would know where the projectiles came from. Bundles of socks. Tom’s crackers. A watery handful of bait eggs.
(3) You’ve committed a string of federal crimes involving mailbox breach. A dead blue jay, found in the road, for your friend Robbie. Glittery invitations to a fake New Year’s Eve party at the neighbor’s house. And once, a two-liter Mountain Dew bottle a third full of urine that you and your suburban friends worked up while watching WrestleMania. That went into a terrorizing girl’s mailbox. Late that night, Charles, the one of you with the deepest voice, called her house and announced, “The piss has landed.”
* * *
But as all tendencies split down the middle, as all rivers emerge from tributaries, cut off into branches, your ten-year-old psyche is already fragmenting. Michael, your partner in crime since kindergarten, will be moving away in a matter of months to Chicago. A ten-hour drive through fields so wide they resemble a different childhood altogether. And perhaps to cheer you up, your parents have asked Marvin to knock together a clubhouse in the empty space under an eave in the Cape Cod, space where they could have stored boxes, or blown insulation. A space they could have just let gape. It’s your job to fill it, so you and Michael decide to open a detective agency. CAAD: Chicago and Asheville Detectives. You’ve read the Hardy Boys, Encyclopedia Brown. You understand the criminal mind. Now you are the Good Guys.
* * *
Toilet Paper Caper
Scene: Living room of a beach house in Beaufort, South Carolina. Family vacation. Crime: Little scraps of toilet paper all over the floor found one morning. Prime suspects: Your sisters and their friends who slept the night before in a boathouse out back. Method: Questioning the suspects separately, and then comparing notes. Solution: The dog chewed up the toilet paper.
* * *
The Case of the Neighborhood Satanists
Scene: The road beside the lake. Crime: None yet. Grounds for concern: Four teenagers with jet black hair cruising around in a sports car the color of dried blood. Method: Watch from the bushes. Solution: Case unsolved.
* * *
The problem with CAAD is that you aren’t listed in the phone book yet. You and Michael drag some chairs out into the front yard, stretch a board across stacked paint cans, and sell lemonade. The idea is to advertise your services while earning funds at the same time, money for stationery, office equipment, an agency phone. As a bonus to those who purchase lemonade, you draw pictures of monsters in crayon, people dying gruesome deaths. The old people smile.
* * *
Michael doesn’t move to Chicago. Instead his father is killed in an automobile accident on his way up to Illinois to find housing. A semi jackknifes across the road and Michael’s dad goes under. When you first see Michael after the accident, he looks puffy. “Kind of terrible, isn’t it?” he says. You play video games. Your dad speaks at the funeral and says, “like rabbit prints in the snow,” talking about fleeting life. Michael gets new friends, friends whose dads are also dead or missing or different. He becomes Mike, which was his father’s name.
* * *
In the years after the agency shuts down, you use the space for schemes with other friends whose dads are still alive: Jay, John, Scott. You make up a character named Quinn Collington and slip oblique notes from him into the lockers of the popular kids.
“The starboard bursts at midnight. Love, Quinn.”
“If you ever need a friend, remember Quinn led the southside revolution.”
The meaningless notes make them angry. They want to know who Quinn is. You start wearing a trench coat and never tell.
* * *
Sometimes, you hang out with Mike and his new friends. These boys without dads introduce you to strobing – drinking bottles of cough syrup and crawling around on the floor. For fun you wander Mike’s neighborhood, breaking windows, pushing rocks down banks into the road. Once, you buy a dozen eggs and cruise Asheville, throwing them at oncoming traffic. You hit some gangbangers in a convertible who chase you around town, making gun gestures. Mike, at the wheel, screams, “I don’t want to die, I don’t want to die.” The gangbangers let you off the hook.
* * *
You go to college and Mike’s family moves to Los Angeles so his mother can pursue screenwriting.
* * *
You won’t see each other for many years. You’ll go to graduate school, get married and divorced, move all over. You and your second fiancée visit him in Ventura, just north of Los Angeles, in 2016. He rents a room at his mom’s house, where he is a caretaker for a great-uncle. In the garage, he’s set up a complicated study for composing electronic music. You call him Michael, because you always have, and he doesn’t mind. You feel partly like a kid again around his mom, naughty by default but also respectable, because you’re a professor in North Dakota now. Michael keeps a pet tortoise on the patio, and there’s an avocado tree out back. He shows you his town, driving erratically, way over the speed limit, honking at normal drivers. You grip the door handle. You hike together in a dusty ravine and talk about whatever happened to this person or that person. Some have died, one of a heroin overdose, one hit by a car trying to offer aid at an accident. Some have gotten fat and followed their dreams. You invite him to your wedding later that summer in Asheville. He surprises you by accepting the invitation. After all, you can’t imagine he has much money. You think of all the people you’ll introduce him to – Michael, your first partner in crime.
* * *
He’ll call a few weeks before the ceremony to cancel. He doesn’t know too many people there anymore, he’ll say. You miss him, but the list of people you miss is long.
* * *
In the meantime, the family will have come together to ready the tents and tables. You sit in the suburban yard with your four-year-old nephew. Star Wars has become popular again, and James has inherited your old action figures, most of which your parents bought you for Christmases in the early ’80s. James wants to know which ones are the Good Guys and which are the Bad Guys. You have trouble assigning the tiny personages to teams. Lando Calrissian you remember as being somewhere in between. Some figures you don’t recognize at all. Tusken Raider? Then there’s a bipedal green warthog in a fur onesie. He doesn’t look too friendly. Another figure is missing an arm and a head. That will be a challenge. James clarifies that when you finally play, after sorting out the sides, he wants to be the Good Guys. You agree and reach for Darth Vader. But James stops you. That’s his favorite character, he says.
Peter Grimes has published stories in Narrative, Mississippi Review, and Sycamore Review, and an essay in Nashville Review.