It happened on the sidewalk off campus after school, and the kid and his buddies were coming toward him, hogging the cement. When Ben passed, they bumped shoulders and the kid spit the word at him, and Ben spun and clocked him square in the face. “How’s that for a fag?” he said to the kid, whose blood was dribbling onto the pavement. The kid and his friends never said anything to him again. Fags didn’t crush people’s faces, everyone knew that.
“Thanks for that, then,” Neil said, flicking the cigarette butt on the ground and heeling it dead with a ratty two-tone skate shoe. Vans, Ben noticed.
Three kids had fallen back in the butterfly, one of them simply bobbing his head in the water, his nose and mouth just barely above the surface. The coach climbed around the edge of the pool, got down on his knees, and started laying into him.
“Your friend’s not there,” Ben said.
Neil straightened his back. “What friend?”
“Lucero.”
The boy stared at Ben, sizing him up.
“I know,” he said, letting his shoulders drop. “He hasn’t been around for a few days.” He lit another cigarette. “Are you immigration, then? You sent him back?”
“No,” Ben said. God, he hated this part of the job. “Kid, I’m sorry. He’s dead.”
Neil’s face fell apart, just collapsed. “Oh, Jesus,” he said. “Oh, Jesus, oh, Jesus, oh, Jesus.”
—
“GET ME OUT of here,” Neil had said. “Please, just get me out of here.”
And Ben did, the kid in the back of the cruiser, curled against the doorframe, crying all the way down to the beach. Ben had parked the cruiser on a bluff overlooking Crystal Cove, and that’s where they stood now, Neil grasping the wire fence between barbs, sucking in the salted air, trying to calm down. If this kid was involved in Lucero’s death, he was earning an Academy Award for this performance.
“He did it himself, right?” Neil asked.
“That’s what I’m trying to figure out,” Ben said.
The surfers were out, black wet-suited bodies on white arrows carving the face of hollowed-out waves. Ben leaned against the hood of the car, the heat of the engine burning through his pants. It was hot as hell this afternoon, the basin sky like a magnifying glass for the sun. Out beyond the beach, a band of smog, pushed offshore by the wind, hovered like an approaching dust storm.
“How?” Neil asked.
Ben didn’t say anything.
“Please tell me how.”
“He was shot.”
“Did it hurt?” Neil said. “I mean, would it hurt?”
“No,” Ben said. It must have hurt, at least for a moment, at least for that flashing second. Maybe it hurt for a few minutes, in the twilight of the heart winding down. But that’s not what this kid needed to hear. “I don’t think so.”
“How do you know?”
“I don’t, really,” Ben said. “I’ve seen men shot, though.” The armed man running out of the 7-Eleven on Wilshire. The laid-off middle manager holding the vice president and his secretary hostage in Century City. The dealer at the party in North Hollywood. “In the right place, it seems to be over immediately.”
“Was he shot in the right place?”
“Yeah,” Ben said.
The boy nodded and turned away to face the ocean and smog. “Can I see him?”
“You don’t want to.”
“Don’t tell me what I want,” he said, his frail profile framed by the ocean. “People are always telling me what I want and don’t want, and they don’t have a fucking clue.” He turned to look at Ben, his face all kid—pimpled, flushed red cheeks. “I want to see him.”
“I’m sorry,” Ben said, “but I won’t do that.”
Two military jets swooped down the coast, afterburners shooting blue flame. Probably back from target practice, bombing the hell out of San Clemente Island. They banked left over Laguna and thundered low into the canyon toward the base.
“Were you in love with him?” Ben said, as gently as he could.
“I don’t know.” Neil finished one cigarette and lit another. “I just liked him. He had a cowlick on the back of his head. It always stuck up, even after he got out of the pool. That made me smile.”
“Were you sleeping with him?”
“What the hell kind of question is that?”
“A common one when death is involved, especially a violent one.”
Neil hesitated, looking down the coast where the swells stacked up. Ben gave him a few moments and watched two surfers catch the same wave. When the first one cut back across the face, he shoved the other off his board. The second one went backward into the maw of the tube, sucked down below. The first one rode the wave to the rocks and flipped out the backside. There was about to be a fight. Stupid kids.
“He was Catholic, you know,” Neil said. “He hated himself for it, said it was a sin, said it was disgusting. I asked him if that meant he thought I was disgusting. He said no, but I didn’t believe him. He was disgusted by me and by himself, but we were still us, you know, didn’t matter how much we hated it.”
“I have to ask again,” Ben said. “I’m sorry. Were you sleeping together?”
“We kissed,” he said quietly. “We were too scared to do anything else. You get told your whole life something’s wrong with you, you start believing it.” He laughed bitterly. “I mean, that’s what they want, right? To make you hate yourself out of being this way? Shit, I get it, I get what they do, but it’s still working on me.”
“You and Lucero were fighting, then?”
“No,” Neil said. “We were supposed to go to the movies tomorrow night, Aliens. I was going to pay because he didn’t have any money. His parents pick strawberries and tomatoes.”
“I know.”
“Have you told them yet?” the boy said, turning to look at him.
“They know.”
“Jesus,” he said, turning back to the ocean. “I hate his mom, but I still feel bad for her.”
“You’ve met her?”
“No,” Neil said. “Lucero wouldn’t let me. He said she would be ashamed of him, of us.”
Neil drew on the cigarette. Below him, in the water, the second surfer threw a punch from his perch straddling his board. The first surfer threw one back, but he fell into the water, and the second surfer pressed the man’s head into the water. He let him up, though, and the first surfer, spitting something at the second surfer, turned and paddled his board to shore.
“He used to bring me strawberries,” Neil said. “He’d stuff them into a pocket in his backpack and give them to me between classes.”
Through the cruiser’s open window the radio called out a robbery, a gas-station holdup, out near John Wayne Airport.
“She found out, didn’t she?” Neil said.
“His mother?”
“Yeah,” he said. “She found out about us, that’s why he did this.”
“There was that man who found you two together in the orange grove. You think he said something to Lucero’s mother?”
“You talked to that guy?” Neil said. “He said he wouldn’t tell anyone.”
“He didn’t know someone was going to get killed.”
Neil thought about it for a moment. “No,” Neil said. “He didn’t tell her. That guy was cool. He’d warn us if someone was coming, and we’d hide.”
“You know his name?”
“No one ever tells you their name over there.” The kid stubbed out the cigarette against the guardrail. “It was that fucking swim coach. He told her.”