2
SAMUEL’S FATHER INSISTED that Sunday evenings be devoted to “family time,” and they’d have a mandatory dinner together, all of them sitting around the table while Henry tried valiantly to make conversation. They’d eat some of the packaged meals from his special office freezer, where the experimental and test-market foods were kept. These were usually more daring, more exotic—mango instead of baked apples, sweet potatoes instead of regular potatoes, sweet-and-sour pork instead of pork chops, or things that would not at first glance seem ideal for freezing: lobster rolls, say, or grilled cheese, or tuna melts.
“You know the interesting thing about frozen meals,” Henry said, “is that they weren’t popular until Swanson decided to call them ‘TV dinners.’ Frozen meals had been around for a decade when they changed the name to TV dinner and boom, sales exploded.”
“Mm-hm,” Faye said as she stared straight down into her chicken cordon bleu.
“It’s like people needed permission to eat in front of the television, you know? It’s like everyone wanted to eat in front of the TV already, but they were waiting for someone to endorse it.”
“That’s super fascinating,” Faye said in a tone that made him shut right up.
Then more silence before Henry asked what the family wanted to do tonight, and Faye suggesting he just go watch TV, and Henry asking if she wanted to join him, and Faye saying no, she had dishes to put away and cleaning to do and “you should go on ahead,” and Henry asking if she needed his help with the cleaning, and Faye saying no, he’d just get in the way, and Henry suggesting that maybe she should relax and he’d do the cleanup tonight, and Faye getting frustrated and standing up and saying “You don’t even know where anything goes,” and Henry looking at her hard and seeming like he was on the verge of saying something but then ultimately not saying it.
Samuel thought how his father married to his mother was like a spoon married to a garbage disposal.
“May I be excused?” Samuel said.
Henry looked at him, wounded. “It’s family night,” he said.
“You’re excused,” Faye said, and Samuel leaped off the chair and scurried outside. He felt that familiar desire to go hide. He felt this way whenever the tension in the house seemed to gather up inside him. He hid in the woods, a tiny patch of woods that grew along a sad creek that ran behind their subdivision. A few short trees sprouting out of the mud. A pond that was at best waist-deep. A creek that collected all the subdivision’s runoff so the water had this colorful oily film after it rained. It was really pathetic, these woods, as far as nature goes. But the trees were thick enough to conceal him. When he was down here, he was invisible.
If anyone asked him what he was doing, he’d say “Playing,” which didn’t quite capture it. Could it really be called playing when he only sat there in the grass and mud, and hid in the leaves, and threw helicopter seeds into the air and watched them spin to the ground?
It was Samuel’s intention to come down to the creek and hide for a couple of hours, at least until bedtime. And he was searching for a spot, a convenient depression in the ground that would give him maximum coverage. A spot where, if he put a few dead branches over him, a few leaves, he would be hidden. And he was collecting the twigs and branches he’d use to cover himself, and he was beneath this one particular oak tree digging among the dead leaves and acorns on the ground, when something cracked above him. A snapping of branches, a creaking of the tree, and he looked up in time to see someone jump down from the tree and land hard on the ground behind him. A boy, no older than Samuel, who stood up and stared fiercely at him with eyes sharp and green and almost feline. He was not larger than Samuel, nor taller, nor in any way physically special except in the certain intangible way he filled up space. His body had a presence. He stepped closer. His face was thin and angular and smeared, on his cheeks and forehead, with blood.
Samuel dropped his twigs. He wanted to run. He told himself to run. The boy moved closer, and from behind his back he now produced a knife, a heavy silver butcher’s knife, the kind Samuel had seen his mother use when chopping things with bones.
Samuel began to cry.
Just stood there crying, rooted to the ground, waiting for whatever his fate was, succumbing to it. He vaulted right into a Category 3 slobbering wet helpless mess. He could feel his face constrict and his eyes bug out as if his skin were being stretched from behind. And the other boy stood directly before him now and Samuel could see the blood from close up, could see how it was still wet and shining in the sunlight and one drop dribbled down the boy’s cheek and under his chin and down his neck and under his shirt and Samuel didn’t even wonder where the blood came from so much as simply wail at the horrible fact of its presence. The boy had short reddish hair, eyes that seemed impenetrable and dead, freckles, something like an athlete’s sense of bodily control and self-possession and fluidity of movement as he slowly brought the knife over his head in the universal language for psychopathic murderous stabbing.
“This is what we call a successful ambush,” the kid said. “If we were at war, you’d be dead right now.”
And the cry Samuel let out summoned all his misery and channeled it in one wail, a great sad scream for help.
“Holy shit,” the kid said. “You are ugly when you’re crying.” He lowered the knife. “It’s all right. Look. Just kidding?”
But Samuel could not stop. The hysteria kept rolling over him.
“It’s okay,” the kid said. “No problem. You don’t have to talk.”
Samuel wiped his arm across his nose and came away with a long slick streak.
“Come with me,” the kid said. “I want to show you something.”
He led Samuel to the creek and then along the bank for several yards until he came to a place near the pond where a tree had tipped over, leaving a large depression between the roots and the earth.
“Look,” the kid said. He pointed to a spot where he’d smoothed out all the mud into a makeshift bowl. And inside the bowl were several animals: a few frogs, a snake, a fish.
“You see them?” he said. Samuel nodded. The snake, he could see now, was missing its head. The frogs had been slit open at the belly or stabbed in the back. There must have been eight or nine of them, all dead save for one, whose legs kicked, bicycling in the air. The fish were beheaded at the gills. They all rested in a bloody slime that gathered at the bottom of the bowl.
“I’m thinking about blow-torching them,” the kid said. “You know, with insect spray and a lighter?”
He pantomimed this: flicking the lighter, holding the spray up to it.
“Sit down,” he said. Samuel did as he was told, and the boy reached two fingers into the blood.
“We’re gonna have to toughen you up,” he said. He smeared the blood on Samuel’s face—two streaks under his eyes and one on his forehead.
“There,” he said. “Now you’re initiated.” He stabbed the knife into the mud so it stood straight up. “Now you’re really alive.”
3
THE SUN WAS SETTING, the day’s heat lifting, mosquitoes buzzing forth in squadrons from the woods as two boys emerged from the tree line, muddy and wet. They’d been walking across terrain Samuel had never seen before, taking him away from his own neighborhood and into this other one: Venetian Village, it was called. The boys’ faces were shiny and moist from where they’d used pond water to clean off the smears of animal blood. Though they were the same height, and the same age, and roughly the same build—which is to say short and eleven years old and tightly skinny, like ropes pulled to maximum tolerances—it was obvious to anyone seeing them that one of the boys was in charge. His name was Bishop Fall—he was the tree leaper, the ambusher, the animal killer. He was explaining to Samuel how he would someday be a five-star general in the United States Army.
“Duty, honor, country,” he said. “Taking the fight to the enemy. That’s my motto.”
“What fight?” said Samuel, who was looking around at the houses of Venetian Village, houses larger than any he had ever seen.
“Whatever fight there is,” Bishop said. “Hooah.”
He was going to join the army as an officer after military college, then become a major, then a colonel, then finally, someday, a five-star general.
“A five-star general has a higher security clearance than the president,” Bishop said. “I’m going to know all the secrets.”
“Will you tell me?” Samuel said.
“No. They’re classified.”
“But I won’t tell anyone.”
“National security. Sorry.”
“Please?”
“No way.”
Samuel nodded. “You’re going to be good at this.”
It turned out that Bishop would be joining Samuel in the sixth-grade class at the local public elementary school, having been recently expelled from his private school, Blessed Heart Academy, for, he said, “not taking any shit,” by which he meant listening to AC/DC on his Walkman and telling one of the nuns to “fuck off” and getting into fights with anyone who was willing, even high schoolers, even priests.
Blessed Heart Academy was a Catholic K–12 prep school that was really the only local option if you wanted your kids to go to one of the elite East Coast universities. All of the parents of Venetian Village sent their children there. Samuel had never been in Venetian Village before, but sometimes on his longer bike rides he passed the front gate, which was copper and ten feet tall. The homes here were large Roman-style villas with flat roofs of terra-cotta tile, circular driveways curving around dramatic fountains. Houses were separated from each other by a distance at least as great as a soccer field. A swimming pool in every backyard. Exotic sports cars in the driveways, or golf carts, or both. Samuel imagined who could possibly live here: television stars, professional baseball players. But Bishop said it was mostly “boring office people.”
“That guy,” Bishop said, pointing to one of the villas, “owns an insurance company. And that one,” he said, pointing to another, “he runs a bank or something.”
Venetian Village had nineteen single-family units, each of them a standardized three stories with six bedrooms, four full baths, three powder rooms, marble kitchen countertops, 500-bottle wine cellar, private interior elevator, tornado-grade impact glass, exercise room, four-car garage, all of them an identical 5,295 square feet that, due to a specially treated glue used in construction, smelled lightly of cinnamon. The exact sameness of the houses was actually a selling point for families worried about not having the nicest house on the block. Realtors often said that in Venetian Village you didn’t have to “keep up with the Joneses,” even though every family who lived in Venetian Village had been “the Joneses” in whatever neighborhood they’d come from. And hierarchies quietly emerged in other ways. Various backyard additions of gazebos or screened-in two-story lanais or even a lit Har-Tru clay-surfaced tennis court. Each house was built from exactly the same mold but was uniquely accessorized.
A backyard saltwater hot tub, for example, behind one of the villas that Bishop stopped in front of.
“This is where the headmaster of Blessed Heart lives,” Bishop said. “He’s a fat fuck.”
He made a show of grabbing his crotch and flipping his middle finger at the house, then grabbed a small rock that lay in the gutter.
“Watch this,” he said, and he flung the rock toward the headmaster’s house. It seemed to happen before either of them could even think about it. Suddenly this rock was in the air, and they watched it fly and everything seemed to slow down for a moment as both boys realized that the rock was definitely going to hit the house and there was nothing they could do about this fact. The rock flew through the red-orange sky and it was only a matter of gravity now, and time. The rock arced downward and narrowly missed the forest-green Jaguar in the headmaster’s driveway, striking the aluminum garage just beyond the Jaguar with a percussive, reverberative thunk. The boys looked at each other in elation and terror, the sound of rock on garage door seeming to them the loudest thing in the world.
“Holy shit!” said Bishop, and both of them, as if moved by the natural impulses of hunted animals, ran.
They ran down Via Veneto, the neighborhood’s lone street, which followed roughly the same curvature as a path that deer had made when this place was still a nature preserve, a path that ran between the small man-made pond to the north and a large drainage ditch to the south, these two bodies of water being enough to sustain a modest deer population even through the Illinois winter, a herd whose offspring still lingered in Venetian Village and terrorized various carefully tended flowering plants and gardens. The deer were so annoying that the residents of Venetian Village paid quarterly fees to a deer exterminator who left salt licks laced with poison on posts high enough for adult deer to reach (but, importantly, too high for any of the neighborhood’s twenty-five-pound-and-under dogs to accidentally ingest). The poison was not immediate but rather bioaccumulated in the deer’s body, so that when the animal’s death instincts kicked in, it tended to wander far away from its herd and die, conveniently, somewhere else. And so along with the standardized gondolier-themed mailboxes and front-yard water features, Venetian Village’s other major repeating architectural items were posts with salt licks on them and signs saying DANGER. POISON. KEEP AWAY in a very tactful and elegant serif typeface that could also be found on the Venetian Village official stationery.
The neighborhood should never have existed but for a loophole that was exploited by three Chicago investors. Before Venetian Village, there was the Milkweed Nature Preserve, named after the plant that grew in great abundance here and drew huge numbers of monarch butterflies in the summer. The city was looking for a private organization—preferably nonprofit and/or charitable—to tend the preserve and its various paths and general health and biodiversity. The covenants the city drafted stated that the buyer of the land could not develop the land, nor could the buyer sell the land to anyone who would develop it. But the agreement said nothing about whom that buyer (i.e., the second one) could sell the land to. So one of the business partners bought the land, then sold it to another of the partners, who quickly sold it to the third partner, who immediately formed an LLC with the other two guys and went to work knocking down the forest. They installed a thick copper fence around what was once the Milkweed Nature Preserve, and advertised to high-end Sotheby’s-style clients, one of their catchphrases being: “The intersection of luxury and nature.”
One of the three founding partners still lived in Venetian Village, a commodities trader with offices at both the Chicago Stock Exchange and Wall Street. His name was Gerald Fall. He was Bishop’s father.
Gerald Fall, the only person on the block, save for the two boys themselves, who saw the stone strike the headmaster’s house, who watched as Bishop and Samuel ran down the soft slope of the road toward the low end of Via Veneto’s terminating cul-de-sac, where he was standing in the driveway, the door of his black BMW open, his right foot already in the car, his left foot still on the driveway he’d had expensively done in high-gloss cobblestone. He was leaving when he spotted his son throw the rock at the headmaster’s house. The boys did not see him there until they were upon the driveway themselves, where they squeaked to a halt on the polished stone, the sound like basketball players on a gym floor. Bishop and his father considered each other for a moment.
“The headmaster’s sick,” the father said. “Why are you bothering him?”
“Sorry,” said Bishop.
“He’s very ill. He’s a sick man.”
“I know.”
“What if he’s sleeping and you just ruined it?”
“I’ll be sure to apologize.”
“You do that.”
“Where are you going?” Bishop asked.
“The airport. I’ll be at the New York apartment for a while.”
“Again?”
“Don’t bother your sister while I’m gone.” He looked at the boys’ feet, wet and dirty from the woods. “And don’t track mud in the house.”
With that, Bishop’s father dove fully into his car and shut the door hard and the engine purred to life and the BMW circled out of the driveway, its tires making this noise on the smooth stones like something screaming.
Inside, the Fall household had a formality that made Samuel not want to touch anything: bright white stone floors, chandeliers with crystal things hanging off of them, flowers in tall and thin and easily tippable glass vases, framed abstract artwork on the walls lit by recessed bulbs, a thick wooden display hutch with about two dozen snow globes inside it, the tops of tables buffed to a mirrorlike clarity, kitchen counters of white marble similarly shined, each room and hallway defined by a wide arch set atop Corinthian columns that were so intricately detailed at the top they looked like muskets that had backfired and been torn apart.
“This way,” Bishop said. He led them to a room that could only be called the “TV room” for the big-screen television that Samuel felt dwarfed by. It was taller than he was, and wider than his own wingspan. Below the television were strewn various cords and wires for video-game consoles stacked clumsily in a small cabinet. Game cartridges lay haphazardly about them like spent artillery shells.
“Do you like Metroid or Castlevania or Super Mario?” Bishop said.
“I don’t know.”
“I can save the princess in Super Mario without even dying. I’ve also beaten Mega Man, Double Dragon, and Kid Icarus.”
“It doesn’t matter what we play.”
“Yeah, that’s true. They’re all pretty much the same game. Same basic premise: Go right.”
He reached into the cabinet and produced an Atari all tangled in its own cords.