“Fine, I promise.”
“Say it with feeling.”
“Just show me.”
Bishop raised his hands in an I-give-up gesture, then pointed at the stairwell below him. “Down there,” he said. “I keep them down there, hidden in the dirt, bottom of the stairs.”
The Berg dropped the page he was looking at and opened the gate to the stairwell and rushed down. Bishop looked at Samuel and nodded: the signal.
Samuel leaped off the loading dock down to the spot where the Berg had been standing. He walked over to the gate and very slowly shut it, just as they had practiced. He could see the Berg at the bottom of the stairs, his long horrible rattail, the fat expanse of his back as he huddled down and swept away the dirt and leaves and discovered the plastic bag that Bishop had planted there.
“In here? In the bag?” the Berg said.
“Yep. That’s it.”
When the gate shut, it did so with a small and trivial click. Samuel slipped the heavy padlock between the bars and closed it. The snap made by the lock’s internal metal mechanism felt substantial and satisfying. It felt final. Irrevocable. They had done it. There was no going back.
A few feet away, fluttering in the wind, was the page Bishop had given the Berg. It spun in the eddies the breeze made around the loading dock, folding over itself at the creases made when it was pressed into eighths. Samuel grabbed it. Opened it. And the immediate impression the photo gave, before all its shapes resolved themselves into recognizable human forms, the dominant textural feature, the thing that seemed to define the photo and would later be pretty much the only thing Samuel remembered about it, was hair. Loads of dark, curly hair. Around the girl’s head, a jet-black cascade that looked physically heavy and difficult to bear, hair in tight curls that reached all the way down to the dirt she sat on, the flesh of her butt smooshing out beneath her like bread dough, one arm behind her and supporting herself with her elbow in the dirt, the other hand reaching down to her crotch, opening herself up with two fingers in a gesture that looked like an upside-down peace sign, revealing this plump and mysterious bright-red spot amid another outbreak of dark black hair, hair that was thick and curly where it almost reached her belly button, but became wispy inside her pimpled thighs, where the hair resembled the desolate attempts teenagers make at mustaches and beards, hair that kept creeping down beneath her to the spot where she contacted the ground, where she sat in some anonymous tropical forest scene, Samuel seeing this and trying to gather all of it simultaneously and trying to make sense of it and trying to enjoy it the way Andy Berg seemed to enjoy it but achieving only this abstract sense of curiosity combined with maybe a mild revulsion or horror that the adult world seemed be a terrible, appalling place.
He folded the page into small squares. He was trying to forcibly forget what he’d just seen when, from the bottom of the stairwell, the Berg suddenly boomed: “What the fuck?”
And at that moment a bright white flash popped. Bishop held a Polaroid camera, and it buzzed and clicked and ejected a white square of film.
“What the fuck!” the Berg said again. Samuel climbed the ladder onto the loading dock and ran to the edge where Bishop stood overlooking the Berg and flapping the photo and laughing. The Berg had several pictures around him, presumably having upended the bag and let them all flutter out. And almost all of them, Samuel could see now, were close-ups of large, erect penises. Adult penises. Adult and very manly and horribly engorged and darkly empurpled and some of them dribbling and wet. Penises, some of them from glossy magazines, some actual real Polaroid pictures, whitely lit, softly focused, close-up anonymous disembodied cocks emerging from shadows or from beneath the folds of someone’s sagging belly flesh.
“What the fuck!” Andy Berg could not seem to find any other words but these. “What in the fuck?”
“See? I knew it,” Bishop said. “You’re freaking out.”
“What the fuck is this?”
“You’re not quite mature enough.”
“I’m going to fucking kill you.”
“You’re not quite there yet, developmentally speaking.”
The Berg took the stairs two at a time. He was so big and he moved so destructively that it seemed impossible to contain him. Had they really trusted a stupid little padlock to keep them safe? Samuel imagined it snapping in half. He imagined the Berg erupting out of his cage like an insane circus animal. Samuel took a step back and stood behind Bishop, put a hand on Bishop’s shoulder. The Berg ran to the top of the stairs and reached his arm forward to push open the gate. Only the gate did not budge. And the force of the Berg’s huge momentum met the solid metal gate, and the only givable thing between them—the Berg’s arm—gave.
His wrist bent back and his shoulder torqued wildly with this crunching, snapping sound, this horrible liquid pop. And the Berg bounced backward and landed hard on the stairs and slid down a few of them until he came to rest near the bottom, clutching his arm, moaning, crying. The gate vibrated against the lock.
“Oh my god,” the Berg wailed. “My arm!”
“Let’s go,” Samuel said.
“Wait,” Bishop said. “One more thing.”
He walked along the edge of the loading dock until he was just above the Berg, roughly six feet over him.
“See, what I’m going to do now,” Bishop said over the Berg’s feeble crying, “is I’m going to take a leak, and you’re not going to do anything about it. And you’re not going to fuck with anybody ever again. Because I’ve got this photo.” Bishop waved the Polaroid at him. “You should see it. There you are with all that faggot porn. You want this photo to show up in every locker in school? Taped under every desk? Slipped into every single textbook?”
The Berg looked at him and, for a moment, the actual sixth-grade mind that was trapped in his giant adult body broke through, and he looked astonished and hurt and pathetic and sad. Like an animal stunned in disbelief at having just been kicked.
“No,” he spat out through the crying.
“Then I expect you’ll start behaving,” Bishop said. “No more picking on Kim. No more picking on anyone.”
Bishop undid his belt and unzipped his pants and pulled down his underwear and released a long strong jet of urine right at Andy Berg, who wailed and turned around to hide from it and screamed. He curled up while Bishop splattered onto his back and shirt and rattail.
Then the two boys gathered their things and left. They didn’t speak at all until they parted ways, at the spot where Bishop cut through the woods to Venetian Village and Samuel continued the other way to his own home. Bishop rapped him lightly on the arm and said “Be all you can be, soldier,” then dashed away.
That night, the heat wave finally broke. Samuel sat at his bedroom window and watched the thunderstorm drench the whole outside world. The trees in the backyard whipped violently and the sky flashed with lightning. He imagined Andy Berg out in the storm, still trapped, soaking wet. He imagined him shivering and cold and injured and alone.
In the morning, the air had that chilly first feeling of autumn. Andy Berg was not in school. The rumor was that he hadn’t come home last night. The police were called. Parents and neighbors went out looking. He was finally located in the morning, wet and sick, in the stairwell behind the school. Now he was in the hospital. Nobody mentioned anything about the Polaroids.
Samuel guessed the Berg had caught a cold, maybe the flu, from the rain. But Bishop had another theory. “He’d have to get rid of the porn, right?” he said at recess that day. “I mean, he wouldn’t want to be found with those pictures.”
“Yeah,” Samuel said. “But how?”
They sat on the swings not swinging, watching a game of tag under way across the playground, a game that included Kim Wigley, which was rare, as Kim tended to avoid recess, or really any public space with a high Berg-bullying potential. Now he played in unself-conscious joy and delight.
“The Berg’s in the hospital now,” Bishop said. “Probably poisoned, I think.”
“Poisoned how?”
“He ate them. The photos. That’s how he got rid of them.”
Samuel tried to imagine eating a Polaroid picture. Chewing that hard plastic. Swallowing those sharp, heavy corners.
“He ate them?” he said.
“Absolutely.”
Across the playground, Kim glanced at them and offered Bishop a feeble wave. Bishop waved back. Then he laughed and said “Hooah” and ran over to join the game, actually almost skipped over there, barely even touching the ground as he went.