Bait Dog An Atlanta Burns Novel - By Chuck Wendig Page 0,12
like thin little fey boys. Delicate as a wilting rose. No, I read Captain America because he punches Nazis and fights evil with a shield and because he used to be a little fey boy like me but now he’s an ass-kicking pro-America patriotism machine.”
“Didn’t figure you for a patriot.”
“Didn’t figure you for Al Qaeda.”
“Cute.”
“Correction: the cutest.” He smiles like a kewpie doll, eyes-all squinty, cheeks puffed out. For added effect he kisses the air around her head. She swats at him like he’s a fly.
“You’re weird,” she says.
“Uh-huh. So. You asked me, now I’ll ask you: what’s it like to be you?”
“It’s fine,” she says, plodding along. “Pretty boring.”
He rolls his eyes. “Oh. Sure. I bet. The town of Dullsville, population: You.”
“Now you’re just being sarcastic. That’s not cute at all. My Daddy used to say, Darlin’, sarcasm is the first refuge of bitter men.”
“Well I say that sarcasm is a mini-mansion in the middle of Awesome-Town and there’s a pool and a room filled with puppies and a kitchen with granite countertops and a double-oven. And a cabana boy named Steve.” He walks in front of her and puts his hands on her shoulders, an act which earns him a malevolent stare. Even still he doesn’t pull away and instead says, “Atlanta Burns, you need to understand something. People are in awe of what you did. Jaw-dropping, pants-shitting awe.”
She sighs. “I can tell, what with the way that nobody talks to me anymore.”
“I said awe, honey. In the truest sense of the word.” Way he says truest is tuh-ROO-est. “Like the way people have awe in God or government. Awe is respect, but it’s fear, too. I think people are a little scared of you.”
“Maybe they’re right to be.”
He shrugs and smiles. “Maybe they are.”
Shane totters back over and thrusts an angular piece of rock in front of their faces, first hers, then Coyne’s. “Boom! Check it.”
He regards both of their ambivalent stares with deepening disbelief.
“Hello? Arrowhead? These fields are full of them. The local Indian tribe, the Shawnee, used to chip away at—“
Chris interrupts. “Nobody is ever going to pop your cherry, young padawan.” Then he snatches the arrowhead and tosses it back in the field to Shane's chagrin.
“You’re a dick and you’re dead to me,” Shane says.
Atlanta laughs and they keep walking back to her house.
* * *
She has to root around her messy room for an hour before she finds her yearbook. As she discards junk behind her—an Oakridge Boys CD (“Daddy used to sing Elvira to me to get me to go to sleep”), a broken lacrosse stick (“I played one game once, shut up”), a box of old Judy Blume books (“Oh, whatever, somebody says they didn’t read Judy Blume is a lying liar-faced liar who lies”)—she finally finds it and plops it down in front of Chris.
“There. Yearbook. Point out your attackers.”
He flips through the book. “Only two of them go to school with us.”
“So show me those two, then.”
Shane whips around a pair of nun-chucks he found on Atlanta’s floor, damn near knocking over a desk lamp. “So what’s the deal with your Mom?”
“There’s no deal with my Mom,” she says.
“She sleeps in the garage.”
“So she does.”
“That’s weird.”
“Not weird. Just her choice is all.”
Shane frowns. “You get the run of the house?”
“I suppose I do.”
Chris—laying on his stomach on her bed, yearbook splayed out in front of him—doesn’t look up when he says, “You should cut her some slack. Let her back in. Figuratively and literally. We look at our parents like they’re supposed to somehow be impervious to stupidity but the reality is, they make mistakes. They’re people like anybody else, and honey, people are dumb as a box of Frisbees.”
“I said, it’s her choice,” Atlanta hisses through clenched teeth. “Now hunker down over that yearbook before I smack it over your darn head.”
“Here,” he says, stabbing his finger down on a picture nestled amongst last year’s junior class. Dude in the picture looks like a real skinhead type. Long, lean hound-dog face with hard cheekbones. Hair shorn, showing the ghost of a black widow’s peak. The collar of a gray jacket and white t-shirt underneath.
John Elvis Baumgartner. Full name listed.
“I’ve heard of him,” she says. “Skinhead, right? Always thought his name made him sound like a serial killer. Don’t serial killers always have three names?”
“Yeah, but if you want to see the one that really looks like a serial killer…” He flips a few more pages deep, flicks another