Cape Cod Noir - By David L Ulin Page 0,11

him by running a set of battery chargers off Second Chance’s engine block up his ass.

Ryan is from Wellesley. Just cause he used to sell dope to his private school buddies he thinks he’s better than all of us, but Ryan just about shit his pants that day. Cunningham punished Freddie and Tiny by making them clean out the outhouse, but Freddie didn’t seem to care. He nearly died from laughing so hard.

When Freddie laughs he sounds like the trains that went through the woods down the road from the cul-de-sac where I grew up back in Pocasset: “A-Huh-a-huh-a-huh-a-huh. A-Huh-a-huh-a-huh-a-huh.”

It was also Chad’s idea to take Caroline’s jewelry box and set it on the train tracks. Bits of that doll went flying everywhere. You could still hear the music playing long after the train left.

Caroline cried so hard after she saw her jewelry box was missing, I went out and gathered up all the pieces of the ballerina that I could find. I wanted to give them to Caroline and make her feel better, but Chad shook his head and said, “What people don’t know can’t hurt them.”

I threw the pieces of the ballerina in the yard later on. I still remember watching the bits of pink plastic and white gauze fly from my hand.

Chad came into the room we shared later that night and said, “You’re a real man now, you know that, kid?”

I was only eight, and he was thirteen but he had started shaving. He knew what it meant to be grown up.

Learning how to be a man is part of Penikese’s chop-woodcarry-water philosophy. Penikese isn’t like being in jail, boot camp, or even regular school, though we can earn our G.E.D. and learn a couple of trades like fishing and woodworking. It’s some of all of these things in an Abe-Lincoln-in-a-log-cabin kind of way. Cunningham leads us on walks and tells us stories about the island and calls it history. Wood shop is where Mr. Da Cunha teaches us how to make furniture, which is also his way to con us into measuring angles and calling it geometry. We whittle pieces of wood along with the time; we’re stuck here for a year unless we fuck up, which means getting shipped off to juvie, which none of us wants though there is something about this place that makes everything bad we’ve ever done seem impossible to escape. Like the fact that the house where we’re living is a ship going nowhere.

At night we sit by kerosene lanterns and do homework around the kitchen table or play pool, except for Bobby Pomeroy who spends a lot of time in the outhouse where we’re all convinced he’s busy beating wood.

Bobby grew up on a farm somewhere in Western Mass, where he was busted for assault and date-raping some girl. Cause he’s a farm boy, he teaches us things that even Cunningham doesn’t know. Useful things. Like how to hypnotize a chicken.

We’d only been here for a few weeks when Bobby grabbed the smallest chicken in the coop by its feet and lifted it, so it was hanging upside down. The chicken was squawking and clucking, but as soon as Bobby starting swinging it around and around it quieted down. “That’ll learn ya,” Bobby said, then set the chicken back on the ground. Next thing you knew that chicken was walking in circles and bumping into things, like it was drunk. We all laughed our asses off, but for Tiny and DeShawn.

“That’s not fucking funny,” Tiny said.

“Whassamattuh?” Freddie said.

“It’s just a little chicken.”

“You feckin’ killed some girl and you’re getting ya panties in a wad over some dumb chicken that’s gonna end up in a pot pretty soon heyah?” Freddie said.

“Just make it stop,” Tiny replied. His eyes were turning red, his lower lip quivering, but the chicken was still spinning around bumping into things. We couldn’t stop cracking up.

“Fucking knock it off, you assholes!” Tiny yelled.

Then the chicken lay down and stopped moving altogether. The chickens in the coop went quiet too. All we could hear was the wind whistling like a boiling kettle.

“That’s fucking sick,” Kevin Monahan said. “You’re sick, Tiny. Killing your own girlfriend and defending some stupid chicken.” Kevin was in for burning down an apartment building in Springfield while cooking up meth with his father. Some old lady’s cat died in the fire.

“Arson ain’t no big thing compared to killing a pretty little girl, pansy,” Freddie said.

Bobby snapped his fingers over the bird, which