Part One

October, 1996.

Chapter One

FRIDAY, The Bell Game.

[White Hills Saints (6-1) vs. Rockburg Rams (6-1)]

2:21 pm.

"Mr. Keller. Sorry to interrupt your seventh period."

The vice-principal of White Hills High School was a tall, impeccably groomed, shady-looking Irishman, Mr. Ray MacCready. He had a kind of old-school swagger and a penchant for mob-cut suits that seemed to hum out the theme to The Godfather. He always made Dave Keller think of Jaws, though; Sharky mows through the crowd of gabbering high school kids clotting his halls on a daily basis, his head tilted just a little higher than the other teachers, his expression carefully neutral. His eyes, though - they darted around beneath his heavy una-brow.

Dave watched him throw his jacket across the desk and roll up his shirtsleeves. MacCready’s hairy arms bristled as he gestured toward the empty chair. Dave sat down. He felt like a mob snitch right before he’s beaten with crowbars, chopped up and buried in lime.

"David. How are you today? We gonna win back the bell?"

Dave had been ready to start blubbering and begging for mercy but the question seemed so surreal coming from MacCready’s viper’s stare, he gaped at the man and said nothing.

Like he cares, his father’s voice whispered in his head. He ignored it.

"Um... fine, sir. How are you?"

"Well, Mr. Keller, I was having a fine week. But you didn’t answer my question. You think we’ll get that bell back?"

The White Hills football team (go bloody motherfuckin’ SAINTS!) had for ten years been a source of agony for its team of mostly-hopeless young bucks and their semi-fascist, Republican (or Democrat, it doesn’t really matter), real estate-gobbling, wife-swapping capitalist parents, hopelessly obsessed with their old school’s long-absent championship status. This was the closest Dave had ever been able to get to understanding his parents’ social circle – mainly football fathers who’d all attended White Hills High together. His Dad’s friends were cops, real estate agents, Local Small Business Owners – Dave knew this last bit meant that the fuckers inherited a hardware store or car dealership and sometimes, above the Drill Bit Supply & Materials, businesses, houses, farms and ranches were won and lost in weekly poker games held in Teddy Rosserton’s office above the supply yard – and other mostly-serious assholes with leathery-skinned, too-tanned wives (who sometimes gave him a good once-over when they thought he wasn’t looking, which sorta gave him the creeps and sorta fired his curiosity, especially after he took bong hits with Max Silva and watched The Graduate that one time) and sons on the football team who he partied with but didn’t really like at all.

They undergo a yearly ritual football game: The Battle For The Bell against their up-river rivals, the Rockburg Rams. The winner gets The Bell, a small, cheap-looking, bronze-plated replica of the Liberty Bell that makes no noise whatsoever. White Hills hadn’t won a Bell Game in six years.

Dave was a running back, but hadn’t really been practicing much. He’d taken to ditching his last two classes and driving to Antioch to pick up weed, smoke out until six o’clock, then wait tables till ten, and do it all again the next day.

FUCK FOOTBALL! was what Dave wanted to scream at him. AND FUCK YOU, FUCKIN’ BASTARD! but Dave looked down at his hands and saw that they were shaking, and thought oh how his guitar could gently weep at this. If only he could play the guitar.

Running, though. Running gave him peace. That was what David Arthur Keller, Jr. did the best, and he knew it. He smiled when he remembered this, and suddenly felt better.

"Yes, sir. We’ll get that damned bell back," he told the vice-principal with a big, shit-eating grin. Maybe that’s it, he thought. Glad-handing the jocks. Right on. He was already balancing how drunk he could get that afternoon at the pregame party at Jesse Aaronson’s place. Jesse’s dad owned the town’s Honda dealership and he was generally regarded as the richest richkid in the school. His parents were taking off for Tahoe with his older brother...something about rehab and some knocked-up cheerleader from Dixon High. Dave thought about how much he dug banging cheerleaders.

"Great!" MacCready boomed, and sauntered toward his office door. Dave half-rose to leave, but MacCready swept the door shut. He leaned against it and stared down at the seventeen year old. "That’s great, Mr. Keller."

You’re fucked now, son, Dave’s father whispered again. He curled his hands into fists and let his nails bite sharply into his palms. Shut up, you fucking corpse.

"Yeah," Dave said. It was all he could think of.

"Yes."

That one word froze David Keller’s spine.

"Mr. Keller, as you know, we had the drug dogs here this afternoon."

See?

Fuck. Shut up. Oh fuck.

"And I’m aware of your preferred parking spot, well off the school grounds down the block..."

MacCready drew out his words, taking his seat with a dramatic slowness that was more annoying than intimidating. He said nothing. He understood he didn’t have to; was not, in fact, expected to say a word beyond tearful pleadings—which Dave could actually feel coming on, rising inside like a psychic tsunami. He swallowed hard.

"We took a little stroll out by your car, Dave."

He thought about that letter opener near this fat, balding fuck’s left hand and then looked away. He knew he would cry, but he’d be motherfucked if he’d do it just yet.

MacCready was looking at him with a bizarre, concerned expression. He looks like an iguana, Dave thought.

Naw, boy, his dad tells him, big wad of flaming shit like this guy, he’s simple and dangerous the way a Grizzly is. Lots of idiot hikers die by thinking them faces are anything but a kind of mask they don’t know they’re wearing. See? He’s a bear, big and ruthless and smarter than he looks. Don’t fuck up.

"Mr. Keller? The black VW Golf — that IS your car, yes?"

"Am I under oath?"

"You’re in a shitload of trouble, young man."

"Look, Mr. MacCready..."

"Mr. Keller, we took the district’s hound out past your car this morning—"

"German shepherd," Dave said, instantly regretted the interruption. He could feel his dad waiting, though, to see if he’d go on with it.

"What?"

"It’s a German shepherd. The drug dog. Not a hound."

"Thank you. Well, the one dog the county allots us to tour the school—"

Tour!

"—one day, one dog, every four months." MacCready sighed, rose and walked around, planting his wide ass on his desk a foot from Dave. He looked ready to say something else when he sniffed a few times, looked around and patted down his pants. He found a Vick’s nasal inhaler in one of the pockets and breathed deeply. Dave had used one before, after an intense two-day coke binge in Berkeley for the junior prom that he really couldn’t remember much of...and always when rolling on E. MacCready hid it away and looked at Dave shrewdly.

"David, three years ago I caught you and Sean Buvoy and Max Silva behind the radio station—"

"We weren’t doing anything, though! You said so!"

MacCready hardened his quasi-concerned vice-principal’s nonexpression into the cold face Dave Keller had always imagined lived there when he wasn’t looking. Max Silva had told him weeks ago that MacCready was probably out to get him, but Dave had thought he was just baked and paranoid.

"I’m fucked," he breathes. His father doesn’t say a thing.

"Shut your mouth."

MacCready didn’t yell. Didn’t need to.

Dave sits there. If he pretended he was in fact part of the Void, like Max said to do before they gave those presentations in U.S. History, maybe he could, like, dissolve his soul into the walls or whatever.

Just fucking get away from here.

"Dave, I’ve watched you since then, the company you keep, your extra-curricular activities — or lack of..."

"I’m a running back."

"If your absence from practices doesn’t get you cut from the team, your grades will. Or would have."

Dave said nothing.

Greasy prick.

Shut the fuck up, man, Dave thought. For a small wonder, his father did.

"I just hate to see you squander such potential."

"Potential..."

"That’s right. All you kids have potential at this age—and little else going for you."

MacCready stares at him.

"But you screwed yourself, son."

"Yeah..."

"Yeah, that’s right. I’m afraid I’ll have to call your mother, and then the police."

"Man, WHY?"

Because he hates me.

"You have been able to defy authority for almost four years, Mr. Keller. This has gone far enough."

Dave stares at him.

"Well?"

Dave only stares.

"You have nothing to say for yourself?"

Dave smiles. "This ain’t about me at all."

MacCready arches his bushy eyebrows. "What?"

"It’s about my dad, huh?"

You bet, kiddo.

MacCready smiles, sighs dramatically. He leans forward, his smile disarming Dave against his will.

"Is that right, Mr. Keller?"

MacCready brings his fist down on his desk blotter. He pounds it twice, his eyes burning into Dave’s.

"Invoking a dead man’s name won’t help you. You miss him, don’t you? Well, at least that makes one of us."

Bastard.

Dave is silent.

Fucking bastard.

Shut up, dad.

Put him in his place.

"I..."

"Yes, Dave?"

"I don’t know why you want to...to persecute me, man—"

"That’s a mighty big word, Dave. Don’t strain yourself."

"Fuck you!"

That’s it, Dave thinks. I’m going right the fuck down, ain’t I?

"Well," MacCready says. "You probably fucked yourself, pal." MacCready leaned down into Dave’s face. "The dogs certainly loved your car, Mr. Keller. They shit and pissed all over themselves, clawing at the door. So, we took a quick peek through the window. I don’t know, Dave. I saw some highly suspicious, bud-like objects scattered around the floor mats."

Dave said nothing. He was listening to his father. He smiled. MacCready smiled with him.

"I know what this is about."

MacCready’s smile beamed a little wider, but Dave saw it stretch to its limit.

"You don’t think I know about it, but I do."

The smile was going.

"Senior Prom, 1975."

Going.

"My old man kicked your fucking ass behind the gym."

Gone.

"Keller..." the greasy prick warned.

"And from what I’ve heard, man, you deserved it. Getting’ up on my mom like that. Know what one of the last things he told me was?"

MacCready said nothing. His face was reddening around his jowls.

Careful there, boy.

Like he needed any advice from some dead asshole. Careful.

He knew what he was doing.

Sure you do.

"No," said MacCready.

Dave blinked. "What?"

"No."

MacCready sat behind his desk and picked up the phone. He did not look at Dave at all.

"Hey, man..."

"You’ve had your fun. That’s quite enough." MacCready cleared his throat and looked blandly at Dave, "Who would you like to talk to first? Your mother, or the police?"

Dave sat there, waiting for his Dad to say something, anything. There was nothing. He took a deep breath and thought about holding it until he collapsed, like he’d done once when he was twelve or thirteen, on a dare from his cousin, Jay Davison. Fucking Roy. That was all Roy’s pot scattered all over his car. His mom had warned him that Roy was well on his way toward a steady, inconsiderate-prick Confirmed Bachelorhood. Roy would not be defending his mother’s sister’s boy the way Dave generally felt obliged to stick up for him. Some lively, active me-me-me instinct leftover from what he had thought of as childhood. But those feelings don’t go away. He would not know at the time that this was the moment of Dave Keller’s first true insight into the human condition. He just felt childish and young. He felt tears now, finally ready, boiling in the back of his throat. He looked up at MacCready and swallowed hard.

"I think you better call my mom.”

Next Chapter: FRIDAY, The Bell Game. 5:15 pm