Cracking the Bell Read online

  “So, he did stuff to you?”

  “Twice. Once the December before you and me hooked up. Once in May when I was trying to be a good kid and date Caleb.”

  “I remember May. You were so mean to me.”

  “Maybe now you know why,” she said.

  “Does Deb know anything?”

  “You try to tell Deb anything bad about Richie. Go ahead.”

  “Maybe we should beat the shit out of him,” I said.

  “No. I don’t want anything to do with him,” Grace said. “Nothing. I might move in with Gin. If it’s okay with you?”

  “It’s great with me,” I said. “It’s really good.”

  For a golden moment I imagined both me and Grace going to college in Bluffton, both of us living on the same block, both of us preparing for a life together. My next life.

  We pulled into the parking lot of the Boulder Junction Tap, which is one of three businesses in Stitzer open on a Saturday (there’s another bar and a Cenex Cooperative Gas station there, too). The parking lot was packed.

  “Badger game is on,” Grace said.

  Any normal Saturday I would’ve been with Riley and Twiggs watching it, too. Maybe even up in Madison with Mom and Grandma Gin, attending the game. For four years, that’s what I did. Played football, watched it, absorbed it. But outside the Boulder Junction Tap, I couldn’t even remember who the Badgers were playing.

  “This is where Steven Hartley got loaded and turned himself into a missile,” I said.

  “Gross little bar,” Grace said.

  Four dudes stood outside the front door. They wore Badger gear and baseball caps. They smoked cigarettes. One, a large man with a big gut, swayed and had to keep catching himself on the post of the foyer.

  “Trashed,” Grace said.

  “How do they all get home?” I asked.

  “Look at all these cars, man,” Grace said.

  It was probably the wrong thing for her to say, but she couldn’t have known it. “They’re all going to drive out of here?”

  Grace looked at me. She shrugged.

  “These dicks don’t care about anything.”

  “I’ve driven buzzed,” Grace said.

  “Don’t. Okay?”

  “Don’t what? You’ve been with me. We drank out at Belmont Mound. How do you think we got home back then?”

  “We were stupid kids. And we were messed up. These assholes . . .” I pointed at the dudes smoking. “They’re in their twenties. Might be older.”

  “They could be messed up, too.”

  “Doesn’t give them the right to take someone else’s life,” I spat.

  “You want me to call the cops on everybody?” Grace asked.

  “I don’t know,” I said.

  Then it happened. The big guy, the one with the gut, flicked his cigarette into the parking lot, then lumbered away from the front door. He weaved a little as he walked. So trashed.

  I leaned forward. “Where is he going?” I asked.

  “I need to get back to work,” Grace said.

  I followed the guy with my eyes. He stopped at a dark blue Chevy Blazer. He leaned into it for a second, caught his breath or whatever, then pulled keys out of his shorts pocket. He pressed a button, flashing the brake lights, and unlocked the door. He climbed in and started the engine.

  “Shit,” I shouted. And I was out the door and running across the parking lot.

  “Where you are going so fast?” one of the other dudes said to me.

  I got to the Blazer, ripped open the door, and said, “Really?”

  “Who the hell are you?” he asked.

  “You going home?” I asked.

  “To my girlfriend’s. She made a lasagna,” he said, smiling.

  “The hell you are, you drunk.”

  I grabbed the collar of his Badgers golf shirt and pulled him hard out the driver’s seat.

  “Jesus Christ!” he shouted.

  I shoved him up against the side of the Blazer. He was easily six inches taller than me. I had to reach high to keep my hand twisted in his shirt. “You don’t drive wasted. You will kill someone.” Held him there. He was cowed. He just stared at me scared and confused.

  It was the other guy. I saw him dash up just as Grace screamed, “Isaiah!”

  He leaped at me. I simultaneously released the big dude and spun to the side. The guy flew by, landed, skidded on his chest and his elbow on the parking lot. He pushed himself up fast, turned, and came back at me. This is essentially what I’ve been trained to do. Shed a blocker. Hit a target. I coiled and jacked him with my hands, knocking him flat onto his back. I leaped on him and pressed him hard onto the gravel lot. Then I was out of my comfort zone. In football the play ends. But the dude squirmed under me. He was heavier than me. He started bucking. I didn’t know what to do. I didn’t want him to get up. I panicked. I barred my left arm across his throat, reached back with my right, and threw a hard punch into the side of his face. He stilled and swore.

  Grace was to us. She screamed something. She pulled me off him. The big guy tried to kick at us. Grace screamed something at him, but I couldn’t hear. Adrenaline coursed through my body, vibrated in my ears. I thought I might throw up. This is the feeling I had after I obeyed “Do it.” Out of control. Having caused destruction. But what had I destroyed? I stopped a guy from driving away trashed. Wasn’t that good?

  She dragged me back to her car while more people came out of the bar. They shouted stuff at us. She shoved me in the passenger side door and ran around to her side, turned on the car, and took off. A beer bottle crashed on the hood.

  “Shit!” she cried.

  “Oh shit,” I whispered. “I might puke.”

  “What are you thinking?”

  “I don’t know,” I said. Blood bubbled from my elbow. “Got a cut.” I raised my arm to show her. But she didn’t look.

  I pulled my hoodie over my head and removed my T-shirt. Blood dripped onto Grace’s seat. I wrapped the T-shirt hard around my arm and tied it tight, using my left hand and my teeth to put my sweatshirt back on.

  Grace shook her head as she drove. Tears rolled down her face. “Do you know guys like that? They have guns in their cars. Somebody could’ve shot you,” she shouted. “Not to mention the fact that you could’ve killed someone yourself. What difference does it make if you kill someone while drunk driving or you kill someone by thinking you’re stopping them from drunk driving?”

  “I didn’t kill anyone.” I dropped my head. Rested my chin on my chest. “I wish I was dead,” I said.

  Grace didn’t hear me. “I don’t know. I don’t know,” she said. “This is going to get back to town. Look what I did. Left my shift. I drove with you. I drove you to a bar. I let you get out and do this. Look what I did.”

  “You didn’t do anything. Don’t worry, Grace. I . . . I can tell them what happened. I freaked. I shouldn’t have asked you to take me there.”

  “Just be quiet,” Grace said.

  I got quiet.

  Suddenly a cop car, lit up, roaring, burst onto the road in front of us. It fishtailed, straightened, shot past us back in the direction from where we came. I turned and watched it scream down the county road toward Stitzer.

  “Who do you think that’s for?” Grace said.

  “They would’ve stopped us here. They’d have a description of your car.”

  “Oh God. Oh God,” Grace cried. “I know what happens when we’re together, but I went off with you anyway. I deserve what I get.”

  “You don’t deserve anything.”

  “Shut up, Isaiah!” she screamed.

  I didn’t say another word. When we got back into town she asked where I wanted to be dropped off. I told her my bike was at Dairy Queen. When we got there, she parked, got out, and walked into the store.

  I vomited and cried by my bike.

  CHAPTER 29

  OCTOBER 6: THE FLUGEL ROCK

  I lay on the ground behind Dairy Queen. I didn’t know what to do. It
was possible the police would be looking for me. Should I just bike to the police station? My legs began to twitch. And then what? Back to eighth-grade Isaiah? Had I already gone back? I couldn’t go back. Where else could I go?

  I turned my phone on and found a blizzard of messages. Parents, Grandma Gin (who does not text, but texted from the Badgers game), Twiggs, Riley, Coach Dieter, Coach Reynolds.

  They all knew the real me now.

  There was a voice mail from Joey, too. I could catch my breath there.

  I called him.

  “You all right, bro?” he asked. “Looks like your dad left a message on my machine. That’s some weird shit, don’t you think?”

  “Can you come and get me? I need to hang for a bit,” I said.

  “Yeah, man. I finished this job over in Cuba City today. Lady paid me three hundo! You want to get some pizza?”

  “No. I’d like to come to your trailer. I want to hang out there.”

  Joey breathed in for a second. “Dude. Okay? So. Where you at?” he asked.

  “Dairy Queen, but I’ll meet you out where County D passes that cemetery. I don’t think I should stand out here in the open.”

  “You’re kind of freaking me out,” Joey said.

  Fifteen minutes later, he picked me up at the St. Mary’s Cemetery. Not Hannah’s. I threw my bike in the back of his pickup. He asked me no questions. Before we drove to his place, he insisted on stopping for frozen pizzas at Kwik Trip. I slid way down in the cab so no one could see me while I waited in the parking lot.

  When we got to his trailer, which is off West View Road, far enough that you can’t see the trailer if you’re just driving past, Joey turned on the oven.

  “Once the oven is heated up, we’re twenty minutes from pizza. This is the only time I waste energy, bro, when I’m not sure when I’m going to eat my pizza but am hungry enough to know I can’t wait for the oven to preheat when the time comes.”

  “Oh,” I said, but wasn’t paying attention to his chatter. I thought about Grace. Were the cops coming for her? Someone probably did write down her license plate number.

  “You gotta check this out. I’m building something because of some stuff you’ve been thinking about.”

  “Maybe I could just lie down for a second,” I said.

  “No way, dude. We have to go up to the barn before the sun goes down.”

  I hesitated, then followed him out to the trail that led to his great-grandpa’s barn. Even though it couldn’t have been later than four thirty or five, the sun had disappeared behind one of Bluffton’s namesake bluffs. The indirect light colored the valley a deep orange. The barn on the property is cool. It’s old as can be—maybe over a hundred? The stone foundation—which Joey and I patched over the summer using concrete, cast-off cinder block, and some limestone we took from the shed at Church of the Hills, his great-grandpa’s church, which went defunct last May—rises about ten feet out of the earth, making for a cool, open space inside. The wood structure’s loft was built another ten feet up, so the ceiling of the first floor is like twenty feet off the ground. Joey opened the door and we entered.

  The barn’s bottom floor is divided into two rooms. Historically, this first room has been a mess, filled with junk Joey’s collected through the years to make art. But now the room was organized, swept. Joey had dragged metal shelving units in. The walls were lined with his junk, but it was all organized into categories: tools, hardware, toys, stacks of canvasses—old artwork people had given him, musical instruments, games and puzzles, coffee cans full of pennies, stereo equipment dating back decades, and more. All the junk that made the barn look like the municipal dump before now looked like a collection in a museum.

  “Wow,” I said, forgetting my troubles, poking through the metal toys (old tractors and cars) on one shelf. “This is a big change.”

  “This is just the beginning, bro. This is like my memory, okay?”

  “Okay.”

  “It’s like your green notebook, filled with all that shit about who you were and are right now. It’s all useful, right? You make an accounting of what you’ve experienced so that you understand what you’re set up to do next. But my shit wasn’t organized. It was jumbled like my brain.”

  “I haven’t thought about my notebook like that. Like memory.”

  “Then you ain’t thinking straight, bro!”

  “I’ll think about it.”

  “Yeah, dude, do that. Because check this out. I was wrong about your monoculture, about football, okay? Football for you is an effort in the right direction, right? Going someplace even if you’re not sure where. It uses all these things you’ve got inside you. Like your grandpa and grandma freezing their asses off to be at that Ice Bowl football game and how they fell in love because of it and how Hannah got killed and you have all this rage that makes you want to break shit and how your family fell into hell, disintegrated after your grandpa died and your sister died and nothing held the center anymore and football is team, right? It’s orchestrated social action and it’s scary, because it hurts when you lose, not just emotionally but physically, but you’re stronger with your team, your family. Man, I’ve been wrong to bum on you about those fools Riley and Twiggs.”

  “Riggles and Twine?” I said.

  “No. I’m not going to demean them anymore. They’re your brothers. They’re the family you had to make because your biological family broke to shit.”

  “Oh man,” I said. “I don’t know if I want to hear this right now.”

  “Buck up, dude. Football is how you took all the energies of your life, good and bad, and organized it and made sense of it and made something beautiful out of it.”

  “Oh man, Joey,” I said. I could feel my jaw tremble. I could feel myself start to cry.

  “Don’t get all bent, bro. I’m using you as an example, okay? I can’t live in the past like I have been. Yeah, this is my great-grandpa’s barn and he was a serious badass who raised my grandpa who was a sweet dude who raised my dad, who got sick and died way too young and, yeah, my family, which is pretty much just me at this point, only owns a few acres out of the three hundred and twenty we once did, but look at what I have?” He gestured with his hand. “Half this shit is from my family, half this shit I collected because it reminds me of my family.”

  “It’s so cool.”

  “It’s not anything until you make something of your inheritance, though, right?”

  “Yeah?” I said.

  “So that notebook of yours, that football talk got me thinking one way. And then my damn cocktail drum set got me thinking another way.”

  “What about your drum set?”

  “Shit, my drums. You know my grandpa played the flugelhorn in a damn oompah band?”

  “I don’t know what an oompah band is.”

  “Polka, bro. He and the Krauts around here played the oompah music and all the farm ladies danced till the sun went down.”

  “That sounds good. I like that.”

  “Me too, man. And my dad? Before the sickness took him, he was like this incredible heavy metal drummer, okay? There are pictures at the high school of him in the pep band, but that wasn’t his joy. He and some dudes from Hazel Green had a hair metal band and they played every weekend. The Bluffton girls and the Cuba City boys, they all put on their makeup and hair-sprayed their hair up to the damn moon and tied bandannas on their ripped jeans and headed out to head bang till the sun went down. Actually, probably more until the sun came up for that crew.”

  “Cool.”

  “Hell yeah, it was. And this is my legacy, you know? That music, which I can’t play—that’s what the drum set has taught me, I have no damn rhythm.”

  “Ha,” I laughed. Joey makes me laugh even when I’m broken.

  “And this land and all these incredible pieces of junk that I’ve just let lie on the ground, like with no respect. I have to respect my inheritance!”

  “Yeah?” I said.

  “So, check this out.” Joey open
ed the door between the front room and the back room. “This is my football, dude. And I was wrong. It’s not monoculture. It’s all my culture coming together to build one great thing.”

  I was expecting to see greatness, but what I saw was a low wall built of stones running across the room toward the back. It was only about a foot high.

  “You making a stone . . . something?”

  “You can’t see it?” Joey asked. “Use your imagination.”

  I tried, but I couldn’t see anything but the little wall. “Huh,” I said.

  “It’s a stage. I’m making a stage. This barn has just been sitting out here for years gathering the dust and detritus of my soul. I’m bringing it back to life. Weirdest music venue around, okay? I even pulled some building permits from the city. They’re down. I’m going to call it the Flugel Rock, after Grandpa and Dad. And that stage? It’s not even close to done.” He walked to the back and opened the door. A giant pile of blond stone sat behind the barn, ready to turn it into a beautiful stage. “I paid Jerry Wiegel seven hundred fat ones to unload the rock here—I’m going to need your brawny help lifting these mothers. I can’t move most by myself, not even with my wagon.”

  “Of course, I’ll help. If I’m not in jail.”

  “What?”

  “Nothing, nothing.”

  He pointed to the pile. “These rocks, bro, they’re the bell tower from Church of the Hills. My great-grandpa built that tower! These rocks held up a four-hundred-pound bronze bell that finally cracked after seventy-five years or whatever. Then what? The rocks had no purpose. And the church died, so they just stood out there like some grave marker? No way. They’re going to hold people making beautiful music, just like they held that bell calling everyone to worship the great eyeball in the sky all those years.”

  I walked over, bent down, and put my hand on one of the cut stones. “The tower is never for nothing. The pieces can be reused for a new purpose.”

  “Yeah, man!”

  “The energy isn’t destroyed. It just changes form,” I said.

  “You can’t destroy the energy!” Joey said. “Let’s go cook up those pizzas.”