Are You Sitting Down?

  I would definitely have felt alone in this world without them.

  Mr. Black

  After picking up the newspaper and cut up Christmas lights from Helen’s cleaning frenzy, I collapsed on the sofa to channel surf. Wholesome black and white holiday movies were repeated on every channel. I left the television on some version of Dicken’s A Christmas Carol which I may or may not have seen before. I thought I heard the basement door open and Helen going down the stairs, but Helen never went in the basement. The only thing down there was my train menagerie, something to tinker with when I was at home. I was too tired from work to care where she had gone. Although school was out, I’d been responsible for cleaning the furnace and checking the heating units in each room.

  I became the janitor at the high school about a year after Justin graduated. The position had been open when Justin was a sophomore, but he begged me not to apply for it because me working there would embarrass him. I had been in accounting during much of my marriage, and landed another desk job with a local furniture company till Justin graduated. When the janitor position came open again, I immediately jumped in line for it. I was tired of crunching numbers, and the pay was the same.

  Only one or two of the kids knew me from church. They nodded at me like they would to anyone on the street, but never spoke. To the others, I was just a strange man mopping the hallways. I was always in their way and they were always in mine. Some would smile and whisper, “Excuse me,” when stepping over my dust mop. Others rolled their eyes, blaming me when they walked into my dust pile because they weren’t paying attention to where they were going.

  I got to work late nights when there was a dance or a ball game. It was a good and legitimate excuse to be away from the house and away from Helen. I made a habit of taking my time so that I didn’t get home until around midnight. Helen had long since gone to bed by then, so I always fell asleep on the sofa watching television.

  I was amazed at the number of used condoms I found under the bleachers. When sitting on the bleachers, if you try hard enough you can look down between the foot boards and see the floor underneath. It’s dark, lit only by the light that comes through those small gaps, and littered with candy wrappers, gum, popcorn kernels, and spilled drinks. The bleachers were nestled between two flights of stairs. The gym was open and sunken into the main floor. You could climb down the bleachers or look down over the gym from the cafeteria up above, or you could walk down the stairs to access the basketball court and the bottom of the bleachers. There were locker rooms at either end and, despite their putrid lingering smell of sour body odor, they tended to be popular places for kids to sneak off to as well.

  Although the bleachers were retractable and folded up into the wall for you to be able to clean underneath them easier, there was a door at either end that led below them next to the stairwell. It was a safety precaution to retrieve keys or cell phones so that the unfortunate owner didn’t have to wait till the end of the night for the bleachers to be retracted. The doors should remain locked to prevent kids from playing underneath, or doing other things, but I intentionally left them unlocked on “active” nights. Finding the refuse of sloppy teen love-making excited me. I wish I could have had this job much earlier in my life, and before prophylactics were treated with spermicidal lubricants. Helen could have had another child.

  I think another reason the kids all ignored me was because I had caught several of them during their trysts on game night or during the prom. If I kept the bleacher doors locked that night, like a spy, I hung out in the crowd leaning against the rails up above to watch the game. Young hand-holding couples loitered in the stairwell and waited for when no one was watching. Discovering the door was locked, the guy cursed the heavens. The girl told him to forget about it, but he was determined to get laid. He would tell her to c’mon and then pull her up the stairs. They’d disappear into the hallway leading to the classrooms. I gave them five or ten minutes to find a comfortable spot. The library was quite popular because it had sofas and overstuffed chairs, another door I purposely left unlocked sometimes.

  Now, the principal was totally unaware of any of this happening because I never reported anyone. I’d sneak off behind the teens and almost make a game of trying to find them. Groans of ecstasy echoing down the hallway usually made them easy to find. I’d sneak up on them, hoping to get a peak of a butt or a flash of a boob. Then, I cleared my throat and put on my deep booming scolding voice.

  “What’s going on here?”

  They always frantically jumped to their feet to put their clothes back on, if any garments had been taken off at all. The boy would turn red in the face while zipping up his fly. The girl turned angry, buttoning her blouse. I’d offer to give them a break this time and not report them because they were such “good kids,” although I had no idea if they were well mannered or not. A couple of the guys even bribed me with money before walking back to the game. I could always tell the bribers from the rest just by the nice expensive shoes they wore, and so, I let them speak first and take out their fine leather wallets. Who knew that pretending to be a hall monitor could pay so well?

  I’m taken aback when I come across two boys who have hooked up and crept down the halls. They never went together. One would wander off, pretending to go to the restrooms although there were toilets right by the gym, and the other followed five or ten minutes later. They’ve obviously prearranged a place to meet up. I’ve never found two boys in the library. Being comfortable isn’t as important for two guys, I guess. Most of the time, I came across them in one of the boys’ bathroom stalls or in the lighting balcony in the theater. I took my time breaking them up. If I have a good view, sometimes I ignored them all together.

  I memorized their faces so that I could be sure to avoid them if I ever saw them in the park. Letting one of them get in my car could put my job in jeopardy if I ever pissed one of them off at school. Backseat etiquette, if there was such a thing, was to never say anything if you run into one another outside the park. I’ve never had that problem so far, but now I cruise a park closer to the outskirts of town. It’s closer to the neighboring county’s school, so few of these kids will travel there just to get off.

  Occasionally, I do see some frail pimple faced kid who probably borrowed his parent’s car and lied about some study night at a friend’s house. He thinks he’s the only questioning kid in town, and he heard about this nameless park in a chat room online. His heart is racing because he’s driven all the way out here and he has no idea why. Rather than sit in his car, he’s out walking the trails and sitting on top of the picnic tables. The other men in cars see him but they won’t approach him for fear of spooking him. It’s tempting, but they know he’s new and will eventually learn the ropes.

  Maybe nothing happens, and the kid jumps back in his town car and leaves, or maybe he disappears in the woods with someone taking advantage of his vulnerability. I’ll pass the kid in the hallway on Monday. Before, he stood to the right side of the hall with a clutch of books in his hand and his eyes on the ground. He was one of the few kids still carrying a backpack. He’s a math or chemistry nerd with an expensive calculator. After his trip to the park over the weekend, sometimes he looks the same. But sometimes, his chin is up and he makes eye contact now. He’s tucked his thick black glasses into his pocket and put some gel in his hair. It’s on those occasions I can pretty much guess what happened to him in the park that night.

  Someone made him a man.

  I never saw the same two guys together twice and rarely caught the same guy and girl together. The girls are usually the repeat offenders. Sluts. The most popular one was a girl named Danyele Child. With as many times as I had busted her having sex in the library or in a classroom, I had caught glimpses of almost every part of her naked body. Danyele’s boobs were big, with some boy’s face often buried between them. She was thin, like all of these voyeur girls, and the sight of her ribs when she arched back on a sofa or desk made me sick. Her full bodied, long hair
reminded me of some rock star girl on the hood of a car in a music video. Her confident demeanor made you believe she could snap the head off her lover’s neck once he fell between her thighs.

  Danyele used that appeal to her advantage in the classroom as well. It was not uncommon to find her sitting in the front of the class and wearing a low cut blouse if the teacher was tough. I wasn’t supposed to see how she charmed Professor White that day in the biology lab last semester.

  Professor White had requested extra trash cans every day that week because the labs would be dissecting frogs. They would need them for disposal of the waste. After each class, Professor White would collect the smaller trash bags and put them into one large can in the supply closet at the back of the class. The supply closet was a walk through space shared by the Biology lab on one side and the Chemistry lab on the other. When the Chemistry lab was not in use, Professor White would push the larger trash can to the outside of the door so I could come by and collect it. On this day, he’d left the door on the Chemistry lab side cracked open. When I stopped by after the first class to collect the trash, I saw Danyele with Professor White inside the supply closet.

  Martin White was a well respected member of both the staff and the community. I knew he was Travis’s brother, and I’d seen him with his wife and kids around town shopping or dining. Despite all of the very public hardships Lorraine White’s family had been through over the past few years, such severity seemed to have skipped over Martin White. His rendezvous with a temptress like Danyele Child was on the threshold of changing all of that.

  Being a large man, there was no place for me to hide and spy on them. Any communication between them outside the classroom was kept to a bare minimum and practically nonexistent. That didn’t stop her from still getting caught with two football players in the girl’s restroom one night at a basketball game. There was no way Martin White could be thinking clearly. He’d been seduced by her only to secure a passing grade, and so I felt the need to save him. Their actions angered me, and I knew he was in need of an intervention.

  I took a chance they would eventually make plans to meet earlier in the day, so I made it a habit to sweep the hallways on the Science hall just after Professor White arrived each morning. One morning, Danyele arrived at the lab before Professor White did. I ducked into an empty classroom so she wouldn’t see me. She was eyeing her watch and soon stepped into the dark supply closet out of sight. On an impulse, I approached the closet through the Chemistry lab. Grabbing a heavy microscope off one of the tables, I swung the door open and caught Danyele by surprise. Her blouse was unbuttoned. She looked at me, quite startled as I stepped into the closet. The look on her face told me she was trying to think up some sort of excuse for her being there.

  Before she had a chance to scream, I smacked her across the face with the scope. She fell to the floor in a heap, knocked out cold. I crushed her skull with the microscope again to be sure she would not wake up, and then I buttoned her blouse back up. I had no interest in what was underneath. Without hesitation, I picked her up and dumped her into the large trash can and covered her with smaller bags of waste.

  I flipped on the light in the closet to clean up any trace of what I’d done. The floor was surprisingly clean except for a small pool of blood and some spattered on a cabinet door. The scope had a bit of blood on it too and was dented. I buried it in the trash with her and wheeled the can to the boiler room. I came back to the lab right away for a second look just to make sure nothing looked out of place.

  Professor White had still not arrived. Upon returning to the boiler room, only then did I come to realize what I had just done. I had no choice but to dispose of her body, but could not risk doing it now at the beginning of the school day. I would wait until the end of the day when classes were out and the building was empty. I locked the trash can in one of my broom closets and then returned to the hallways to go on with my daily chores.

  “Good Morning, Manny,” Professor White said passing me in the hallway.

  He seemed as if he was in a rush to get to the lab, although classes didn’t start for another hour.

  “Do you need extra trash cans today, Professor White?” I asked.

  “Not today. We’ll be dissecting fish in a few more weeks and will need some then. I’ll give you plenty of advance notice.” He turned the corner to the Science hall and disappeared before I could reply.

  Without him seeing me, I cut through a few of the classrooms to a view through the windows to his lab. I watched as he knocked on the closet door. When no one answered, he opened the door slowly and peeked in. I could see his mouth moving. I imagined he was calling out to Danyele lovingly, or whispering words of affection to her, although I could not hear him. Through the window in the closet door, I saw the light come on. Professor White came back out with a puzzled look on his face. He sat down at his desk and crossed his arms, waiting.

  First hour came and went. Danyele was in the second hour lab. He seemed uninterested by her empty desk, probably assuming that she was just absent for the day. I knew I’d have to act fast by the end of the day. When Danyele didn’t return home after school, her parents would call all of her friends first. Upon discovering her friends didn’t see her at school all day, they would contact the police.

  After school, I kept to my usual schedule as well to avoid looking suspicious to anyone. I stopped in at Greer’s Grocery to pick up supper for Helen and me, and then went home. After eating, I told Helen I had to go back to work which is something I did at least two or three nights a week anyway. There was always something to do to pass the night away. The parking lot was empty and the front doors locked. I was in the clear for what I needed to do.

  It was six weeks before summer vacation. The school was heated by an old radiator system which wouldn’t need to be turned on until late November. Heat was generated by a huge gas boiler that looked like a giant furnace or stove you’d expect to see in some old steel mill. It was massive and black with soot and grease. In the dark, the red and yellow of the fire inside made it glow like a monster. With a wrench, I turned on the gas. A match lit the gut of the thing with an intense whooshing sound, and the smell of heat filled the air for a minute or two like on the first day of winter. The dial on the outside, measuring the degree of heat, quickly rose to 870 degrees.

  I found a pair of work gloves and opened the two iron doors on the side, which was already as hot as an oven. Flames licked at the edges of the open space. I adjusted the gas to pull the fire back inside while I retrieved the trash can from the utility closet. My stomach churned to find it empty if Danyele had escaped, but the bags of trash on top under the weight of the microscope were undisturbed. I pulled them out to look down inside. Danyele was still there, pale with eyes open. She looked frozen. Blood had painted most of her face and matted her hair. The slut didn’t look so likable now.

  I tossed the smaller bags of trash into the belly of the heat. A singe of the plastic expelled air from one of the bags like a popped balloon. The rubbish spilled out across the broad grill and ignited, eventually dripping into the bottom as black liquid matter and ash. The vapors from the extreme warmth inside clouded my eyes. I tipped the trash can off its wheels and over onto its side. Pulling at the plastic still wrapped over the sides, I was able to maneuver her out of the can without having to touch her. The strength of the bag amazed me as I pulled at it to wrap it tight around her. It never broke once, not even when I pulled up to lift her body off the ground.

  With my arms now underneath her, the feel of collected blood in the bottom of the bag felt like a full bladder of water or an IV drip. It squelched in my grasp and I was afraid it would break. If blood spilled on my clothes, I would have to burn them too. There was a mechanic’s jump suit in my utility closet which I could wear home if it came to that. Pinched between her lifeless body and my arms, luckily the bag never broke.

  I supported the weight of her upper body in the palm of my hand, pushing her head first into the boiler
. Once her shoulders touched the retort, it was easier to grab her by the legs and push her completely in. I folded her legs under so I could close the doors. The trash bag had already started to cling to her like shrink wrap on a gift basket. A sporadic hissing sound came from her blood dripping on the grill like water on a camp fire.

  Had it been winter yet, the boiler room would have been nice and toasty in only a matter of a few minutes after I turned up the gas. The smell of cauterized flesh and burning hair did not invade my nostrils because I stepped out to clean the restrooms to pass some time. Three hours later, I touched one of the radiator units in the hallway. It was just turning luke warm. I returned to the boiler room and stood next to the furnace listening to its crackle. It did not sound like the rapid burning of anything inside, only the steady flicker of flame slowly providing heat to the building. I turned down the gas and opened the doors to look inside.

  The retort glowed and the grill was empty. Danyele Child was now a pile of cremains, bone fragments, and one badly charred shoe in the bottom of the boiler. I dimmed the flames to only a glint and doused the base with a bit of gasoline I kept in a squirt bottle, soaking the pile of ash and the shoe. I shut the door again before turning the flame back up. An explosive flash lit the inside of the boiler as the gas ignited. I let it burn for another two hours before shutting the boiler down.

  The police did come the next day. They took the contents of Danyele’s locker and held a meeting with the teachers, then had a meeting with just the teachers who had Danyele in class. Professor White looked nervous, but he didn’t look guilty. With no breaks in the case, and the headlines in the paper moving on to some dead girl who had overdosed in Martin’s brother’s apartment, Danyele faded and became a yearbook dedication. A rumor surfacedd that her locker was haunted.

  Before the end of summer break, the boiler always had to be cleaned and checked. I removed the few remains from the bottom and put them in a bag with the microscope, which until now I had kept hidden. I wrapped the bag in duct tape and thought about burying it. Instead, I threw it off the Nicks Bridge late one night. The scope made a perfect anchor to sink the bag to the bottom of the muddy Forked Deer River.