Dexter in the Dark

CHAPTER 15

B EING FOURTEEN YEARS OLD IS NEVER EASY, EVEN FOR artificial humans. It’s the age where biology takes over, and even when the fourteen-year-old in question is more interested in clinical biology than the sort more popular with his classmates at Ponce de Leon Junior High, it still rules with an iron hand.

One of the categorical imperatives of puberty that applies even to young monsters is that nobody over the age of twenty knows anything. And since Harry was well over twenty at this point, I had gone into a brief period of rebellion against his unreasonable restraints on my perfectly natural and wholesome desires to hack my school chums into little bits.

Harry had laid out a wonderfully logical plan to get me squared away, which was his term for making things-or people-neat and orderly. But there is nothing logical about a fledgling Dark Passenger flexing its wings for the first time and beating them against the bars of the cage, yearning to fling itself into the free air and fall on its prey like a sharp steel thunderbolt.

Harry knew so many things I needed to learn to become safely and quietly me, to turn me from a wild, blossoming monster into the Dark Avenger: how to act human, how to be certain and careful, how to clean up afterward. He knew all these things as only an old cop could know them. I understood this, even then-but it all seemed so dull and unnecessary.

And Harry couldn’t really know everything, after all. He could not know, for example, about Steve Gonzalez, a particularly charming example of pubescent humanity who had earned my attention.

Steve was larger than me, and at a year or two older; he already had something on his upper lip that he referred to as a mustache. He was in my PE class and felt it his God-given duty to make my life miserable whenever possible. If he was right, God must have been very pleased with the effort he put into it.

This was long before Dexter became the Living Ice Cube, and a certain amount of heated and very hard feeling built up inside. This seemed to please Steve and urge him on to greater heights of creativity in his persecution of the simmering young Dexter. We both knew this could end only one way, but alas for him, it was not the way Steve had in mind.

And so one afternoon an unfortunately industrious janitor stumbled into the biology lab at Ponce de Leon to find Dexter and Steve sorting out their personality conflict. It was not quite the classical middle-school face-off of filthy words and swinging fists, although I believe that might have been what Steve had in mind. But he had not reckoned with confronting the young Dark Passenger, and so the janitor found Steve securely taped to the table with a swatch of gray duct tape over his mouth, and Dexter standing above him with a scalpel, trying to remember what he had learned in biology class the day they dissected the frog.

Harry came to get me in his police cruiser, in uniform. He listened to the outraged assistant principal, who described the scene, quoted the student handbook, and demanded to know what Harry was going to do about it. Harry just looked at the assistant principal until the man’s words dribbled away into silence. He looked at him a moment longer, for effect, and then he turned his cold blue eyes on me.

“Did you do what he says you did, Dexter?” he asked me.

There was no possibility of evasion or falsehood in the grip of that stare. “Yes,” I said, and Harry nodded.

“You see?” the assistant principal said. He thought he was going to say more, but Harry turned the look back on him and he fell silent again.

Harry looked back at me. “Why?” he said.

“He was picking on me.” That sounded somewhat feeble, even to me, so I added, “A lot. All the time.”

“And so you taped him to a table,” he said, with very little inflection.

“Uh-huh.”

“And you picked up a scalpel.”

“I wanted him to stop,” I said.

“Why didn’t you tell somebody?” Harry asked me.

I shrugged, which was a large portion of my working vocabulary in those days.

“Why didn’t you tell me?” he asked.

“I can take care of it,” I said.

“Looks like you didn’t take care of it so well,” he said.

There seemed to be very little I could do, so naturally enough I chose to look at my feet. They apparently had very little to add to the discussion, however, so I looked up again. Harry still watched me, and somehow he no longer needed to blink. He did not seem angry, and I was not really afraid of him, and that somehow made it even more uncomfortable.

“I’m sorry,” I said at last. I wasn’t sure if I meant it-for that matter, I’m still not sure I can really be sorry for anything I do. But it seemed like a very politic remark, and nothing else burbled up in my teenaged brain, simmering as it was with an oatmeal-thick sludge of hormones and uncertainty. And although I am sure Harry didn’t believe that I was sorry, he nodded again.

“Let’s go,” he said.

“Just a minute,” the assistant principal said. “We still have things to discuss.”

“You mean the fact that you let a known bully push my boy to this kind of confrontation because of poor supervision? How many times has the other boy been disciplined?”

“That’s not the point-” the assistant principal tried to say.

“Or are we talking about the fact that you left scalpels and other dangerous equipment unsecured and easily available to students in an unlocked and unsupervised classroom?”

“Really, Officer-”

“I tell you what,” Harry said. “I promise to overlook your extremely poor performance in this matter, if you agree to make a real effort to improve.”

“But this boy-” he tried to say.

“I will deal with this boy,” Harry said. “You deal with fixing things so I don’t have to call in the school board.”

And that, of course, was that. There was never any question of contradicting Harry, whether you were a murder suspect, the president of the Rotary Club, or a young errant monster. The assistant principal opened and closed his mouth a few more times, but no actual words came out, just a sort of sputtering sound combined with throat-clearing. Harry watched him for a moment, and then turned to me. “Let’s go,” he said again.

Harry was silent all the way out to the car, and it was not a chummy silence. He did not speak as we drove away from the school and turned north on Dixie Highway -instead of heading around the school in the other direction, Granada to Hardee and over to our little house in the Grove. I looked at him as he made his turn, but he still had nothing to say, and the expression on his face did not seem to encourage conversation. He looked straight ahead at the road, and drove-fast, but not so fast he had to turn on the siren.

Harry turned left on 17th Avenue, and for a few moments I had the irrational thought that he was taking me to the Orange Bowl. But we passed the turnoff for the stadium and kept going, over the Miami River and then right on North River Drive, and now I knew where we were going but I didn’t know why. Harry still hadn’t said a word or looked in my direction, and I was beginning to feel a certain oppression creeping into the afternoon that had nothing to do with the storm clouds that were beginning to gather on the horizon.

Harry parked the cruiser and at last he spoke. “Come on,” he said. “Inside.” I looked at him, but he was already climbing out of the car, so I got out, too, and followed him meekly into the detention center.

Harry was well known here, as he was everywhere a good cop might be known. He was followed by calls of “Harry!” and “Hey, Sarge!” all the way through the receiving area and down the hall to the cell block. I simply trudged behind him as my sense of grim foreboding grew. Why had Harry brought me to the jail? Why wasn’t he scolding me, telling me how disappointed he was, devising harsh but fair punishment for me?

Nothing he did or refused to say offered me any clues. So I trailed along behind. We were stopped at last by one of the guards. Harry took him to one side and spoke quietly; the guard looked over at me, nodded, and led us to the end of the cell block. “Here he is,” the guard said. “Enjoy yourself.” He nodded at the figure in the cell, glanced at me briefly, and walked away, leaving Harry and me to resume our uncomfortable silence.

Harry did nothing to break the silence at first. He turned and stared into the cell, and the pale shape inside moved, stood up, and came to the bars. “Why it’s Sergeant Harry!” the figure said happily. “How are you, Harry? So nice of you to drop by.”

“Hello, Carl,” Harry said. At last he turned to me and spoke. “This is Carl, Dexter.”

“What a handsome lad you are, Dexter,” Carl said. “Very pleased to meet you.”

The eyes Carl turned on me were bright and empty, but behind them I could almost see a huge dark shadow, and something inside me twitched and tried to slink away from the larger and fiercer thing that lived there beyond the bars. He was not in himself particularly large or fierce-looking-he was even pleasant in a very superficial way, with his neat blond hair and regular features-but there was something about him that made me very uneasy.

“They brought Carl in yesterday,” Harry said. “He’s killed eleven people.”

“Oh, well,” Carl said modestly, “more or less.”

Outside the jail, the thunder crashed and the rain began. I looked at Carl with real interest; now I knew what had unsettled my Dark Passenger. We were just starting out, and here was somebody who had already been there and back, on eleven occasions, more or less. For the first time I understood how my classmates at Ponce might feel when they came face-to-face with an NFL quarterback.

“Carl enjoys killing people,” Harry said matter-of-factly. “Don’t you, Carl?”

“It keeps me busy,” Carl said happily.

“Until we caught you,” Harry said bluntly.

“Well, yes, there is that of course. Still…” he shrugged and gave Harry a very phony-looking smile, “it was fun while it lasted.”

“You got careless,” Harry said.

“Yes,” Carl said. “How could I know the police would be so very thorough?”

“How do you do it?” I blurted out.

“It’s not so hard,” Carl said.

“No, I mean-Um, like how?”

Carl looked at me searchingly, and I could almost hear a purring coming from the shadow just past his eyes. For a moment our eyes locked and the world was filled with the black sound of two predators meeting over one small, helpless prey. “Well, well,” Carl said at last. “Can it really be?” He turned to Harry just as I was beginning to squirm. “So I’m supposed to be an object lesson, is that it, Sergeant? Frighten your boy onto the straight and narrow path to godliness?”

Harry stared back, showing nothing, saying nothing.

“Well, I’m afraid I have to tell you that there is no way off this particular path, poor dear Harry. When you are on it, you are on it for life, and possibly beyond, and there is nothing you or I or the dear child here can do about it.”

“There’s one thing,” Harry said.

“Really,” Carl said, and now a slow black cloud seemed to be rising up around him, coalescing on the teeth of his smile, spreading its wings out toward Harry, and toward me. “And what might that be, pray tell?”

“Don’t get caught,” Harry said.

For a moment the black cloud froze, and then it drew back and vanished. “Oh my God,” Carl said. “How I wish I knew how to laugh.” He shook his head slowly, from side to side. “You’re serious, aren’t you? Oh my God. What a wonderful dad you are, Sergeant Harry.” And he gave us such a huge smile that it almost looked real.

Harry turned his full ice-blue gaze on me now.

“He got caught,” Harry said to me, “because he didn’t know what he was doing. And now he will go to the electric chair. Because he didn’t know what the police were doing. Because,” Harry said without raising his voice at all and without blinking, “he had no training.”

I looked at Carl, watching us through the thick bars with his too-bright dead empty eyes. Caught. I looked back at Harry. “I understand,” I said.

And I did.

That was the end of my youthful rebellion.

And now, so many years later-wonderful years, filled with slicing and dicing and not getting caught-I truly knew what a remarkable gamble Harry had taken by introducing me to Carl. I could never hope to measure up to his performance-after all, Harry did things because he had feelings and I never would-but I could follow his example and make Cody and Astor toe the line. I would gamble, just as Harry had.

They would follow or not.