Raleigh's Prep

Pounds of Flesh-1

Pounds of FleshThe dead body sat in the middle of the playing field, looking like a pile of rags melting into the ground. Zorn saw it and stopped jogging, thinking it might be a drunk student passed out after a night’s partying. Why hadn’t his friends dragged him back to campus?

“Topher, look,” he said.

Topher stopped a few feet away, jogging in place.

“Quit making excuses and run, you slug. You’ll never survive this place in your condition.”

“No, really.”

Topher rolled his eyes and looked, squinting against the sun rising over the campus.

“I’ll be damned.”

The smell hit them at the thirty-yard line. It reminded Zorn of the time the meat freezer in his parents’ basement died. He and Topher pulled their shirts up over their noses and came to a stop on either side of the pile. There were scraps of clothes and shards of bone and red stuff all mixed together like a salad, and it was big and wet and sticky looking. Flies had begun to gather.

“Phew,” Zorn said. “I am ripe.”

“Not as ripe as that.”

Gertrude (whose real name was Kenneth) finally caught up to them, winded and confused.

“What are you doing?” Then, seeing the bloody mound, “what’s that?”

Topher crossed his arms. “Well,” he said, squatting down to get a better view. “That’s a finger.”

“Where?”

“Right there, next to the spleen.”

Gertrude put his hands on his knees.

“How do you know that’s a spleen?”

“It’s either a spleen or a bladder.”

A buzzard swooped down and landed on the mound, which shifted. Something plopped on the grass. Gertrude turned green. The stench, the offal, the machine-like buzzing of the flies, it was all too much. The bird plucked something out of the mess, something long and stringy, and he trotted off to the edge of the track and threw up. At the same time, a pickup truck, primer gray with calico patches of rust, came bounding over the maintenance road, engine revving.

“Oh no,” Zorn whispered. “Mr. Floyd.”

Mr. Floyd was the grounds keeper. Though the boys had only been at Raleigh’s for a few weeks, they’d heard rumors about his meanness, and his drunkenness, and his mean drunkenness, and now they were about to experience all of it first hand, beginning with being bounced along in the payload of his truck, plastic zip ties binding their hands. Gertrude looked miserably out at the passing fields. He had been hit hardest by the whole ordeal: the accident, the fire, the trial and incarceration. His family was tightly knit and, unlike his friends’, still alive. He had promised his mother there would be no more of the shenanigans that landed him there in the first place, and now he was already tangled up in the death of another student. There were no second chances at Raleigh’s Prep: any student caught breaking any rule was subject to the sternest possible punishment. In some very few cases that meant some kind of beating or flogging in the courtyard, but for most it meant one thing and one thing only. Expulsion. And expulsion meant prison.

Real prison.

With prison cells and prison food and prison rape.

Not that there weren’t rapists at Raleigh’s, but at least they were wealthy rapists.

Topher watched him for a while, looking for signs of weakness or instability. Would he cry? Was he angry? The latter was more his worry than the former. Gertrude was easily a foot taller and fifty pounds heavier, even without the furs and beard. He’d once seen him lift an entire keg over his head in a drunken rage and throw it through a sliding glass door.

“Are you all right, Gertrude?” he cried over the wind. Gertrude continued to stare at the passing fields. “Gertrude! Are you all right?”

Gertrude said nothing. Topher kicked him. Gertrude still didn’t respond. Zorn put a hand on Topher’s foot.

“Leave him alone. I’ll talk to him later.”

The payload hit a bump, sending them all a few inches into the air with startled cries. Zorn ended up on the truck bed.

Topher beat on the window with his fists.

“Damn your hide, Mr. Floyd!”

Mr. Floyd shot them a glance, then whipped the window back.

“You mind yourself there, boy. You three in a heap of trouble already.”

Then he slammed it back and locked it into place.

“The man is a moron,” Topher cried to the wind.

Gertrude nudged him with his foot.

“Here comes the campus.”

Topher craned his neck to see how fast they would get there. Who would be awake in the courtyard at this hour to witness their arrest? What a wonderful rumor that would create. Whispers in The Grotto: The new kids were caught eating a dead student! His standing with the older boys would skyrocket. Especially if they were all flogged or beaten.

“Do you think that ass, Brimstone, will be awake at this hour?”

Zorn stretched his legs, resting his feet on the tailgate.

“Why do you ask?”

“He wants somebody to see us,” Gertrude said. “He wants to be associated with the murder.”

Topher was offended.

“I do not want just anybody to see us. I want that ass Brimstone to see us. How do you know it was a murder?”

Gertrude shot him an incredulous look.

“You saw the body. How could that not be a murder?”

“Perhaps he had a virus. Maybe he died of natural causes, and then was eaten by wild dogs. Did I not tell you of the bloodcurdling howl I heard this morning?”

The pickup emerged from the path and stopped parallel to the forest.

“It doesn’t matter,” Gertrude said. “We’ll be expelled before breakfast.”

“Oh don’t be such a baby.”

Mr. Floyd cut the engine, which knocked and pinged before finally coming to rest. The door opened with a crack and a whine and he jolted out, his boots crunching on the gravel as he stalked around to the tailgate. He surveyed the grounds, but other than a few voices floating out of the dorm windows, the coast was clear. Satisfied, he turned on them and snarled, “Get out! Get!”

Topher stared back like a dumb beast. Gertrude merely glanced at him. When it was clear they weren’t going to move, Mr. Floyd leaned in, yanked Zorn out by his wrists, then Topher, then Gertrude.

“Line up against the truck.”

They did as they were told, shooting each other wary glances.

“Aren’t you going to bring us to the headmaster?” Topher squeaked.

“Shut up,” Mr. Floyd growled. “Now listen. I’m gonna ignore the fact that you boys was out of your rooms before morning roll. I’m gonna ignore the fact that you been sass talking me all morning. Now one of ya’ll tell me what you seen out there on the field.”

“A bloody cor—” Zorn began, but Mr. Floyd backhanded him across the face before he could finish. The crack echoed in the morning. Crows in the nearby trees cawed in complaint and flapped away into the distance. A red welt swelled on Zorn’s cheek.

“Now listen to me very closely,” Mr. Floyd repeated, breathing hard. His breath smelled sharp, like rotten apples. “Tell me. What you boys seen. Out there. On the field.”

“Well,” Topher said. “I believe Zorn was trying to tell you that we saw a dead body befo—”

Mr. Floyd backhanded him, too. He fixed his eyes upon Gertrude, who shrank back a little

“You. Tell me what you seen out there on the field.”

“Certainly not a dead body.”

Gertrude shut his eyes tight, waiting for the blow. The birds in the trees awoke and sang, and a strong breeze whooshed through the leaves. He opened one eye. Mr. Floyd was smiling at him, which was a terrible thing. He raised his chin at Gertrude.

“This one here’s the smartest one of all ya’ll. Now listen, I’m gonna tell you boys what you seen out there.” He pulled a hunting knife out of a sheath on his belt and waggled it menacingly. “You ain’t seen nothing, got it?” Gertrude nodded furiously. “Now, if you go around spreading any rumors—” He shoved the knife between the boy’s wrists and began to saw back and forth.

“No!” Gertrude cried, but then the zip ties were cut and he was free. Zorn was next, then Topher, and then all three were standing there, free, frowning in their confusion.

“Get outta here,” Mr. Floyd spat.

They didn’t move.

“I said GET!”

They took a few cautious steps away from the truck, waiting for some kind of trick. Mr. Floyd twirled the knife in his hand, then Zorn reached over and grabbed Topher by the sleeve and pulled him away, and all three sprinted off.

The grounds keeper watched them cut across the grass and head up the brick path that led to the courtyard. When he was sure that they weren’t coming back, he limped to the driver’s side door and eased himself inside. The pickup started with a throaty roar. He put it in gear and spun the wheel around, heading back the way he had just come, back to the field.

When he was sure they were out of earshot, Topher said, “A near miss. We’ll have to be more careful.”

Zorn patted his belly.

“I’m hungry.”

“Today’s sausage day at The Grotto. I love sausage day.”

The thought of sausage links reminded Gertrude of the corpse on the field, particularly its—

“Perhaps I’ll just have a fruit cup.”

Topher fell silent, which unsettled his roommates. When Topher fell silent it meant one of three things:

1. that he was plotting to vomit.

2. that he was plotting some kind of tomfoolery.

3. that he was plotting to vomit as a measure of tomfoolery.

It was just such the combination that landed them in Raleigh’s in the first place, only in that case it wasn’t “vomit” and “tomfoolery,” but “arson” and “premeditated murder”.

Fortunately, all he did was remain silent and continue to walk, and Gertrude, feeling better now that they hadn’t gotten into trouble, began to think about his family.

“I wonder if my parents have built the new house yet.”

“Hardly,” Zorn replied. “They’ll have to wait for the check from the insurance company.”

“At least that’ll allow father’s wounds to heal. How long does it take skin to grow back?”

“It would make an excellent research project. I once burned my calf on the tailpipe of a moped. My doctor prescribed this greasy salve. I was supposed to rub it on the burn for two weeks, and so I did, but all it did was make the skin melt. I got a violent infection, and my leg nearly fell off. It took a full two months to recover.”

“Father’s in an oxygen tent. He’s fed intravenously.”

Brown shirted boys burst out of dormitory’s side doors, screaming like drill sergeants. Assistants. The worst of the worst, chosen specifically for their lack of empathy and daddy issues, sycophantic psychopaths assigned by administration to boss the other boys around, bully them, snoop through their belongings, and report any and all non-conformists, weirdos, oddballs, introverts, rebels, radicals, mopers, and ononists to Headmaster Stoneman .

“Get to breakfast!” they cried.

Topher despised them. He despised their short clipped hair and their crisp, button-up shirts. He despised their shiny black shoes, their pressed and pleated khakis. But most of all he despised their whistles, which they blew incessantly, red faced and angry, directly into the face of any peon who dared not immediately react to an order. Fortunately, they were unarmed. Stoneman was severe, but he wasn’t an i***t. Still, he ignored the little homemade blackjacks some of them carried, unless they were crazy enough to use them in the open, or if one were used in the commission of the death of another student, in which case his preferred method of punishment was more biblical than progressive.

“Beat the cur with his own tail and it will never disobey again,” he often said.

The door to Burleigh’s flew open, and Topher saw the Assistants that were assigned to their floor, Brimstone and Burr, stomp out onto the cobblestones, carrying on in their usual fashion, screaming at everybody to exit the dorm immediately, maggots, and get to chow.

“Just fall in with the crowd,” Topher muttered, and they did exactly that, wending their way into the mass of adolescents nearly trampling each other to get to breakfast and away from the brown shirted menace.