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Overview
The battle is nearly over. The outsiders—who came to Oakland looking for excitement—are about to get back on the highway and go home. But they hurt 1 of Zach’s friends, and he can’t let that stand. He hurls a chunk of concrete at their car, starting a fight that turns into a riot. The police flood the streets with teargas, and Zach gets lost in the chaos. In the melee, he finds something someone left behind—something that will poison his life. It’s a .38 pistol, and once he picks it up, he can’t let it go.
Zach hates violence, but since he quit high school, he feels its power creeping into his life every day. When his father is shot during a robbery, Zach’s newly found pistol gives him the power to take revenge—if his heart will let him pull the trigger.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781504019750 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Open Road Media |
| Publication date: | 09/29/2015 |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 216 |
| File size: | 955 KB |
| Age Range: | 12 - 17 Years |
About the Author
Michael Cadnum lives in Albany, California, with a view of the Golden Gate Bridge.
Read an Excerpt
Edge
By Michael Cadnum
OPEN ROAD INTEGRATED MEDIA
Copyright © 1997 Michael CadnumAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-5040-1975-0
CHAPTER 1
A bottle spun out of a car, a bright, beautiful burst against the pavement. It was dark, none of us had faces, and none of them either, headlights off, voices challenging us to come out into the street.
Earl was the one who changed everything, hopping out on one foot like a man with a peg leg, but it was only because he was getting ready to give a kick, his right leg cocked. He was dancing out there to kick a car, making a joke of it.
Everyone laughed. Even some of the refinery kids hooted, hanging out for once so we could see, faces like ours but strangers, people we would never know. But most of us didn't even know each other, kids from all over Oakland, a mix of races and attitudes. I hated all this, typical high school summer, none of us with anything better to do. I thought I had left this sort of thing behind.
When Earl went down it was because he was clumsy, kicking the rear end of a Chevy pickup and missing. He sat there afterward, looking around the way you do when you are hurt more than you expect. Or maybe he was milking the laughs.
"They hit him!"
What a thing to shout, a ragged lie, a big red headline in everybody's mind. It was me. I said it. I was sick of everyone standing around.
"Earl is hurt!" I cried. Earl did look badly hurt, once you looked at him that way, dumb with pain, his mouth slack, his head trying to look back, legs squished into place.
Look at him, I wanted to cry out.
Look at him, he's dying.
I glanced around at my feet for something to throw and lunged at the curb for a chunk of broken concrete. It was not as broken as it looked, stuck into the curb.
I dug my heel into the concrete, and it broke. I took a few running steps, brushing past people just standing there, unsure what to do. I threw the chunk as hard as I could. It punched into a car door, fragmenting.
For a moment it was all over. The concrete had burst, the car was dented. That was all. Nothing else was necessary, and we could all go home.
Then bodies poured from cars. Some of the drivers wrestled steering wheels around, deciding maybe it was time to head east along Lakeshore and take the freeway back north to the Chevron towns they came from, already having seen enough excitement. Driving a car — especially if it's your own car, even a hulk with the chassis rusted through — sometimes makes a person feel like playing it safe.
But half the passengers were already at us, fists swinging and hitting nothing, teeth gleaming. The police were swamped, helmeted heads in a tide of grabbing, punching bodies. A helicopter pounded the air overhead, licked us all with a searchlight, and then lurched upward, gaining altitude. Sirens sang, jagged high-low notes. It was one of the reasons I had quit school, tired of the violence.
The city of Oakland chains the trash cans around Lake Merritt. You pick them up and shake them and trash tumbles out, but you can't roll the cans away or hurl them out into the street; a heavy length of chain anchors them to a tree or a light pole. Freelance recycling collectors had been there ahead of us, and only garbage was left, but I found an empty orange juice bottle, a smiling fruit wearing sunglasses on the label.
I elbowed out into the crowd with a sour, dry taste in my mouth, because things were about to get really bad, people breathing hard, faces shining with blood. It took only a few moments before people were tired and scared, not fighting now so much as shoving, and the real trouble was about to start. I didn't know what I had in mind. Maybe I was going to break the bottle and use the broken edge on someone.
At the same time, I knew this was the kind of thing I hated, caught up with a bunch of kids I didn't respect, just as crazy as they were.
"I think I'm going to meet you up by the Mini Mart," Bea was saying, as loud as she could. I had to read her lips, Bea's voice lost in all the yelling and swearing, more cop cars approaching the edge of the crowd, amplified electronic commands.
She had a knit cap tugged down over her ears. "Wouldn't you like some ice cream?" she was saying: you come, too. It was just like her to state things indirectly. Bea has one of those crinkly voices. It sounds like she has to clear her throat half the time, but it's just her natural way of speaking.
I read the look in her eyes. I put down the glass bottle very carefully, knowing that someone else would knock it over or seize it and hurl it into someone's face. The cop cars have loudspeakers mounted inside, under the hoods. Cops can speak into a hand mike and the entire car is a loudspeaker announcing, This is an illegal assembly.
The explosion was soft, sickening, a giant water balloon. The gas was hard to see in the darkness, but the way people panicked surprised me, because I had seen movies where bad guys tie hankies over their faces and keep gunning down cops.
The teargas hit me, barbed wire across my eyes, and I went down to my hands and knees, ducking all the way under it. Feet trampled each other, and one huge foot ground my hand into the asphalt as I rolled, digging my way through the mob, yelling for Bea.
That was when I touched the cold steel, wrapping my fingers around it.
I hunched over my find, kneeling on the pavement. I crouched there, waiting for the avalanche of bodies to pass, people falling over me, the breath slugged from my body.
I slipped it into my pocket.
CHAPTER 2Lake Merritt is fresh water, mixed with salt tide from San Francisco Bay. The water has a smell, a room too full of people, or eggs going slightly bad. I took a moment to crouch beside the water as a family of ducks griped, looking over their feathered shoulders.
Traffic was backed up, the Oil Towners gone now, grass trampled and litter squashed out into the streets from the trash cans. My orange juice bottle was still there, a minor wonder, upright in the street.
The cops had their gas masks off, little lines on their cheeks from the pressure and the sweat. Talking into radios, writing reports. Flares had been lit on the pavement, dazzling magenta flames leaving ash like bone, and a traffic cop stood in the middle of the street, hands on his hips, watching the traffic.
I found a pay phone beside the library and got Bea's mother on the machine, her fake country western twang, "None of us are right here right now, I am very sorry to say," said Bea's mom, taking her time explaining what we could do after we heard the beep.
I hung up without leaving a message. I told myself Bea was too smart to get arrested or trampled to death.
There was no one home at Bea's house, just a front porch with bikes chained together and the TV set on a timer, CNN playing to an empty room.
A car door slammed, and there was Bea's mom in a full skirt and western boots, clumping up the slope of dried-up crabgrass. For a moment she didn't know who I was, maybe trouble waiting for her there on the porch.
"Look at you, Zachary, forlorn and lonely," she said before I could break my silence. One thing about Bea's mom, she always sounded happy. It cheered me up, sometimes, to watch her lip-sticky mouth. "Don't tell me you and Bea had a parting of the ways." Bea's mom had insisted I call her Rhonda, but I called her Mrs. Newport or else refrained from using any name at all.
"I just sort of lost track of her," I said, working on sounding casual.
"You look a little funny, Zachary," she said.
I made a casual gesture: funny, not-funny, what did it matter?
"Is Bea all right?" This was asked in a normal voice, for a second no country vanilla in her voice.
"Of course," I said. I made it sound macho: of course she's okay; she was with me.
Mrs. Newport had a solemn, stubby-looking man in tow in the darkness. She took square dancing lessons and went to Neon Leon's, a country western bar on San Pablo Avenue. She had been born and raised in South San Francisco but worked hard at her role. Her skirt looked like it had been made out of two or three red checkered tablecloths, but her blouse was pretty, little metal beads in the shape of a bucking bronco, when she turned on the porch light. She had leaned against me in the kitchen last New Year's Eve, her full weight pinning me to the dishwasher, telling me she could show me how to dance the Silverado two-step.
When I shook hands with the man I could feel the weight of the steel dragging down one side of my jacket. I didn't catch the man's name, and I didn't ask him to repeat it. Mrs. Newport kept a string of these guys around, phone numbers and business cards held to the fridge with poodle dog magnets.
Earl strode up the middle of Bella Vista Avenue with a liter bottle of grape soda. He was a perfect example of why I had dropped out of school, as he stopped to take a long drink and then belched almost musically, a clown even when he was alone.
My eyeballs felt like they had been soaked in Clorox. I liked Earl, in a way, but I didn't want to talk to him.
"Were you just in the Mini Mart?" I asked, working up to the subject obliquely, the way Bea does.
"No, I just found this lying around somewhere," said Earl, his way of saying: dumb question.
"You're not hurt, are you, Earl?" I heard myself ask. Maybe I was trying to wish a little pain on him.
"Of course I'm hurt," he said. He handed me the half-empty soda and I took a swig, that ripe, delicious fake grape. "Right here, on my left butt," he was saying. Hoover High had an entire student body like this. I felt years older than any of them, although I wasn't.
"The cops should take down license plates," said Earl. "Don't you think?"
The way he asked showed how my status had changed since I got up out of Junior English one afternoon, in the middle of a test on The Scarlet Letter, an essay exam, the changing role of the scaffold in the novel. I had put the test on Mr. Kann's desk, not meeting his eyes, turning back to give him a look when I reached the door.
Mr. Kann was holding up a yellow hall pass, not being unfriendly, reminding me that I would need permission to leave the classroom. I looked back and shrugged. It was the shrug I regretted. If I had it to do over again, I would just keep my eyes level, open the door, and walk out.
I liked Mr. Kann, and I usually enjoyed reading. But ever since my best friend, Perry Sheridan, moved to Seattle, school had lost a lot of its flavor. When I had the trouble with Mrs. Hean in World History I decided to quit. I straggled on for another few weeks, but it was a death march, class after class without really seeing or hearing.
"The cops should drive up to Rodeo and Hercules," Earl was adding, making his voice full of ridicule as he mentioned the refinery towns, as though their names weren't silly enough already. "Kick in some doors."
I finally asked what I really wanted to know. "You didn't see Bea, did you? Or did she get stomped to death in the stampede?"
"A hundred people got stomped to death," he said, emphasizing hundred, as though giving me news any fool would know.
"I didn't see any ambulances," I said.
Earl gave a little whinny, finding my remark humorous.
A cat slipped from the shadows and hesitated at the curb, startled by the sound of our voices.
CHAPTER 3Bea was sitting on the curb in front of my house, her cap off, her head small and round. It made me pause, how delicate she looked with her new hairstyle. She pulled the cap back on when my shadow fell over her. Her new hairdo was an attempt to compete with her mom's full-color good looks, a stab at finding a style of her own.
"Your mom was worried about you," I said.
I had never told Bea about her mom's moment of over-friendliness with me on New Year's Eve. I considered it one of those things that happen over the holidays that you try not to carry with you into the new year.
"Aren't you a little warm?" Bea asked. Bea must have noticed the way I kept my arm stiff over my jacket pocket. I ignored her, pinching the end of her knit cap and pulling it off in little jerks.
I wished I hadn't. She hung her head and examined the residue left by the street sweeper. She sat there pressing her foot into the thin layer of dried silt left by the machine that careened up and down the street on the first Tuesday of every month. If someone left a car parked by the curb on those mornings the machine had to pass by, leaving a loop of faintly ridged dust you could see for days.
Her head was as close cut as you can get without a razor. It had the soft, burry look you want to reach out and touch. Bea was wearing a piece of jewelry, a little golden horseshoe pinned over her heart. Bea was obedient to her mother in a spiritless, mildly humorous way. Once I had asked Bea why her mother was heavily preoccupied with cowboys and cowgirls, and Bea had expressed a theory. She had said that some white people did not have much ethnic identity the way other races and cultures did, and that her mom was trying as hard as she could to come up with something resembling a folk tradition.
She said, "I had a feeling you might run off and leave me. I wasn't all that surprised."
I had nothing to say, taking a long look at the surface of the street.
I looked okay in the downstairs bathroom, except that the whites of my eyes were red, like beet juice.
My mom hates to stand still, and she's always running late. When she's home she likes to plant trees, paint the garage floor with waterproof sealant, replace the rubber washers in the pipes under the sink, running nonstop. One time I came in from a long trip delivering shower stalls to Stockton and she was in my room in a sleeveless sweatshirt, vacuuming my closet, the contents of my closet all over the room. Sometimes at seven in the morning she will decide to get the hedge trimmer out, and once she cut the electric cord in two, shorting out every light in the house. I woke up and found every lamp, the microwave, the television, dead to the world.
Mom manages a title company on Solano Avenue in Berkeley, and all her friends are manic, too. At parties they stand inches apart from each other and yell nonstop about capital gains. A title company orchestrates real estate sales and guarantees that the seller is the actual owner of the property. Mom has a computer with every house and apartment building in Alameda County.
Bea and I knew we were alone because the house was so quiet, so there was no danger of interrupting a meeting between Mom and her bookkeeper/boyfriend, Webster. Webster was a cheerful man who always had a pager clipped to his jogging pants. Somehow I knew Webster was not a replacement for my dad, but only temporary, and not likely to graduate into anything beyond the service department of my mom's life.
The house was very quiet. Ever since I had started paying rent on my room as a symbolic gesture, Mom tried to leave my room alone, but when she was in the house you knew it. She was always on the phone, managing the Western hemisphere. Sometimes I wore yellow earplugs I had bought at Payless, although I could hear her voice perfectly through a couple of slugs of sponge rubber.
Bea was sometimes dazzled by my mother, afraid Mom would have her help tear up the kitchen tile or hold a wrench while Mom ripped out the garbage disposal. Listening to Mom explain mortgage rates, sometimes Bea's eyes would meet mine and she would give me a smile with her eyes. It was something I have never seen anyone do so well — show a feeling or thought with a look.
I folded my jacket carefully and put it in a place where it did not belong, on the top shelf of my closet. Bea watched me favor the weight in the jacket, holding it in place so it wouldn't fall out, but she made no comment.
Her eyes asked me what I was hiding in the jacket, and my eyes looked right back.
A school bus in Los Angeles had run into a sanitation truck, and children were critically injured. A space probe was getting close to the planet Jupiter, and even though its main antenna was not responding to commands, the backup system was expected to creak into life. After that the anchorman said, "Meanwhile, in Oakland tonight ..." and the story covered mainly the traffic snarls from the "fracas caused by what police are calling out-of-town visitors cruising the streets around Oakland's Lake Merritt." Tear gas was mentioned, plus three arrests for public drunkenness.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Edge by Michael Cadnum. Copyright © 1997 Michael Cadnum. Excerpted by permission of OPEN ROAD INTEGRATED MEDIA.
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