Concrete Zoo, Chapter 3: The Tomb

The Tomb was the center of the campus. Students poured into it, the heat beat down on the concrete roof, and metallic slams and a torrent of voices and music poured out of it.

It was time to go to his locker, but the Tomb, the ominous, dark, foreboding locker bay he was assigned to, was too much at the moment.

He couldn’t budge. His legs were heavy, and his feet felt like bricks. He’d been warned about being assigned a locker in the Tomb by guys he’d met on orientation day. He thought they were kidding him—now he wished they had been.

During orientation, he’d wondered why they called it the Tomb: it wasn’t so bad when it was empty. He’d found his locker with the guys helping and put his lock on it. The reasons for the nickname were now evident. It was dark. It was cavernous, and it seemed no one was coming out of it after going in.

The pause forced Ben to study its shape and lack of objective function. The bay was only open on two sides. The back end was connected to the science building, and the front end was a concrete wall. It held hundreds of lockers, and hundreds of students entered it, yet there were only two exits.

The second bell rang, so he forced his legs up and down to get moving. Entering the Tomb brought a different noise level to the shouting, slamming, swearing, and music filling the space. It was like a jet engine and a Metallic concert were fighting dominance.

The locker rows stood three high and stretched for 100 yards. He searched for his locker in the dead center of the third row. Staring at a slip of paper in his sweaty hand, he read the locker number and combination to his lock over and over.

Checking the numbers on the lockers as he went, he pressed the anxiety and rage he felt building in the Tomb out of his mind. It was hot and crowded, and everyone was tired and hungry. But he was determined. He had to get the books off his back. Carrying them all day would not fly while it felt like the sun had shot from the sky and parked itself on the school campus.

The further he went down the row, the darker it got. Ben found himself squinting to read the paper. It enfolded him and swallowed him up. He passed a guy sitting on top of  a row of lockers, eating chips and tossing some down on those who passed by.

He passed by two girls shoving each other to see their reflections in the tiny mirror they had put up in a locker door.

Two guys knocked him into the row as they chased each other down the row and out the other side, one of them swinging his fists and yelling Hispanic insults at the other.

He took a deep breath and kept going. Finally, he reached 1350. Middle, bottom row. He gazed down and peered around two legs that hid the door from him. He looked up into the face of the person to whom the legs belonged.

The person appeared to be a man, but the zits on on his nose and forehead told a different story.

Could he be a wereman masquerading as a teenager? Ben thought.

A dense red beard covered the lower half of his face, and his curly, wiry, red hair covered his ears and half his forehead. His eyes were blue as the sky, and he sneered at Ben through bluish lips and yellow teeth. His right cheek bulged; he chewed intermittently on something. His bright red tee shirt had a black stenciled image of Jesus holding up the peace sign on the front.

Behind the hairy teen, Ben could see two things filling the open locker: a boom box circa 1985 wedged in sideways and a towering stack of plastic bags containing green leaves covered in condensation.

“Can I get in my locker?” Ben asked.

The man-boy looked him up and down, spitting tobacco at Ben’s feet. He missed Ben’s Cabs by half an inch.

Ben’s face flushed red with anger, and the man-boy went from a slouched posture to hands on Ben’s backpack straps, yanking Ben into his face.

“What?” the man-boy gurgled.

“Hi,” Ben choked out.

All the sounds around him stopped. The guy sitting on the lockers with the chips jumped down and walked out. The girls checking themselves in the mirror vanished.

“What?” the man-boy asked again, his eyes red and cracked.

“Nothing,” Ben said this time.

The man-boy dribbled tobacco juice down his chin and let it drip on Ben’s shirt. Then he dropped Ben. It wasn’t until he landed that Ben recognized that he had been suspended in the air.

The man-boy slouched again and glanced off to the right. Ben followed his gaze and spotted Ray running by the Tomb, arms pumping wildly, head back, chest out, knees reaching his chest. Seconds later, a slower but unvanquished Sanchez ran after him, face red with exertion, legs stumbling, mouth uttering cursing that should have blackened the sky.

Ben returned his attention to the lockers, and the man-boy held his hand out. Ben lifted the slip of paper, and the man-boy snatched it from him.

Turning away from Ben, he knelt down, flipped the lock dial on Ben’s locker, and pulled the lock off. He stood and crumbled the paper. He handed the freshly opened lock to Ben.

Then, he reached behind him, took a lock from amidst the plastic bags, knelt back down, and locked up Ben’s locker.

“You want into your locker?” the man-boy asked as he stood again.

Ben just stared.

“If you want in,” the man-boy said, “you got to wait for me to be here,” he said, pointing at the spot they stood, “and to open it for you.”

“Oh,” Ben said.

The man-boy turned and took down a bag of leaves in plastic and shoved it into Ben’s open hand.

“I’m Turner,” he said, “and this is a gift. After this, it’s $50 a bag.”

He shut the locker, locked it, and walked off.

Ben turned the bag over in his hand.

“It’s weed, dumb ass,” someone said behind him.

Ben looked around, but no one was there.

“Shit,” he said and jammed the bag into his pocket.

The bell rang, and everyone scattered. Ben followed suit.

He made a beeline for the Art building, dubbed the Asylum by the art students, directly north of the Tomb, wondering what he was going to do with a stolen radio in his backpack and a bag of marijuana in his pocket.