On a Wednesday, Tyler Black, my former classmate and sometime friend, fired a shotgun at his mother as she was coming into the house from the adjoining garage. The paper said that police said that EMTs said she was killed instantly.
Rumor has it someone is right.
Later in the morning, Tyler drove to our middle school. He parked his dead mother’s stolen jeep in the teachers’ lot and stepped out to look for his girlfriend. She was in the seventh grade, same as he – same as I. But he didn’t belong there. A year that Wednesday, he did. A year before he and Jean-Claude goofed around in the back of my sixth grade classroom, harmlessly misusing a word Ms. Haefer had given to them.
“Carrie, stop actin like such a shenanigan!”
“Yo, Benny! Put down that shenanigans before you hurt someone!”
Like that.
Now, Tyler, kicked out of school for spitting on a teacher and yelling at a hall monitor – and so on – belonged at a school in the western suburbs of Minneapolis where they collected troubled youth as a dubious hobby. Everyone at the school loved him. He was a joy to have around.
Joy to have in class. Check.
Works well with others. Check.
Practices self-control. Minus.
The paper’s headline was: “Teen kills mom, self, police say; Boy found in family vehicle near his home.” I didn’t read the article for 11 years. When I did, I was ashamed at what numerous people said. His uncle. Some kids. A friend. They said Tyler was happy. They said they didn’t expect this.
Well, listen up.
Tyler was driving back from the middle school that Minnesota March morning after saying goodbye to his girlfriend. In all likelihood, he passed my mom, sister and I as we raced, late again, to the school where the nurse (who doubled as a truancy officer when it was still too early for anyone to be seriously injured or suspiciously ill) would shake her head at us and say in a pre-caffeine monotone, “Just go to class.”
On Highway 7, in Excelsior, just where Lake Minnetonka reaches out a hitchhiking thump of St. Alban’s Bay, Tyler fired a shot through his temple.
Bang.
The muscles in his shoulder flexed obstreperously, his hand tightened fearfully on the wheel, and the car jutted sharply to the right. In the next and final heart beat, the strength ebbed from his tense muscles, all of them. His hand dropped from the steering wheel. His body, and what remained of his head, thrust, almost violently, forward causing the car to piercingly change direction back across traffic, shattering the axle and front left tire on the low median, and – like a Mozart composed James Bond movie – narrowly missing opposing cars by begrudging honks before exploding in dirt and noise into an adjacent ditch.
Shenanigan. Shenanigan.