Free Fresh Kills by Reggie Nadelson

can’t tell if he’s still awake or dreaming. The night noises of the boys, coughing, snoring, sneezing, yelling, reminds him of the noise of his mother’s refrigerator at home: first a steady hum, the whir of the motor, then, suddenly, the clunk of machinery before it turns over and settles back into a steady drone.
    Waking up those nights in Florida – and he wakes up every few hours, he says – he turns over, looking for quiet. His feet are cold. The blanket is too short for him and leaves his big feet uncovered, as he tumbles down into sleep again. For a while there’s nothing, just the hole of sleep.
    Then the dreams. Walls moving in. Crowds of boys taunting him. Billy himself in the locked ward, doors at the end of the corridors bolted shut. He feels trapped like a boy caught in a net, like a fish on a hook, and he thrashes around and can’t get free.
    Gangs of boys chasing him to the end of a long hall, all the boys whirring, clunking, sucking, snoring. They’re running after him to the death chamber, which is when the screaming starts. He can’t tell if it’s a real death chamber or a video game, but it’s him and they will stick a needle in his arm and make him die. Every morning, his sheets are soaked with sweat.
    Billy has read the books, seen the movies, knows how people will watch him die through a little window. This is the worst part, people watching while he’s tied down flat as a board, and they stick the needle in.
    Inside his dreams, Billy wakes up screaming. No one comes. He reaches for a word, can’t grab it, it hangs in front of him, letters made of ice that begin to drip, just beyond his grasp in the dream world of unremembered phone numbers and lost names, and he reaches harder because it’s the only thing that can save him, can make him safe. The background noise gets louder, boys closing in on him.
    Every night. Billy hates going to bed. He can’t fend off the dreams. He refuses. Is punished. They take away some of his books. He can’t sleep. He can’t get hold of the word.
    That night in the motel on the way back to New York from Florida, I finally got Billy to lie down in bed. I sat with him all night. As it got light outside, he drifted into a light sleep.
    And then everything seemed better. We kept driving. I thought maybe Billy’s worst time was over. On the road, we talked and laughed and ate potato chips out of huge bags and peanuts in the shell and by the time we got to the Holland Tunnel, the car was a mess. I had almost convinced myself that the newspapers had been right: all Billy had done where Heshey Shank was concerned was defend himself. Or else he had been nuts, had been out of his mind when he killed Heshey.
    On the Manhattan side of the tunnel, I turned east on CanalStreet. Billy put his head out of the window, pulled it back, and started laughing.
    â€œWhat’s up?”
    â€œI’m happy,” Billy said.
    â€œHow come?”
    â€œNew York,” he said. “We’re home.”

7
    â€œI’ll lock the door,” said Billy as we left the Farone house.
    He locked up carefully, maybe showing me how careful he was, while I went ahead of him towards the street and my car. Most of the houses on the block were lit up and there were street lights every few yards that made pools of yellow on the sidewalk.
    Did I smell it before I saw it? The sewage smell of rotten garbage hit me first. On the edge of the front lawn where Genia had planted pink roses – the neighbors appreciated these elegant touches, she had said – was a pile of trash. Wet garbage – cold, half-eaten burgers, banana skins, egg shells that gleamed weirdly white in the night light – had been dumped along with beer cans and wet newspaper and what looked like diapers. You could smell the shit.
    I looked for the garbage cans and couldn’t see any and remembered the plastic bins that belonged to the house had