Hawk Mountain: A Novel
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Synopsis
An English teacher is gaslit by his charismatic high school bully in this tense story of deception, manipulation, and murder.
Single father Todd is relaxing at the beach with his son, Anthony, when he catches sight of a man approaching from the water’s edge. As the man draws closer, Todd recognizes him as Jack, who bullied Todd relentlessly in their teenage years but now seems overjoyed to have “run into” his old friend. Jack suggests a meal to catch up. And can he spend the night?
What follows is a fast-paced story of obsession and cunning. As Jack invades Todd’s life, pain and intimidation from the past unearth knife-edge suspense in the present.
Set in a small town on the New England coast, Conner Habib’s debut introduces characters trapped in isolation by the expansive woods and the encroaching ocean, their violence an expression of repressed desire and the damage it can inflict.
Both gruesome and tender, Hawk Mountain offers a compelling look at how love and hate are indissoluble, intertwined until the last breath.
Release date: July 5, 2022
Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
Print pages: 313
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Hawk Mountain: A Novel
Conner Habib
ONE
The beach had gone still, except for the waves. Todd was on a towel, his son, Anthony, at the edge of the miles and miles of ocean, and the sound of water pulling away, like a dream ending.
There was nobody else. The few other beachgoers were hundreds of feet from him as the afternoon ended. Their voices and stereos were covered up by the wash of the surf. Anthony was six, wading up to his knees in the water, which must have been cold, too cold to swim in. Todd was thirty-three, the season was almost over, the whirring of the cicadas was dead, and the gulls were still circling.
Not much had happened for almost four years, after an uneventful divorce from Livia, who had let go of their marriage and custody the way an enemy might let go of your hand if you were drowning. At the end, Livia said she’d never really wanted either of them. The last time he checked, she was in Rome. But that was more than a year ago. Anthony was too young to know much about her, except that his mom had gone away somewhere, and Todd had hoped that would be that. Four months ago, Todd had gotten his job in New Granard, bought a house, and now there was just over a week before Anthony started school.
Todd rubbed sand on the bottoms of his feet to scrub away the dead skin. The beach was pocked with bits of wrappers and cigarette butts and every once in a while a can. Why couldn’t people keep after themselves? Down the coast, away from Todd and everyone else, there was a little flesh-colored knuckle of movement; someone walking up the shore.
Todd had spotted Anthony’s first-grade teacher down the beach on the way here. She, Ms. Paige, would be his first teacher ever, since Todd had kept Anthony out of kindergarten. She was by herself, which seemed unlikely. He’d thought about asking her on a date. He hadn’t been on a date with anyone since Livia and hadn’t really had a desire. The whole district would have a meeting soon, he could talk to her then. Maybe it was time to ask someone out and see how it went. That was what he was supposed to do, wasn’t it? Fall in love, or act like it?
“Fall in love,” he whispered, but was unconvinced.
He loved his son. He loved being alone.
A colony of gulls split open from the beach into the air as the stranger walked closer. Maybe he—Todd could see the stranger’s bare chest now—was on his way to see Ms. Paige and she wasn’t single after all. Well, if she wasn’t, maybe there would be a conflict, or he’d have to convince Ms. Paige to be with him. That was something that could happen, wasn’t it? Maybe it would be exciting to feel what that was like. He’d forgotten what it was like to date anyone, but here was a vague idea: You ask someone to go out with you. But when? Do you have to talk first for a bit, or do you just come right out with it? Then you sit there at dinner or wherever, which would mean he’d need a babysitter for Anthony, something he hadn’t found since moving here. Then, if it goes well, you’re supposed to have sex, something that Todd and Livia had barely done in the nearly two years they were together, and which he hadn’t done since.
He closed his eyes and thought of the books he’d teach this semester,when he was allowed to actually teach between standardized testing. Lord of the Flies, which they had to read over the summer. The Catcher in the Rye, A Separate Peace. Books about white kids that he read growing up. He liked them, but needed to add something else. Maybe not A Separate Peace this year, but then what? Other English teachers loved The House on Mango Street. Maybe that. Maybe The Woman Warrior. He taught a story by ZZ Packer at his last school, and got an angry letter from a parent about the swearing. The administration told him not to introduce contemporary works because their tone was too close to the students’ lives. Maybe he’d have the kids read Crime and Punishment or Moby-Dick. Those older books weren’t in most curriculums now, but he’d read them in high school and loved them for their struggle and sweat and tension.
He opened his eyes. Squinting through his sun-blindness, then shielding his eyes with a saluting hand on his brow, he saw that the man walking along the water was standing, now, by Anthony.
Todd felt a lurch in his stomach. He didn’t want to cry out yet—didn’t want to display panic and make Anthony afraid of everyone who approached—but that was the way Todd felt when he saw this figure, tan, golden-haired, tall, talking to his son. Menace. He watched and tried to slow his heart. Go out to him, but he didn’t. It wasn’t like the man would just carry him away, not like he would—what?—drown his son? Hold him under for the pleasure of it? He had to remind himself that those things didn’t happen. Mostly they didn’t happen.
The man looked over his shoulder up toward Todd. He looked for a long time, as if trying to settle something. Then he started walking up the sand. The sun was behind him. The light was like a crown, so bright that it obscured his visage.
Closer. Todd sat up.
Closer.
Anthony was standing in the distance, now, looking at them both.
Closer.
Closer. Until here he was, standing above Todd, and it was only in the absence of the sun, when the stranger’s head had blocked it out completely and forced Todd into shadow, that Todd could see who it was.
He was different, of course, fifteen years later, but unmistakable. His body had been pulled taller with time and into light muscles. The same swipe of freckles on his face was darkened by the summer, and his hair had leaned away from blond toward light brown. His chest was smooth, and his legs were sparsely covered with a rush of golden hairs. His eyes were still that same color green. Clear but opaque, like cracked sea glass.
Jack opened his mouth to say something but stopped. The waves rolled in once more, and then he laughed.
“No fucking way, I knew it!” he said. His voice was delighted.
“I . . .” Todd couldn’t speak.
Jack sat down on the sand next to his towel. His bare feet were covered in coagulated sand that followed him up from the shoreline. “Don’t pretend you don’t know,” he said. He was smiling in a happy, challenging way. There was the gap between his two front teeth.
They said his name at the same time.
“Jack?” Todd said in a vulnerable tone.
“Jack!” Jack exclaimed.
Then he leaned and knelt into Todd, hugging him. Their bare chests were touching, and Todd wondered if Jack could feel his heart racing. Or maybe that was Jack’s heart, or maybe it was both of them, filling in each other’s beats. Maybe it was both of them at once.
“I saw that kid—that’s your son, isn’t it? I guess I was all wrong about you,” Jack began, laughing.
“Yes, that’s . . . Wrong? About me?”
“A kid! I saw that kid and I knew—”
“Anthony . . .”
“He looks just like Todd Nasca, is the first thing I thought. Like a mini–Todd Nasca, and then I saw you . . . Hey, are you married too? Do you live here?”
Everything had been so quiet a moment before, and now the ocean, it seemed, had caught up with him. Memory was alive in him again, and he felt the impulse to leave, to get in the car, to drive, to not come back to New Granard. To go get Anthony first. Of course, of course, to get his son. Then to flee. He would answer Jack’s questions one by one, he guessed. One at a time. But Jack was hugging him again, and Todd could feel the light and warmth in his skin.
“It’s so weird when you see someone out of place, you know?” Jack said. “Like you could see your worst enemy where you live and hate them, but if you saw them, say, in Florida, you’d want to go up and say hi!”
Are we enemies, then? Todd thought. Still?
“Sorry, I’m talking too much,” Jack said. “Okay, so, do you live here?”
Todd took a breath.
“We do.”
“You and . . .”
“Anthony!” Todd yelled at the water, and Anthony, obedient, started to make his way back up to them slowly, swinging his arms dramatically along the way.
“Are you married?”
“No, and . . .” Todd added hurriedly, “can you not talk about that when he gets up here? He doesn’t really know his mother.”
“Accident?” Jack asked.
“No, we wanted . . . Well. I wanted . . .” But then Anthony was there, and he stood behind his father like a fawn behind a doe.
“Jack, this is Anthony,” Todd said.
“Pleased to meet you,” Jack said. “Again.” He put his hand out, but Anthony didn’t take it.
“Are you my dad’s friend?” Anthony asked.
For a moment, there was no answer.
TWO
He’s trying not to think about it, but then he’ll close his eyes and see it: Jack Gates’s face, trembling.
Todd’s at his new locker, at the end of the day, turning the dial back and forth, but it won’t catch.
“I’m hopeless,” he says to Hannah Grace, who is waiting for him to get gum for her.
“Everything is hopeless,” she says. She loves gloomy pronouncements. Once she showed Todd how she’d drawn a skull on the inside of her uniform skirt with black Magic Marker. She said it was because we should all remind ourselves that death was always with us. Then she asked him not to tell anyone she’d done that.
“I can never open them the first day either,” she says.
“You’ll get it next year,” Todd says.
“We’re seniors,” Hannah responds.
“You’re right,” he says, “we are fucking seniors.” The locker opens. Todd has friends, a few good friends, at this school. So strange that he’sknown almost everyone in his class, all 150 of them, most of his life now. They all went through it together. They were kids, and they were friends, then some became strangers to each other, some moved away, some moved in, some were enemies, some became friends again. Senior year is the feeling of an extended family rushing to an end; they will never all be together like this again. Everyone is more relaxed. Friendlier. But he still slams his locker.
Everyone slams their lockers.
He hands Hannah a cube of gum, and then she smells like fake strawberry. Down the hall, which is filled with people, she holds his hand a little; they haven’t done anything. Last year he had a girlfriend from a different school, and after she left him for another boy, she felt bad and sent him a letter apologizing and saying she wanted him back. He called her and read it to her on the phone in a mocking tone and made her cry. It was the meanest thing he’d ever done, but some of his friends, Justin Geiger and some of the other boys, thought it was funny. He’s nice to everyone else, though. He’s nice to Hannah. So they’re holding hands, even though no one is really supposed to hold hands in the hallways. But it doesn’t feel like a violation of that rule, because Todd, and maybe Hannah too, can sense that nothing will ever arise from this small gesture.
They pass Jack Gates. He closes his locker and looks at both of them. Todd tries not to look, but Hannah stares at Jack over her shoulder, and her hand and Todd’s let go of each other. It’s just for a second, but it’s like slow motion: the space between their unclasped hands, the space between her face and Jack’s, it all lingers. Then she squeezes Todd’s hand again, and time goes back to normal, and she starts talking about class.
“Hey, do you know anything about that guy?” Todd asks.
“Just what you know,” she says. Then adds, with a laugh, “Are you jealous?”
“No, I just. He . . . I feel like I know him.”
“Oh,” she says. “So should I be jealous?”
“You should go get your stuff,” he says. “I’ll meet you outside.” And Hannah goes to her locker, one floor up, and Todd goes to the back doors of the school where already the kids are doing what they do every year: they loosen their ties and spit on the blacktop, they make jokes and light cigarettes as they amble away; they huddle in groups, finding each other against each other. It’s the second week of September, and the air has gone cold, but the girls’ legs are still bare, and the boys are allowed to wear shorts for as long as they want, as long as they’re the uniform shorts. For the seniors, it’s the first day of the last year. An end to everything they’ve known; it’s a mini-apocalypse, and most of them are ready for it.
Todd is passing through the doorway of the school out into the world, when he sees Justin and heads over to him. Then he feels a little jolt under his left foot. He stumbles forward and turns around.
“What the fuck?” he says, and then sees Jack behind him.
“You think my voice is funny? You can’t even walk,” Jack says. Todd backs up into the parking lot.
“No, I wasn’t laughing at your—”
“You know where I grew up?” Jack says, cutting him off, and takes a step closer. And in this step, it dawns on the other kids that something is about to happen. Gradually, Todd and Jack become the center of gravity. Justin backs up, everyone crowds in and somehow makes room at once, a space is created.
“We don’t let people come into the country,” Jack says. “We hold down the border. You think my voice is funny?”
Todd is angry but afraid. Then he sees Justin lingering and Hannah standing nearby. “Oh sure,” he says, and laughs, “you hold down the border.”
And now Jack is even closer.
“With guns,” Jack says. “And knives. And bear traps we set to snare people’s legs.”
When Todd looks over for Hannah again, she’s gone.
“I wasn’t . . . I wasn’t laughing at you. I just . . .”
“And when we find some faggot stuck in one of those,” Jack continues, and the word faggot makes Todd feel like the blood is running the wrong way in his veins, “we just beat the shit out of him there. While he’s standing there, snared. Till he falls down. And then we come back the next day, after a long night, when he was all alone in the dark and he’s pissed his pants and shit himself and he’s had some time to think, Why did I try to sneak into the country? And then? We do it all over again.”
There’s a pause. There’s going to be a fight. Someone is going to get pushed. Todd is going to get pushed. And then maybe he’ll push back and then Jack will swing. Todd has never gotten in a fight before, but he knows his friends won’t help him, that’s not the way of these things. But then a teacher, Mr. Appel, comes out. He’s the Cultures teacher and wrestling coach. He reaches into the scene and pulls Jack by the arm. “Get inside,” he shouts. Instantly everyone goes about their business, like a hex has been broken. Todd doesn’t even think about turning away, he knows he’s supposed to go to the principal’s office too.
He follows Mr. Appel and Jack and waits as Mr. Appel knocks on the principal’s door. He tells them to sit down and then beckons the principal out of his office to tell him what he saw, which was not much.
While Mr. Appel and the principal are in the other room, Todd and Jack sit next to each other in metal chairs with cushioned seats. Their knees are touching. Jack is looking ahead, and Todd whispers, “What are we going to say?” But Jack only stares forward.
Todd has only been to the principal’s office once before in high school, for taking his necktie off in class. It was the day of a civics test he hadn’t studied for, and after the teacher put the sheets of paper on his desk, he felt his throat constricting. He shifted in his seat and tried to calm himself down like his father told him: Breathe deeply. It’s difficult to feel anxious if you’re breathing slowly and deeply. But he didn’t think he could.
The tie felt like a garrote. He took it off in a panicked, noisy way. The sudden gesture broke the focus in the room. Kids looked up from their tests, they looked at each other, they looked at each other’s answers. In exasperation, the teacher sent him to the office to be punished. Since then, he had a fear of being caught, even when he’d done nothing wrong.
Like today. First when Jack saw him laughing. Then by Mr. Appel, by everyone in the parking lot.
“I’ll cover for you,” Todd says. So when the principal comes in and interrogates them, Todd says it’s nothing, they were only joking. And Jack nods his head.
“Hannah just worries about me,” Todd says.
“Is she your girlfriend?” the principal asks.
Todd’s face stumbles around an expression. “I . . . don’t know?”
Jack looks up at the ceiling. The principal laughs. He’s relieved that this is going the way it’s going. “You’ve got to get her under control, Todd,” he says. “So, okay, you’re sure?”
The two of them nod.
“Well, good to know that our second scholarship kid isn’t a troublemaker on his first day.”
Jack looks down at their knees, which are still touching. Then he stands up before anyone else. The principal stands and shakes Jack’s hand like it’s the end of a business meeting. Todd stands and then moves to the hallway, which is empty now, hollowed out. It feels like, with the halls empty this way, the students are all in classrooms. But they’re not. The lights are off, the only illumination is sunlight, coming through short windows near the ceiling. Jack is gone already, Todd is alone, everything is quiet, and Hannah isn’t waiting for him when he leaves.
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