Foster's Choice

by Jake Williams

  I stepped into the living room and stood around waiting for him, looking around at all the furniture and pictures and whatever. It was nice and felt so homey that I felt a little twinge of jealousy, but I wasn’t even really sure why. I saw something move out of the corner of my eye and Pete was coming down the hall. He was wearing board shorts too, but his were white and you could pretty much see right through them. As he came down the hall he was pulling on a t shirt and I noticed some pretty big scars just above his left hip. “I guess we need to head out fast and quiet, Betsy’s afraid were going to wake up Emma.” He was rubbing his eyes and you tell he had just rolled out of bed. “Sorry I’m not ready, you’re a little early aren’t you?” He walked into another room, the kitchen I guess, and came back with a big cooler that was making sloshing ice and clinking bottles sounds as he carried it. “I probably went a little overboard on the booze but we haven’t done this in a while. I have two twelve-packs of beer and a bottle of bourbon.”

  “That’ll last until noon, maybe.” I grinned at Pete and winked at Betsy.

  Betsy shook her head, “You guys please call me if you drink ALL of that and I’ll pick you up at the gate to Ron’s.” She leaned up and gave Pete a quick kiss on the lips, then looked at me. “The only thing I ask is that you don’t do anything that’ll land you two in jail, Foster. You guys have fun—within reason, and I’ll see you this afternoon.”

  We tip-toed out of the house with the cooler sloshing and clinking but Emma was still quiet. He led me around the house to an old barn and slid the doors open, and there it sat. “Jesus, Pete, is that the same Jeep you had in high school?” I flashed back to all the times we had ridden around in that old thing and stared at it in awe.

  “Foster, this Jeep is only three years older than the last time you saw it, it’s not a friggin’ antique! And she still runs like a champ. Plus,” he pointed at the scraped up sides and mud packed under the fenders, “this is about the only thing that can still make it back to the boathouse.” He pointed at the Range Rover. “Your suv or truck or whatever doesn’t look like it’s ever left pavement, and Billy would shit if he knew I took the company truck out there.” We threw all the stuff in the back of the Jeep and hopped in, the doors and top were off and I really felt like we were in a time machine. He cranked it up and the Jeep roared and backfired a few times, then he threw it gear and headed out the driveway.

  We went about ten miles down some country roads without saying much over all the wind and the noises the Jeep was making. I felt the wind pulling on the right leg of my shorts and the sun hitting my shoulders and just sat back and enjoyed the ride. We turned off the road and on to his uncle’s property. There was a huge metal gate with all kinds of red and orange stickers on it. I looked closer and saw that they were all from banks, the DEA, and the IRS. All of them claimed ownership of the land and warned about trespassing. Pete got out and swung the gate open, “Somebody cut the lock off this thing last winter, but they probably didn’t get too far down the path.”

  “Uh, Pete, it’s probably none of my business but it looks like maybe this isn’t your Uncle’s property anymore?”

  “Yeah, well no, not so much anymore, I guess. It’ll take years for all those people to figure it out. Everybody’s been fightin’ over this place since he went to prison. Not sure how it’ll all play out but he has years to worry about it.”

  I reached behind me and pulled out a pack of cigarettes and a lighter out of my plastic bag. Then I pulled a couple beers out of his cooler, and offered him one. He shook his head and then nodded at the path ahead, “I need to watch the road pretty close going through here, you can try to smoke and drink if you want to, but I bet you’re gonna need at least one free hand to hang on.” As soon as we moved forward I realize what he meant, the path disappeared into overgrown brush and low tree limbs. There were a bunch of scraping noises as the bushes slid down the side of the Jeep. I hung on to the roll bar with one hand and tried to keep my beer balanced and my cigarette from falling out of my mouth. We kept climbing up and dropping down, crashing through everything at a slow but deliberate pace. I caught glimpses of a few animals moving out of our path—a couple of deer, a possum or two, one fox, and suddenly we were at the banks of a wide creek.

  “This can get can a little tricky Foster. You may want to grab anything you don’t want to get wet and hold it up high, sometimes I miss the crossing. And watch that limb over your head, there’s some kind of snake hangin’ up there. I’ll get movin’ in case it drops,” he squinted up there, “that may or may not be a water moccasin.” I grabbed the plastic bag with chips and held it over my head and Pete gunned the engine. I was mainly looking up at the trees for snakes and shit while he zigzagged across the creek. At one point a wave of muddy brown water rolled into my side of the Jeep, coating my right leg in the swampy-smelling water and sloshing across the floor. We shot up the bank and he eased back on the gas.

  “Jesus Pete, are you taking us to the Batcave?”

  He laughed, “Yeah, it didn’t long at all for this trail to get overgrown. I think even the horny kids have given up on trying to get back in here.”

  After a few minutes we broke through the brush and came out into a wide meadow where the ride smoothed out. I looked to my left and saw the cabin. We used to ride out here for some huge parties in high school, but now the paint was peeling and the glass in a lot of the windows was shattered. The red and orange stickers on the front door were faded but I could make out a big padlock on the front door. We went back into the tree line and the road sloped steeply down. The lake and the boathouse suddenly came into view and he brought the Jeep to a stop on a concrete pad that was cracked and crumbling on the edges but was still mainly clear of weeds and whatnot. We gathered up our stuff and walked out to the dock.

  He grinned at me, “Do we even want to pretend to fish or just start drinkin’?

  “You know me well enough to not even ask me that.” The lake was quiet, and from as far as I could see there were no boats on the water, no other houses around. It was all still and quiet and shit and it felt like something I needed. “I thought your uncle had some big plans for all this land, wasn’t he gonna subdivide it and start building some houses? What happened?”

  “Well, he got some investors but he spent all the money before anything got started. That’s a big reason he’s sitting in prison right now.” He got up and walked into the boathouse and came back with a few old beach towels and spread them on the dock. “This deck will get hot when the sun’s out like this. Let’s go ahead and get this party goin’.” He reached inside the cooler and pulled out a couple of beers, I reached into my bag and pulled out a joint. We sat there for a little while drinking and passing the joint back and forth. I watched the birds swooping down and pulling fish out of the water, felt the light breeze coming from the lake, and dangled my feet over the edge of the dock making little ripples in the water.

  “So why hasn’t anybody else jumped in here and started building something new?” I looked around and thought about the old parties, skinny dipping off this dock late in the night, excursions into the boathouse to make out with some random girl. “I’d hate to see it happen but it always kind of seemed inevitable.”

  “I dunno,” he looked around, “the real estate market had really tanked before he tried to do anything out here. And I think anybody who was interested backed out quick after they took a tour of the lake. Things are in bad shape out here.”

  I pulled my foot out of the water, “you mean the lake’s contaminated?”

  “No, not so much the lake—it’s the shores, the land, the people who live here. He started point out places on the other side of the lake. “Over there on that rise you have all the methnecks, and they are a truly dangerous crowd. Then right across there you have some fairly large pot-growing areas, they aren’t quite as rough but they do like to booby-trap the crop to keep people out. There are a bunch of survivalists over there, they’re harmless enough I guess. All of
the roads around here are like the ones we just took, hard to get in, hard to get out. A few of our friends from high school are up here but I’m not sure which crowd they joined, I don’t really want to know.”

  I took all that in, “that’s a shame. But I guess they’re happy living their lives the way they want to.”

  Pete just stared at me for a minute. “Really Foster, do you think this is some kind of dream life for them? I think they just ended up out here, it wasn’t a freakin’ career goal or anything. It’s probably not a life they dreamed about when they were in school.” He considered that for a minute. “Well the survivalist may have dreamt about it I guess, but not any of the others.”

  I realized I still had a bunch of mud on my right leg and stood up, looked around in the water and dove in. The water was pretty cold and I popped up and gasped a little. I looked up and Pete was diving in, landing close to me and then popping up right beside me. “Feels good, doesn’t it?” He grinned and rolled on to his back, kicking around and moving in slow circles. I swam back to the ladder on the dock and climbed up shivering, the water pulling on my shorts. I got out and spread out on my towel, laying on my stomach and letting the sun warm me. I watched Pete drift around a little and then he climbed out, too. When he got to the top of the ladder his shorts were clinging to him and I was staring right at everything showing through. I figured I’d be on my stomach for a while.

  We cracked open another round of beers and he pulled the bottle of bourbon out of the cooler. We each took a generous swig and washed it down with beer. “So what happened in the Marines, Pete?” I had been wondering about it since last night and then after seeing the scars on his side this morning I wanted to know. I figured now was as good as any time to ask.

  “Yeah, well you know I signed up for the corps right after school, right? I nodded and noted a USMC tattoo on his shoulder. He has some kind of badass tribal one wrapping around his bicep too. I was always a little afraid of the needles and shit, and the few times I tried to get one the tat artist would always refuse—something about me needing to be a little more sober. He started the story back up, “I enjoyed it but I missed Betsy a lot. I got through basic okay, made a lot of friends, and then the next thing I knew I was in Afghanistan with a lot of generally pissed off locals trying to shoot me. One night, right at sunset, one of ‘em got lucky and put a couple of bullets in my side. If that wasn’t bad enough the force of it knocked me off the ridge I was standing on.” He tilted the bottle up to his lips and then passed it to me.

  “Jesus, Pete, that’s terrible.”

  “Yeah, that was the beginning of some really fucked up shit. I was stuck there at the bottom of the hill for most of the night ‘til the guys could find me and get me the fuck out of there. I had a few broken things, and some bad cuts. One of those cuts must have picked something up because by the time I got back to a hospital in the states I had a raging fucking fever, an infection that took a while for them to get under control.”

  “Fuck Pete, I didn’t know you went through all that. I mean, I guess I did know part of it, Mom kept me up to date a little. I remember her telling me about some of it and I wondered why she didn’t tell me more. “Mom sent you some flowers right? And did you get the card I sent you. I remembered rushing through a drug store down the street from the frat house for condoms and grabbing a card while I was running down that aisle. I think there was somebody waiting in the car I was feeling rushed.

  He gave me a funny look and said, “Yeah, Foster, I got it……..it was a Valentine’s Day card which did seem a little odd at the time.”

  I blushed. “The cashier must've put the wrong card in the bag, oops.” I figured there were all kinds of holes in that story but it just kind of came out of my mouth and it was too late to change my story.

  “Yeah, okay.” I lit a cigarette and handed him the pack. He shook his head no and kept talking. “I feel bad Foster, we should have stayed in touch. I should have—”

  “Pete you were stuck at the bottom of a ditch, recovering in a hospital and shit. I’m the one who should apologize, I guess. I could have at least caught up with you on Facebook or whatnot.”

  “Not much time to check that in the hills of Afghanistan or in the hospital, but I know what you mean. And when I was at the bottom of that ditch there were two people I thought about, I gotta confess. It was you, and it was Betsy. I figured out a few things about you, about me, about things. Do you know what I mean?”

  I was stumped, he was being a little too vague to cut through the weed and the liquor. You thought about your wife, you thought about me—your best friend in high school. That seems normal, is that what you mean?”

  He grabbed the cigarettes and fired one up. “I thought about how much I loved Betsy and that she was really who I wanted to spend the rest of my life with. But you were the first one back in school—you were the first one I loved back then.” He broke eye contact and stared out at the lake.

  “Well, shit. I mean Pete, really? And you thought you were like that, that I was like that?

  He laughed at stood up, pacing a little and staring down at me. “Oh, I knew for sure about you. I saw the looks you gave other guys in the locker room. And when we were out with the team doing shit, going to the diner or something. If some hot girl walked by all the guys would stop talking and stare at her. You only stared if it was a guy. I think I figured you out pretty well—”

  “No, I mean, yeah, you did I guess. I didn’t think I was that obvious. Fuck! I didn’t really even realize I did that until I got to Hawthorne—you know, the looking and shit, or I didn’t think I was that obvious.” I noticed a sailboat moving across the lake, it was pretty far away but I could have sworn it had a Jolly Roger flag flying from the top of the mast. Somewhere near it a few shotgun blasts boomed across the lake.

  Pete stared out at the lake, he wiped some sweat off of his forehead and squinted in the sun. “It was obvious to me ‘cause I spent most of my time in high school staring at you while you were staring at other guys.” He looked at me and studied my reaction.

  I was pretty fucking stunned by that. “But Pete, you’re married, you were dating Betsy back then! Are you trying to tell me you’re, you know, you’re like gay or something?”

  He grinned at me, “Not really, not like that, Jake. When we first started hanging out I had this thing for you. I thought it was just a little hero worship, a little man crush or something. But we were spending more and more time together—playing baseball and football, parties on the weekend, you know, just spending all that time together. It got out of control, I got obsessed or whatever. I started spending time watching your Facebook page to check out your pics, see what you were doing when you weren’t around me. I’d drive by your house late at night to see if you were there, and to see if anybody else’s car was over there. I got bad, real bad. I had the fever and all after getting shot, but this thing I had about you, it was worse.”

  I tried to lighten the mood a little. “Well I guess I should be honored by that. I mean, you were like my first stalker, that’s pretty flattering.” I gave him my best fake grin but I think I failed. “Why didn’t you do just do something Pete, just say something? You don’t think I wanted it too?”

  “I guess I knew, I had some idea. You were always inviting me over to spend the night. We’d drink beer, you’d tell me to sleep in your bed even though you have like three guestrooms in the house. Plus you’d play porn videos and you always slept naked. That’s not really normal behavior for a couple of high school buddies.”

  “But that’s what I did every night back then, why would I change my routine because you were there?” He looked at me like I had just escaped from the zoo. “Well, okay. But I was giving you all those clues and you never did anything about it!”

  He shook his head, “I couldn’t! You were my best friend, and I couldn’t stand to lose that. What if I was wrong and you had kicked me out of your life, you know—freaked you out so bad you’d never talk to me
again? I couldn’t risk it.”

  I caught something, like a shadow moving around in the water near my feet. “What about me, Pete. I could have done something and then have you go back to the team, tell the whole school, whatever. I couldn’t risk it either!”

  “Well that’s not exactly the same but I guess neither one of us could make the next move. And nothin’ really would have changed. In the end I realized somethin’ pretty basic.”

  Whatever it was in the water seemed to be moving faster, going back and forth in something that looked like a search pattern or whatever. “So what did you realize, Pete?” I sipped my beer and waited for his answer, that shadow took off toward the middle of the lake and I wondered just how much pot I had smoked in the last 24 hours.

  “Don’t take this the wrong way or anything—I fine with it—but I realized that I loved Betsy and that you loved dicks.”

  I blew beer out of my nose and mouth. Right about that time whatever it was in the water broke the surface, it was huge, way too big for a fish in a lake. It dove back under and Pete didn’t seem to see it. I jumped up and all the sudden it was like a wave of gravity hit me, I started wobbling and I realized I was going to fall into the water. I felt Pete grab me from behind and pull me from the edge. He had his arms wrapped around my middle and I was pressed against him.

  “Easy there Foster,” I could feel his breath against my ear and his stubble raked my shoulder.

  “Jesus! Did you see it Pete? That thing out there? It looked like the Loch fucking Ness monster! What if I had fallen in the water?” I shuddered a little and leaned back harder against him.

  “Bo, I’m pretty sure there aren’t any sea monsters in this lake, although with all the meth runoff and the pot growing on the banks there’s no telling what might grow in there. I grabbed you ‘cause I was pretty concerned that you would just sink to the bottom. You seem wasted enough that I didn’t think you’d remember to swim or anything.”