Wait Until Twilight

by Sang Pak

  I climb out of the car window onto a comfortable beige sofa and run out the gaping hole where the side of the house once was. Will’s right behind me. “Split up!” I say, before turning toward the woods behind the house. Will heads left, and I see him disappear as he hurdles a line of hedges into someone else’s backyard. I’m busting through the tree line into darkness. That’s what it’s like the first few minutes: racing through darkness. I’m just trying to avoid running into trees, but every other form of plant life—branches and bushes and brambles—are slapping and scraping me. I stop for a second to catch my breath and let my eyes adjust to the half-moon light. Shapes start to emerge. The inner forest appears before me in blurry silhouettes and shadows. I start running again but at a jogging pace, picking my way through the woods more deliberately. I’m sweating big time, and I can’t help but think I hear another pair of footsteps. I stop to listen, but there’re only crickets and frogs. And then I hear it: police sirens in the distance. I quicken my pace, veering back toward the direction of the main road. Imagination or not, I can’t help stop thinking about him out there in the woods with me. It makes the cops seem a hell of a lot more pleasant. I keep running.

  Eventually the brush clears, and I come upon an old log cabin in the middle of the woods. It’s the kind of thing you might see on a bottle of maple syrup, some place Daniel Boone might have lived. I hear a vague whimper coming from inside, then a moan. I start jogging on by as quietly as I can. There’s a trail leading away from the cabin, which I hope takes me back to a road. That’s when some guys come out from the other side of the cabin with flashlights.

  I start running hard down the trail, and I’m pretty fast. But these guys are damn faster. There’re three of them, and that’s plenty enough to beat the crap out of me. “Hey, stop!” says a familiar voice. I can’t outrun them anyway. I’m too damn tired so I stop and turn. A light’s flashed in my face.

  “Samuel?” one of them says.

  He flashes the light onto his own face. “It’s me, Chip. What the hell are you doin’ out here? Did Reed send you?” he asks. I’m breathing so hard I can barely talk.

  “Cops…” I gasp, leaving Daryl out of the mix.

  “Cops? Where?”

  “They’re probably coming…”

  “Shit, what the hell happened?”

  “We drove a car into a house. And there was some guy already following us.”

  They grab me and start running. At the end of the trail is a parked car. We all get in and drive to the end of the trail and onto a dirt road.

  “What about Todd?” says one of the cronies to Chip.

  “He’ll be okay,” Chip says, and we speed down the dirt road and onto a paved one, where we get on the highway past Fairfield Plantation.

  “What were you guys doing back there?” I ask.

  “That’s where we bring the girl. Shit, there goes our night. What do you guys want to do?”

  “Just drop me off at my house,” I say, and start giving them directions.

  “That’s a good idea. Lay low.”

  They drop me off, and I station myself in front of my black-and-white TV for the rest of the night. My cell phone rings around eleven. It’s Will calling from a gas station a few miles down from Fairfield. I tell Dad I have to give a ride to a friend who drank too much. He commends my lie.

  When I pull up to the gas station, Will’s sitting on the curb by the ice machine staring into space with a Gatorade in his hand. He’s soaked with sweat.

  “Are you okay?” I ask.

  “I just ran almost six miles through the woods. What happened to you?”

  So I tell him about Chip and the boys with their sex cabin.

  “I guess they weren’t rumors then,” he says. “I wonder who it was. I heard Jenny Flynn was into that.”

  “Hell if I know.”

  I take him back to his car at the mall. Before separating, we make up a backstory about how we were watching a movie at the time of the house ramming, just in case Joe talks. I’m super careful driving home, making sure not to be followed. I keep checking the rearview. After I get home I go up on the roof and keep a lookout from under the stars. When Dad goes to bed, I give all the doors and windows a once-over, making sure to draw all the blinds. I take the hunting knife from under the mattress and slip it under my pillow before settling down to sleep.

  CHAPTER 12

  MY TEMPO JUST ISN’T RELIABLE ENOUGH for that long of a drive, so I leave for the wedding rehearsal out in Heflin, Alabama, at eleven-thirty in the morning that Saturday in Dad’s car. I take one food break and one bathroom-stretch break at a gas station just beyond the West Georgian College, which sits halfway between Sugweepo and Heflin. I give Jim a call along the way but he doesn’t answer so I leave a message telling him about the rehearsal and how I’m passing through and all. I’m not a hundred percent sure he’ll call back, he being reclusive as he’s been but at least I tried.

  The rehearsal starts at three and is supposed to end a half hour to an hour later. Angie and the bride and her bridesmaids are already there by the time I get to the church. There’re four of them: the bride-to-be, Terry, along with Julie and Angie and one younger girl, Naomi. They gush all over how nice I look. I’m wearing a nice Polo dress shirt with a tie and have a jacket to go with it but it’s way too hot for that. I’ve got a pair of jeans and running shorts along with other casual clothes in a gym bag for when it finishes.

  Naomi’s the one I came to be pictured with. Her boyfriend, Carl, refused to come. He’s my brother’s housemate at college, so she already knows a little about me. I can’t tell what her race is, maybe a little Hispanic, I think. She definitely has the dark complexion for it, but her hair is almost blond-colored, which doesn’t seem Hispanic to me. Not that it matters. She’s pretty. And she has a tall, curvy body. Probably better than any girl at Sugweepo Central High. She even had ole Mrs. Baker beat.

  “You don’t look anything like your brother,” she tells me.

  I don’t know what to say, so I blurt out, “I’m much smarter than him.”

  She gives me a quizzical smile. “Are you staying for the dinner afterward?”

  “I don’t know,” I say. “I didn’t know there was one.”

  “What’s the name of that town you’re from again?”

  “Sugweepo. I think in Native American it means ‘tangerine grove.’”

  “You’re kind of funny,” she says.

  The men show up together a little later. Angie’s boyfriend, Mark, is there, and so is Terry’s fiancé, Phil, and Julie’s boyfriend, Tony. We take a ton of pictures, all the men, all the women, couples, every permutation imaginable. It seems to keep going forever. Then they end up having the rehearsal much later than anyone expects. While the rest are finishing up with some more pictures, I take a seat in the back of the church and check my messages. Jim called and actually invited me to visit and stay the night. He says later on in the evening I could come along with some of his buddies to hit some bars. It’d be the first time we’ve done anything in a long time. Now I want this wedding gig to hurry up and end.

  Naomi comes over and sits down beside me. “It’s almost over,” she encourages me, with a pat on the back.

  “How do you know these guys?” I ask.

  “Terry’s a second cousin. We lived close to each other when she was in New York.”

  “You’re from New York?”

  “I’m a Brooklyn girl.”

  “You’re the way I imagined a Brooklyn girl would look like.”

  “And how do I look?”

  “Kind of mixed-up.”

  She laughs. “Mixed-up, huh? I guess maybe I am, come to think of it.”

  “I didn’t mean that in a bad way. I love mixed…things.”

  “Yeah, yeah, yeah.”

  “No, I mean it. You actually remind me of a friend from school.”

  “Is she pretty?” she smiles.

  “Very.”

  “So you know everyone here
?”

  “Yeah, I know everyone here except Terry and Phil. But they seem okay.”

  “What about Julie?”

  “I know her through Angie. She’s a little sneaky,” I say. Naomi seems pleased with what I say, so I continue. “What I mean by sneaky is, a couple years ago she promised to take me on a road trip she was going to go on. I was all excited and had a bag packed and everything. Then when I saw her that summer, she had asked some girlfriend to go with her instead, because I didn’t respond to her e-mail, which was a lie. I was the last one to send her an e-mail. I didn’t say anything, but I knew she was full of it. I used to think she was pretty.”

  “How old are you, Samuel?”

  “Sixteen.”

  “Sixteen,” she says wistfully.

  “How old are you?’

  “Twenty.”

  “That’s kinda old.”

  She laughs. “Tell me about it.”

  “Well, not that old. Hell, it’s just four years.”

  “That’s very sweet of you to say.”

  Tony and Julie sit down on the other side of the pew. Tony’s got a briefcase full of papers. He’s a graduate student studying psychology. He’s a nice guy, so I don’t understand what he’s doing with Julie. She’s kind of pretty, with long brunette hair, but like I said to Naomi, she’s a sneak.

  “Listen to the stuff this guy is writing,” says Julie.

  She starts reading, “ Both males and females experience orgasms, but the exact response varies depending on sex. Generally speaking, orgasm is the third stage of four in the human sexual response cycle, which is the currently accepted model of the physiological process of sexual stimulation. Even infants as young as five months are capable of experiencing orgasm, as documented in the research of Alfred Kinsey.’ This is what his paper is on. This is science,” she says sarcastically.

  “Don’t listen to her. She’s frigid.”

  “Samuel, do you cum?” she asks in a fake scientist’s voice. They both crack up over that. My face had already started getting a little red, but now I can feel it turning warm soon to be hot. I can see them noticing my redness.

  Before it becomes a ridicule-Samuel-fest, I turn on the humor, and in my best snooty Englishman’s voice, I say, “Of course not, but instead of ‘Do you cum’ don’t you mean, in scientific terms, ‘Do you climax?’” I say. They both laugh at that, and I’ve successfully deflected a potential barrage. That’s when I realize why I had liked Julie in the first place. She usually pretends to be prim and proper when she’s around people she doesn’t know, but when she knows you, she shows her natural dirty side. I guess Tony can look past the sneaky part.

  When it’s all over, I tell them about my meeting Jim and how sorry I am for skipping out on the dinner. We say our good-byes and I head back east into Georgia toward the West Georgian College.

  JIM’S APARTMENT IS AT THE very top of a three-story brick building fifteen minutes from the college. It sits in between a row of short office buildings. I go up a set of white narrow stairs on the side with no handrail to the third floor and knock on the door there. Jim opens the door in his boxers. He looks like he just woke up: serious bed head and bushy eyes. He was already stout, but now he’s entering the pudgy zone. “Hey, bro, come in,” he says. Inside Jim’s two-bedroom apartment there’re papers and notebooks and files all over the kitchen table. And there’re more on the coffee table in front of the sofa. Pretty much every flat surface has something on it. “I’ve been up for almost forty-eight hours, bro. I gotta get some sleep before we go out. You can watch some TV.” He goes in his room and shuts the door. I look around for Carl. Luckily he isn’t there. I have the place to myself, so to speak, seeing as how Jim’s in the sack. I turn on the TV and plop down on the sofa. There’s some political news program on. I can’t find the remote, and I don’t feel like getting up, so I slip off my shoes and lie back. Even though it’s boring as hell, I can’t remember feeling so relaxed in weeks. It’s a nice feeling and one that I don’t want to lose. It doesn’t feel like there’s another darker world out there, just this one, with one real me. On the TV, an Asian woman’s interviewing two guests: a big old college professor wearing a brown tweed jacket with a red tie and a skinny young journalist with a white shirt and tie on. The old professor begins blabbing about the cold war and Reagan. When the young man tries to say something, the old professor asks him, “Now what have you gotten published?”

  The skinny journalist stutters, “I-I-I don’t have to explain myself to you.” Geez, I think I wonder if I ever sound like that. Daryl sure the hell made me feel that way. The old professor tells the journalist that if he hasn’t published any books, he shouldn’t be on that show. The young journalist stutters some more and gets red in the face. I stick my hand between the cushions and find the remote down there. I turn to a basketball game and find myself saying, “Ahhhhh,” like I’m lying down in a hot bubble bath.

  Jim gets up a little past nine and throws a frozen pizza in the oven for our dinner while he gets a shower. Then we have our pizza in front of the TV. I want to ask him about something. Something I’ve been thinking about off and on. Like I said, he was the last one to be with our mom before she couldn’t even talk anymore. We just don’t talk about it. But still, it seems like she would have said something. Anything. When Jim finally says something, it’s to ask me about school. “So when does summer vacation officially start?”

  “About two weeks left,” I say.

  “You got any plans?”

  “I guess work at the store. I don’t know.”

  “How about doing something for me? I’ve been working extra hours at my part-time job, and I’m barely getting by at school. I might have to miss a couple classes, but if I do I think I might flunk out. Just to be safe, how’s about sitting in on a few classes for me. Just for a week or two until final exams. It’d just be taking notes—classes in big auditoriums or labs, you’d need to show your student ID, and all this other stuff. Don’t worry. It’s just a couple classes.”

  “Can’t you get off work for your classes?”

  “I need this job or I can’t even afford school, period.”

  “If you miss those classes, you’re sure you’re going to flunk out?”

  “I’m not a hundred percent sure. It’s just that some of them have mandatory attendance. Look, if you don’t want to do it, that’s fine. I should be okay.”

  “No, I should be able to.”

  We watch some TV together, and it feels like old times back at home. It feels good. Jim’s buddies, Chang and Jason, show up soon after. Jason’s a Floridian who’s spent a couple years in the navy before moving to Georgia. He’s real thin and has the face of a famous young actor who died a few years ago from a drug overdose. “No Carl tonight?” Jason asks.

  “No Carl,” says Jim.

  “Thank you, Lord,” Jason says, with palms pressed together. Chang’s on his cell phone almost the entire time, talking to his Korean girlfriend in Korea. Chang isn’t Korean though. He’s Chinese, and his hair goes down his back in a ponytail. He’s almost as pudgy as Jim. We all get in Jason’s Bronco and head into town.

  “You don’t have a fake ID, do you?” Jason asks me.

  “Nah, he doesn’t,” says Jim. He turns around. “Do you?”

  “No,” I say.

  “I know a place. If the guy I know is carding, you should be good.”

  Chang’s still talking to that girl. “No, I’m not angry, just disappointed. Well, I didn’t get that e-mail…”

  We cruise around for a time looking for a parking space downtown. It’s hard because there’re plenty of cars doing the same thing we are. Once we find someone backing up, we pull up and get our spot. Then it’s off to a bar called the Pioneer, a dive-looking place in between some restaurants. Jason goes in first. He pokes his head back out and says, “It’s cool.”

  I follow Jim and Chang into a dark smoky bar tinted red from the neon signs behind the counter, which lines the left
side. On the right are tables and booths, which are packed. I can’t tell which is louder, the rock music or all the people trying to talk over the music in such a small space. My brother and Chang show their driver’s licenses to this curly-haired tough guy sitting on a stool, who then stamps their wrists. I start to take out mine when Jason says, “He’s with us.”

  The curly-haired guy nods and stamps me. I follow the guys through the sea of people to the back. Jason sits us down at a booth at the very end of the bar. Chang’s yelling into his cell phone the whole time. “I’m in a bar! No, no, I said I’m in a bar!”

  “Samuel, that guy at the door?” says Jason.

  “Yeah.”

  “Guys like him are bitches. They look tough, but all you got to do is slap them down one time, just one time, and then they show the kind of bitch they are. Remember that.”

  We all get beers. Chang’s still on his phone. Jason and Jim are talking about work and school. It turns out Jason isn’t even a student. He just lives there. Come to think of it, he really doesn’t seem like a student. He’s too tough, like he’s been in quite a few fights. Even the way he dresses, he wears a sleeveless wife beater with a white jacket over it. He and my brother occasionally get up and talk to girls and then come back. I’m sitting with Chang drinking my second beer when a fight starts right in front of us. A big militant-looking guy has a guy who’s wearing a dress shirt and necktie in a headlock. The necktie guy slips out and tackles the bigger guy, and they fall out of sight into the hallway that leads to the bathroom. That cold feeling in my gut comes back. Seeing those two guys fight makes me think of Daryl kicking the shit out of me. I hear Chang saying, “Oh, there’s a fight. You wanna hear two guys fighting in a bar?” He places his cell phone faceup on the table. As this is happening a bearded guy with a big gut and a flannel shirt stands by our table and keeps looking at Chang. I can’t figure out why. Chang doesn’t seem to notice. He picks his cell phone up and says, “Hello? Hello? Shit!” Then he finally hangs up the phone. “Man, she’s boring,” he says.