Thalo Blue

by Jason McIntyre

  Line up, he thought then. Time to get this show on the road. The optimistic little voice, the one that had praised a higher power for small favours, now sounded bitter, underwhelmed and callous. But it was true. All bets are off, welcome to the machine, he wanted to say. We’re in it, under it, and there’s nothing else for us. Might as well line up, step in, pull up some imported Italian leather sofa, and get comfortable.

  He already regretted coming all the way out here for this stupid party. His head was a crashing sea of turbulent waves and the sensations he experienced in crowds of people generally meant that he could hardly concentrate on conversation, much less speak effectively above the roar of Shane Jose’s porno-lyric house music. So he sat alone, fuming a little, and simply tried to get through the night.

  As Zeb bounced from group to group over the year and a half since that gym class when he had been informally crowned as Towel Snap Champ, he had managed to avoid more words than were absolutely necessary with Riley Fischer and his band of merry men. There was a respect developed between him and Fish. Passing in a hallway, there would only be eye contact and an exchanged ‘hey’ but nothing further. The School of Fish, as Zeb referred to them, was one clique he had managed to stay away from. Sheer circumstance.

  But on this night, circumstances shifted, the line-up shifted, and the new tilt to the situation felt like an unexpected slap on Zeb’s cheek. As if the sea of bodies—all dancing and standing and goofing around—simply parted for him, Riley Fischer was there. And he made his way to where Zeb sat on the otherwise empty couch.

  Zeb had enjoyed where their relationship had gone since the towel snap—there wasn’t a relationship. He reveled in the fact that he was respected from afar and revered in silence by the one guy who could make or break you. It was avoidance, plain and simple. And having never really spoken to Fish meant he didn’t need to impress or cower for him. He was just coasting neatly left of center, out of range but always with a little assurance that hey Red meant he was okay.

  But here was an assault on the old, cloaked ways. Here was Fish and his School, plunking down on the couch to either side of him. Already on his way to one mother of a hangover the next morning, a smoky-eyed Fish said, “Hey Red. How’s it hangin’?”

  “Long and stiff,” Zeb said back, as another burst of white flared in his eyes. He squinted for a second, thinking how stupid that had sounded but he had been trying to come up with something cool and distasteful. Success, he supposed. He hated when anyone called him Red. Most did not, but it didn’t matter to Fish, did it? And, at this moment in time, with the white bomb-beats in his eyes and the fire stroking his head like it was, he was willing to let it go.

  Simon and Rudy laughed at his long and stiff comment. Both of them had been taking a few drinks as well. They must have been—their gestures and speech were drawn out and carefully considered. Fish sounded that way too. “Speaking of ‘long’, he said, “and ‘stiff’ too, I guess”—he laughed at his own gag—“Red, you want one of my special Three-Mile Long Islands?” Three-Mile Long Islands came out of his mouth sounding more like Free My Long Eye-lens.

  Zeb told him no, and Fish, oblivious, started unscrewing the cap on a bottle of Triple Sec. He had probably stolen the Triple Sec from the Leland liquor cabinet; someone had broken the lock on it earlier in the night and the house had erupted in whoops and cheers. He drained more than half of a non-brand name pop can into a potted fern then poured the Triple Sec into it. It was red, the tin can, with shiny white letters on it, proclaiming simply, Cola, and Fish managed to spill a good portion of the Triple Sec down the side. As he bent to lick his fingers and the face of the can, Zeb was struck by an odd thought: that the Lelands, so concerned about appearances, would buy a no-name flat of pop for their kid’s sixteenth party. Two-color, professionally printed flyers, but make sure you get the cheaper brand of pop, honey. He stifled a little laugh.

  Zeb always found things like that funny. And, on top of that, he wanted to know why Fish was worrying about hiding the Triple Sec in the cola can. Just chug it, Fish, jeez, he wanted to say to Riley. Go ahead, tip the damn thing back if you want to be the lush. But Fish wouldn’t do that—he was drunk, true, but he wasn’t yet that drunk. If someone called the Dorset police to settle down the noise, or if Viv’s parents came home to find a roomful of kids with stolen mickeys in their hands, Fish could look as innocent as a school marm if he stood artlessly still as everyone else scattered and tried to discard the evidence they were holding. When things suddenly went to hell and everyone got picked up for underage drinking then waited in agony for their parents to arrive at the sherrif’s office, Riley Fischer could tell his parents that he didn’t have a drop, that he only sipped on pop and snacked on chips. And there would be some kind of value in that. “We couldn’t find any gin or rum, or bitters, so this’ll have to do,” Fish said and took a drink. “Mm. ‘S good. You really sure you don’t want a swig?” Shard Own One Ass Wig?

  Zeb told him he was quite sure he would be okay without. The bass was still exploding mercilessly across his vision and the last thing he needed was another sensation on top of it. He ran his fingers through his hair, front to back, as though it might reduce the burn and sting of his skin up there. This was the exact spot he didn’t want to be in. His mild aloofness over the last year or so had provided a simple, yet effective, mysterious ‘coolness’. Coolness from the simple fact that the coolest of them all held him in reserve. Fish just didn’t know anything about Zeb. Hell, he called him Red, for chrissakes, so how could he know that Zeb was so far removed from his league?

  The four of them did the small-talk routine, mostly about Fish’s new car, while Fish worked at his make-shift Three Mile Long Island. “Well, I don’t know about you guys,” Fish interjected to his School, “but I gotta piss like a race horse.” He threw his head back, drained the pop can, belched, said something about how nice Vivian’s tits were, and then got up from the couch. He sloppily set the empty cola can down on an end table and walked off with Rudy and Simon. Next to the can, there were fern leaves spilling out of their pot in long thin, vibrating strands of iridescent green. Zeb looked at the cola can, and the words seemed to bleed outwards in a wash of exploding white—with each pound of the music. He got up too, and went outside to listen to the moon.

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  When the lights went out on Vivian’s face there was a giggle from somewhere behind the darkness. It was followed by a crash of pottery and shelves in the deepest part of the greenhouse shed.

  Startled, Zeb jumped down from the wooden counter, grabbed his pants and started putting them on. He caught sight of a darkened figure clambering among pots and garden tools, knocking them over as he picked his way among them, then outright bolting for the highlighted outline of the doorway. Zeb leapt for the shadow as it crossed the threshold, pushed the door open and ran out into the night. Tangled in his pants, he came up short of grabbing the figure, and he fell across the wooden and dirt doorframe. He came crashing to gravel and cool grass which was already moistened by dew on its blades. He looked up to discover a group of fifteen or twenty of the partiers standing around in a semi-circle a short distance away, smiling in silence. Some were holding drinks and some held pilfered mickeys from the infamous liquor cabinet. Jackson Cavanaugh was among the mob, standing in stunned wide-mouth amazement. In front of them stood the shadow figure in clear view, a young dark-skinned boy, maybe ten or eleven. He was saying something in another language, and laughed until Zeb scrambled up and after him again. “You think that’s funny?” he screamed at the kid. But without reply, the kid took off towards the house. He laughed more and the sound of his giddy wails faded into the shadows. The gathered crowd had started to whisper a little by then too.

  From behind him, in the doorway of the shed came Vivian. She grabbed Zeb by his bare arms, stopped him from chasing after the boy and then finished doing the buttons up on her top. Her hair was matted and fell across her cheeks; both of them were damp with sweat. I
t was obvious to everyone what had been going on. And Zeb was fuming mad.

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  Vivian didn’t seem embarrassed, actually. Not at all. And that almost made Zeb angrier. In reality, she actually seemed to revel in the attention—she had been caught with Zeb Redfield, of all people, naked in the garden shed. And the Portuguese housekeeper’s kid had climbed through a back window vent after drawing everyone’s attention to it. No big deal. Not to her. This was something to make the weekend of her sixteenth legendary when only moments before it promised nothing more than to be remembered as a party when the Leland liquor cabinet’s lock got broken. Not much for the record books. Not much for the last summer before graduation. But this, this was more definitive. This would seal the deal. Zeb and her, Zeb of all the guys at Marin she could have been in there with, would make it memorable for everyone.

  Looking at Zeb’s flushed face and fierce eyes, and thinking he might just become another aggressive, another alpha male bent on retribution, she told Zeb just to let it go. “He’s just the cleaning lady’s kid. No biggie.” But Zeb was pissed off. In this moment, with everyone standing around, with all of them flashing disapproval at him like that, he found it growing like a chemical reaction that would soon burst and pop, and spill over. The embarrassment didn’t seem like something he could get past. His face was red, not just from the orgasm, but from genuine fury. Usually he could keep his emotions in check but this time felt completely different.

  A few minutes later, after people had generally dissipated, gone back into the house or down to the beach to walk off hangovers that were already starting to take, and after Vivian herself had gone with a few of her friends back to the living room for more drinks, Riley Fischer came over to Zeb who was sitting on a stone barrier at the edge of the lawn.

  His voice was still slurred, more so possibly, than before. “Red. Don’t sweat it, man. Actually, most everybody thinks it’s pretty cool. I mean, who would have thought you’d be the one to pop lil Viv’s cherry, eh?” He sat beside him, gave him a little elbow nudge in his side, and flashed him his silk smile. He was holding another pop tin that reeked of Triple Sec.

  The tune behind the moon was nearly gone, only a whisper, like a marching band that had made its way down the street around a corner. And Zeb actually caught himself laughing a little at what Fish had said. It might have been further attempts to seem like he was a collected cucumber to Fish or it may have been just because of the real irony in the situation. Precisely, who would have thought that?

  Rudy Dunlop came running up then, darting through a couple of people who were making their way back to the house. Music was still blasting and Simon Caulder had caught the Portuguese kid somewhere up the road.

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  Lake of Bays, near the town of Dorset, had scattered streetlamps and the roads were narrow and winding through trees and large sections of rock. Houses were set far back from the road and there was a gullet of gravel running down either side of the road before the sunken gutter of clover, wild grass and moss.

  But the street was lit up enough by the moon on that night so the three boys, Fish, Zeb and Rudy, could find Simon in the grass holding down the Portuguese kid. They were the equivalent of about five or six city blocks from the roaring Leland Beach Home. The sound of the stereo and the party-goers did not carry this far and it was silent out here. Only crickets and gentle, pushing breezes in their ears.

  Fish was smiling. So was Caulder. Zeb was stone-faced. And so was the kid—until he saw Zeb and then he started laughing and pointing again. He was saying something in his native tongue and none of them could understand it but the meaning was obvious—it was associated with his laughter.

  “Simon, just let him go. It doesn’t matter.” Zeb’s anger was still there but some semblance of sanity seemed present in his head again. He realized his hands were fists at his side, and he forced himself to relax them a little. Why had he been so angry?

  Fish’s smile faltered. “What? Zeb this young man deserves to be taught a valuable lesson about personal space.” He dropped into his noted ‘Fish-as-politician’ routine, complete with his mock pulpit-speech voice, a little fuzzy about the edges, rounded by a good dose of Triple Sec. “Privacy, Zeb. Privacy is the issue at hand. And as his elders and ambassadors of a country which he clearly knows nothing about, I feel it is our responsibility— nay, our civic duty—to teach this young and ignorant foreigner about such democratic concepts as privacy. He obviously doesn’t know of such things.”

  An image of how Zeb’s back must have hunched in a white mound of flesh on top of Vivian on that dirty wooden countertop with her legs spread around him must have looked, how their moans and sighs must have sounded. And then he had an image of Sicily’s face and he started getting angry again. He didn’t know why—it made no sense. The kid didn’t know that Zeb had seen his aunt’s face there where Viv’s should have been. Or that Zeb still couldn’t shake the idea that it had maybe been the face of his own mother instead. There was no way the Portuguese kid could have known that.

  And still, he was mad as all blazes at him.

  Fish had picked the kid up by then, grabbed him by his arm and hauled him up from the damp grass of the gutter. He gave him a pretty solid back-hand that bloodied the kid’s lip and the laughter was gone. He yelled something in the boy’s face about rights and privacy in the land of the free. The boy’s let loose only sobs. His face was wet and bloody. The whites of his eyes were so stark. And before Zeb knew it he had stepped forward and delivered a series of blows himself. His anger was pent up in his hands and they just kept swinging. Later, he would remember bursts of orange and white flaring up in his eyesight, but he wouldn’t remember how many there had been. At that moment Zeb was looking through a filter, a veil of soundlessness and tunnel vision, a gauze of sleep. He heard nothing and saw nothing. Even the secret chords from the nearly full moon, the magic of all that had come before in the night, were gone. He felt like he was sleep walking, half of him in his body, and the other half somewhere far away. And the sound that finally snapped him out of his trance wasn’t the laughter from the other three around and behind him. It wasn’t even the wails and howls of the little dark-skinned kid laying in the gutter under him with Zeb’s faint full-bodied shadow across him; it was instead the sound of Fish’s red and white pop can rolling down the gravel edging of the road. Tink, tinktinktink-tink-tink.

  He looked over and saw it there, gently rolling towards him and making the only audible noise. Hollow aluminum on a bed of small pebbles. Tinktinktinktink-tink. Fish had thrown it down as he had grabbed the little boy’s wrist and now it was gently coming towards him on the gravel, slowly, rolling to make the white letters, cola, disappear, then appear, disappear, then appear. It filled the vacuum-void surrounding Zeb with only its sound. And gradually other sensations, other sounds, other feelings, came back. The wind in his ears, the shushing of branches overhead in the gusts, the sobs and sniffles of the swollen-faced boy below him, wet grass on his ankles and toes through the openings of his sandals.

  Then Jackie-O got there.

  Zeb looked at his hands as his closest friend took him by the shoulders and shook him. There was blood there but he couldn’t see reason. Reason was gone. It was obscured, murky and dingy. It had come out of the need for a sort of maintenance—the silent respect of the School of Fish, and others like him. It had been finally spoken aloud—but that was only part of it all. The worst thing, at least at that moment, was that Zeb didn’t know why he had done it.

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  If Vivian was passion, then Caeli was poetry.

  In a rotating brand nameless pop can under foreign moonlight, Zeb had seen everything he never wanted to be. And in Caeli’s eyes, whether she was laughing or crying, he saw everything he did want to be.

  A year later, in one of Zeb’s socio-political, dirty white pill-induced painting speeches at Vivian’s, he had blurted out a confessional to everyone there that he and Fish had been the on
es who beat the hell out of the Portuguese kid. Sure, everyone who had been sober enough to even think that morning had wondered about the connection when Jackie-O had turned up at Dorset Township’s local medi-center with the kid. The boy had needed twenty-nine stitches, his face was swollen as large as a tennis ball in some places, and it had all occurred just down the road from the infamous “Viv and Red in the Garden Shed” exploit—which actually made the two of them rather infamous at Marin High. Of course the kid didn’t lay any blame. And Cavanaugh told Dorset Police that he hadn’t seen who had done it, that he had just come across the kid laying there all beat up.

  Jackie-O had looked after the kid, and covered Zeb’s sorry ass—Zeb didn’t know why—and yet Zeb proceeded to try and bury himself again by telling everyone exactly what had happened. Of course he had smoked a few and had popped a few by that point of the night and was literally seeing double. His paintbrushes had found their way onto the walls and the curtains more than on the canvas at his easel. The ‘mystery pills’—the Adams, which Vivian had gotten him when the pot didn’t seem to be producing paintings he was happy with—made some interesting patterns on the walls and in Zeb’s ears. He was more wasted than he had ever been when he started talking about the night of the garden shed.