Ohio

by Stephen Markley

  “Only too late did he realize that when he arrives he’ll have to rip this fucking tape off,” he said to his gut. His stomach hairs, mashed to the skin with suffocating, cloying adhesive, were now terrified little buggers.

  Before he could follow the thought, he turned and barfed into the grass, which he knew would sober him up quick and be a true bummer in the near- to mid-term.

  Returning briefly to the cab, he plucked a photograph from the visor and slipped it in his back pocket. This picture had taken a mercurial path. Many times he’d thought of leaving it wherever the wind happened to have blown him. How many dorm room corkboards or hostel bathroom mirrors or apartment refrigerators had he tacked, magnetized, or otherwise affixed it to, always with the thought that here would be its final resting place in this kingdom. That he’d leave it there like he’d left behind every other artifact. Somehow it was always the thing he remembered, the one crisp piece of buried nostalgic schist that he’d unearth before moving on. He sometimes wondered if this sticky photograph had its own agenda.

  Then he set off toward the lights of the town that was still, for lack of any other concrete options, his home. After walking maybe half a mile down the road, he realized that while remembering the picture, he’d left the keys in the ignition and a thousand dollars in the glove compartment.

  He didn’t bother going back.

  * * *

  Bill had chosen this particular weekend to make the return trip because he knew his parents would be out of town, so that when he stumbled up to his childhood home, a dark, pristine castle in the country with a neat lawn and a basketball hoop in the driveway where he, Rick Brinklan, and Ben Harrington had balled until the daylight gave out, he could be sure to wreck around the house half-wasted without his parents asking a thousand questions about what their twenty-eight-year-old semi-estranged son was doing with himself these days.

  Estranged was a hell of a word, and not exactly accurate. His parents were more like exasperated with him: his postgraduate wandering, his lost jobs, his remarkable ability to filch money even after they’d increased security around their ATM pins, PayPal accounts, and jewelry boxes. There was also the possibility that his parents were divorced and just hadn’t bothered to tell him. His mother, a journalism student who gave up a New York City career to follow her dentist husband to his hometown of Corn & Rust, Ohio, where they would supposedly raise a son away from—well, from what? Violence, fear, minorities, pollution? A joke like that surely had an expiration date, right? Love was a marketing strategy, but every ad campaign lost its zest in the end. Every romantic bond eventually turned into the Yo Quiero Taco Bell dog.

  More to the point, they were at his cousin’s wedding in Cincinnati.

  Beyond his mission and all its implications, he was also eager to escape the gun-blast heat of New Orleans for a few days. That place already felt as claustrophobic as New Canaan. It was really all he’d discovered from his travels: No matter where you went or how novel it seemed when you first pulled into town, it always turned into the same bars, same food, same women, same politics, same liquor, same drugs, same troubles.

  He’d been writing media releases for a wetlands conservation group, an organization that had sprung up following the 2010 BP nightmareathon. Dedicated to helping residents and the environment of the Louisiana coast, rumored to have some Oscar winner’s money behind it, pushing back against the oil and petrochemical interests that ran the state like the British ran colonial India. It didn’t exactly take a policy wonk to understand that the state and local governments were obsessed with slurping up every last drop of oil from the wells off the coast, and the wetlands—as far as the vast majority of the state legislature was concerned—could go take a flying fuck on the spaceship Challenger. No two ways about it: the city was fucking doomed. It wasn’t clear if he’d been fired for his desperation, his drinking, or an impolitic remark to his boss (the prissy, lecherous, Vermontonian Treme superfan), “Try fucking your wife for a change,” but fired he had been.

  So if he ever went back to New Orleans, it would be to clean out his apartment. After securing this new gig, he made a diplomatic mission to the French Quarter where he found a saxophone player willing to sell him a tab of acid. He then smuggled himself past his self-loathing and straight out of town. From there, he drove north.

  The first part of the job went off without a hitch. He met the guy in the empty, forsaken lot of a shuttered warehouse, the chain-link fortification rusted and collapsing, scoured NO TRESPASSING sign in the dirt, weeds taking back the concrete through any crack rain and sunlight dared penetrate. Just another abandoned industrial Leeziana outpost, nothing on the approach but grief, churches, cancer clusters, and gut-loving bayou cooking. The man also drove a truck but not a cheap, used beater like Bill’s. This Cajun good ole boy drove a shiny new F-350, bloodred and fierce. He had a salt goatee and a camo trucker’s hat with a cross dead center. He’d come from somewhere that put mud on his boots, and he spoke in that Creole dialect that a kid from Ohio could never fully decipher. He instructed Bill to smash the burner cell underfoot. The two of them got under Bill’s truck together, and Bill handed the guy tape and twine while he fixed the package to the truck’s guts. Then he gave Bill an envelope stuffed with twenties.

  “Drive the limit. Don’t go talk to no one. And you get pulled over, don’t got drink nor drugs in your cab.”

  “I got cruise control and white skin, my man. Pigs can’t even see me.”

  The Cajun didn’t look amused, and Bill didn’t have time to explain that the comment was ironically racist, a satirizing of the power structure—or that he fully intended to do psychedelics on the trip. (Lotsa stuff left out of that convo.)

  Thing was, Bill had a hard time driving long distances without being some kind of altered, and pulling from New Orleans to Northeast Ohio in a day to deliver mystery contraband would require strong mojo. He only had the one mishap when he tossed his phone, a bad idea because he’d been told to show up for this exchange at an acutely specific time. He remedied his mistake by stopping at a pharmacy where—unable to locate a section with wristwatches and feeling the searing eyes of the staff—he purchased a small kitchen timer and, after stumbling into a display of self-tanning lotion, the bottles clattering and careening down the sleek aisle like bowling pins, set it to 15:00:00, which was a fine guesstimate of the schedule he’d been given. Solving that hiccup seemed to activate the LSD’s magic. For ten to twelve hours, he smoked cigs across the bleached-out American landscape, up through the deltas of Mississippi and stars falling on Alabama, he watched the sky shift in burning purple and orange wars. Armies cascaded across the plains and planes died in beautiful violent violet clashes. Dust thick enough to taste billowing off the fields serving up their corn and soy. Black birds clutched black telephone wires and watched him with black eyes. The flags ran up the polls of the clouds and an amber smoke drifted in and out of time, crept up into other levels of existence and sailed back, changed. The CD player useless, the clock broken, and the radio his only companion, he kept for company the vast panoply of American broadcast eccentricity: pop radio, country doggerel, and Evangelical dreamers hoping against hope that Jesus would make it back sooner rather than later. Through Tennessee and Nashville and the bluegrass hills of Kentucky, through July, a month of electric heat hallucination and erotic moons, the fields were on fire on all sides, and the flames rose thousands of feet in the air until they scorched the underbellies of passenger jets. Only the highway was a cool river of water through which he could be assured safe passage. The rest of it burned like blood on fire. Cruising along Eisenhower’s interstate baby with the setting sun on his left spilling some mystic aurora across the addled sky, he thought he could feel his brain bleeding.

  But these visions began to tame as he neared home, and when he crossed the Ohio River near Marietta, that familiar thirst was there, riding him, demanding satisfaction, that whole beautiful flow of mid-American freshwater looking like a goddamn bat
htub full of booze. He pulled into a liquor store, bought the cheap shit, and drove across the gloaming blue of the Ohio, taking his first pull at the moment the fading color of the twilight sky perfectly matched the water.

  * * *

  He’d been on a bestial three-week bender since getting fired, but that was more like a culmination of a four-year bender since getting fired from Obama’s Columbus office, which itself may have been an extension of a prolonged drinking spurt that dated back to New Canaan High School. Hard to say, really. Bill had spent this last three-week leg drinking and smoking and snorting and popping in such an unreflective stupor that, in a way, the acid had almost woken him up, brought him reeling out of a safe place into the vampire-incinerating light of day, and now this whole moment of existence was a protracted, muscular mindfuck of remembrance and poetry and wonder. Really, the way a good trip should be. He hadn’t eaten in a day. Every time he took acid, he’d forget to eat for thirty-six hours and wake up famished, wanting to drain the blood from a rabbit.

  He trotted along the dark country road, a shambolic gait through whispering trees wrung wild. Big stars overhead. Sweatshop Nikes crunching over the gravel edge of the road. Too sober following his purge. The long walk into town took him over a bridge with low concrete barriers. Below, the swiftly flowing Cattawa River whispered. His childhood river. The grass on the banks was a dirty, dry summer yellow. The night felt formless here, and it wasn’t just the alcohol’s cool washcloth on his mind or the lingering effects of the LSD—this was something elemental he was hearing. The river spoke and its singular trail churning through the earth, shaping its contours, told profound stories of time and apology and geology. This was the sound or absence of sound he sometimes felt when he drove from New Orleans to the wildlife refuge to hike the trails through the bayous and watch the world waste away. Trying to catch a glimpse of the part that had maintained, that had survived, at least for now, the pestilential lust of humankind’s brief party.

  The tape wound around his torso stretched and bit with each step.

  He had time to kill—02:18:24—and the liquor store, coincidentally, lay right in his path. He fingered the shard of torn napkin: Jonah had jotted the phone number on it while they smoked outside the bar. Beyond the urge to drink and get the vomit taste out of his mouth was the urge for something harder. And beyond the urge for something harder was the urge to remember—the worst addiction of all.

  Boy, he thought, suddenly looking around, did Ohio look like shit.

  The whole state for sure, but stumbling down SR 229 into the outskirts of the city limits, New Canaan looked like the microcosm poster child of middle-American angst. This little stretch of strip mall had lost all its signs, so you could see the ghostly outlines of the vanished businesses as well as all the smaller rust outlines where the screws once attached to the stucco. The rest of the road had all the familiar tumors. House with FOR SALE sign. House with FORECLOSURE sign. The rest for rent yet clearly unrented. Andy’s Glass Shop, closed. Burger King, open. New Canaan Building Supply across the street, closed, FOR RENT sign. Subway, open. Gas station, open, sign burned out, weird old dude lingering by a pay phone watching him. (A pay phone! Still!) Gotti’s Pizza, where Harrington’s dad used to take them after YMCA soccer or basketball, shut down, gone, along with its excellent Hawaiian pie. Liberty Tax, open.

  Ohio hadn’t gone through the same real estate boom as the Sun Belt, but the vultures had circled the carcasses of dying industrial towns—Dayton, Toledo, Mansfield, Youngstown, Akron—peddling home equity loans and refinancing. All the garbage that blew up in people’s faces the same way subprime mortgages had. A fleet of nouveau riche snake oil salesmen scoured the state, moving from minority hoods where widowed, churchgoing black ladies on fixed incomes made for easy marks to the white working-class enclaves and then the first-ring suburbs. The foreclosures began to crop up and then turn into fields of fast-moving weeds, reducing whole neighborhoods to abandoned husks or drug pens. Ameriquest, Countrywide, CitiFinancial—all those devious motherfuckers watching the state’s job losses, plant closings, its struggles, its heartache, and figuring out a way to make a buck on people’s desperation. Every city or town in the state had big gangrenous swaths that looked like New Canaan, the same cancer-patient-looking strip mall geography with brightly lit outposts hawking variations on usurious consumer credit. Those entrepreneurs saw the state breaking down like Bill’s truck, and they moved in, looking to sell the last working parts for scrap.

  “Hey-ho!” Bill toasted the night with an invisible bottle.

  Passing into town he’d spotted several houses with their ROMNEY/RYAN yard signs still holding on nearly nine months after those two effete, moonbeam-colored Cylons bit it. He spotted other yard signs that appeared, as sure as the seasons, begging people to vote Yes on a doomed school levy.

  He streaked for the pay phone, weird old dude trickling into the night with his shopping bag. Bill transferred the phone number from the scrap of napkin to the greasy buttons, each denuded silver rectangle likely a spa retreat for herpes and snot.

  “Drugs-d-drugs-drugs-drugs,” he sang to the tune of Sisqo’s “Thong Song.”

  He got two rings and a voice on the other end.

  “Jonah Hansen gave me this number. Can I get something?”

  “Where? And what?” The guy’s voice was light and buzzy, like when a fly drones by your ear.

  “Weed preferably. But I’m open to other bad ideas . . .” His gaze fell on the Dunkin’ Donuts, lights aglow. An employee pushed a mop. He was old and rail-thin, his face an archipelago of scabs, a few still looking open and wet, and Bill could almost smell decay through the glass. He noted a missing a tooth, a single incisor in the top row.

  “I got plenty-a options, yo. Where you wanna meet?”

  “I was on my way to the liquor store.”

  “Perfect. See you in ten.”

  A New Canaan PD cruiser slowed as it went by. Of course, he looked to see if it might be Marty Brinklan, but the cop was young, his head a cue ball, his face cruel and curious because this pay phone was likely used strictly for drug deals. Bill stayed on the phone as the dial tone began—just to make sure this oinker cruised on by.

  * * *

  The night knuckled down.

  For perhaps the thousandth time in the last twenty-four hours, he wondered what he’d gotten himself into and wandered out of that wonder by singing an old Ben Harrington jam. The one that sounded kind of sailor-songy from the album where he was wearing that imbecilic pork pie hat on the cover.

  “Everyone went off to war / Everyone got addicted to dope / Everyone woulda hanged hisself if it weren’t for the price of rope.” He reached a crosswalk, belting it out. A lone car idled at the intersection contemplating a green light. “Everyone got an Ess-Tee-Deeee / Everyone set the banshee free / So now it’s just ole you and me / With our sad, sick revelry!”

  At first he thought the driver had simply not yet noticed the green, but the car continued to sit, uninterested in its right of way. He guessed a drunk or a stoner lost in a daze. Surprise tingled his fingertips when he recognized the face.

  It was his ex-girlfriend’s goddamned mother. Bethany Kline sat in the lane heading south, so he could see right into the car. With her hands dug into the wheel at ten and two, she wept.

  The plastic-green color of the traffic light made the moisture beneath her eyes shine. Bethany Kline looked even more swollen, saggy, and ugly than he remembered. One spent so much time looking at the Botoxed and surgery-perfected visages of movie stars and TV personalities that it was sometimes jarring to just see what an average sixty-something woman, trampled by time and disappointment, actually looked like, let alone what she looked like crying. She hadn’t changed her haircut, still the unflattering midwestern bowl of badly dyed brown. Bangs like a friar. Her eyes were inflamed red wounds. It almost made him angry. What the fuck did she have to cry about?

  He thought of her daughter at Jericho Lake wearing a black
bikini and Jackie O sunglasses, her skin with both the mocha and the cream of her ancestry. Her taut, muscled build. Lisa Han had cheekbones higher than the moon and a delicate lift to her eyes that betrayed the half-exiled Caucasian in her. For the two keyest, binge-drinkingest, fuckfestingest years of high school, Lisa surprised him, drove him, maddened him. They met when she’d hunched forward at her desk in geometry class, studying a returned test. She’d been the only freshman in the class, bumped ahead a year by the Powers That Will. Bill had been staring at her cleavage, the way her high and tight tits pressed up out of this silver V-neck. She made a sound like “Blargh.” And he looked up.

  “Problem?”

  “Asian F,” she said, showing him her ninety-one percent score.

  It had been game on after that. The first time he’d gone over to Lisa’s house, he had to ask. There were just too many pictures of this beautiful Asian girl with this family of Tupperware-looking white people. Lisa explained how her father had fled after the fall of Saigon, shepherded by distant relatives to Texas. He ended up going to school at Ohio State where he met and impregnated a young woman from his Bible study group. Like good Christians, they married over a baby bump, but Papa was gone shortly after Lisa was born, possibly to return to Vietnam to find out if his family was still alive, more likely just another broke-dick father running away.

  “Who knows,” Lisa said, shrugging at the wall of family portraits. Bill was sorry he’d asked, as he could sense the embarrassment wafting off her. “Ole Bethany’s told me the story about five different ways. She buzzes me off when I ask too much. It’s why I refused to change my last name to Kline when she remarried. So she can’t pretend I’m her nice white girl. Like she never had a premarital yellow cock in her.”