Ohio

by Stephen Markley

  Funny, he thought, folding the picture back up, how you could look at anyone’s high school homecoming picture from any middling town or suburb in America, and they all looked like stock photos, the image that came with the frame, identical teenagers doing identical teenage shit and hoping it wouldn’t end because what lay beyond was too unknown.

  He heard the door of the liquor store chime and popped his head up in time to see a short, unkempt figure stalk in. He sat finishing his cigarette.

  After a moment the man reemerged and looked at Bill the way you’d check to see if a dog in the pound was actually the one your parents told you had run off. Unruly dreads bobbed around his face, playing Velcro with gnarly, gnatty stubble. Clothed in baggy jeans with white bleach stains and a dark zippered sweatshirt despite the warmth of the night. A big chain looped from his belt to a wallet in the back pocket. He’d added a bottle in a brown paper bag to his accoutrements.

  “Whoa. Bill Ashcraft.”

  Bill held his whiskey aloft. “The one and only.”

  “Where in the pits did you come from?”

  Bill studied the face: a coyote scowl, thick platypus lips, a disappointed menace in the eyes, but so very white bread underneath the posture—a specimen plucked from the suburbs and spray-tanned with disaffection. Familiarity flickered but winked out. “Sorry, it’s been a fucking hippo of a day. We went to school together?”

  “Dakota.” He stuck out a small, delicate hand. His eyes were furious and careless and nihilistic. It was like locking gazes with a torturer.

  Bill clamped the cigarette and shook the hand, though the name still meant nothing.

  “Sure, man.”

  “Bill motherfucking Ashcraft. You back in town?”

  The trigonometries of his patter were familiar. The Ohio drawl acting as interlocutor for an urbanized, hip-hop patois gleaned from interaction with young black men mostly via CD.

  “Sure. Maybe. Who knows. Up here running an errand and Jonah handed me your number.”

  “No doubt I can hook you up.”

  Suddenly he remembered the kid. Exley. Dakota Exley. He’d been without dreads then, just a mushroom of bland brown hair. A petite little fucker a grade ahead, Dakota had skulked around with a skateboard and no friends. At least, he’d had the skateboard until Ryan Ostrowski, a football-playing Beaufort lacky, cornered Dakota in the parking lot for the LOLz. He’d torn Dakota’s skateboard away, shoved him to the ground, and hit him so hard over the spine that it cracked the wood. Kids stood around watching the way they do.

  “You backed me up. Sorta,” Bill remembered, a glow of unexpected camaraderie blooming. “During that whole T-shirt debacle, you came up and said something to me that wasn’t ‘Go fuck yourself.’ ”

  “What can I say? You had a point.”

  Bill slapped his new friend on the back and stood. “C’mon. Let’s boogie.”

  They ambled away from the liquor store, searching out a place to make a deal. Clouds moved in overhead, blotting out the stars in large dark-white patches of spilled, glowing paint.

  * * *

  Let’s call it a defining time of Bill’s young life, but for very different reasons than it was definitional for most. This was fall of his junior year, right before basketball began, and all that was on his mind were those last days of freedom before the season swallowed all his time and energy. He and Lisa were having the kind of exhausting amounts of sex only teenagers can truly manage, and then, one Tuesday morning during earth science, Mr. Masoncup got a call. He hung up, turned on the television in the corner of the room just in time for the class to see the second plane crash into the World Trade Center. All they could do was watch in total, undiluted awe as the first tower fell. Hailey Kowalczyk sat beside him in that class, and when the South Tower began pancaking down in a cascade of gory gray glory, she ate a breath of air, buckled back so fast her desk shrieked against the tile, and said two words that, for Bill, would come to define the event and all that came in the aftermath.

  “Oh no.”

  Bill was immediately on the wrong side of the thing. In his social studies class, they talked about the coming invasion of Afghanistan. He’d stayed up nights reading the history. Some war-torn country literally known as the “graveyard of empires” and they were going to go bomb the rubble around and occupy? Good fucking luck. “Maybe we should be asking why people hate us so much,” he said in that class as he felt Rick glaring at him, Lisa wishing he would be quiet. “Like is it crazy to think we had this coming? Like, those people think God chose them, but here we all are just clearly thinking God chose us. It’s in the pledge the state makes us say every morning.” The class sat in silence, picking at their desks and fingernails.

  In New Canaan High, 9/11 had this element of activation. At lunch, the boys crowded around the military recruiters who came through handing out pamphlets. Students were instructed to write and decorate messages to the troops on stiff pieces of cardboard, which would be “sent to the war zone.” On his, Bill wrote: Try not to kill too many civilians. His social studies teacher informed him that this sentiment was removed from the pile before it was mailed.

  His own activation had been a long time coming.

  Adolescent identity is an odd thing, formed mostly for hypermasculine young men by their chosen extracurricular activity. Since seventh grade when he and Rick were breaking out as up-and-coming stars of their respective sports, they’d each had a taste of that oozing, slippery product called popularity that had something to do with health and something to do with wealth but simply couldn’t be predicted. Prior to this moment, the two of them made sense. Maybe his parents were college educated and Rick’s parents worked as a police officer and ran a salon, respectively, but who cared about that? About their parents’ levels of education or incomes or worldviews or politics? He, Rick, and Harrington had stories dating back to the second grade. In seventh and eighth grade, they took to quizzing each other on basketball and football plays and joked about Rick’s eerie ability to recall running routes after only a glance (“You’re like Redneck Rainman, Brink”). They made weird bets at parties to set lawn chairs on fire or jump into scummy ponds for Little Caesars breadsticks coupons. They were whip-smart badasses, lambent troublemakers. They were boys.

  Something began to change right around the time the shit-eating Texas governor snookered the 2000 election from the doughy and ineffectual vice president. They’d always busted each other’s balls about everything, but this felt different. It bothered Bill. For that period of months when they were counting chads and maneuvering to the Supreme Court, the two of them argued about it the way you’d argue about a bad foul call in the NBA playoffs or an Ohio State touchdown that got called back for offensive pass interference. When Bush got crowned, Rick needled him at every opportunity, including slapping a W STANDS 4 WINNER bumper sticker on Bill’s locker, which he had to scrape off with a razor blade.

  Then two planes hit the World Trade Center towers, one hit the Pentagon, and a final one dug a crater in a Pennsylvania field, and almost that same day, he felt a divergence occur between them. Bill observed the flag-waving, the brainless nationalism, the invocation of military might as panacea for sorrow, and it felt to him like a bad movie, a gloss of convenient worship for shared bloodletting. Rick got into it. Really into it. He put a bumper sticker on his car: LET’S ROLL. He took down every football poster and hung a massive American flag in his bedroom, the kind that belongs on a pole outside a civic building. He seemed genuinely disappointed when the operation in Afghanistan came to a quick conclusion (or appeared to). When he turned eighteen the summer before senior year, he would get his first tattoo: a claw mark on his shoulder where invisible talons revealed the Stars and Stripes beneath the skin. Meanwhile, Bill felt like he had to ingest everything he could to counter this jingoism suddenly ejaculating from his best friend’s mouth. His favorite album became Let’s Get Free by Dead Prez, while he checked off all the required reading of a young radical struggling t
o make sense of history and the social order: The Autobiography of Malcolm X, Manufacturing Consent, A People’s History of the United States. The bug gestated, and when he began to see the way the world is—not the way the corporate media presented it, not the way his parents and teachers told it, not the way he wished it was so he wouldn’t have to feel guilt—once he saw the way the world is in its most gritty, tactile, overwhelming sadness and injustice—well, he could never unsee it.

  Maybe at that age he was aping left-wing provocateurs, not yet ready to author his own opinion, but Rick was just a Fox News fire hose spraying invective at anyone he saw as insufficiently war-hungry.

  So a few months after the attacks of September 11, as the administration began murmuring about a second war, Bill came to school in a black T-shirt with a mug shot of Bush and the words WANTED: INTERNATIONAL TERRORIST.

  He’d been in the building less than ten minutes, enduring the stares and glares, when Rick found him by his locker. He’d never seen his friend so angry.

  “Are you fucking kidding me?” He pushed close. Put his face breath-to-breath with Bill’s. Rick had this particular scent, a pre-sweat musk that hovered around him even after he showered. It smelled almost of bean burritos.

  “All right, don’t get all fucked up over it, Rick. It’s a goddamn T-shirt.” He pretended to look for something in his locker, which was a disaster of folders, textbooks, errant clothing he kept forgetting to take home. He found his varsity jacket and searched the pockets, found his car keys, which seemed like a reasonable excuse to not face Rick and a fury that, he had to admit, surprised him.

  “Would you wear that shit around someone who died fighting for your right to wear it?” Rick asked, the muscles of his face taut and demanding a real answer. Even his acne appeared redder.

  Bill gave him a quizzical look. It was times like this he yearned for Kaylyn the most. The resentment felt like wolves breathing on the back of his neck.

  “You mean like would I wear it around them in the afterlife? Not sure I understand.”

  Harrington had been milling near his locker with Stacey and left her to walk their way. They had a crowd now. Clusters of their book-clutching peers stopped to watch this juicy scene unfold. Rick plucked at the shirt, pinching Bill’s skin in the process. “This is some sick shit, even for your unbelievable dumb ass.”

  Despite Rick’s Creatine muscle, spreading over his young frame like an exoskeleton, Bill felt the impulse to take a swing and see where it led. He was still four inches taller. Rick had to gaze up at him.

  “How’s this . . .” He thumped a palm hard off Rick’s chest, hoping it would back him up. “Any fucking different from putting that idiot bumper sticker on your car? Just exercising my free speech rights. Isn’t that what you want to go off and kill a bunch of Third World farmers for?”

  Rick’s face in motion always reminded him of an angry little boy. It was a face of small features—tiny ears, tiny nose, beady brown eyes. When he smiled, his eyes almost disappeared in the manner of a little kid caught in gut-busting hysterics. Maybe this was because Bill had known him since they were toddlers, but it’s what he always saw when the guy laughed. Now this sense of Rick disappeared, and after this moment Bill never saw him that way again.

  Harrington finally spoke up. “Dudes. This is dumb. Let’s chill the fuck out? Everyone’s already agreed you owe us all a dollar every time you bring up politics. So Ashcraft that’s five dollars for wearing the shirt, and Brink that’s five dollars for getting pissed about it.”

  Rick pretended not to hear. He jabbed a finger into Bill’s chest. So hard it stung. “I see that shirt after today, man, we’re gonna have words.”

  He stormed away, swollen arms held adrift from his body, as if allowing them to hang normally by his sides might give the terrorists succor. Bill turned back to his locker, tossed his car keys back into the pocket of his varsity jacket.

  Harrington stared at him like a dumb puppy.

  “What?” said Bill.

  “Nothing.” He began walking back to Stacey, who stood at the end of the hall, hips cocked, chewing on her lip with her pixie-cute face wrenched in worry. Over his shoulder, Harrington said, “Have it your way, Ashcraft. Just have it your way all the time.”

  But the day didn’t end there. After third period, he was walking through the upstairs hallway, talking to Eric “Whitey” Frye, a sophomore and one of the only black kids in lily-white NCHS. They were pushing through the crowd, talking hoops, feeling the first pre-lunch pangs, Bill explaining how Coach Napier was going to have him play a two guard even though he had height—

  And then a hammer landed on his chest, sent him sprawling to his ass before he even realized it was his books and folders flying. They slapped back down to hard hallway carpet as Frye made himself slim against the lockers. Bill looked up to see a shoulder and above it, a delighted smile, both belonging to Todd Beaufort, the football team’s co-captain.

  “My bad,” said Beaufort, and Bill had a flyby thought of how this was such a move from some bad teen comedy. The cliché offended him as much as the physical act. “Maybe don’t make treason against your own country? Just a thought.”

  Bill hauled himself to his feet, face hot from the whispers and snickers. Beaufort’s girlfriend, Tina Ross, stood a few feet back snickering with delight. For some reason—as Bill stepped toe-to-toe with Beaufort—this is what pissed him off the most. This stupid, pretty girl giggling at her steroidal fuckbag boyfriend, playing the good little Christian virgin while the high school’s football star used her like a blow-up doll. Beaufort was born to be a bully, oversized and stupid. What excuse did she have?

  “If you wanna go . . .” Beaufort mused. He and Bill were about the same height, but the kid probably had thirty pounds of muscle on him. For the first time in high school, he felt the isolation of the easy pickings. He wondered too if Beaufort was acting as Rick’s proxy.

  He felt a hand on his shoulder.

  “Get moving,” Mr. Clifton said to Beaufort. “And, Bill, come with me.”

  Beaufort smirked as Bill was led away, and he saw Tina give him this look like she’d never been more delighted to see someone knocked down a peg. He’d bought her a milk shake at Vicky’s once, and they’d even made out in one of those long-ago grades (Seventh? Eighth? Who remembered?). He hated her more than Beaufort.

  “This isn’t you in trouble with me,” Clifton assured him on the way to Principal MacMillan’s office. “This is about your safety.”

  “Seems like it’s about censorship.”

  Mr. Clifton took a hand from his pants pocket and smoothed his mustache. “I admire your passion, Bill. I always do admire people with passion. But you need to learn the difference between passion and provocation.”

  In Principal MacMillan’s office the bureaucratic lump took one look at him and said, “Turn it inside out for today. Then I don’t want to see it again, or it’ll be a suspension.”

  That afternoon after classes let out, Bill went to the screen printer in town and had a shirt printed with the quote:

  Returning violence for violence multiplies violence, adding deeper darkness to a night already devoid of stars

  This too landed him in the principal’s office. Mr. Bonheim, the football coach and also a history teacher, spotted him in the hallway.

  “We been put on notice about this,” he said, examining the words, trying to ferret out what radical meaning they might possibly contain.

  Bill spat it out before he thought it through: “It’s Martin Luther fucking King.”

  He entered MacMillan’s office with the rage of the righteous. He was ready to shout. To threaten. To take a stand. He pictured a Supreme Court case. He pictured the New York Times editorializing on the courageous determination of this humble kid from Middle America. He pictured an Oscar-winning biopic.

  “You have a choice,” MacMillan told him, hands tented. Bill glared at the way his baldness was happening—a streak of fallow follicles crawlin
g up his scalp from where he parted the limp brown. “Coach Napier tells me you’re a hell of a ballplayer. Either you can keep up this nonsense or you can play basketball this year. You cannot do both.”

  Like that, his fury drained. His skin went clammy, the way it will when dread chokes away false courage.

  “That’s what he said?” He hated the way his question came out: frightened, childish. Suddenly, his surroundings returned to him. The drab, uncluttered office space of a public school warden. Clichéd inspirational posters making success sound as if it had nothing to do with socioeconomics.

  MacMillan nodded. “It’s not his decision anyway. Now, Bill, if you want to get the ACLU involved, be my guest. Meanwhile, you won’t play basketball.”

  Bill threw away both shirts that day. Only one person ever acknowledged him for what he’d done. A squirrely outcast named Dakota Exley approached him in the hallway after school, likely when he was sure Bill would be alone. This skinny, scraggly upperclassman with a face like a rhesus monkey, Bill had to look around to make sure it was him the guy was speaking to. “Heard what happened with your shirt. Just wanted to say fuck those dickless cogs,” he said while blinking too much. “Someone should knife ’em all and put ’em in the dirt.”