Ohio

by Stephen Markley

  Dakota arched his eyebrows. “If you say so.”

  From what his parents told him, Harrington’s music had been fairly polarizing back home. Certainly no sign was going up at the city limits: HOMETOWN OF WILLIAM BENJAMIN HARRINGTON. He’d had a following, he’d played the festival circuit, but he’d never really broken out. He’d certainly never made money. A gruesome OD may have since helped record sales and mythos, but rock stars don’t get remunerated for the good career move of dying at exactly twenty-seven years old.

  “At the bar tonight we were talking about this New Canaan rumor—you heard of this? The Murder That Never Was?”

  Dakota checked over his shoulder, the road empty. “Sure, everyone’s heard of that.”

  “Right. So someone decides to make it up for a laugh. But it sticks, it spreads. It’s like any urban legend, like the guy with the hook for a hand who murders kids on lovers’ lane. That’s so teenagers will stop having sex at the Brew. It serves a social utility.”

  “You lost me, man. Lost me good.”

  “You know,” Bill said, waggling both hands in the air as he tried to capture his point. “It’s trying to provide meaning and narrative where there is none. The murder rumor is like a conspiracy theory in that way. People don’t want to believe dark, terrible violence can just spring out of—or onto—bored normal folk. Look at the kids we grew up with. How many ODs do you know?”

  Dakota snorted a laugh. “That are dead or that just OD’d and started shooting up a week later?”

  “Curtis Moretti, Ben Harrington.”

  “If you’re only counting from the popular cliques. My class alone had eleven. If you’re talking jail, you got Tony Wozniak? Ron Kruger? And are we counting the Flood brothers? They’re like on frequent flyer miles. Still not sure what you’re steering at.”

  “It’s the Harrington song, man. It’s all part of the same phenomenon in the end. You either fight for your dignity and some fucking justice or you lose it—no other way. And once you start to really lose it, the rot sets in.”

  He knew a bag of weed was hidden somewhere in the substratum of Dakota’s jeans. The guy had a scent like a cyclohexane refinery.

  “We’re here on business,” Dakota warned. “Don’t fill my ear with your liberal bullshit.”

  Bill stopped, his feet skidding in the gravel berm, and regarded him. “Thought you were down with my T-shirt protest back in the day?”

  “Didn’t mean I was no Democrat. Ain’t like I voted for Barack O-fucking-bama.”

  In the wind, the leaves looked like an addict’s agitated fingers, stroking night and sky. They turned onto New Canaan Avenue, which ran by a few industrial lots, the bowling alley, the park, and over the Cattawa. For some reason the town had never felt it necessary to put a sidewalk on this road, so they walked on the berm, uncapping their booze and swigging, vigilant for the NCPD patrol car.

  “Yeah, well, neither did I. The second time, I mean. I was in Mexico anyway.”

  “Doing what?”

  Bill went on to describe his many aborted journeys: the reservation, Cambodia, Occupy, the cartel town. It sounded a hell of a lot more exciting than it actually felt to live, sitting unbathed in interminable airports waiting on delayed planes; broken phrases in disparate languages; chopped English and hand-gesture communication; keeping your whole life strapped inside a forty-pound Osprey pack. Of course that was after he lost his job on the 2008 campaign.

  “See,” said Dakota. “Democrat.”

  He laughed, thinking of when he got fired for an “outrageous, indecent, indiscriminate” tweet (Ready to string up these Wall Street fucks & their families from light poles on Park Ave #JacobinTime). He hadn’t bothered cleaning out his desk, accidentally leaving behind a glass cube with a piece of the net from when Harrington tipped in his own missed free throw for the conference championship. Self-fucked, out of the whole incident Bill regretted this the most.

  They passed under a street lamp, one of those sodium-vapor deals that cast the worst kind of orange-soda color and made half the streets in America look washed-out and sick. Only under its glare did Bill now realize that roughly a third of the lights on New Canaan Avenue were dark, which created large pockets of sallow shadows.

  “What you learn’s like: the American system . . .” He flicked his cigarette into the road. “It’s not like this conspiracy of Illuminati. It’s just this adaptive, fucking assimilating, smooth motherfucker. It gives you cars and credit and religion and television and all this other comfort that we go and call ‘freedom.’ Problem is, there’s no raging against the machine because the machine just consumes whatever objection anyone makes about it.”

  “Hey, can I bum a smoke?”

  “Sure.” Bill fished in his jeans for the pack of Camels. He popped the top with one hand, offered the pack to Dakota, and then drew another for himself with his teeth.

  “But it’s— Here, I got a lighter.” He snapped a flame for Dakota and then lit his own. “It’s way more subtle than that. Like anyone trying to say her piece,” Bill explained. “You’ll just get commodified, assimilated, appropriated. You’ll get a tenure-track teaching job or a record contract or your own TV show, or God forbid, a publishing deal. Now you’re owned by the status quo. By GE or Comcast or Pearson PLC or worst of all, some neoliberal Ivy League university.”

  Dakota ashed with expert flicks and ticks of his fingers, like an old-timer sitting on the porch matter-of-factly recounting the moment his wife left him. They passed the varsity baseball diamond and neared the secluded safety of the football field where—eons ago it seemed—he’d graduated on one balls-dripping-hot summer day.

  “Democrat? Liberal? Duckfuck. At this point I’d rather be called a Nazi. Liberals are the Harvard grads interested in diversifying the plutocracy. And if you’re really causing trouble, if you’re really being heard, and it needs you to shut up? It’ll find a way.”

  Dakota appeared bored by this, but at least he was someone to talk to. Bill had never actually met a person to whom he did not enjoy ranting.

  “Ever seen that John Carpenter movie? The Thing?” Dakota asked, smoldering Camel sticky-tacked to his lower lip.

  “Yeah, Kurt Russell?”

  “Right. Great flick. Yo, let’s cross here.”

  They waited for a lone pickup truck to pass, its lights sweeping over their faces, one of the two dim, nearly padiddled out.

  “The monster in The Thing is like this alien parasite that takes the form of the people it eats. It can become whatever it’s parasiting off of, if you get me.”

  “Let’s assume I do.”

  “So. You’re talking like the Great. American Thing, man.”

  “The Great American Thing?” he asked, amused because he could hear Dakota placing the capital letters. He sucked on his cigarette. There was a pothole in the road and sticking out of this pothole was a stuffed animal, a lobster. He swore to Christ it was waving its claw at him. He started laughing really, really hard, choking on smoke and light. “Shit,” he said when he finally recovered. “The Great American Thing. That’s pretty goddamn hilarious.”

  They arrived at the stadium: two sets of bleachers presiding over a football field now rough and patchy from drought and the cleats of summer two-a-days. A cancer patient refusing to shave her skull and letting the hair fall out in irregular tracts. Stadium lights stood sentry over the bleachers, and on the north and south ends of the field the orange goalposts took the watch. On the backside of the western set of bleachers, an enormous mural looked out at the road: a ferocious black jaguar bursting through a wall of orange, fangs bared, grapefruit eyes gleaming with savage Darwinian murder. The whole town was awash in black and orange, but this mural was the epicenter of the tsunami.

  “Climb the fence?” Bill asked.

  “Sure.”

  Bill tucked his bottle of whiskey into the back pocket of his jeans. They each took to the chain links, digging the toes of their tennis shoes into diamond-shaped holds and scalin
g the eight feet only meant to keep out the laziest of intruders. They swung their legs over the top and dropped to the other side.

  They made their way around the crossbeam jungle of the bleachers’ interior, pieces of litter from long-ago football games still decorating the dirt. Dakota returned to the earlier conversation.

  “I dunno, man, it all rings kinda hollow to me.”

  “What does?”

  “You’re a prep, dude. College boy and a rich bitch back in the day.”

  “What? My mom works at the paper. My dad’s a dentist. Do you have any idea what the word ‘rich’ actually means?”

  “Not just that—good grades, good at sports. Hot girlfriend. Popular.”

  “Not for a long time I wasn’t. Popular, I mean.”

  Take for instance, the last home basketball game of his junior year in 2002, a must-win against Mansfield. Butterflies in the days leading up to it, he’d arrived in the stadium lot where the underclassmen parked wearing his good shirt and tie (as the players always did on game day). The start of the season seemed to be pumping water under the bridge in regards to the situation with his T-shirts the previous fall. He’d played a great season. People were forgetting. Then a car pulled alongside him, the back and passenger windows down, and two classmates he didn’t manage to get a look at opened fire on him with paintball guns. Multiple hits to the torso, back, and butt, one to the head that coated his hair in neon and made his skull ring, and one that drew blood when it cracked open the skin of his elbow. He’d stood stoically, feeling the snickers and whispers of the dozens watching. Turning back to his car, he winked at some anonymous sophomore and knew she would remember him forever. He drove home to shower and change. The pellets left enormous, painful welts, but he didn’t shed a single tear. He went back to school clean and furious and scored twenty points that night to prove to those who’d shot him, watched him, or gossiped about him, that he could not be fazed.

  They climbed the rows of aluminum-can-colored bleachers. Dakota’s dreads waggled and his wallet chain splashed against denim. Bill took the opportunity to check his timer (01:18:23) and idly ponder how he’d slip away from this kid in the next half hour. Over the wrecked wind and quiet homes lay his destination and, he hoped, answers: to the contents of this package, to his guilt, to this last lost decade and its discontents.

  “How ’bout here?” Dakota asked, pointing to the third row down from the top.

  “Looks good.”

  They sidled into their seats. Bill propped his legs up on the row in front of him and leaned back. His whiskey was about halfway gone and he made himself wait a bit before the next swig.

  Dakota ashed his cig with two smug taps. “Think what you want. That’s why I live the way I do. No one owns me, no one tells me what to do. It’s more than most can say.”

  “Oh, fuck me,” Bill started and stopped, hated that he could never let things go, and plunged ahead anyhow. In his idle moments, he prepared soapbox ramblings for arguments that would never happen. Like Rick would climb out of the grave to finally have a conversation of reckoning about the Iraq War. “You believe all the rap albums you grew up listening to, I get it.”

  “Fuck you, man. I made my own way. I got mine on my own. No one helped me or gave me a fucking thing. Nobody took me shopping for the right kind of jeans when I was a kid.” He jerked his skull at Bill’s lap. “And believe me, I paid for that shit. For years in school I paid for that.”

  Bill smirked. Amazing the way social dislocation manifested itself, the raw wrath roosting in the small towns, suburbs, and exurbs of Middle America. It could be the worst if your family had money and could afford to wall itself off behind home security systems and inside megachurches. If you weren’t rich or religious you could bang your head to thrash metal and ICP and wait to have your alienation harvested. If your job options amounted to “Paper or plastic?” you could deal dope and call yourself free. Some people thought they were born without the capacity to obey, and yet their only act of defiance was to believe they could never be conned by the powerful. Retain only the savory flavor of their own certainty. What had Dostoyevsky imagined at the end of Crime and Punishment? Raskolnikov dreamt of a virus that spreads the world over, causing each and every person to believe he or she is the sole possessor of Truth.

  Dakota sniffed. “If all this shit is so evil, Ashcraft, what are you doing out here getting loaded? Go blow up some banks! Shit, I’ll point you in the direction of Fallen Farms right now and the Flood brothers will hook a white boy up. Otherwise, keep away from me, my porn, my money, my drugs, my life. Every man for himself and every man free.”

  “You’ll see how all this ends,” he said.

  Dakota made his scorn no secret. “How do you figure?”

  “Eh,” he grunted, and batted a hand. “They won. They fucking won. It’s the divine right of kings updated for the secular age. Convincing people like you diddling on the fringes of their empire to subscribe to their philosophy. And for the rest of us to be so jaded we throw up our hands and allow all this exploitation to roll on until we all hurtle into total ecological and economic collapse. The usual.”

  Dakota shrugged a shoulder. “So we go live in space like in WALL-E. Problem solved.” Then he angled one slim butt cheek higher and farted.

  This let the tension out of the conversation, allowed Bill to laugh. “Dakota Exley, anarcho-capitalist. And I thought my life was weird.”

  They sat in silence for a while staring out over the dusty field. The smell of a waterfall in Angkor Wat returned to him. He felt the strangeness of being alive and a part of time, the specificity of death and the holy beat it put in your pulse.

  “You remember Rick Brinklan?” Bill asked. “Senior year we had a game against Marysville. Big conference rival—”

  “Couldn’t have given less of a shit.”

  “Well, Marysville was a bunch of mean wiggers. Rick used to tell me stories of being at the bottom of the pile and guys would be trying to punch him in the kidneys, squash his nuts, spit in his helmet. Anything for an advantage. There were fights on the field for three years in a row, fights in the stands, fights outside the stadium. It got to be where the cops would send extra bodies just to make sure a riot didn’t break out. But senior year, with Beaufort graduated and Rick captain, he tells me, ‘I’m gonna switch it up. I’m just gonna be real nice to everyone on the field. Even if we’re in the pile, and someone sticks a thumb in my ass, I’m just gonna be like, “You jokers! Good one, guys!” Total reverse psychology them. Freak ’em out.’ And he totally did it. He was going around during the game patting Marysville guys on the back, telling them, ‘Nice tackle, bro! Love your sticktoitiveness!’ Rick’s girlfriend, Kaylyn, and me, all our friends—we were crying laughing in the stands. But I guess it worked. Psyched Marysville out of their gourds. We ended up winning by four touchdowns and Rick ran for like one fifty or something.”

  That night, while the football team was still showering, he’d slipped out of the dance to meet Kaylyn. So this is something we’re doing? she’d said, but not shamefully. Playfully. Grotesquely. Joyfully as a fucking rainbow. Later, when he and Lisa drove out to the Brew, he’d worried that his dick still smelled like the condom.

  “That guy,” he told Dakota, giggling. “He was pretty fucking funny sometimes.”

  He was about to bring up another story concerning Rick when blue and red lights erupted in sweeping whorls to their left, and a spotlight as bright as being awake on the operating room table came blasting over their faces, wrenching them from the safety of darkness’s sticky womb.

  * * *

  Before Kaylyn reached out to him after the Marysville game, he thought it was over. It was always up to her if they would meet, when and where, and she hadn’t texted him with their funny little code word—grandmas?—in nearly four months. It began to infuriate him, madden him, make him lose sleep. Every time he saw her with Rick, he found himself dangerously close to becoming the guy who snatches an arm and dem
ands an explanation. But then she sent him the code, and he slipped away. They pulled their cars side by side in the part of the parking lot where the lights didn’t meet.

  Because it was already wrong, because they were already ashamed, Bill did things to her. Lisa was wild, but Kaylyn—she wanted punishment or humiliation or degradation or maybe something Bill couldn’t even think to give her. He almost couldn’t find the low level within himself that she actually wanted. Pull her hair, dig into her ass with a finger, choke her, come on her face—afterward she’d seem bored with it, disappointed in him. By winter of senior year, when they’d been doing this under everyone’s noses for nearly a year, he feared that all he could give her was the thrill of what would happen if their friends found out.

  “We could get a hotel room sometime,” he suggested. She brought her knees to her chest in the backseat and slid her underwear up her sleek calves, then hoisted up her butt to pull them all the way on.

  “We could,” she agreed. She went searching through her jeans pockets, brought out her inhaler and a pack of gum. “What are you doing now?”

  “I guess going to the dance.” Bill tugged the condom off, buzzed the window down just low enough to toss it. A frigid gust of winter wind sipped inside and chilled his naked skin. She got her jeans on but then settled back against the door and watched him, her flesh pocked with goose bumps.

  “Rick texted you?” he asked.

  She chawed her gum thoughtfully. “Only about twenty times. I told him I had to run home after the game to do some stuff for Barrett.” Her mouth curled the way it did whenever she mentioned her autistic younger brother.

  “Want to meet this weekend?”

  She shrugged with her eyes and jaw. “Maybe.” She kept her curious gaze on him. Before he’d known her, when all the local elementary schools fed into the only middle school, he’d watched her across the lunchroom, marveled at this stunning girl. She had this long, taut body, small hips, small breasts, small round ass, and it was all narcotic to a teenage boy in the grip of hormones, but it was really her face that caught his breath. Gorgeous Germanic features with a dusting of farm daughter freckles on a slim, sharp nose. Green eyes that she must have known were hypnotic because she so frequently wore pale green sweaters and scarves and shirts that set them off. Her small teeth bent slightly into her mouth and were just crooked enough to be charming. She kept her hair long and knew how to play with it; to leave it messily tossed over one shoulder or draping down across her breasts as she did now. He loved burying his hands in the thickness; it felt like you could pirate-swing from the mast of a ship with it. Of course, she had the tattoo she’d gotten with Rick, and that night, pumping into her from behind, he’d stared at it and wondered what could have possessed her to foul a piece of her lovely body this way.