“Do you ever think you hate anyone?” she asked. She propped a foot on his lap, and he kneaded her toes, small as corn kernels.
“George W. Bush,” he said.
“I’m serious.”
“So am I.”
“Bill.”
He thought about it. “I don’t know. I don’t hate Rick if that’s what you’re asking. That’s not why I like being with you.”
“Sometimes”—she chewed and laid her bright green eyes on the fog of the windshield and the gloom of the park beyond—“I get this idea in my head. Like all my frustration gets focused on just one person, and everything that goes wrong—whether, you know, I’m like messing up in a class or I have a lousy game, it all goes into that one person. Usually a girl. And I just can’t even be around them—I can’t look at her without this feeling like I want to just claw her face off.”
He always had trouble reading her but especially now.
“You feel that right now, you’re saying?”
Her chewing quickened. She tilted her head and swept her hair to the side. A big tent of blond stayed aloft for a moment before easing back down to her skull. “Maybe. A couple years ago, this girl . . .” She let out a single laugh that sounded like Eh-ha. “I just got so much pleasure out of hating her.”
“Who?”
“Doesn’t matter. She was just. I don’t know. Like looking at her upset me, but she was just around all the time. I had to see her all the time.”
“And you still hate her?”
The fog they’d steamed onto the windows had turned the scene outside opaque. This, he realized, was what he loved about her. She was inscrutable, unpredictable. She wore a small gold crucifix around her neck, and now she picked it up to feel the edges. “You know, I did whatever people do. I messed with her a little. Got it on tape. Then got over it.”
He admitted, “I’m a little lost here.”
Her eyes found him again. She leaned across the backseat, naked from the waist up, her nipples still erect because the heater couldn’t quite warm the car. Pausing a few inches from his face, she breathed on his lips twice, then kissed him, and he was hard all over again.
This all began the previous year after her father died very suddenly. About a week after the funeral she’d called Bill out of the blue to ask if he could give her a ride to her grandmother’s house to pick up her forgotten medications. Dover was about an hour’s drive east, and Rick was on a college visit that weekend. On the drive, they talked about her dad. He’d only known Mr. Lynn by reputation: a surly, depressed alcoholic who could never hold a job and who occasionally got into gossip-inducing physical altercations with Kaylyn’s mother. Dead of his second heart attack at fifty-three. The funeral was Bill’s first open casket. There lay the stiff, embalmed, made-up version of what was once a man. His beard looked like it belonged on a mannequin, the hair a toupee. Kay’s mother, a frayed woman with tics in her face like multiple metronomes, blinking as though constantly trying to clear her eyes of debris, spent most of her time handling Barrett. Thirteen and hopeless, Kaylyn’s brother was an incomprehensible jack-in-the-box of illogical outbursts. He brayed, he whined, he screamed, and it all seemed to have no tether to anything that was happening around him. Bill could see how quickly he wore the family out.
Somewhere on the barren state highway, he asked Kaylyn if she was okay.
She didn’t answer for a moment, kept staring at the gray rotten-tooth fields on her side of the road. “I guess I’m fine. People keep asking me that, but what do you say?”
“Uh: ‘I’m awful, my dad’s dead, so get fucked and eat a dozen dicks’?” Bill suggested.
Joy swelled when the smile cracked her face and spread.
Mr. Lynn had long resisted moving his mother out of her home in Dover, but now he was gone. Barrett needed a lot of help, the family needed money, and Grandma Lynn would have to pitch in by going to decay in the Eastern Star Retirement Home in New Canaan. Replete with those fabricy, doilyed, glass figuriney touches of an elderly woman, the small home made Bill unbearably sad. Kay didn’t know what her grandma needed exactly, so she scooped the entire medicine cabinet into a brown paper bag. Then a thunderstorm rolled in. Lightning split the sky and a downpour turned the street outside to a molten river. They found peach schnapps and gin in a cabinet. They talked about death, about how Bill didn’t believe in God and never would. “I’ve been waiting,” she admitted. “It’s like I’ve been waiting forever to feel it, but I still don’t.” And he kissed her. She tried to push him away, but he wouldn’t let her. “Don’t,” she said, but only once. The storm lasted the rest of the day and night. It was still raging when he pulled her hair and snapped her head back. Then she lay with her legs clutching his torso, and they listened to the rain together. The wipers were barely capable of peeling the deluge from the windshield on the drive back.
You don’t know the lengths you’ll go to, Bill figured. The people you’d risk hurting. He’d been infatuated with her for years, and of course Lisa had been his consolation prize. Of course, he’d long resented Rick for pinning Kaylyn to his hip. They had a certain Ohio symmetry Bill could never mimic. They were sweethearts who were born in this town and believed in it, believed they were fated to raise a family here and cheer for all the Jaguar teams as long as civilization stayed standing. Bill was a transplant, a New Yorker who accidentally grew up in this struggling shitburgh, who just happened to fall for its native daughter. As he and Kaylyn began meeting more often, driving halfway to Akron just to figure out a place to get on with it, he began to understand what an enigma she was to him, a fantasy he filled up even as he swore she was too clever, too self-aware for a sincerity-generating cliché like Rick. He wasn’t sure what her inner monologue was like, what she thought about, what she cared about. He suspected she carried more pain than anyone he’d ever known. He felt like she pursued their clandestine affair because when they were together, he could relieve that damage, maybe not take it out of her but at least tamp it down for a time.
That winter of senior year, in the park, after a frigid football game against their conference rival, she stretched one long leg to the passenger seat and, using nothing but her big toe, picked up her bra and shirt. Bill said, “I want to see you again. Soon.”
She curled her leg in and collected her clothing. “You don’t know a thing about what you want.” Her eyes evaded his. “None of us do.”
She found a place within him for all of time. Through the years, the sound of the rain against her grandmother’s house echoed in his head, became a minor chord. A song in the skin.
* * *
They ran.
The lights kept strobing—blue-red-blue-red-blue-red—washing over the football field in this hallucinatory diurnal carnival, and sure, Bill felt panic, he felt the terror of the tape jerking his torso flesh, knowing there was no way to get his shirt off, let alone rip the package from his person (and for real, how evil were the contents?). Yet also, overwhelming the panic, he had this glee, like: Finally, we’re having some fucking fun!
On the other side of the field, he and Dakota snatched the chain link. The metal bit into each finger in that bone-pressure way as he scrambled up over the top. Then they were both at a dead sprint through the ghostly parking lot where he’d once died in a blaze of paintball rounds. As they approached the long, low structure of the high school, the brick and mortar ganglion of their youth, the ultimate haunted house, Bill saw the pipe that made the roof accessible.
“Roof,” he huffed without further explanation. And then mostly to himself, “Unless they moved the dumpster.” He and Harrington used to climb to the school’s roof in the summer and smoke joints until they didn’t know their own names. He quickly assessed that the Powers That Will still kept the dumpster in its position next to the pipe.
“Looks like they never wizened up,” said Dakota.
“Authority never does.”
They quickly pushed the dumpster over so that it was directly und
er the pipe. The lights of the police cruiser were still distant because it had to drive the long side of the “L” around the football field, but this Barney Fife wasn’t fucking around. The patrol car turned down the drive that led to the school, and he was hauling, maybe fifty or sixty in a twenty mph zone. They only had to climb onto the dumpster and make a small jump to grab hold.
He reached the roof, pulled himself over the top. His whiskey remained miraculously tucked into the back pocket of his jeans and now, as he fell to his butt, he rewarded himself with a long, fiery pull. He was having a hard time staying drunk with all this activity. Dakota followed, wallet chain clattering Jacob Marley–style, and they huddled in hiding where he and Harrington had first smoked weed amid the vents and gutters of the gritty black surface, approximately above the southern end of the basketball court where he’d honed his legend.
Back to the wall, Bill positioned himself so the package didn’t dig into his back. They waited and watched the strobing lights chase the sky as the cruiser slowed. The spotlight studied the brick, the bushes, the rows of trees that separated the school from a residential neighborhood. Of course, it occurred to him it could very well be Marty Brinklan giving chase, but he was in no mood to find out. Then the spotlight’s glare angled over their heads. Dakota heaved breath beside him. Bill marveled that he was actually in pretty good shape, his lungs buoyant hot-air balloons.
When the spotlight went searching elsewhere and the lights dwindled to the other side of the school, Bill peeked his head up and looked out over the town. Flecked with radiance, it cupped light in its palm.
“We wait here a minute. He might circle back or call another patrol over.” Dakota shuddered his dreadlocks out of his eyes. He too had not let go of his whiskey. “You gotta be careful with these NCPD psychos. Man, they will fuck you up for nothing. ’Member that Ostrowski kid? He’s a cop now. Anybody who likes fucking up people when they’re young, you can bet they’ll end up military or police. You wanna talk ’bout The Murder That Never Was? I’ll tell you, I’d look at them first.”
“What’s that mean?” Genuinely curious.
“Means I might be down the food chain, but there’s skeletons all over this town.” He popped his head up to check on the patrol car, a paranoid-snake motion. “I mean literal fucking skeletons. You know here and the three surrounding counties have double the missing-persons reports?”
“Double of what?” Bill asked, but Dakota wasn’t interested in explaining his arithmetic or citing sources.
“Jericho Lake—there ain’t no bottom to it is all I’m saying.” Bill didn’t bother pointing out the inaccuracies in this statement. Every New Canaan kid had heard the story of Jericho, most likely in Mrs. Bingham’s seventh-grade history class. When the lake was built in the fifties, the engineers had needed to buy up and flood an entire town. Supposedly, gangsters from Youngstown had financed the project so they had somewhere to dump bodies, but Bingham was always telling gory tall tales to keep kids awake in class. Dakota kept peering over the roof, but there was no sign of the police. Not even the glow of distant headlights. “We should all be more paranoid.”
“Have you even heard me tonight?” Bill gulped, wiped a sleeve over his mouth, thought about sucking out the excess sleeve-booze, rejected it. “I already got all the paranoia I can handle.”
Dakota turned his head to show that he did not care. Bill lapped the last vestiges of his whiskey and kept right on staring out over the lights of the city. Fireflies hung in the night, a vascular chandelier. He thought of all the places he’d been.
Dakota surprised him by raising his bottle in a toast. “Here then, Ashcraft. To The Great American Thing. Long may it run.”
Bill saw purple in the corners of his vision and figured it for sorrow manifesting on the ultraviolet fringes. “Long may it run,” he agreed.
He gulped down the last of the bottle, tasting mostly of the accumulated saliva at the bottom. He pulled the kitchen timer from his pocket. 00:48:37.
He looked up to see Dakota remove a pipe and plastic bag from the zippered pocket of his sweatshirt.
“Since we got time to kill, this high’ll be free of charge.”
Bill stared at the small rocks in the Ziploc, dread swelling.
“Doesn’t look like any weed I’ve ever seen.”
“Glass,” said Dakota. “Prior experience?”
“None. And I’m not sure I care to.”
“See, I didn’t actually bring any weed, son.”
Now Bill felt the crossroads. Crystal felt kind of over-the-top, even for him. Yet he smelled the ash descending from the sky, mixing with the rain and wind. Markers to measure the coming storm.
“One hit,” he warned and promised.
Dakota had already lit the pipe, a blue glass job the color of Walter White’s product. He held the smoke in his lungs while passing to Bill. Without giving too much more thought to the entire sad episode, Bill put the pipe to his lips and lit. As the wet axe blade scraped the back of his throat, he immediately hacked on the smoke. He and Dakota dueled coughs. His head spun two ways at once. Through his tears he could see the stars that appear above a cartoon character’s head blending with the lights of downtown. When his coughing began to abate, he said, “I really need to go. I gotta be somewhere.”
“So go,” said Dakota, whose head had fallen back against the wall, jaw slack. “No matter what you think, it’s still a free country.”
Bill tried to relax. The key to any new drug was to understand that there was some small chance you might freak and try to claw your own eyes out. If you knew these mental appeals would come you could resist them.
“Whoa,” said Bill—because there It was. It came flooding over him in one titanic wave that may have resembled chemically induced sensations he’d felt before but only the way a silent film resembles a modern-day summer action movie. Like take a child from 1922 and sit him down for Transformers: Dark of the Moon in 3-D. There was a semblance of familiarity but not really. It was pure bliss that sublimated every anxiety and sorrow that had built in him for the past fifteen years. All those faces that produced such deep shame and guilt and nostalgia and love, now a mist torched by the dawn. He felt only unattached, unwarranted, pure-as-the-driven-snow happiness. His skin warmed and tingled, every pore orgasming at once. He watched the loves of his life writ brilliantly across the mystic sky river, carrying summer stars, satellites, and dust from the beginning of creation.
* * *
As we all know, the way memory works is that the sweep of your life gets explicated by a handful of specific moments, and these totems then stand as narrative. You must invent the ligature that binds the rest. After LSD mixed with methamphetamine, with an interregnum of several quarts of booze, one really begins to interrogate those incidents that blaze neon, and this cocktail was creating particularly interesting transpositions of time. It was like taking a virtual reality walking tour of his own past, like he could hold his little egg timer, rub it like a lucky time machine, and zip back to the morning he woke up in a diaper in Rick’s backyard to the heart-shitting sound of a shotgun blast.
Obviously he fell right out of the lawn chair where he’d passed out. His central intelligence came back in denuded bits of soggy puzzle pieces:
Where am I? Who am I? What the fuck was that sound? I’m Bill. Brinklan’s backyard. Why? We got fucked up last night. Where? His parents are in Arkansas ’cause his older brother’s wife had a baby. Bottle of Smirnoff, bottle of Jameson, case of Miller Lite. But where? Kaylyn and Lisa got it for us. How? In the backyard lawn chair. Good-looking girls can always get booze. What the fuck was that sound?!
Rick stood by the backyard porch, cackling, his dad’s shotgun jutting from his hip to the sky. “Aw, did I wake you?” he asked.
“You’re a hick psycho,” Bill wheezed. He looked down at himself. “Oh for fuck’s sake.”
“You passed out first,” said Rick. “It was mostly Harrington’s idea.”
Hard to
take it all in. Charred logs and shards of beer cans the fire had left behind. He was naked from the waist up and covered in Sharpie ink. He had about a zillion mosquito bites. And of course he was wearing an adult diaper.
He started laughing very hard. “Why the fuck am I wearing a diaper?”
“Hey, we didn’t like undress you and put that on,” Harrington called from inside the house. “The Sharpie-ing was my idea, but that was your idea!”
Bill looked to Rick for confirmation. Rick was wearing nothing but gym shorts and an apron that said You Don’t Need to Kiss Me but You Could Get Me a Beer.
“You said you wanted to try a diaper—who was I to stop you?”
“But . . .” Bill looked down at the ridiculous pair of plastic underwear moistly clinging to his skin. “Where did I even get this?” He couldn’t stop laughing.
“They were left over from when my grandpa lived with us,” said Rick. “Don’t laugh! It was a sad situation.”
His head was splitting but this made him laugh even harder.
“Did I actually piss in it?” he asked.
“Like we checked? C’mon in, I’m making breakfast.”
Rick set the shotgun against the garage door and went back to the skillet where, from the smell of it, he was making eggs, bacon, and pancakes. Harrington sat at the kitchen table reading the New Canaan News, and Bill could see his mother’s byline beneath the top headline. Most of the night trickled back to him. Their girlfriends had stopped by briefly, but this first night of post-graduation summer vacation had been designated as a guy’s night. They built the campfire in Rick’s backyard, shot at a bowling pin until they filled it with enough birdshot to kill it good, and then sat around getting loaded until the first person passed out.
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