He didn’t know how long he’d been lost in his own head. He looked around, trying to remember where he was. His hands were sticky with whiskey.
Stair step. When you came down minutely from a high, Harrington had called it a “stair step.” He felt how his breath connected to the thud of his heart inside its rib prison. Ventricles and muscles made for such a delicate slaveholder. One broken piece, and you sacrificed your entire consciousness? Seemed like a shoddy system.
“You’re a real weird motherfucker, Ashcraft.” Dakota rummaged around in his pocket. “I mean, you need to, like, chill out and take yoga classes or some shit.”
He exhaled a memory of the New Mexico desert, hot and red as Mars, where he went to work after getting fired from the campaign in ’08. He’d been seeing another teacher out there. Their stipends hadn’t allowed them much fun, but in lieu of dinner and a movie they used to fuck a lot in the shower of their dorms. She’d had wonderful bundles of black hair. On their way back from a visit to Durango they’d come across a spectacular drunk-driving wreck burning like a pyre in the night. This flaming car throwing light over the sweeping grasslands and distant mesas—how awful and awesome. He and this girl watched it for a long time. Now he couldn’t remember her name.
“Dude, you home?” Dakota snapped his fingers in front of Bill’s face. They stood in spilled garbage bags, fast-food wrappers, a pile of wire coat hangers, and five empty forties lined neatly in a row. “C’mon, man, let’s pop a squat over the river.”
They crossed the street to the bridge, home to the train tracks where no trains ran anymore. Dakota took a seat with his legs dangling over the side. Bill joined him. The Cattawa flowed on in near silence.
“So I gotta ask,” said Dakota. “Whatcha got strapped to your back?”
The meth was doing something to Bill’s brain, joining up with the expiring veins of LSD and getting up to devious shit. He could feel the worming quality of a greasy electrician’s fingers rewiring circuitry.
“Long story.”
“Saw it when you were doing cartwheels.” Dakota reached behind him in a practiced motion anyone would recognize from the movies. He set the gun in his lap. The way the grip of unexpected fear feels on the skin: like on a warm day when a cloud suddenly blocks out the sun. “Maybe I need to get that story.”
Bill had seen the future before, but he’d never seen his own death. That it could be something as stupid as this made him want to sob.
“ ’Cause it’s drugs?” he asked, the words dumb and taffy in his mouth.
“We kinda got a situation worked out in the county where we don’t like new business.”
All moisture fled from his throat. He said, “Anarcho-capitalism.”
“Don’t know nothing about that. What I know is we can’t control the sale of anhydrous ammonia, but we can control some things.”
The water of the Cattawa looked good. Maybe better to slip off the bridge. Feel gravity carry his every molecule into the water. Bill dared a hard look at the gun. It had severe angles and weight, like a shrunken anvil. He hallucinated the crimson flash of a discharging bullet, the heat of the hammer on hot steel. Dakota had worms writhing on his scalp again. His pores opened up into enormous caverns gushing with toxic black juice.
“Look, man, it’s my livelihood.” Dakota’s voice had yet to waver from its stoned calm. Now he took the pistol and pressed the barrel to the top of Bill’s skull. The bullet would burrow straight down through his throat. “You gotta understand, all the shit going on round here—it makes people paranoid and violent. Just tell me if you’re moving product.”
The gun pressed a dream into him, a dream of the last time he and Rick spoke. The night bulged. The darkness swelled and collapsed like the beat of a heart.
“Honestly,” said Bill, as carefully as if trying to speak around a capsule of cyanide held in his cheek. “I don’t know what it is. It’s a favor for a friend.”
“Lemme tell you something, Ashcraft.” Dakota took the gun away from his skull. His trigger finger looked so utterly calm and reasonable. “This ain’t the same place we grew up. People are expecting a certain level of discipline. You think this is fun and fucking games? I can assure you it ain’t. I wasn’t fucking around about Jericho Lake—that’s what some of these dudes wanna start doing. I want you to answer honest: This a onetime thing?”
Bill felt out words with his tongue. “For sure, man. Seriously.”
Dakota finally set the gun on his lap and sighed, as if bored with the whole affair. “Got the feeling you’re the kinda dude people are always giving passes. This one’s mine.”
Sounds returned: the river below gargling like a throat. In the distance, a soft wind stirred the drought-fried corn cowering in its husks. His relief felt gastric, intestinal, as if the old children’s myth had come true and he’d swallowed a seed that grew tendrils through the juicy soil of his belly.
“My senior year, woulda been your junior . . .” Dakota replaced the gun in the back of his jeans, and Bill felt the anguish of relief. He still didn’t dare twitch, let alone stand and try to leave. “I thought I might kill some people at school.”
Bill waited and when he didn’t say more, asked, “How do you mean?”
“Those kids who did Columbine, Klebold and Harris? I, like, read about ’em. Studied ’em. Dreamed about ’em. I just thought, how cool would it be to be remembered like that? You know, no one would remember anybody from New Canaan, Ohio, ever again except me. It would be a Me day. So I brought a gun to school. My mom’s. And I was planning on walking into the cafeteria and just start mowing fuckers down. I didn’t know if I could break Klebold and Harris’s record, but I thought I could come close.”
Bill’s throat clicked, depending on which lunch period Dakota was talking about. He thought of how cruelty created chain reactions, how one act could set off events, could eat through floors like acid, so to think of all the systemic cruelty in the world was to think of acid burning from one floor of a skyscraper down to the basement.
“But you didn’t do it,” he said.
A shake of his head. The worms made juicy noises. He shimmered between the person he was now and the kid he’d been then. “Can’t really remember why not.”
Bill felt dizzy, vomity, his heart slammering like a drunk kicking at the foot pedal of a drum kit.
Dakota nodded slowly, blinkless eyes fixed on the river. “I mean maybe I pussed out or maybe I just figured too many people would get away. I’d end up killing pointless kids. Not the ones who mattered.” Dakota swung his legs back and forth, childlike. “Gotta say I’m glad I didn’t. Might’ve been you, and then we could never have had this weird night. You got a good heart, Ashcraft.”
At this uninformed description of himself, Bill felt a crashing surge of guilt and remorse. Because that’s what he’d always hoped, and even though he knew it to not be the case, he nevertheless ached to hear someone say it.
They were both quiet for a long time, the tricks playing light on them.
Finally, Dakota stood. “Okay, man. I gotta head out. Got a bedtime story to get to.”
He didn’t know what else to say other than, “Thanks for not murdering me.”
Dakota cocked his head, and the worms on his head whiplashed. “You try to fly from evil, but evil will always come to you.”
And then something pretty strange happened.
Dakota began walking backward from the bridge to the road, and as he did, his body began to swell the way the night had, and then it was morphing. Unlike his vision of The Thing, this wasn’t happening in his eyes but their own physical reality. The skin along Dakota’s arms and sides grew into course, leathery flaps. His clothes shredded and fell away. His face contorted, and soon it was no face, just a grotesque collection of folds and bones. His fingers stretched into gnarled autopods, and the ulna of his forearm deformed into the angled zeugopod of a bat. The creature, this deformed angel, flapped harder and achieved liftoff as gray hairs sprouted
from every pore. The digits webbed, and the gnarled face grew stranger still as huge worms came writhing from the orifices and fell to earth in wet clumps. The angel sailed higher and higher as the muscles in its back thickened and added power, percussive thumps of its wingspan crippling the wind. They grew to the width of a city street. The feet metamorphosed into talons and the knees buckled inward. It climbed into the dead sky, singing, screaming a song, until the air slipped open. A vortex of blue light spilled across the pavement, the streets, the downtown buildings, swirling violet violence and a piercing hiss as the oxygen was sucked into another dimension. It flew backward into the hot cerulean spiral, gazing mad black eyes, and when it passed over the edge of existence, the puncture in the universe wheezed painfully and then zipped up like a wound stitching itself shut.
Bill watched in awe as the worms left behind sizzled on the ground, vanishing to steam.
He spat into the water, feeling a real nice stair step bringing him back to the moment, excising some of that paranoia. The water gurgled over its carve of sediment, a murmur of voices rolling like time, telling rumors of the past. The wind, hot and fecund, deposited its consoling coat. Above this, a bizarre bleating sound. It took him a moment of looking around to realize the electronic squawk was coming from his pocket. His kitchen timer read 00:00:00. He couldn’t figure out how to silence it, so he chucked it into the river where the water immediately swallowed the tinny noise. It was time to make this delivery. And then ride off into the sunset like a good cowboy.
* * *
He followed High Street north, past downtown and into the rows of colonial homes. The cars had all but vanished at this late hour. The night grew quiet, introspective of its nightly self. The colonials gave way to two-family homes and dilapidated aluminum siding. Here was more flaked paint and sagging porches. Less care went into the lawns and more flotsam was left to accumulate spiritual inertia. Tricycle, garden hose, kiddie pool, another ROMNEY/RYAN yard sign halfway trampled, clinging upright by one wire spike, trampoline with rusted springs, white plastic lawn chair, swing set with runty plastic slide, an undulating brick street with drips and drabs of concrete patching the potholes, American and Buckeye porch flags vying for attention. One particularly parochial home had the state flag with its red-and-white bull’s-eye floating in a field of stars. The Confederacy was decently represented as well.
He heard a car idling ahead and then in a huff it continued down the road, tires drubbing the brick. His body tensed as the headlights spilled over him—surely this was the NCPD patrol car, finally caught up now that his legs had no sprint left. But it was a minivan. A dingy burgundy Chrysler with a pink stripe like a thin belt. The window was down, an emaciated arm hanging nearly to the outer handle. As the vehicle passed, the driver turned to watch him. Though Bill had known this person only by reputation, Dakota had name-checked him earlier. Frankie Flood had spent most of his teenage years in juvie for stabbing his stepfather. His face was cut-and-pasted from adolescence, affixed to a shriveled shoulder and completely inked arm. Bill turned his gaze to the ground before their eyes could meet.
He hurried on. His hands were still sticky with whiskey.
His sneakers scraped across a dry wild-flowered lawn as he cut over to Sandusky Street, checking the house numbers. 705 Sandusky bloomed before him and with it enough heartache and regret to fuel a vessel straight through the flood at the end of the world. A low and cramped two-family with white vinyl siding and a roof blacker than the night around it. He didn’t hesitate, though he’d suspected he might. The tape rubbed and creaked against his skin. Behind cheap venetian blinds, a low-wattage lamp left on for him. And there was his heart picking up. There was the sweat breaking out in his pits and on his back. There was the sinking in his gut, like a bowel movement going off in the wrong direction. There was his fist rising to knock on this cheap hollow door the color of cool stone. There was the door cracking for him, the dusky light washing into the night.
And there, of course, was Kaylyn Lynn, ten years on, a beautiful memory downloaded to flesh, with a bubble of a stomach jutting toward him like a beach ball about to pop.
* * *
Citing cause and effect here might be difficult. It would have been more satisfying if his transgressions had found daylight. If Lisa had just learned about Kaylyn. She would have said whatever needed to be said. But she never found out, and instead of resolution, there was fracture.
Everyone thought his disagreement with Rick was political, but it wasn’t. Nor was it the kind of machismo jealousy Lisa always suspected. There were deeper subterranean features that allowed Bill to feel no particular regret about sleeping with Kaylyn—why, in fact, he’d almost engineered it. His resentment began with this thing—this bizarre, fucked-up, only-in-Ohio story about a girl who’d once laughed at him.
Junior year, uneasy rumors circulated about Tina Ross. Rumors are immaculately fucked things in small towns. Embers often make the jump across roads and spark fires in other forests. Bill and Rick were spending the night at the home of poor Dakota’s teen tormentor: Ryan Ostrowski—Strow, as he was known. Bill had planned to go to Harrington’s, but the kid was again at war with his father, so he called Rick looking for something to do. This was after the T-shirt debacle, when it seemed like they were finally getting back on decent terms. Many drinks into the night—a group of maybe ten jocks from different grades hammering back cheap gin with lemonade—Ostrowski took out a digital camera.
“Check this out,” said Strow, and they gathered around the squat, powerful senior, a living, breathing concrete abutment on the offensive line. Though Bill saw the others laughing, covering their mouths in disbelief, when the camera landed in his hands, he wasn’t ready. To his wild surprise, it was the girl he’d tried to court in middle school with a Vicky’s milk shake. He couldn’t remember what he thought at the time, he was so wasted, nor did he recall Rick’s reaction.
He did remember Strow saying, “We got a video of her first time too.”
Bill woke on a sticky sofa in the basement, Rick nudging him, first light spilling through a ground-level window. Driving home with Rick, a hangover throbbing between his eyes with each beat of his pulse, he had to be reminded of what he’d seen.
“We should say something to someone.” Rick’s eyes traveled from the road to Bill. It was as much uncertainty as he’d ever heard in his friend’s voice.
“What?” This made his head thud harder. “To who? Why?”
Rick rubbed a hand over the stubble of his skull. He had a way of furrowing his brow where he could go from looking mean and handsome to genuinely distressed, the expression of a young boy about to burst into tears.
“Because they’re still doing shit like that to her regularly.”
“Didn’t look like she was objecting, if I recall.”
“That’s not the point.”
Rick’s self-righteousness pricked his headache. “You’re going to tell who? MacMillan? Coach Bonheim?”
He was thinking ruefully of his T-shirt ordeal. MacMillan, Bonheim, even Coach Napier, whom he loved like an uncle, no way would they make trouble for Beaufort, the star linebacker who was going to sign at a D-1 program. Rick didn’t get that the people in charge could be as cloistered and gutless and frightened as teenagers.
“It’s not that I want to snitch,” said Rick. “But you think she deserves that?”
He could feel the blood in every single vein in his skull. “Brink,” he snapped. “Those guys are your fucking friends. That was your call to hang out at Strow’s place last night. I don’t see how this is our problem.”
Rick let it alone after that and dropped Bill off. He managed to chat amicably with his dad for five minutes before he retreated to his room with a glass of water and a flask of spit-stirred whiskey to get a little hair of the dog in him. As he lay in the dark beneath his poster of Malcolm X, he mused that his objections to making this a federal case weren’t exactly on the up and up. Truth was, he had gotten a thrill fro
m the pictures. He’d thought of Tina laughing at him in the hallway after Beaufort put him on the floor, and here was proof the snotty, Jesus-loving brat was more deep-down pathetic than he would ever manage to be. He recalled drinking a milk shake with her, the way a head of large brown curls spilled over each shoulder onto her varsity jacket. An air of fragility surrounded her, not only of her porcelain features or compact frame, but her very presence in the world, small and thin with dusty skin and large owl eyes. She played her part as the ingenue, the chaste. These Jesus kids all got away with this facade, dripping with self-righteousness while they pulled all the same shit the rest of the sinners did (and occasionally much worse). A few of the images of Tina did create a certain feeling, like spiders scuttling on the inside of his stomach, but he enjoyed them nevertheless: not for any sexual reason but for the gratification of discovering hypocrisy in exactly the place he expected. If he did harbor any guilt, Stacey’s older brother helped relieve him of it. He was friendly with Matt Moore, who’d been impossible to miss in the pictures, so he simply asked.
“Aw, that mother-frickin Ostrowski.” Matt rolled his eyes. “He should not be showing those off.”
“But it’s . . .” Bill searched for the word. In one snapshot, Stacey’s brother had worn a Jags football shirt and nothing from the waist down. “She’s okay with it all?”
Matt arched two red-blond eyebrows. He could never decide if he thought Stacey was weird-looking because she looked so much like her older brother or if Matt was weird-looking because he looked so much like his little sister. “That girl,” he said, nodding each word, “is the craziest little freak ever. Ever, Ashcraft.”
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