Ohio

by Stephen Markley

  Fall progressed to winter. Football season ended and basketball season took over. Beaufort signed to play for the Buckeyes. Bill and Rick had another conversation.

  “Curt Moretti was drunk the other night,” said Rick. They stood outside the Brinklans’ house by the field overlooking town. “He got to talking.”

  Bill glared at the ground, not wanting to have this conversation again. He’d eaten dinner at his friend’s house, Jill Brinklan’s glazed salmon that he always scouted out days in advance so he could come over. It had long been Marty’s joke that Bill was their third kid on salmon night.

  “We gotta tell someone.” But Rick sounded anything but certain.

  “Tell them what, dude? What is it you’re planning to say?”

  “Alls I know,” said Rick, “is I keep thinking about Kay, you know? She and Beaufort went out in middle school. Like it’s not out of the question that a few years back maybe things go different and she ends up with Beaufort instead of me. And he tries that on her. It makes me want to kill him just thinking about it.”

  He still felt nips and pinches and fleabites of jealousy at the way Rick had to reassert, out loud, again and again, that Kaylyn was “his girl.” Like he’d conquered mountains, slain dragons, dedicatedly collected enough proofs of purchase from cereal boxes to win her. My girl was Rick’s incantation of possession, and though Bill first told himself his loathing of it was somehow feminist, he knew his reason to be baser: he coveted Kaylyn and always had.

  “This isn’t grade school where you can just tattle to the adults and all your problems go away. Fuck, man, most of the people in charge at that school are the fucking problem.”

  The sound of dishes banging around in the sink reached them from the kitchen window, and they both silently agreed to move farther down the road, past the Brinklan mailbox with an American flag etched into the metal. They stood in light jackets, watching a dense fog twist and distort the distant lights of the town.

  “I know why you’re not bugging Harrington with this shit,” Bill grumbled, then told him what Matt Moore had said. A helpful reminder to Rick that whatever had gone on—was going on—could affect a lot of people.

  “Beaufort and Ostrowski,” said Rick. “They call Tina their ‘fuck pig.’ ”

  Those words made a gristly, nauseating sound together. Bill would not forget them for as long as he lived.

  “I’m planning on having kids someday, which probably means a daughter or two. How do I live with myself knowing this about guys I play with? That I high-five every day?”

  Reluctantly, Bill found this an alarmingly mature notion. He felt his friend’s honor then, his electric core of decency. Made ever more stark by a world he was coming to see as increasingly honorless. And yet it wouldn’t be until years later that he’d be able to admit this to himself. At the time, it just made him more furious that Rick was trying to rope him into playing chivalrous knight.

  “Brink, I’ve heard grown fucking adults say ‘Beaufort carries the town’s hopes.’ Medium-case scenario is they ignore this. Best-case scenario is also the worst, which is that the whole school finds out, sees those pictures—or Jesus, there’s a video? Yeah, so Tina will be humiliated, and people probably blame her for fucking up the life of the star linebacker. Just because you think what Tina and all them are doing is gross doesn’t give you the right to insert yourself like this.”

  It had rained that day, and the air still smelled like damp stone. Rick breathed it in now, pulling through flared nostrils. “You’re not hearing me on this,” he said, and then tucked his hands and stalked back to his house before Bill could reply.

  * * *

  Bill pointed to Kaylyn’s stomach. “That mine?”

  Her face, wide and worried and as expectant as her pregnant gut, collapsed into a laugh. A beautiful expression. She could still light him up like a firefight.

  “Get in, Bill.”

  He staggered inside, and she eased the door closed, eyes lingering on the night.

  “You’re late,” she said, turning the deadbolt. She peeked through a blind and studied the street before turning back to him.

  “Sorry, lost my phone. Had to go buy an egg timer. Then there were some hiccups, some weird happenings, but . . .” He lifted his shirt to show her the brick strapped to his back. “I don’t really see the point of a recap. Long story short, my truck broke down and I had to hoof it here. Might’ve smoked some meth on the way.”

  A momentary stare, then an accommodating laugh from the corner of her mouth. Sure, he’d left some stuff out, but he figured narrators were always conveniently forgetting essential shit. In the last decade everyone had learned to be a truth masseuse.

  “We might have to cut that tape off you,” she said. To hear the nimble honey of her voice again. What a holy song. Seeing her in full glare of the lone, cheap lamp, though—the decade had battered her. Her eyes still floated in a splash of freckles like two sapphires tossed onto a white-sand beach, but the skin around them was creased with a thousand worries. Her teeth were nicotine-dimmed, yellowing on their way to brown. Her limbs looked skinnier, knees and elbows knobbier, perhaps accented by the grotesque bulge that almost looked fake. An actress strapping on a prosthetic for a role. She still wore her hair long, but instead of the strawberry blonde she’d favored in high school, it was now that tacky platinum blonde, the color of a Post-it note. She’d chosen to greet him in black sweatpants and a simple green V-neck.

  Yet an ache still surfaced that hadn’t stalked him in years. Here is longing even when you bury it alive in the dirt of your heart.

  “It’s going to hurt,” Bill said matter-of-factly, scanning the room. “I’ll probably need a drink for numb-the-pain purposes. Know what I’m getting at?”

  “I have wine and vodka, that’s it.” She had a pimple on her chin and a scrim of sleep burned away by the nervous edge of waking abruptly.

  Bill exhaled, long and dramatically. “Yep, that sounds like it can locomote me to the right place.”

  Kaylyn smiled again. A real wormhole to the soul. “I’m not sure if it’s reassuring or totally terrifying that you have not changed like one iota.”

  * * *

  He heard from Harrington that Rick had proposed to Kaylyn and she turned him down. This was after he and Rick had stopped speaking but before Bill left for college. How simultaneously furious and overjoyed this had made him, imagining Rick on one knee with some flimsy blood diamond that nevertheless must have cost the kid his savings.

  Rick left for basic training two weeks later, and Bill never spoke to him again, so he never got his version of the story, but Kaylyn admitted it had happened. He tried to persuade her to let him drive to Toledo where she enrolled that fall.

  “What for?” she asked with hostility he couldn’t understand.

  “To see you.” He gulped down the silence that followed. “Kay?”

  “Don’t you feel guilty? About Rick? And Lisa?”

  “Not really,” he admitted.

  “You kept fucking her. The whole time we were— Are you still?”

  “Lisa?” He was confused. “We broke up. I told you. What? Are you jealous?”

  “I don’t understand why you don’t just be with her. You guys have your little book club; you’ll both be superstars in college. Why not just be with her?”

  “Maybe I’m not getting something, Kay, but—Jesus Christ—I’ve made it so clear how I feel about you.”

  “You’re both smart. You’ll have money,” she said. “You should just be together. Just be with that pretty Chinese bitch and leave me alone.”

  Bill almost choked—on rage, grief, and disbelief, on not understanding what the hell was going on with her. “Who gives a fuck about Lisa?” he blurted, though he did. He just wanted this cruelty out of Kaylyn. He wanted back the confident girl he’d fallen for so long ago in the sixth grade. The fearless one.

  Then she stopped answering Bill’s texts and calls. The last thing she ever said to hi
m before opening the door of her rental on Sandusky Street in 2013 came via text in October of 2003. I know you won’t like this but I don’t think we should talk for a while. Sorry.

  Now he saw himself a decade on, directionless, staggering through life, learning to tell fast lies and leaving a burning landscape behind him everywhere he went. He never thought Lisa would flee to the other side of the world, never to return, or that Rick would catch a bullet in Baghdad or Harrington would die glazed and asleep in a flame-soaked room. He’d never expected any of them to get old or sick or sad or dead. He never thought any of them would be afraid. But Kaylyn was the first person he really lost, and the one who left him wide awake and staring pointlessly at the dark.

  He stood in her living room with his shirt off as she used a pair of scissors to cut into the clear packing tape, studying the small, sad unit. A two-seat couch faced a small TV. Piled beneath it, a helter-skelter collection of DVDs, the kind of ancient, soon-forgotten rom-coms with Jennifer Aniston or Paul Rudd you got for three bucks in the bargain bins of gas stations. The coffee table was a mess of Us Weeklys, a plate of half-finished, lipstick-red spaghetti going cold, and her inhaler, right next to an ashtray with two fresh cigarette stubs, the stench heavy in the air. He saw back to the sliver of bedroom, the unmade bed, a closed laptop on a pillow, and a disaster of clothes scattered on the floor. His gaze lingered on the pair of enormous, muddied work boots kicked into a corner.

  “Ow-uh!” said Bill as the tape screeched from his skin. The black hairs on his chest appeared to him as scuttling insects.

  “I don’t understand why you taped it to you.”

  “Felt right. Real Midnight Express shit.”

  He cried out again as she ripped more of the tape free. She held the package in hand and looked visibly relieved. “Want me to do it like a Band-Aid or peel it off an inch at a time?” He didn’t remember her having this much Ohio drawl in her voice. Like it had deepened.

  Bill batted her hand aside and ripped the rest of the tape free in two skin-burning, flab-stretching, hair-shredding tugs. This took with it a good deal of the hair on his torso and left behind tormented red skin. The room shimmered all around him, hallucinations and weariness coming like a fog.

  “So what is it, Kay?” Bill asked, patting his tender flesh the color of massacred civilians.

  She held the gray brick like she was contemplating Yorick’s skull. “I don’t know.”

  When she’d sent him the Facebook message a month ago to ask if he was really in New Orleans and if he’d like to make some quick money, Bill had felt stir all those forgotten parcels of himself. Whatever line she was throwing him, asking him back into her life after all this time, he couldn’t resist it. But she’d been all business. She named the price for taking a package from Louisiana to Ohio. Having just lost his job anyway, it seemed like a win-win. Progressively, things skewed stranger. She told him to buy a burner phone, and they spoke twice to arrange the details for where and when he would meet the man who’d give him whatever it was to take north. Even as the sketchiness of the operation increased, Bill found himself more compelled. He ate up adventures. And this one would allow him to lay eyes on her again. He couldn’t remember being as nervous about anything—and keep in mind, once, in Mexico, someone had disemboweled a dog and left it on the steps of his rental trailer.

  “You’re paying me two grand to carry it, and you don’t know what it is?”

  “I guess.” She considered the brick. “It’s complicated.”

  Bill pulled his shirt on, popping the buttons back in place.

  “Why me?”

  “You were in the area, and I knew I could trust you.”

  “How’d you know that?”

  She motioned for him to follow her to the kitchen. “I’ll get you that drink.”

  Her ass swished in front of him through the sweats, juicier with the pregnancy. Her shirt rode up just enough that he could see the butterfly tattoo, the ink now faded. He imagined scraping it away a layer at a time with a razor blade.

  Over the last decade he’d followed her movements only through refractions and reflections from other sources. What frustrated him the most was that he knew he could have helped her. After she dropped out of Toledo after just one semester, she returned to the same provincial piece-of-dawdling-shit town that she’d sworn on all those nights in the backseat of his car she would never go back to. He didn’t even want to think of all the one-act men she’d kept busy with. It killed him to imagine what the father of this child must be like, how he must think, dream, behave, and love.

  “Drugs?” he asked, nodding to the brick now resting on the kitchen counter.

  “It’s not important.” She poured vodka over ice cubes in a coffee mug.

  “Except who pays that much money to haul one little brick of coke or heroin or Oxy?” wondered Bill. “No way is that worth two grand on the street.”

  Kaylyn’s eyes didn’t move from the package. “Doesn’t matter what it is. Just that we’re getting paid for it.”

  She was lying. He went to the kitchen, and she handed him the drink.

  “I’m thinking counterfeit thousand-dollar bills,” he said. “Or smuggled Chinese microchips.” She smiled without teeth. He raised his mug. “Or Marsellus Wallace’s soul.” The vodka smelled pleasantly isopropyl and tasted of relief. Out here on the edges of the fracturing economy, people muled mysterious packages back and forth across the scorched American landscape. Getting all the dirty deeds done.

  “Not your problem anymore,” she said. She opened the silverware drawer and reached beneath the divider. She handed him an envelope. “You can count it.”

  Bill accepted it and wondered at the odds that the other half would still be in his truck. “Not necessary.” He stuffed the envelope in his back pocket. “You didn’t really answer my question. Why not go down and get it yourself?”

  “I don’t have a car. Plus, this doesn’t make travel all that easy.” She rubbed her belly affectionately. Bill watched her. This story was such garbage. He wondered how much that even mattered to him. He wondered how blinded he was by seeing her after all this time. He drank.

  “So who’s the father, Kay?”

  He felt the sensation that people called the heart moving into the throat, but that didn’t exactly describe it. It was more the throat closing off in anticipation of dread.

  “It’s such a long story, Bill. Let’s just say he’s still deciding if he’s sticking around, and I’m pretty far from sure I even want him to.”

  Her face morphed into those of his dead friends: Rick and Ben. For a moment she looked like Lisa, until her freckles and eyes returned. He blinked and tried to keep his voice even. “What does that mean?”

  Her eyes darted to every part of the narrow kitchen: the saucepan soaking in the sink, an owl clock on the wall shifting its eyes back and forth with each tick of a second. She palmed her swollen belly. “Sometimes I’ll sneak a glass of wine. The doctor said it’s okay every once in a while, you know? Why don’t we go out back and you just let it lie. Okay?”

  And because it meant she’d spend a drink’s worth of time with him, he accepted.

  Out on her back stairs, beneath the frozen ligature of the stars, she sat a couple steps up from Bill facing the yard while he reclined against the faded spindles of the railing. He told her about visiting Rick’s grave earlier in the night. “A mostly purposeless endeavor,” he finished, with a shrug and a chug.

  Kaylyn bit her thumbnail, peeled it off, and flicked it to the cement. “I haven’t been out there in a while. I’ll see his parents around sometimes, but . . .”

  Marty and Jill, prototypical kind, plainspoken midwesterners. He thought of Marty with his white walrus mustache giving him shit about staking out salmon night. The backyard looked out over a cement walkway leading to a dingy single-car garage. This path was flanked on either side by strips of pale grass. The fence obscured almost any view of the neighboring homes, so they only had the dome o
f the sky above. There were stars in this dome, and they were mighty and beautiful.

  “Do you miss him?” said Bill, though he did not want to hear the response.

  She was quiet for a long time. “Not sure I know how to answer that. It’s messed up but when I heard, I was . . . relieved, I guess. He’d never come home, and I’d never have to face him again. I got to see my dad drop dead at dinner, but having to spend all that time with Marty and Jill at the funeral, then the parade, was one of the worst things. I don’t know. Just how hard parents can cry.”

  “Do you think Rick knew about us?”

  She sipped the wine she’d poured from a box. Delicately licked the purple stain off her upper lip. “I don’t know. I know he would’ve forgiven me.”

  He scrambled the ice cubes at the bottom of his mug, then cradled it gently in both hands, the way you would a baby chick. Bill thought of how he’d felt when she stopped returning his calls, that cold, comingled rage and grief. He and Rick had that in common till the end.

  “He had our lives here planned out down to when he’d get the head coaching job. Then you and I got, you know, close. And you always wanted to go out and live life. You won’t remember this, but one time, maybe junior year, we were all at Vicky’s after a dance and you were going on about how you wouldn’t stop before you’d seen both the northern lights and the Antarctic ice. That’s exactly how you put it: the northern lights and the Antarctic ice.”

  “Haven’t seen either.”

  “Yeah, but it mattered to you. It sounded very brave and romantic to a girl who’d never been on an airplane.” She bit into a nail. “You had this hunger that Rick never did.”

  He felt that pang in his throat again and the cool bore of the wind. He knew seduction was just another con.

  Bill took the photograph from his back pocket. He unfolded it, handed it to Kaylyn.