by Dale Peck
HONK!
With a start I looked up and realized I’d drifted into oncoming traffic. I had the briefest glimpse of a big round white face before I swung the car so violently off the road that I could swear two wheels left the ground. Fortunately a dirt path angled west off the highway, heading towards the river, so I didn’t end up in the ditch. I grabbed the gun off the floor and stuffed it in the glove compartment, peeked into the rearview mirror to see if anyone had followed. The coast was clear. But Ty had also disappeared.
“Um, Ty?”
There was a long pause—just long enough for me to wonder if I’d somehow thrown him out of the car when I jerked onto the dirt road—and then a long, satisfied burp sounded from the floor of the backseat. Ty’s head popped back into view, and even before he said anything I smelled the sweet fire on his breath.
“Well I tell you what,” he said, rolling back into the front seat. He held a three-liter bottle of dark brown liquid, nearly full. “I don’t know what this is, but it sure as hell ain’t Pepsi.”
I drank. If you want an excuse or an apology, you ain’t getting one. I’d watched my dad and Mrs. Miller enough to know alcohol had its uses.
“Rum,” I said, handing the bottle back to Ty. “Trust me, we’re gonna regret this tomorrow.”
“Live for today, that’s what I say.” Which is about as completely the opposite of who Ty is as possible—he has one foot stuck in the past, the other striding blindly towards a make-believe future—but I didn’t bother to correct him. Just listened to the glug-glug-glug as he took a second long drink, then accepted the bottle when he passed it my way.
I swigged again, perhaps a little delicately—rum is gross, after all, and flat pop doesn’t help the taste at all—and handed the bottle to Ty.
“What’re you, a little girl? We’re getting’ drunk here, Daniel, and then we’re gonna shoot some stuff up. Drink.”
“Screw you, Petit.” I tipped my head all the way back, sucked so hard that the plastic sides of the bottle buckled inwards and a syrupy sweet-and-sour river coursed down my throat, inside and out. Rivulets of brown liquid streamed down the sides of my cheeks and into my green-stained collar.
“Allow me,” Ty said, leaning over and slurping the residue from my face and neck, fumbling at my pants at the same time.
“Hey!” I heard myself say more harshly than I’d intended. “Don’t be like, Oh, I’m so drunk, I don’t know what I’m doing. You’ll be really drunk soon enough.”
Ty was silent a moment, then grabbed the bottle, swigged deeply. Then: “I know exactly what I’m doing,” he said, and pressed himself against me again, slower this time, more deliberately, the tip of his tongue flicking at my ear, my jawbone, his teeth nipping at my collar, his fingers dancing over my T-shirt.
“Car!” I yelled. “Car! Car!”
Ty rolled off me as some kind of Oldsmobile rattled past, stayed slumped against the passenger door even after the car had disappeared behind us. At first I thought he’d been spooked, but then I looked over and saw that he was laughing so hard no sound was coming out. His face was red as a ripe tomato, and lines of sweat had broken out below his hairline and above his upper lip. Actually, I think the line on his lip was spit. My spit, I mean, not his.
“Car!” he wheezed finally. “Car, car!” His voice creaked like an old air conditioner the first time you turn it on in June. He pointed at the crows in the sky. “I thought you were imitating them! Car, car!”
“You’re drunk,” I said, reaching for the bottle. “Give this to me!”
“Hey,” Ty took the bottle after I’d downed about half of what was left. “Just cuz I’m a straight-D student doesn’t mean I’m an idiot. It’s much too soon for us to be feeling the effects of the alcolol.”
“Alcolol? Alcolol?”
“Car!” Ty cawed. “Car, car!”
Suddenly he sat up.
“Where’d the river go?”
“Whuh?” I looked around. Sure enough, the river had vanished. Since the Arkansas River is almost 1,500 miles long, this was slightly disturbing. I prodded the Taurus’ cracked dashboard with my index finger. “And the GPS is on the fritz too! We’ll never find it.”
“Don’t worry, cap’n, I’ll be your navigator.” Before I knew it, Ty’d rolled down his window and hoisted himself into the open ledge. Cold air rushed into the cabin. I felt it on my forehead, throat, forearms. Realized Ty wasn’t the only one who’d started to sweat.
He hooked a couple of fingers around that mysterious handle that car manufacturers install on the ceiling right inside the passenger door and banged on the roof of the car.
“Yee-haw! Floor it, cowboy!”
“Ty! Get your butt back in here!”
“That’s a negatory,” he called faintly, unselfconsciously mixing his pastiches. “River’s just a little ways north. There’s a left coming up in about a quarter mile. You need to take it.”
I did take it, hard, and Ty slid even further out the window. Only his knees were hooked over the edge of the door, and his eyes went wide in surprise—and delight.
“Whoo-hoo!” he hollered, hoisting himself back up. “Thass what I’m talking about.”
If I had to guess, I’d say Ty’s “thass” had more to do with the rum than ebonics, but I didn’t really care. I floored it, and the car sputtered up to fifty miles an hour. The great thing about old rattletraps, though, is that fifty feels like a hundred, especially on dirt roads, what with all the shaking and skittering and bouncing, and that effect is multiplied about a hundred times more when you’re drunk (yes, it felt like we were going ten thousand miles an hour). Every once in a while Ty would scream out “Left!” or “Right!” and then he began screaming “Left! Right! Left-right-left!” in marching cadence, and I swung the wheel back and forth and the car fishtailed down the road. My eyes flickered between Ty’s writhing legs on my right side and the meandering river, never more than a mile away, on my left. For some reason I felt that as long as I stayed between these two poles we’d be fine. If I didn’t go near Ty’s legs or dump the car in the water everything would turn out okay. The road played along, supplying a left or right turn at convenient intervals to bring us closer to the river each time it meandered away, but not so close that we ever felt like stopping and walking to it. We passed Yoder, Haven, Mt. Hope even, which is not so much a town as two houses planted a quarter mile apart. A needy-looking road sign—read me, please read me!—annouced 279th Street, and I knew we were closer to Wichita than to Hutch. I’m sure I’d’ve kept going all the way to the Missouri border if physics hadn’t gotten in the way, or chemistry, or mechanics, or I don’t know, maybe just math, by which I mean:
We ran out of gas.
Oops.
I’d never been in a car that ran out of gas, so I don’t know if the experience was typical. The first thing I noticed was that the power steering disappeared, and then when I glanced down at the gauges I saw that all of them had gone to zero, and we were losing speed rapidly. The rattling was so loud that I didn’t realize the car’d actually turned off, however, until Ty slid back in his seat.
“Why’d you turn the car off?”
“Whuh? I didn’t turn the car off.” I stomped on the gas, which did even less than it usually did. By now we were inching to a stop, and even I could hear that the engine wasn’t running.
“Um, Daniel? You didn’t happen to check the gas this morning, did you?”
I tried to look in my brain, but in order to do that I had to lift it out of a vat of dark fumy liquid, and even after I’d managed to hoist it up for inspection it kept dripping in my eyes, so I dropped it back in with a drunken splash. Just before the dark liquid swallowed it I remembered the twenty-dollar bill on the counter, the note that’d been with it.
“Well, that little turd.”
“Who?”
“My dad. He deliberately ran the car low on gas so we couldn’t go too far.” But then it occurred to me that my dad knew nothing about me
and Ty, had no reason to suspect us of getting up to anything. But Mrs. Miller did. I glanced down at the lipstick-stained coffee cups.
“Well-played, Mrs. M. Well-played.”
“Um, Daniel? Who are you talking to?”
“Never mind. We’re gonna have to hitch a lift to a gas station.”
I reached to open my door, felt Ty’s hand on my leg. When I turned to him he nodded at the river, which was still off to the left, less than a mile away.
“What’s your hurry? We got all day.”
If he’d squeezed my leg it would’ve been too much, if he’d leered or smirked or grabbed his crotch (or, God forbid, mine). But all he said was “We got all day” and then he held my gaze, not fearlessly, no, but not plaintively either, as if to say that just spending time with me was nice, and if anything else happened, well, that was just gravy.
We pushed the car off the road first. That was another thing I’d never done before. Pushed a car, I mean. It was interesting. Made me realize that this vehicle, which had ferried my dad and me across nearly a dozen states and racked up almost 200,000 miles, wasn’t really all that big, all that special. Just a rusty box sitting on top of four wheels that were almost as inclined to respond to a two-boypower push as a 200-horsepower engine. As the Taurus inched into the ditch I thought it could just as easily stay there, and in a blip of time—a century or three—it’d rust away to nothing. But then, when it picked up speed and rolled deeper into the ditch and we couldn’t stop it—hello, boys and girls, this is why you shouldn’t drink—I thought it just might end up staying there after all. The ditch was steep as Kansas roadside drainage ditches go, with a deep narrow channel at its center, just like the river, and the Taurus’ right front tire sank into this depression, which caused the left rear tire to rise up off the ground about six inches.
Ty and I stared at the seesawing car for a good long time. Finally he handed me the bottle and I drank down the last of it. We were already drunk; the car was already stuck; it couldn’t do any more damage.
“Who wants to—” I burped “—gimme an ‘Oh crap’?”
“Oh crap,” Ty said, although he made a minor substitution with his word choice.
I walked to the car, gave the free-floating back tire a spin, which obliged with a half revolution. “That can’t be good for the alignment.”
Ty shmirked, which is a shrug/smirk combo, although maybe I should say shmunked, since it was really a shrug/smirk/ wait-am-I-drunk-already? combo, then walked to the front passenger door and leaned into the cabin. A moment later his head was back.
So was the gun.
“You bring them phones?”
Somewhere in my head I knew that if guns were a bad idea, then guns and drinking were a really, really, really bad idea. Somewhere I knew that. I just didn’t know how to get to that place at that particular moment. Did I take a left at the cerebral cortex and then head on down to the medulla oblongata? Or, you know, should I meander through the corpus collosum until I came to the temporal lobe, and from there make my way to the good old cerebellum? I had no clue. As it was, I could barely get the key in the trunk lock, and almost ripped the bag of phones in half as I lifted it out.
Ty looked in the bag and smiled approvingly. “The thing about target practice,” he said, stuffing the gun barrel-first in his waistband and setting off towards the river, “the thing is, you want something that’ll explode. Cans or plastic bottles just don’t give the same thrill. Glass bottles’re good, but my dad takes them back for the deposit. These phones however—” he turned and looked at me with a wicked grin “—these phones’re gonna be awesome.”
I nodded my head as if Mr. Schaefer, the world history teacher, had just pointed out a heretofore unconsidered connection between global trade and factors leading to the rise of the American Civil War. Gun + phone = explosions = fun! The fact that there were two equals signs in my equation should give you an idea how clearly I was thinking. I was going to shoot up a bag of twice-stolen cell phones in a stranger’s field a good twenty or thirty miles from home, leaving my dad’s already decrepit old car catterwonky in a ditch with the rear axle audibly bending out of shape. I’m pretty sure if you go to your mom’s cookbook or epicurious.com and look up “Disaster, Recipes for,” you’ll find that set of ingredients pretty close to the top of the list.
There was a fence on the far side of the road, an open pasture a few hundreds yards wide beyond it, then the huddled, half-leaved trees that marked the edge of the riverbed. It seemed so close that when I reached for the fence’s single strand I felt like I was going to lift up the river itself and pull it the last few inches towards me.
“After you-ooo-ooo-ooo-ow www www wwwwwuhhhh hhhhhhhhgyawdDAMN!”
Ty’s fit made his response to “Car! Car!” seem like a quiet titter at a fancy restaurant. He laughed so hard I thought he was going to crack a rib or crap his pants. When he was finally able to speak, he picked himself up off the ground and reached a hand down to help me stand, which is the first time I realized I’d fallen on my butt. I’d dropped the bag of cell phones and they lay scattered about me like the last of my commonsense.
“Nice fro dude!” he sputtered, and haloed his head with his hands.
I touched my hair tenderly. It crackled alarmingly, as though electricity still coursed through it.
“Jesus,” I said. “Aren’t they supposed to put a sign up? Or something?”
Ty, busily scooping up phones, nodded towards a metal placard flapping about six feet down the fence.
WARNING!
1,000 VOLTS
“Like that one?”
“Ty! You could’ve warned me! I might’ve been killed!”
“Relax, missy, it’s only a thousand volts close to the circuit box. This far out, it’s probly not even five hundred.” He tossed the last phone in the bag, where it landed with a loud cracking sound.
“Hey, be careful. You’re gonna break that.”
“Um, news flash, Bradford. We’re gonna shoot them?”
“Oh right.” I grinned sheepishly. “I’m not as think you drunk I am,” I said, and reached to lift up the fence.
“Daniel!” Ty’s voice was half concerned, half amused. He pointed to the sign again. “Electric?”
I shmunkurped, which is a shrug/smirk/Man-am-I-drunk combo, capped by a good long burp. Ty pushed down the top strand of the fence with the sole of his shoe, and I stepped over it very, very, very carefully. I only fell once.
As we began our final march to the river, he said quietly, “Keep your eyes peeled.”
I looked around for a farmer or a cop or the congregation of the Westboro Baptist Church. “Huh? Why?”
“Electric fences are expensive. Wouldn’t put one up unless there was something to keep in.”
“Like?”
“Dunno. Bulls probly.”
“A pasture full of bulls?”
“Getting ready to be steered.” His fingers illustrated: snip-snip.
I glanced around. It was a big pasture, and I couldn’t see where the fence stopped. The river was still a ways away, and I picked up my pace.
“Maybe we should run.”
Ty shook his head. “The vibration of our footsteps. It’d bring ’em to us faster than a heifer swishing her tail to spread her pheromones around.”
He slowed still further, and I slowed with him.
“You know the word ‘pheromones’?”
“Sshh.”
He slowed even more, placing his foot gingerly on the ground as though it were the thinnest crust over a pit of molten lava. I slowed as well, which was strangely more difficult than walking fast. At one point I was halfway through a step and forgot that my front foot was still in the air when I tried to lift my back one to follow. Oddly enough, I could not do this.
“Sshh!” Ty hissed when I tumbled to the ground.
Slower, slower, slower. Eventually we were taking slomo Saturday morning–cartoon steps, one foot hovering off the ground for five, te
n, twenty seconds before landing on the ground, and my rum-addled brain finally figured out he was jerking my chain.
“You buttwipe!”
I lunged for him, but he dodged, and then we ran all the way to the river (adrenaline seemed to counteract the effects of the alcolol—I mean alcohol—and I was able to do this without falling). The dry grass of the pasture gave way to low brush—itch ivy of course, and ragweed and nettles and, you know, plants—and then we were in the trees. We beat our way through a good fifty feet of fairly dense undergrowth, then suddenly burst through the other side. The river was narrower here, faster, deeper. A single stream ran through the line of trees with only half a dozen feet of muddy bank on either side. Ty stopped dead in his tracks to keep from running into the water, and I ran right into him. He fell forwards and I grabbed him, kept him from landing in the mud. I pulled him upright and against me and my arms fell naturally around his ribs. He was breathing heavily. Not gasping or anything, just taking in long deep drafts of air and letting them back out again. His body was warm, and I could feel the dampness beneath the hem of his too-small shirt.
He dropped the bag of cell phones and adjusted something in his pants. I stiffened (I mean my arms stiffened, pervert) and only when I felt its handle press against my hipbone did I remember: the gun. I shifted slightly to the left so it was no longer touching me.
Even though they’d lost most of their leaves, the trees were still so thick that only a thin ribbon of cloudless sky hung over the water, the latter reflecting the former perfectly. Shadows of crows swam in the shallow water like fish, and the whole impression was of some private rift in the Kansas landscape, which was usually one of endless vistas, the constant feeling of being exposed and vulnerable. I pulled Ty a little closer. Our curves lined up, fitted into each other. The handle of the gun nudged my hip again but I ignored it. I put my chin on his shoulder, pressed my cheek against his ear. Unlike the rest of his body, it was cold, and I rubbed my cheek against it until it was warm. It took a long time, but we had all day.