Opioid, Indiana

by Brian Allen Carr

  I woke to text messages. Bennet was hitting me up and telling me about school. He said the kids were taking a vote to see who would be the best teacher and worst teacher to have a gun. Also, they were voting to see who was most likely to come to school and shoot the place up.

  He was on some new number.

  (317) xxx-xxxx: Who you got, man? We’re taking bets.

  Me: Huh?

  (317) xxx-xxxx: Most likely to shoot up the school?

  Me: I dunno. What’s everyone else saying?

  (317) xxx-xxxx: I think that kid Shelby Frank. Fuckers always got angry fists.

  Me: He ain’t that bad.

  (317) xxx-xxxx: Who then?

  I thought about it. It’s an odd thing to consider. Who might break? Who might go home one day and decide they’d had enough of something? Who would curl up to violence like that? Like a blanket to protect yourself from the cold of the world with. Because violence is warm. Have you ever gotten angry? So angry you could hurt a thing? Your body feels like fire. And maybe that’s what those kids are looking for. That feeling. Because it’s so strong, it must be there for a reason.

  I don’t think I believe in God entirely, but I believe in something. I believe that we exist for something. That things happen for reasons. That our paths follow something like orbits.

  My parents never really told me what they believed. My mother took me to church a few times after my father died, but we didn’t go enough to learn people’s names. My father’s funeral was a small thing. A few of his family members. We went to a golf course in a community where his oldest brother lived and we sat in a clubhouse with so many windows it felt like an aquarium. A player piano played hymns and there were about a dozen of us, and people sat in a circle telling stories about my father, and there was a picture of him on an easel. Most of the folks there were relatives, but there was a trucker or two who knew him from work, and they sat quiet with their faces aimed at the carpet, and I don’t know that anyone ever mentioned God.

  But I remember my mom after Dad died, and I remember she had two modes. She was either staring off at nothing and holding her face, or she was slamming things around and cussing under her breath. And one time I told her that she was always angry, and she said that if she wasn’t supposed to be angry she wouldn’t be angry.

  “When you’re thirsty it’s because your body needs a drink,” she told me. “When you’re angry it’s because your body needs something else.”

  “What?” I asked her.

  “You heard what I said.”

  “What does your body need? When you’re angry.”

  She scooped me up and held me to her. “Who knows?”

  I think she was right. Sometimes you feel so terrible that all you know is that you need something, and when people feel that way, they go out looking. My uncle went out looking for drugs. My mother went out and found death. I think those shooter kids go out looking for violence. They think it will stop the ache they have, but my guess is it doesn’t. I wanted to google it. I wanted to search up how school shooters felt afterward. Did it help them? Did it give them purpose? Did they get to jail and feel free from the pain, or did it just give them new pain to deal with? Or if they die there in a shootout or by turning the gun on themselves, do they get something like closure? A final bit of peace? A miraculous answer from God?

  I think, if you asked an adult, they’d say it just gives them more pain, but that’s probably not true. It probably gives them different pain.

  I feel like there are two types of misery in this world. There’s not getting what you want and being angry. And there’s getting what you want and being sad.

  If you’re either one of those—if you’re miserable—you don’t know what will fix it. You go back and forth forever. Wanting a thing. Pursuing a thing. Getting a thing. Not wanting it. And you start all over again.

  So the question wasn’t who would shoot up the school. The question was: who might think shooting up a school would make them feel better than they feel right now.

  And I didn’t know how to answer that.

  Me: Fuck if I know.

  (317) xxx-xxxx: Fine. What’s your porn name then. We’re also doing porn names.

  Me: Porn names?

  (317) xxx-xxxx: It’s your first pet’s name. And the name of the street you grew up on.

  I had never really had a pet, but in my fourth-grade class we hatched chicken eggs in an incubator, and each of the students was responsible for a chicken for a short time, and my chicken was named McCluck. He was a Rhode Island Red, and when they are chicks they are black like crows, and I remembered watching him climb out of his brown shell and slump gross and slimy onto a Styrofoam plate, heaving breath and exhausted. The street I grew up on was Forester Way.

  Me: McCluck Forester Way?

  (317) xxx-xxxx: You had a dog named McCluck? You can leave off the way part.

  Me: A chicken.

  (317) xxx-xxxx: McCluck Forester is a pretty good porn name.

  I didn’t know if it was or not, but I sat thinking about my life on Forester Way, and my time with McCluck the chicken, but then it occurred to me that the apartment was quiet as fuck. So I bounced out of bed and scraped around the place, calling out “Peggy,” but no one was there. I was hungry, so I made four toaster waffles and brewed some coffee. I’m not very good at brewing coffee. I’ve watched it done plenty, and I follow all the right steps, but every time I make it, it tastes funny. Too weak or too strong, but maybe it’s just something that’s better when someone else makes it. Like sandwiches or jokes. Like, when you tell yourself a joke, it’s never as good as when someone else tells it to you. I could listen to jokes I know all day so long as they’re coming out of someone else’s mouth, but when they come out of my mouth, they never seem new.

  That was one of the great things about Remote. He could tell me things that I already knew and they’d be funny again.

  Here’s how Remote told me Thursday got its name:

  There came a disease called thirst that could only be cured with rain. Before that, we never felt compelled to drink anything. After thirst, we’d check the skies hoping for clouds.

  “Do you think it will rain today?” we’d ask each other. If it didn’t, our tongues would go dry and we’d have a hard time swallowing. Our heads would ache. Our muscles would cramp. It was god-awful.

  We went to Wed to see if he could catch the disease and release it in his tree, but he was busy keeping the sun where it was with his arrow, his gross penis hanging nude between his legs.

  “What will we do, then?” Remote asked aloud to no one in particular.

  “Just drink rain when you can and deal with it,” said Wed.

  Our knowledge of weather wasn’t fully formed so Remote said, “Well, can you move the sun back a ways? Whenever it rains, it seems like the sun is farther away. And we are terribly thirsty.”

  “It’s not farther away,” said Wed. “The sun just goes behind clouds. In the hills there is a woman named Jupiter who can tame clouds. Go to her.”

  Remote did. I journeyed into the mountains and found Jupiter sitting on a throne of mist. She had beautiful legs that had never been shaved and breasts covered by long black hair. Other than that she was naked.

  “We are plagued by a new disease,” Remote said in a raspy, thirsty voice.

  “It is not a new disease,” said Jupiter. “It’s an old disease that you only just realized you’ve always had. You’ve grown into it the way young people grow into wanting sex.”

  “Either way,” Remote said. “What do we do? We need rain. We heard you can tame clouds. Can you make it rain more for us?”

  Jupiter made it lightning. She made it thunder. “There are other people in this world and they need the rain too. I can tame the clouds, I can’t make more of them.”

  Remote was not happy at all. If
I was less thirsty, I would have cried tears.

  “Also,” said Jupiter, “think about how much better the rain tastes after you’ve been thirsty a while. Think about how grateful you’ll be when it finally does rain.”

  Remote tried a final plea. “Help us and we’ll name a day after you.”

  “I don’t want anything named after me. I want to be remembered the way lightning is remembered: as thunder. The way rain is remembered: as puddles. I want to leave an impression, not a memory.”

  “What if,” Remote said, “you just make it rain for us once. Just one hard rain. That way we can all cure our thirsts one last time. And after that, it will just be a thing we have to live with. But we will remember you always for the thirst that you took from us, and we will call your day Thirstday and it will be your impression upon us?”

  Jupiter leaned back into her throne of mist. “I like it,” she said.

  With a flick of her wrist, she sent all the clouds on Earth to the place where Remote lived, and a great storm broke out, and Remote and the Earthlings all drank deeply of Jupiter’s rain.

  But it kept coming down. And coming down. It was more rain than we’d ever seen. It was way more rain than we’d ever hoped for. It was too much rain. The streets washed away from us. Anything not fixed to the Earth was lost to the flood. We sought refuge inside.

  I was in bed with my phone, thinking about being McCluck Forester, and then I remembered what the waiter had said about the houses on Schort Way.

  I texted the last number that had hit my phone, and I said:

  Me: Look up a street for me.

  I figured I was texting Bennet, but the message came back:

  (317) xxx-xxxx: Who’s this?

  Me: Riggle

  (317) xxx-xxxx: Oh, bennet texted you. Not in class 2gether now though

  Me: Sorry

  (317) xxx-xxxx: What’s the street?

  Me: Schort Way.

  A little time passed.

  (317) xxx-xxxx: Wait why don’t you look it up on your own?

  Me: Bennet used all my data, and my uncle would kick my ass

  (317) xxx-xxxx: Bennet does that.

  Whoever it was sent me a picture of a Google map, and Schort Way was at the south side of town. I didn’t know what time it was, so I got dressed and headed out.

  The last time I saw my uncle, he was smoking a Swisher Sweet on the sidewalk, looking up at ragged clouds. “When I was a kid,” he said, “your grandpa smoked. A ton. We’d drive around in his station wagon and he’d have beers and cigarettes and we’d listen to Cubs games on the radio, and I was so young that I thought weird things. Like, I sat on the passenger side, and he’d be blowing his smoke out his window, and in my head it was like all that smoke floated up and got caught in the sky. Like it hung there and became the clouds. And I’d watch him smoking. And I’d look at the clouds. And I’d see things in the clouds, you know? The way kids do. Bears and horses and shit. And I’d tell Dad, blow me an elephant. And he’d be like what? And I guess somehow I explained it to him. Because it became our thing. He’d take a big hit off his cigarette,” my uncle took a big hit off his cigar and puffed a mess of smoke toward the sky, “and he’d say, here comes a Cubby. Like the mascot. And he’d blow that smoke out his window, and I’d get to looking in the sky for whatever it was he said he blew.”

  “Ever see it?” I said. “The Cubby?”

  “Hell,” my uncle said. “People always see what they want to see.”

  I was walking through Opioid, on my way to Schort Way, when I spotted the Bicycling Confederate standing on a corner with his bike between his legs. I wanted to ask him about Remote again, but something in me just made me see his flag and made me think how bizarre it was that a half-delayed Hoosier would snag such a crummy symbol and devote his life to it.

  “Struggler,” I hollered at him. “Struggler.”

  He looked up at me, a sort of spooky blankness in his face, a kind of slack to his mouth, sleep in his eyes. “Who me?”

  Now, I don’t advocate hitting anyone. I don’t. This is mainly because I’ve been hit before, but it’s also because if you hate somebody that much, why would you want them on you?

  And I mean, if you beat somebody up they get on you. Their blood and spit. Their skin. Their sweat. We show violence as so dreamy in the movies. Even when people bleed it glistens like sex. Folks will fight a dozen people and never roll an ankle, never sprain a wrist. Go punch a punching bag with no gloves on and see how long you can do it before you start crying.

  In Black Panther those Wakandan bros swung their fists at everything and everybody. I get T’Challa. Dude’s swallowed the Black Panther magic, but what about everyone else? Charge into some terrible fight, then run a mile to fight some other fight? No one ever gets tired, has to shit, needs a drink. The only thing they ever do is crack their necks. That right there, to me, seems to be a flaw. If you need to adjust your spine then you can twist your ankle. It only makes sense. And they’re always glistening. Beads of sweat just pouring of them. If you can sweat, you can get thirsty.

  I guess I hit the Bicycling Confederate about six times, once I caught up to him. The first two shots landed in his right eye, and then maybe the rest hit his shoulders and the crown of his head and the knuckles of my right hand broke open, and I was bleeding wherever else I stuck him, so I didn’t know if had gotten him good, or if I was just bathing him in my own blood, but he dipped out like a kicked puppy, covered his head with his hands and ran off down an alley with his noggin leading the way. I didn’t wait long. I pulled the flag from his bike and sailed it like a spear in his direction, jumped on the bicycle and pedaled away.

  My dad gave me my first bike. It was one of the best things I could remember about him. He had come home from a route one day and for some reason his semi was parked on the street. At least that’s how I remember it. My mom took me out to see him in the front yard, and she was like, “You brought the rig home?”

  “Had to,” he said. “Got special cargo in the back.”

  My dad wears navy Dickies in all my memories, and he always has on a plain white T-shirt. He had a few tattoos on his forearms, but I don’t remember what they were of. So, in my mind they change all the time. But, in my mind, he always smells like coffee and car trips.

  “Special cargo?” my mom said.

  “For you and the little man. You my little man, right? Were you good?” I nodded. “Was he good?” he asked my mom, and she held up her hand and waggled it like so-so.

  “Gave you the shakes?” my dad asked.

  “Shut up,” Mom said. It’s my best memory of her smile.

  He picked me up and held me to him, and threw his arm around my mom, and my mom kissed him and we stumbled over to the back of his rig, and my dad set me down and fished a giant key ring from his pocket. It jangled and clanged. He thumbed through them, found the right key, undid a lock on the roll-up door and told me to close my eyes.

  I did.

  “And cover them with your hands.”

  I did.

  “And cover his hands with your hands.”

  My mom did.

  I heard the door shimmy its way open, and then my dad said, “You can look now.”

  My mom took her hands off my hands. I took my hands off my eyes. And when they were open, there was a bike for me sitting lonely in the giant cargo space, and there was a package for my mother, but I don’t remember what she got.

  I do remember, though, how much our excitement echoed in the empty cargo space whooping and hollering and all, and my dad said, “Don’t say I never . . .” He shook his head. “I always forget how that saying goes.”

  “Gave you a bike,” my mom said.

  “Yeah,” my dad said. “Don’t say I never gave you a bike.”

  And I spent the rest of the afternoon riding up and down the street wit
h my training wheels.

  My mom took them off after Dad died. The training wheels. But I don’t really remember learning to ride without them. I think one day, I could just do it on my own.

  But there I was in Opioid, Indiana, a struggler on a stolen bicycle with the wind in my hair, my hands numb from the cold, snot leaking down my face, the houses whipping by. I rode out to the edge of town, through cornfields dead with winter, along streets glazed with salt and snowmelt. They looked near silver, the roads. Twinkled like sweaty skin. And the air was huge. And above, clouds hung like exhaled smoke. And I tried to find my grandfather’s shapes in them.

  If the events of it all hadn’t been so awkward, I think I would have been having a good time.

  Schort Way was a crooked little street with three houses on it. Two seemed straight out of a catalog for suburban dream living, but the third looked like a cavity in a mouth otherwise empty of teeth. The rest of the road was nothing but a stretch of abandonment, a curved thing dotted with broken corn-stalk patches, but I biked up and down it a few times thinking about what to do. There were cars in the driveways of the two nice houses. The other house seemed deserted, and I figured it was the house the waiter was talking about.

  The land sloped toward the house. It seemed to heave up like castaway blankets—a janky thing of spent and splintering boards. I got off the bike in the front yard, leaned it to the earth, and the front tire spun the way front tires do, coughing off salt water until it came to a still.

  “Hello,” I called. As though someone might hear me. I stared up at the windows of the second story. They looked like haunted eyes. Like an old person staring off, trying to remember something. “I’m looking for my uncle,” I hollered up again, moving toward the house. And then I wondered what I would even say. If someone came to the door, opened it and was like, “Looking for who? Your junkie uncle? You don’t say.”