Opioid, Indiana

by Brian Allen Carr

  At a certain point it gets so cold you can’t even tell you’re alive anymore. That night was like that—standing outside made you feel like you’d crumble to dust and drift off with the snow—but I didn’t want to ride with the conspiracy-theory waiter. My pants were wet, and my shirt was soaked, but I bundled into my jacket and threw up my hood, and I waded through the snowbanks wondering why people liked winter. And some people did. I knew that some folks watched the weather for blizzards and kind of had blizzard parties the way we’d have hurricane parties back on the Texas coast.

  In 2015 my last guardian bought extra beer for Hurricane Bill and I was only fifteen but he let me drink with him. We didn’t get much more than rain. Too far south. But we sat on the back porch under the easement in candlelight slurping Lone Stars, and he told some ghost stories, but none of them stuck with me. It’s weird how some things you remember and some things you forget. And it’s weird how you don’t get to decide. You can’t trim away things from your brain that you wish weren’t there, and you can’t dig out the memories that seem lost forever. Your brain shows you what it wants you to see. Your mind is totally at its mercy.

  The snow was stacked like white scabs and the streetlights hummed yellow in the hiss of new snow falling. Flakes the size of my thumbnail. They drifted down, and their silence seemed to slow the whole world.

  I felt cold enough to die but I knew I wouldn’t. We’d read a story earlier that year in English about a man up in Alaska, I think. He had a dog, and he needed to start a fire but couldn’t. And he kept worrying that it was 50 degrees below. At a point, to keep his hands warm, he thought of slicing open the dog, of burying his hands in dog guts the way Han Solo kept Luke Skywalker warm inside a tauntaun on Hoth. But it wasn’t 50 degrees below, so dogs were safe near me and my hands.

  Peggy had known about my being suspended. She knew about the Bicycling Confederate and Autistic Ross too and how I said I wanted to be like them. She knew about the vape pen. She knew about Remote.

  But she said she didn’t.

  And I guess in my shock of all that, and in the pain from my uncle, my mind started going funny places. I could see, somehow, in my mind a vast puzzle being pieced together. A weird conspiracy against me. My aunt somehow planning all these things. My uncle’s death. My seeing Remote on other people’s hands. And I didn’t know why, but I just knew she was deceiving me.

  The apartment lights were on when I finally got home, and Peggy sat cross-legged on the sofa. She wasn’t doing anything. You could tell she was waiting for me, but she didn’t know what I knew, and because of that I had power over her, and she didn’t seem nearly as sexy as she sat in the warm light.

  When I went inside, she shot up to her feet. “You leave that money on the table?” she asked.

  “I did.”

  “Where’d you get it?”

  “Like you don’t know?”

  “You think I’d ask if I did?”

  I went to the refrigerator and opened it up. There were some beers that my uncle kept around, but he never would let me drink in the apartment. He didn’t want me to become like him. I grabbed a bottle and twisted off the cap.

  “You know what your uncle thinks of that,” Peggy said, and she made to come and take the beer from me.

  But I said, “I know what he thought about it.”

  Peggy and I locked eyes.

  “What do you mean?”

  I took a swig of beer. The bottle kind of hooted when I pulled it from my mouth, and I wiped my lips with my busted knuckle, my tongue numbing in the alcohol wash. “It’s called past tense.”

  “I know what it is. Where’s your uncle?”

  “Why are you lying?” I asked. “How do you know about Remote?”

  Her face clenched. “About what?”

  I held my hand up and made Remote. I spoke, and as I did, I had Remote’s mouth move with mine. “You knew I was suspended.” I widened my eyes. “You knew about the bicyclist and Ross. I saw my counselor tonight, so there’s no use in lying. You somehow knew about Remote and you somehow got Ross and the Confederate to play along in your game. I’m not sure why you’d do that, but there can only be a few reasons.”

  “What the fuck are you even saying?”

  “Either you killed him and wanted to pin it on me, or you killed him and wanted me to find him so I’d run away.”

  “I am literally under the impression that you’ve lost your mind or are on acid.” She looked at Remote. “What the fuck are you doing with your hand?”

  “You’re a murderer,” Remote and I told her. “You’re a killer and you’ve been lying this whole time.” Remote was up near her face, so close she would smell his breath if he had any. “You’re twisted and evil, and you’ve been playing me this whole time.”

  “What?”

  “You talked to her on the phone.”

  “Who?”

  “My counselor.”

  “When?”

  “On Friday.”

  “I was drunk as fuck on Friday.”

  “Yeah, had to steady your nerves?” Remote and I said. “Couldn’t get over what you’d done? Killer. Murderer.”

  Peggy slapped Remote and my hand went open. “Killer? Murderer? Are you crazy? Where’d you find the money? Think about it. Where?”

  I didn’t have to think. “In Uncle Joe’s wallet.”

  “In his fucking wallet,” she said. “You think I’d kill someone and not take their money?” She put her face near my face.

  “Whatever,” I said, and I finished my beer in a few giant pulls. When it was empty, I set the bottle on the counter. “I don’t need to talk about it.” And I went to my room.

  Saturday

  Bennet woke me up the next day by tapping at my window. “I got the curly carrot leaf,” he said.

  “What?”

  “C’mon.”

  I got dressed and climbed out the window. I smelled like dirty dishwater, but I didn’t much care. I zipped up my coat and couldn’t smell myself as bad. The sun was out, and the fallen snow had a way of making the day warmer. Everything glowed and Opioid, Indiana, seemed like an entirely different place with the weekend crowd roaming around.

  I hadn’t gone to school in a week, but still Saturday had a vibe. It felt like an unusual and beautiful thing. All the freedom in the roads. All the happy people on their days off drifting about. Kids rolling snowmen. Men shoveling sidewalks. The slick sound of the cars on the streets, turning over snow that coughed and crumbled.

  “You alright?” Bennet said.

  I guess I was in a daze and I guess he’d been trying to talk to me, but we were just walking to a place to smoke and I had gotten lost in thought.

  “Yeah. Yeah.”

  “Well?”

  “Well what?”

  “Well where you wanna go smoke this?”

  I looked around. “We’re tight, right?”

  “Yeah. The tightest.”

  “Like if I asked you to do something but couldn’t tell you all about it, you’d come, right?”

  “Depends. I mean, what you asking exactly?”

  “Will you come with me to see something? And we can smoke there.”

  “See what?”

  “That’s what I can’t tell you until we get there, but just come.”

  “How far is it?”

  “It’s a walk but it’s worth it to me.”

  Bennet was wearing a heavy jacket, and he pulled his hood over his head. “Alright then.”

  I don’t know exactly how long it took us to get to Schort Way, but when we got there, Bennet went stiff. “Looks like a fucking trap house.”

  I looked it over. “I guess it is.”

  We went around back and Bennet paused harder when we got to the door. “Is it safe?”

  “Maybe? I mean, I think. I’m
not taking you here because I don’t think it’s safe. I’m just taking you here because . . . I don’t even know why exactly. There’s something in there that I’ve seen, and I’m not sure anyone else has seen it, and I just kind of need you to see it, so someone else has.”

  “Okay. What is it?”

  “I’ll show you.”

  Bennet paused again. “Is there something we gotta do in there?”

  “Well, we’re gonna smoke, and then we’ll talk about it.”

  “I don’t know if I make the best decisions after I’ve smoked,” Bennet said.

  “Oh, I make terrible decisions when I’m high. But it doesn’t really matter. Whatever we decide will be a bad decision.”

  “So why we even going in?”

  “Because we have to.”

  We moved through the kitchen and into the living room, and the sun came through the front windows of the house, so you could see the shape of my uncle leaned against the wall, but he rested in shadow, and you couldn’t tell he was dead.

  “Who’s that?” said Bennet. There was caution in his tone.

  “My dead uncle,” I told him.

  “The fuck?” said Bennet, kind of dancing back. “There’s a dead motherfucker in here?”

  “No,” I said, “there’s a dead uncle in here. My dead uncle. Light the joint.”

  “I don’t know, man.”

  “Light the joint.”

  Bennet rubbed his head and his hair was kind of growing back so you could hear a noise like static. “This is fucked up.” He sort of gabbled nothing, and his eyes flickered back and forth.

  He lipped the joint, lit it up, puffed some. He took two hits and passed. He was holding in smoke but said, “Super fucked-up,” when he passed it to me, his voice strained and throaty.

  “I agree.” I took my puffs and blew smoke toward my uncle, and I squatted like a baseball catcher so my smoke blew across his lifeless face.

  I looked back at Bennet as he blew smoke toward the ceiling. He stood quietly watching it dissipate. He passed back, and we were like that a while. The joint going back and forth between us. The air getting dank and spicy.

  After a few turns he went to hand it back to me but I said, “I’m good for now.”

  “Me too,” said Bennet. He half spit into his fingers and clamped his spitty grip down onto the cherry of the thing, and it went out with a mild hiss, and he pocketed what was left. “We’ll save it for later,” he said. “How long’s he been here?”

  “I dunno really.”

  “How’d you find him?”

  “I don’t really know. How high are you?” I asked.

  He looked around the room. “Uh, pretty high, I guess.”

  I reached my hand up in front of the window where light was shining through, and I made Remote, and Remote flashed in shadow form against the opposite wall. “Ever seen that?”

  “What is it?”

  “Remote,” I said.

  “Remote?”

  I nodded. “My mom used to show him to me. He was like our thing. A bedtime thing. He’d tell me all kinds of stories.”

  “Stories?”

  “Yeah, like why winter’s cold. How the days got their names.”

  There was no furniture in the room, so Bennet sat on the floor Indian style. “Tell me a story, Remote?” he said at the shadow.

  “Ah, man, I don’t know about all that.”

  “C’mon. We just got high with your dead uncle. I don’t see any reason why there should be any secrets between us.”

  I thought a second. “I have to make a voice,” I said.

  Bennet looked at me. “Huh?”

  “He has a kind of voice. Like an accent,” I said, nodding toward Remote.

  “Well, I should hope so,” said Bennet.

  “Okay,” I said. “Here’s how Saturday got its name. But I’m gonna change it a bit, so it makes more sense for you.”

  Long ago, before time and shadows, Remote began to name the days. He started with Monday. He had named up until Friday. Each day had a specific purpose. Each day had a story that meant something. Monday was about a killer and his adoptive father. Tuesday was about a great warrior who blew smoke. Wednesday was about a crazy man who caught the sun with an arrow. Thursday was about the disease of thirst. Friday was about working away pain.

  But there was a half human named Satur who had no purpose. Think of a thing and he sucked at it. He couldn’t dance and he couldn’t wage war and he couldn’t catch anything and he couldn’t keep a job. Still, he wanted a day named after himself. He wanted to be remembered.

  Satur came to Remote on the day after Friday, and Remote had been out partying late the night before, and Remote felt like death.

  “I want a day named after me,” Satur told me. “I like the idea of it. I heard that’s what you guys do. How can we make that happen?”

  Remote was puking. He could barely think. “What do you do?” Remote asked, and puked in a bush. “What are your gifts?”

  “I don’t do anything,” Satur said proudly. “I just kind of hang around.”

  Remote considered this. Remote’s face was green with nausea. “You couldn’t have come at a more perfect time,” Remote said. “Today is for just nothing. Nothing at all.”

  Satur beamed. He and Remote loafed around all day.

  And Saturday became the day for recovery, the day for waking up late and lounging around and puking in bushes.

  “That’s some crazy shit.”

  “Yeah, well my dead mom told me that story, so, y’know . . .”

  “I meant that in a good way though.”

  “Sure.”

  “I’m serious.” Bennet looked at the wall. He looked back at me. He looked back at the wall. “And who is he again?”

  “Remote.”

  “What the fuck is that again?”

  “It’s just a name, I guess.”

  The walk home was a bizarre mishmash of feels and weirds. The glint of the sun was beautiful, but my insides were dead-uncle stained. My brain was a loopy thing of thoughts. When you’re high, you understand things in a way that makes no sense when you’re sober. You do maths of emotions. You solve puzzles that have no true pieces.

  I was finding answers to questions my mind couldn’t give shape to. I was tying together invisible threads too slippery to hold with mental fingers.

  Bennet and I had a snowball fight. Bennet and I ran and slid on the road surface. Bennet and I found shapes in the clouds.

  “I’ll see you later,” I said, when we got back to the complex. “Don’t tell anyone.”

  “Tell anyone what?”

  Peggy wasn’t home, so I sat on the sofa, just waiting. I had to see where her mind was at. I had to see what she thought we should do. I texted her.

  Me: We should talk

  Peggy: On my way home now

  I was near nodded off when she arrived. She came in through the front door looking dragged down, and I kind of sat up, and then we were both just there in an odd silence.

  “So?” I said.

  “So,” she agreed.

  “What do we do?”

  “Well,” said Peggy, “there’s the short term and long term. Rent’s paid, and your uncle and I share an account, so when the checks come I can put them in the bank. I don’t know who all will miss him and when. I mean, he doesn’t have a boss, and it’s not like he had any jobs lined up. He doesn’t owe anyone money. His friends might realize he’s missing, but most likely his friends are the ones who left him where he was, so them snooping around makes little to no sense. You turn eighteen in a few months. At that point the checks start coming to you. I think we can keep everything about your uncle quiet until then. But it leaves us the short term.” She rubbed the bridge of her nose, sat silent as if waiting.

 
“Okay,” I said. “What about the short term.”

  “I need to see where he is.”

  That night, beneath a slight moon, Peggy and I drove to Schort Way.

  “If it was a movie we’d burn it down.” I imagined the house ablaze in the night. Orange fire shifting the entirety of it to wood smoke.

  “That’s stupid. That place catches on fire they’ll know for sure. They’ll come put out the fire and his dead body will be in there, and then who knows what happens to you and who knows what happens to the checks.”

  “Then what’s the plan?”

  “We gotta move him.”

  “Move him where?”

  “You ever been to your grandfather’s old place? It’s northwest of here about half an hour. It’s farmland, but there’s a clump of forest toward the back of it, and there’s an old outhouse that we could put him in, to keep him safe from coyotes, and I don’t think anyone would find him for a long time. I went out there looking for him. I checked in the damn outhouse. I figured he might be there holed up and wasted. He took me there a few times. Told me about growing up. There’s no houses. No people really live out that way or anything.”

  “When?”

  “Day before yesterday. I drove up.”

  “I mean, when should we move him?”

  Peggy took a deep breath and exhaled a plume of steam. It drifted toward the moon. “Now.”

  I looked at her. “And then what? You and I just live in the apartment. Pretend like it never happened?”

  “When you’re eighteen we can discuss it again.”

  “But then what’s that make us? You and me?”

  “It makes me your aunt, Riggle.”

  “Okay,” I said. “Seems like a good enough plan.”

  I pulled my uncle from his death spot and dragged him through the snow toward his own car and his legs left a trail in the fresh powder like a slug across carpet. I heaved him into the backseat. His neck was frozen. His head didn’t wibble wobble. His arms stayed stuck to his sides. I got him halfway in, circled the car, opened the other door and lugged him the rest of the way in by his shoulders. He hit the warm inside air and immediately started reeking of piss. We drove silently in the night down empty farm roads that glowed in the gleam of our headlights, and on either side of us there seemed to be a universe of nothing. Peggy and I sat quietly, I guess both of us just replaying memories of my uncle in our heads.