The Trip

by Aaron Niz

  “How am I the only one who’s concerned right now?”

  “You’re a big pussy, Gabe. That’s why you’re shitting your panties and everyone else knows it’s nothing. Tomorrow we’ll walk to the pay phone by the main road and get someone out here to tow our cars in for new tires.”

  “This is bullshit,” Tyler says. He’s eating pretzels. Crumbs and pieces of salt are falling onto his lap as he chews with his mouth open. “Trip’s become a total mess because brothers can’t handle their drugs.”

  “And what do we do if the missing brothers still aren’t back here in a few more hours?” I say.

  “Look, it’s Eli and DeSantos,” Tyler replies. “DeSantos ran around with no clothes on one year and tried kissing everyone, remember?”

  “Yeah, but—“

  “Yeah but nothing. They’re probably running around the woods sucking each other’s dicks or something. They’ll come back. Give it some time. It’s not even dark yet.”

  “What if they got lost?”

  “We’re not in the goddamn tundra. If they walk long enough in these parts they’ll come to another house or a cabin or a road. Trust me.” Hetridge laughs as he guzzles more beer. “Gabe, you need to take your skirt off.”

  “I’m just worried.”

  “Of course you are. It’s called being a bitch.”

  “Go fuck yourself.” I’m worried because I can feel it in my bones. Something is wrong. But what can I do about it?

  What really scares me is that I know there’s nothing to be done about any of this.

  We can’t call the police because our cabin is crawling with drugs and alcohol and underage drinkers. And there’s no cell or Internet reception in this area, no landline, no way to make contact with the outside world.

  The only chance would be to take the mile or two walk to the corner store where there’s a payphone, or perhaps to try and find a house. But I have no idea where the nearest houses are from here. We’re isolated, just like we wanted to be. Only now I wish we’d chosen a place a little less separated from the rest of civilization.

  I glance out the window again.

  And then I see it. Or, rather, I see HIM. Eli Grover, the older brother who drove up to the cabin with Hetridge and Stutty.

  He’s stumbling out of the woods holding the side of his head. His eyes are enormous, and his mouth hangs open. It looks as if the side of his shirt is wet.

  And then I realize why it’s wet. His shirt is soaked in blood.

  Eli sees us, but he doesn’t say anything directly to us. He’s half-screaming, half crying as he lurches and stumbles into the driveway.

  I scream, I’m not even sure what comes out. Probably a string of expletives.

  Bolting out of the kitchen to the deck and down the stairs.

  The other brothers follow right behind me as I catapult down the steps. We run across the driveway and put our arms around Eli, trying to support him.

  “Holy shit, get him inside, fast. He’s hurt bad.” We grab Eli and drag him into the basement.

  He has some kind of cut on the side of his head but he’s holding his hand up against it, so I haven’t gotten much of a look at how bad it is.

  Feet stomp down the stairs and before I know it the rest of the brothers are coming into the room with us. There’s a bunch of us now.

  Eli’s crying and yelling incoherently as we try to calm him down and find out what happened.

  “Christ, he’s bleeding like a stuck pig,” Reyes says, but he doesn’t sound that upset by it.

  “Let me look at him,” Randall tells me, moving me aside and prying Eli’s hand away from the wound.

  Blood shoots out and splatters Randall across the cheek.

  “Jesus, what the fuck!”

  “What happened to him?”

  I turn and look at the brothers, they’re in various states of shock at what’s going on. “We better stop this bleeding.”

  “Looks bad,” Randall says, and his voice is shaking.

  Stutty is whimpering.

  “Call the cops!” I tell the brothers standing around staring. “Somebody call the cops now. He’s hurt really fucking bad.”

  “How do we call the cops?” Walden asks.

  “There’s a payphone at the top of the main road. Someone needs to run there like now. Right now.”

  Nobody’s volunteering. Finally, Diggler says he’ll do it. “I’m pretty out of shape but I’ll do my best.”

  “Hurry, man. He’s really bleeding.”

  Diggler takes off out the back door at a fast run. The pay phone is at least a couple of miles away, and I’m assuming that an out of shape Diggler can’t get there in anything less than twenty minutes.

  Twenty minutes, at least, just to make it to the phone. Then assuming the pay phone is even functioning, he’s got to call 911 and explain where we are and then the EMTs and cops have to drive out here. It could be easily forty minutes or an hour before paramedics arrive.

  Eli’s shuddering on the floor. His black boots jitter on the tiles.

  “Grab me a towel,” I tell Randall, who’s seemingly overwhelmed by the amount of blood pouring from Eli’s head.

  “Dude, I think I saw his fucking brain—“ He whispers in my ear.

  “Shut up and get me a fucking towel.” Nobody even wants to touch Eli at this point.

  I wish we weren’t just a bunch of drunken, drug-taking underachievers. Couldn’t we have had one pre-med student in our frat?

  But no.

  None of us has a clue about what to do with anything that doesn’t involve a bong, rolling papers, or a beer funnel. And I’m no different, but I do know that we need to get some pressure on this wound fast if we’re going to slow the flow of blood.

  Eli’s face is a mask of red gore. I can’t even look at him, and I don’t want to see just how bad the gash in his head is.

  While Randall goes to fetch a towel, I take the palm of my hand and press it against the side of Eli’s head, next to his ear. I can feel the wound now, pulsating like a living, breathing gill carved into his scalp. It feels long and deep and very, very serious.

  It occurs to me that Eli isn’t going to live much longer.

  “Eli,” Tyler says. “Can you hear me, man?”

  Eli’s eyes are rolling around in their sockets. He doesn’t respond.

  “Stay with us, dude. You’re going to be fine. Help is on the way.” But Eli’s struggles are worsening.

  “Can somebody take his pulse?” I ask.

  “I can try,” Vinnie replies, getting down on the floor with us and taking Eli’s hand. “Jesus, he’s cold as ice.”

  “You’re going to be fine, Eli,” I say loudly.

  His adam’s apple bobs up and down and there’s a gurgling in his throat, as if he’s choking on blood.

  I look at Vinnie now. “Can you feel a pulse?”

  “It’s racing.” He checks his watch and counts under his breath. “I think he’s at like one hundred and fifty beats per minute. Maybe I’m wrong.” Stutty’s face is ashen and his lips quiver. “Is he going to be okay?”

  “Yeah, he’s going to be fine,” I reply, knowing it’s not true. He’s not even close to being fine. He’s dying.

  Blood is still flowing from the wound. His eyes are bulging and the pupils are dilated. His mouth is open and the tongue slithers in and out of his mouth reflexively.

  There’s blood pouring through my fingers and pooling around us on the floor.

  Bloody footprints are all over the white tiles.

  “How did he get cut?” Randall asks.

  “He just came out of the woods like that,” Tyler says, and I can hear the fear and awe in his voice. He sounds like a scared little kid.

  Finally Randall comes back with a large brown bath towel and hands it to me.

  “That took long enough.”

  “I couldn’t find the linen closet.”

  There’s a collective gasp from the guys in the room when I take my hand off the side
of Eli’s head and a huge fountain of blood pumps from the enormous wound above his ear.

  And that’s when I realize that Randall was telling the truth—I can see Eli’s brain.

  I stuff the towel against the wound and press it with all of my might. For the first time, I can feel true panic rising like vomit in my throat.

  I’m focusing intently and after a minute or two I think maybe I’ve staunched the bleeding somewhat. The towel is soaked through but it doesn’t seem to be gushing out like it was before.

  Vinnie takes Eli’s pulse again. He shakes his head at me. “Gabe.”

  “Is it slowing down at all?”

  Vinnie’s eyes are brimming over with unshed tears. “It’s…it’s gone. I’m not finding a pulse.”

  “Try his neck.”

  He leans across Eli’s torso and starts feeling around his neck.

  I look down at Eli’s pale, sunken face. His jaw looks almost unhinged. His eyes stare vacantly at the ceiling.

  No one says a word. Vinnie keeps trying to find a pulse.

  I’m sitting in blood. Sitting in the blood of a dead man. A man I only just met who died in pain and fear and anguish.

  Vinnie sits back and plants his hands on his thighs. “What do we do now?” Hetridge is standing there watching us all with a strange expression on his face. I can’t put my finger on it. He doesn’t look worried or horrified or even sad.

  Then I realize what the emotion is that’s written across his face. Pure, unadulterated anger.

  Hetridge glances around the room at the rest of the brothers. His stare becomes a challenge. “Did one of you idiots hurt Eli? Because you better say it now before I find out on my own. Believe me, I will fucking end your world if you hurt him and you keep quiet about it.”

  “Nobody here did this,” Walden says.

  “How do you know?”

  “Because,” Walden says, taking a pack of cigarettes out of his pants pocket.

  “We’re fucking brothers.”

  It’s a simple statement of fact.

  “We’re brothers, but someone went and slashed all our fucking tires. Someone is trying to mess with us.”

  We all look around the room. Would a brother do these things, secretly try to hurt one of us? To what end?

  There’s been violence on brother outings before. A couple years back, Ricky Daniels got really messed up on weed and coke and started repeating the phrase “why not kill?” like some demented mantra. He kept saying it and saying it and his behavior got progressively more erratic, culminating in his attempting to bite one of the newest members of the fraternity on the face.

  Or there was the time Diggler and Neil got in a fistfight at the brother apartment when Diggler said that Neil was a lazy piece of shit. Diggler held back though. He could’ve really hurt Neil if he’d wanted to.

  Yes, brothers have gone slightly crazy before, yes they’ve gotten weird and violent. But this is something else entirely.

  “I think he might really be dead,” Vinnie says in a choked voice.

  “Maybe…maybe someone had a bad trip and got paranoid,” I offer, my lips numb. “If someone did this accidentally, got scared and hit him in the head or whatever.

  Just tell us. We won’t blame you if it was an accident.” Nobody speaks. Everyone’s just staring at the now lifeless body on the basement floor.

  “He’s not dead. No fucking way,” Tyler says.

  “I can’t find a pulse at all,” Vinnie replies. He licks his lips. “And look at all the blood.”

  “I see the blood, I’m not blind.”

  “You sure about that?”

  “Fuck you, Vinnie.”

  “It’s not my fault he’s dead. Maybe we’ll never know how it happened.” A few brothers have started openly sobbing. Stutty is a blubbering mess.

  “Diggler’s calling the police,” I say. “We need to get rid of any drugs. I suppose we’ll take the hit on having booze here and underage drinking, but we need to make sure that there’s no evidence of drugs, because then we’ll all be fucked for sure.”

  “Who are you worried about here?” Walden says, his beady blue eyes boring into mine. “Eli, or saving your own ass?”

  “Eli’s dead. We can’t help him now. But if cops show up and start to investigate this, we might all end up in the newspapers. We might end up in jail.” This shuts everyone up.

  I feel like I’m in a waking nightmare. There’s a dead man lying at my feet. His blood is all over my clothes. What’s next? Am I going to be a murder suspect?

  “What should we do now?” Jared says. He’s always got a cocky look on his handsome face, but now, for the first time ever, he looks like a timid little boy. Like he aged ten years in reverse over the course of five minutes. “Should we try to clean up the blood, cover him or something?”

  “You don’t disturb a crime scene,” Randall says, putting a clove cigarette in his mouth.

  “This isn’t a crime scene,” Walden mutters.

  “We don’t know what this is,” I say, trying to steady my shaking hands. “I think we should leave his body alone for now. We don’t want to be accused of trying to stage the body or anything that could be misinterpreted by police.” Hetridge snorts. “What are you, some sort of crime scene investigator now?”

  “I’m just saying—“

  “Eli was my friend, asshole. My friend, my pledge brother—I’ve known him ten years. I know his sister and his mom. So don’t lecture me with shit you watched on TV

  last week, fuck-head.”

  For the first time ever, I’m not intimidated by Hetridge. “Don’t talk to me like that. I didn’t see you doing anything to help him survive. At least I tried to do something.”

  “And a great job you did. He probably died even faster thanks to you trying to play Grey’s Anatomy.”

  “If you could have done better than me, I wish you would have at least tried.” Hetridge stares at me with that weird rage smile. “Keep talking, Gabe. Say another fucking word about what I should have done and watch what happens.” He’d probably love to have a fight right now, I realize. Anything to give vent to his hate and anger and impotence in the face of his dead friend. I’m not going to have a fistfight and roll around in a dead person’s blood. So I just look down and shut my mouth.

  “So what do we do now?” Jared asks.

  Reyes takes out his phone and starts snapping pictures. “We better document this, just in case.”

  “In case what?”

  “In case whoever did this to him tries to tamper with the evidence.”

  “The cops will be here soon.”

  Reyes looks up from his camera with a curiously excited expression. “You sure about that?”

  Nobody answers. So we wait.

  ***

  It’s been over three hours and no sign of any cops or Diggler. DeSantos hasn’t returned either.

  It’s getting dark outside and people are moving around the house in a state of shock, a kind of haze.

  Sitting in the bedroom flipping through an old copy of Sports Illustrated I found in the downstairs bathroom, I try not to let my anxious mind run wild. I’m reading an article about how LeBron James might just be the next Michael Jordan, if only he can conquer his personal demons.

  And I don’t even give a shit about LeBron or basketball in general.

  Neil comes in and sits down on the bed next to me.

  “What’s up?” he says, and puts a hand on my shoulder.

  I lay the magazine on the floor next to me. “Just hanging out. Pretending I didn’t watch Eli die.”

  He shakes his head. “People are starting to talk.”

  “About?”

  “Diggler. He never came back, and there’s still no cops or anybody showing up to help. It’s been hours.”

  “So what’s next?”

  “Everyone’s saying we need to send out a group this time. With some weapons and stuff just in case.”

  “They think someone’s out there? In the
woods?” Even saying the words makes my bowels loosen.

  Neil shrugs. “I don’t know. Nobody knows but who wants to go out in the woods, in the dark, by themselves?”

  “Not me.”

  “Me either.” He shrugs, silently acknowledging that neither of us is likely to be awarded the Medal of Honor anytime soon. “A few brothers volunteered though.”

  “Who?”

  “Eugene, Walden. Jared. They’re getting ready now, gathering supplies and weapons.”

  There’s a guilty tug in my stomach. I could volunteer to go with them. Maybe they’d tell me no but at least I’d have put myself out there instead of letting other people do the dirty work on my behalf. “Maybe all of us should go together,” I offer lamely.

  Neil shrugs. “I guess.”

  “We don’t know if anyone’s out there at all,” I say, as if that makes it better for the three people who are potentially risking their lives.

  “True.”

  “Is anybody watching over Eli’s body?” I ask him.

  “No one wanted to stay with him alone.”

  I can’t say I blame them. The thought of standing in that room at night with Eli’s corpse staring at me isn’t much more appealing than running through the woods with nothing but a flashlight for protection.

  A few moments later, we head upstairs to see what’s going on.

  In the kitchen, the brothers have gathered together as the three brave souls get ready to head into the night. They all look scared, too, making me feel like an even bigger coward for not volunteering.

  “If you guys see anything suspicious, or hear anything—come back right away,” Vinnie tells them.

  They’re all dressed heavily for the cold night air, two of them have backpacks and each of them has a different weapon. A baseball bat, kitchen knife, rusty tire iron.

  Looking at their pathetic weapons, my heart sinks. They won’t be any match for someone with a gun or a crew of dudes with machetes. Still, we never heard gunshots. If there is anyone out there, in all likelihood it was a lone maniac who won’t dare to mess with three armed men at once.

  At least, that’s what I tell myself. The truth is none of us has a clue what or who is out there.

  We all shake hands and hug one another and then the four brothers march out the back door and down the deck stairs. We file onto the deck after them, watching them head into the woods.