Summer Sons

by Lee Mandelo

  When he passed through the den Luca called out to him, “Andrew, are you all right?”

  “—and anyway, you’re flat fucking wrong,” Riley said with enthusiasm, gesticulating wildly at West as they stood toe-to-toe, refreshed wine glasses in hand. Riley’s cheeks were red; West’s eyes blazed.

  “Listen, I’m not disagreeing the book is useful, but what I’m saying is—” West began in a rejoinder containing equal fervor.

  “Sorry,” Andrew said to Luca as he waved her off and walked straight toward the door.

  “Wait,” she called out.

  Andrew didn’t pause in his flight, unbuttoning his cuffs as he jogged down the short porch steps. He swung himself into his car—his real car, his Supra, with its ugly wrap and sticky transmission—and pushed the clutch as he turned the key. The messages on his phone, which he read while he waited for the frantic shaking in his hands to quit, read:

  I’ve got whiskey and two blunts

  One blunt

  Zero blunts but more weed

  Tell me you’d rather stay there and listen to the nerds twist each other’s pigtails

  He almost sounded like Eddie. Andrew put the car in gear and sent, what’s your address, then input it to his GPS as soon as he got a profanity-and-praise-laden response. The paper in his pocket jabbed into his thigh, pokey and unforgiving. He drove fast through the yellow-moonlit night, tracing steep hill roads to the house he was becoming familiar with. Troth was after him to fill Eddie’s shoes for her, to complete his research with her, to dredge the accident up for her—she forced her way into things no one else understood, probing secrets he’d rather leave buried.

  But he had questions to ask, and he needed her answers for some of them.

  “Fuck,” he barked, crunching to a stop on the gravel in front of Halse’s garage.

  He wasn’t some whiskey-gentry scion playing historian for kicks, digging into his long-nursed wounds to find the festering bottom. He didn’t belong at Vanderbilt, and he didn’t belong in Troth’s world either. He hadn’t been groomed to inherit the Fulton name and legacy. He was just Andrew Blur. All he wanted to unearth was the truth of Eddie’s last hours, to set things as right as he was able.

  The front door opened as he climbed out of the car and Sam jogged down the steps, his fingers looped through a plastic-ringed sixer of Old English tallboys and a smile on his face.

  “I’ve got you covered,” Sam said.

  Andrew met him halfway across the lawn and yanked a beer free. The rib-crushing squeeze in his chest hadn’t abated, but the hiss-crack of the can opening eased it a fraction. Bitter malt liquor on his tongue settled him another inch. Sam snagged the can and stole a swig. Companionable silence settled between them, unbroken by Riley’s chatter or the squabbling of other boys. It was the second time they’d been alone. In the ambient light, the square cut of Sam’s jaw was ghostly familiar.

  “Let’s go for a drive,” Sam said.

  “Yours or mine?”

  “Mine. I haven’t gotten to show her off yet,” Sam said.

  Andrew grunted his agreement and moved his car to the side of the drive while Halse cut through his house. He clasped the OE between his knees, since the can wouldn’t fit in the console holder. With a clamoring grind, the garage rolled open to reveal the WRX, gunmetal and black chrome and anticipation. Andrew squeaked his thumb over the low spoiler, touching the car for the first time. Sam had left the bolts unpainted, bare metal.

  “Get in,” Sam said as he locked the door to the house.

  The passenger door was already unlocked. Andrew glanced over his shoulder as he settled into the seat. The rear compartment was empty, bench seats removed. Halse snagged a hat from the scattered detritus, and Andrew passed him a tallboy from the sixer.

  “Thanks, man,” Sam said.

  He planted his hand on the back of Andrew’s seat as he turned in his own to reverse the length of the drive, fast enough to feel fun-sloppy, comfortable with his maneuvering. Upon executing a two-point turn onto the main road, he released Andrew’s seat to face front—and somehow managed to skim the tips of his fingers across the join of Andrew’s neck and shoulder, raising the hair on his nape in a bristling twitch. Opposite the direction of the city where Andrew had come from, the road climbed farther into the hills; Sam headed that direction, seeking distance from the rest of the world. Once he’d hit third gear at a maintenance speed, he cracked his beer open.

  “So it sucked,” he said.

  Andrew nodded.

  Sam hummed and passed his tallboy across the console. Andrew balanced it on his knee, dropping his head onto the seat rest when Sam thumbed the controls to roll their windows down. Fresh summer air filled his mouth with the taste of a forest in the hot dark. The engine revved and Sam laughed under his breath, laughed for himself. Andrew had done this more times than he could count, with a different man at his side. The road leveled out around the side of a hill, a track cut wide and long with a gentle curve and a precipitous drop past the steel barrier rail.

  “Well, fuck ’em,” Halse barked, and gunned it.

  Acceleration flattened Andrew into his seat, pinning him. With eyes closed and lips popped open he allowed the vertigo to slam through him, cold beer spilling on his crotch when Sam pumped the brakes to corner hard around the curve. The tires slipped in a wild second of drift before he wrangled the car over the center line. Sam Halse drove with the confidence of a man who knew he was a king. Andrew lolled his head to the side and peeked at the broad set of his smile and his loose shoulders. The relaxed pleasure in his posture spoke to the fact that he’d taken this route a million times and would drive it blindfolded if someone asked. Andrew chugged the rest of his beer and tossed his crumpled empty over his shoulder.

  There were no streetlamps. Sam’s bluish headlights and the partial moon were all that illuminated the world. Trees towered mossy green, eerily verdant, from out of the blackness on either side of the road as they cut through a flatter strand of hillside. As their pace leveled, fast enough to entertain but slow enough to split his attention without the risk of death, Sam reclaimed his OE. He tilted it to the side of his mouth and watched the road while he sipped. Andrew watched his throat work, watched a trickle of sweat leaching into the collar of his shirt.

  Andrew opened his mouth and said, “None of them ever shut up.”

  Sam snorted. “Let me guess. My cousin and that rich dude he’s always getting irritable at sniped at each other about bullshit they technically agree on while Luca tried to smother their dumbass feud, and you hated every minute of it. Am I right, Blur?”

  Andrew gulped another throat-challenging mouthful of OE in response. The grade of the road descended by degrees as they circled the other side of the hill. If Eddie were driving, he might’ve reached across the console to grab Andrew’s knee. He’d have dug his thumb into the notch on the outside for a moment of grounding discomfort. Sam just drummed his fingers on the steering wheel, left arm flung briefly out the window to grab the breeze.

  “Call me Andrew,” he offered.

  Without looking at him, Sam drawled, “All right, Andrew.”

  His name lay full on Sam’s tongue, the two syllables spilling out rounder, less clipped than the one. The disembodiment of the department gathering, his pretense at scholar-gentleman, dropped away at Sam’s slur on the -drew.

  Switchback pavement led them to the base of the hill. In a creek-split holler between the rolling heights of the forest, draped with night and interrupted only by the porch light of one farmhouse set a far distance from the road, Sam coasted to a casual stop. Humid air danced through the windows. Sam wiped his forehead with his wrist, dislodging his hat. The pair of them finished their sixer, elbows out their windows and silent as old friends—the night had spackled over his cracking façade with watchful silence and purposeful adrenaline, offering the right comfort without making him ask for it.

  After Sam tossed his last can in the back, he asked, “Ready to head home?�
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  17

  Sam drove them up the hill again, climbing toward the moon resting in place overhead. A fierce urge to piss battled with his head-fogging buzz. Something in his pocket jabbed the crease of his groin as he shifted; he adjusted it, rediscovered the paper packet, thumb finding the metal indent of the ring. Through the whole drive home he left his thumb there, and only when Sam parked them safe in the garage did he rouse from his distracted reverie. Even as he tromped up the steps to the house, Andrew found he wasn’t ready to leave the night behind them. Sam gestured over his shoulder, a crook of his index finger, without a word or a glance. Building nerves dispersed as Andrew followed after him through the kitchen, accepting a handful of mismatched blankets tossed at him from the hall closet. He dumped them on the couch and sat to unlace his high-tops, soaking in the intense release of pressure around his sweaty ankles.

  Across the room Sam braced his arm above his head at the entrance to the hall, worming his scuffed sneakers off without bending over. His right sock caught on the shoe and slid to mid-foot; instead of fixing it, he kicked it free. His tattoo’s bold edges hinted from underneath the hem of his shirt as it rose above his waistline. As he straightened he caught Andrew staring and flashed a smirk before striding down the hall, one sock on and one sock off. A door shut in the depths of the house, and Andrew released the breath lodged in his chest from the abrupt eye contact.

  Andrew availed himself of the bathroom and considered his reflection in the unlit mirror: mouth slack with exhaustion and drink, a hectic flush from cheeks to chest, hair a wind-snared mess. The bruises on his face were healing through a spectrum of mottled flat colors, unlike the nasty green of the fresh one Sam had left on his thigh. On the couch he wrapped himself up in blankets to check his phone. From Riley, a series of questions, then silence once it became clear he wouldn’t respond to them. Either that, or Sam had told him he’d collected their wayward charge. More surprising, three messages from Del:

  I’ve given you some space to sort through a few things. I’m checking in now because I’m worried, and I’d appreciate you letting me know you’re okay.

  I know you don’t want to talk about it, or about how you feel, but we were friends. I want to think we’re still friends. It shouldn’t be my job alone to make that happen.

  Love you Andrew

  He responded with a brief, Give me some more time. Love you too. He didn’t think he meant it, but it would give them both longer to sort out their relationship. For good measure he sent a quick message to his mother as well before shutting his phone off. Head turned into the couch cushions, he wondered if Eddie had slept where he was sleeping, if he’d driven those same roads and drank that same cheap liquor and passed out here with Halse. He hadn’t told Andrew if he had—but it made sense, more sense than dinner parties, than washing professors’ dishes. He pressed his thumbnail into his wrist bone over the tattoo, and felt the earth calling to his bones. There were answers somewhere out in these woods.

  He slept easier than he’d expected.

  The velvet twilight of the dream resounded with Eddie’s voice: further, come further, this way. Andrew stumbled toward the sound of his call over roots and rocks, the shadows treacherously misleading. Just as he glimpsed Eddie’s silhouette through the trees, the ground collapsed under his unsteady heels. Pain sliced from hip to scapula as he fell, the breath punched out of him in a cracked shout. He scrabbled for a grip on the dirt walls as he tumbled with the rotten leaves, tearing a fingernail loose with a pop. His full weight landed on his left ankle, crunching it to the wrong side. Overhead the light waned as his vision swam.

  That was how it had happened, and also not how it had happened.

  Further, he heard from within the cavern, across the dripping water and the rushing of a far-off stream. He crawled on elbows and knees, useless ankle stabbing at him. He’d lost someone, something. Blind and blinder fumbling led him into chill emptiness, bloodied and hurting. As a child, he’d reached out and touched the heaving warmth of his friend’s chest. This time he encountered a cool, slick, porous surface. Numbing tingles sparked up the length of his arm as the blood in his veins vibrated to life. His thumb slid around a strange, slick hollow, followed a ridge to a branching, rough length of—antler.

  The hungering void lurched. Eddie’s cracked murmur filled his ear—further, you’re getting there, huskily intimate—whispering as the revenant had while dragging him through the graveyard, attempting to show him the truth. Hands closed over his, guiding his limp fingers to wrap around the damp-furred antlers. Power beat in a determined pulse at the base of his tongue. Reverberation pinioned him alive between the haunt’s bones and the antlers—conducting from their hands on the stag’s skull to the swelling neglected thing in Andrew’s belly with an agonized ripple.

  “Jesus fucking goddamn.” Rough hands jerked under his armpit and around his waist. “Wake the fuck up, come on Andrew.”

  The antler in his hand was attached to a dead deer. Andrew recoiled in deranged panic, phantasm superimposed onto reality. Halse dragged him farther from the animal’s remains as he kicked at the ground and struggled to shove himself free. Coarse, gore-matted fur clung to the deer’s corpse, its rot-eyed skull. Scavengers had begun their work long before he’d stumbled onto this dead thing in his sleep. The overpowering stench gagged him. The roiling cold the haunt had raised in his blood lashed toward the deer without his consent, pouring from his fingertips into the earth—and from there to the corpse, its sucking gravity drawing the spill.

  Andrew swore a hoof twitched in response, or the shadow it cast did.

  “You in there?” Sam said, crouching in front of him to block out the sight of the deer. He was wearing nothing but basketball shorts and house shoes.

  Andrew resisted the hair-raising urge to peer around him and confirm the corpse hadn’t moved, grunting out, “Fuck.”

  “So do you sleepwalk often,” Sam said, flat.

  His clothes stank. The brackish streaks on them, he realized with a burst of nausea, were almost certainly from lying near, or on, the rotting stag. He made a disgusted noise and pulled first one arm then the other into the shirt, careful to strip it over his head without turning it inside out.

  “I heard the door open, figured it wasn’t a big deal, and then remembered you’re the poster child for doing insane shit when no one is looking,” Sam said. “Took me like twenty minutes to find your dumb ass. Get up. I’m tired.”

  Andrew dropped the shirt on the ground and got to his feet. Sam turned from him. The glow of his phone cast eerie shadows from under his chin while he flicked the flashlight on, a bubble of white light cutting into the forest ahead. Sam started walking; Andrew stumbled after, footsore. Under muted moonlight, filtered through the leaf cover, the stark lines of his tattoo crawled in spiny, feathering geometric shadows across his pale back.

  After a few steps he glanced over his shoulder and said, “I haven’t charged this thing in like a day and a half, so get a move on before we end up lost in the woods.”

  The final brambles of the tattoo crawled under the waistband of his shorts.

  Andrew winced at the bite of sticks and underbrush on his lacerated feet, each step stoking the hurt higher. He couldn’t remember if he’d had a tetanus shot recently. Sam moved at a comfortable lope through the forest debris, tracking their dot on his phone’s map until the vegetation cleared into his backyard. On the porch, under clearer gold light cast by a bulb studded with blundering moths, Andrew noticed that the tattoo lines curled between a scattering of thin, raised white scars. Sam opened the door and raked another look over his filthy body.

  “I’m gonna shower,” Andrew said, hoarse as a crow’s caw.

  “Yeah, I’ll find you something to wear,” Sam said. “A dead deer. Christ, man.”

  His tone was incredulous and disturbed, a pair of emotions Andrew could relate to. He stripped to his boxers and threw his pants onto the porch rail, resolving to add them to the list of thin
gs he wasn’t going to deal with if he didn’t have to. Sam called from the hall, “Dropped you some shorts in the bathroom. Figure you didn’t want to touch them until you’re clean.”

  An hour later, he sat at the kitchen table with a glass of bourbon and ice. He was scrubbed pink, ticks removed and peroxide liberally applied to all of his minor wounds. Sam sat across from him, watching Andrew over the rim of his own tumbler. Andrew had nothing to say for himself. Last time the revenant had hijacked him, it had at least shown him the death he deserved to see; he wasn’t sure of the point of dragging him into the woods, which was almost more disturbing.

  The stag’s hoof had moved, he was sure of it.

  “Here’s some free advice for you,” Sam said, turning his glass in his hands. His accent crept thicker as he spoke. “Our grandma, Riley’s and mine, she owned this house. She told us one thing from the time we were little: don’t fuck with what’s outside your scope. There’s a lot of that weird shit out in these parts. Keep your hands off it, it’s no good for no one. I told Ed and Riley the same thing, they just didn’t listen.”

  “I hear you,” Andrew muttered.

  “Seems like you’re smarter about it than those two chucklefucks, but I still keep catching you at it.” He gulped the rest of his drink and stood. “C’mon.”

  Andrew carried his bourbon with him. Sam’s tattoo moved with the defined muscles of his back, trailing from the complex physical machine of his shoulders across the sweep of his lats as he strode to his room. Andrew paused in the doorway, the quiet urge to stay catching him. Sam sprawled onto his bed with a creak of springs, arms over his head, ambient light from the window caught on the hollows of his knees and the central valley of his chest. He tilted his chin expectantly. Andrew knocked the door shut behind him with his heel, set his drink on the dresser, and considered the floor with its pile of laundry. He hadn’t brought his blankets, but he grabbed a pillow off the bed and flopped onto the gritty roughness of the rug.