by Don Zolidis
“You want to go for a walk?”
I will walk with you into hell and back.
“Sure,” I said, trying to sound casual as my soul caught fire and exploded with joy.
It was one of those rare evenings in early November when it was actually warm enough to be outside. And when I say “warm enough,” I mean that you could still see your breath, but it wasn’t so cold that you were a shivering mass of ice.
We walked through downtown, which was largely deserted because most of the businesses had moved out by the interstate. So we walked through empty parking lots and past vacant buildings and the random insurance agency and lonely coffee shop with one customer. There was no one else on the sidewalks, and the light from the streetlamps was yellowish and dim.
Amy skipped ahead of me most of the time, shuffling a bit, then hopping up on the occasional parking barrier. The whole area near the river had been paved over long ago, but the cement was cracking now, and there were areas where chunks of the sidewalk were missing.
“I want to show you something,” she said.
I hustled after her as she crossed one of the busier streets. Past that, the concrete gave out and we were in a group of sparse, overgrown weeds that I guess could be considered trees.
“Come on,” she said, picking her way through the trees to an old railroad bridge.
In the distant past, trains used to go through downtown and carried things like cars and the circus, but these days the tracks were largely unused. There was a small hill of loose rock leading up to the bridge, and Amy clambered over it like a very attractive goat. I mean, okay, she didn’t look like a goat. That was a poor choice of words, but she was goatlike in her climbing abilities. I stumbled after her, starting a small avalanche, but succeeded in not dying or otherwise embarrassing myself.
She stopped about halfway across the bridge and looked out over the river. The light from the nearby buildings bounced off the black water, glinting and shimmering.
IT WAS ROMANTIC.
“I wonder if there’s any organized crime in Janesville,” I said. “And if they killed people, maybe they would dump them in here.”
She honked a laugh.
“I like how your mind is always on crime,” she said. “It really tells me a lot about you.”
“I have a disturbing past.”
“Do you?”
“There have been a lot of…unfortunate accidents around me.” My mind drifted back to Son of Bo-Dag and his accusing, squashed little guinea pig eyes.
“That doesn’t surprise me.”
I laughed. “Have you ever killed a man?”
“A man? No.” She elbowed me in the ribs. “Not lately. ’Course if I did want to kill a man, this would probably be the place.”
Mist was sinking over the river. It felt clammy and cold, like the spirit of the town was conspiring to drive me out. I edged a little closer to Amy. She was wearing her green fuzzy parka thing.
“You know, I come out here sometimes,” she said.
“Really?”
“Yeah. It’s cool. I mean it’s nice to just be by myself sometimes.”
“That’s like a nineteenth-century-poet thing,” I said.
“To look out at a river?”
“Yeah. Like you’re thinking deep thoughts.”
She turned to me, with one eyebrow half-raised. “You’d be surprised.”
She was close, and I could see the reflection of the distant streetlights in her eyes. My breathing got shallow.
“If you kill me now,” I whispered, “the leaf-mulching bill will die with me.”
She honked again and elbowed me in the ribs. “I think that’s probably a good idea. First of all, in order to manufacture all the superglue you’re going to need, you’ll have to clear-cut all the forests for glue factories.”
“I’m cool with that. Price of progress.”
“And then where are you going to get all that glue?”
“Probably have to kill all the horses.”
This time she bumped into me with her shoulder, which was awesome.
“Right,” she said, “but to get all those horses, you’re going to have to steal them from people, so you’ll probably have to institute martial law to get them—and, of course, once you’ve got martial law, then you’ll have a dictatorship. And then after you become a dictator, you’ll start murdering your political rivals. But the leaves will stay on the trees.”
“Like I said, it’s a small price to pay.”
The mist intensified. The railing in front of us was slick, and I gripped it with my hands, looking down at the black water below us. Don’t die. Life is just getting good.
“This is much better than working on our bills,” I said. “And it’s not like we’re going to be politicians anyway.”
“You have too many dark secrets.”
“Exactly. And what about you? Do you have any dark secrets?”
Her eyes sparkled just a bit. “Sure. But I’m not going to be a politician either. I don’t know what I’m going to do with my life, but not that.”
“That’s okay. You’re only seventeen.”
“Eighteen.”
“Ooh. You’re an older woman. Nice.”
“I got held back in second grade.” She said it in offhand way, like I killed a man in Reno.
“You got held back?” Amy Carlson got held back? The president of everything got held back?
“Yep.”
“Wow.”
“I couldn’t spell. I mean, seriously, I hated school. As soon as we started having spelling tests, they put me in Remedial English. I mean, nobody even bothered testing me for dyslexia at the time, so they just assumed I was stupid and made me repeat second grade.”
“That sucks.”
“Yeah. I didn’t even get diagnosed until eighth grade. I just always assumed I was kind of dumb. Everything that was easy for everyone else was really difficult for me. I got my driver’s license when I was a sophomore, though, so that was cool. Suddenly I had a whole bunch of new friends who used me for rides.” She made a little “hurm” sound.
And then we were walking again, this time on the other bank of the river, where there was a stone wall to keep people from jumping in (not that anyone would jump in). As we were going along, I felt her hand slip into mine. I tried to keep walking and concentrated on making sure my feet were going one in front of the other, but mostly what I was doing was mentally hyperventilating.
Sheisholdingmyhand! Sheisholdingmyhand! Sheisholdingmyhand!
We did manage a conversation, even though I was still trying my hardest to concentrate on putting one foot in front of another.
“I’ve got a theory,” she said. “You have to embrace chaos. I mean, I guess it’s weird for the girl at the top of the class to say that, you know? But that’s what life is about. It’s about making peace with uncertainty.”
“Change is good,” I said.
She smiled. “Change is good.”
“Unless you’re a werewolf.”
“Sometimes change is bad.”
We kept going. Youth in Government normally lasted for two hours, and we spent all of it just walking around. Every so often the wind would whip up, and the edges of my eyes would water—when I was little everyone made fun of me for crying all the time when it got cold, and since it was Wisconsin, I was basically leaking 24/7. I wanted to tell Amy everything. About how I’d never felt comfortable in my own skin, how I couldn’t seem to figure out how to “be” around other people, how everything that came so easily for my sister was so difficult for me. I wanted to tell her how I needed to get out of Janesville, how I wanted to see the world or at least find someplace where I didn’t feel like an alien all the time. I imagined there was some better version of me just waiting to emerge, like you could open up my ribs like a pair of wings and there would be the beautiful, hopeful person that I thought I was.
I wanted to tell her that was going to be me someday. But mostly I listened.
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“There’s a patch of forest behind my house,” she said. “My dad bought it when he bought the house—twenty acres or something. And it’s all unspoiled, you know? When I was a kid, when I was feeling miserable, which was pretty much all the time, I’d go out there. You know when we talked about Emerson and those guys in English class? That’s what I’d do. Just go out and open my eyes as wide as I could and take it in, you know? Every little detail, every little scrap of beauty. That was God.”
“Do you still do that?”
“Not as much.” She looked far away for a bit. “I don’t have the time.”
We were back at the Y, standing on the street. Kaitlyn would be here any minute to pick me up, driving the car we shared. I had held Amy’s hand for an hour, even when it made no sense. Even when we were going up and down stairs, when it looked like we were a pair of convicts who escaped from a maximum security prison.
So now she stood there, about to return to the real world. What do I do? Do I try to kiss her? What if she had been holding my hand by accident and then felt too embarrassed to drop it? Whoops, I thought you were mentally slow and needed some guidance, that’s why I held your hand for the last hour or so. Would my sister get there on time? I should—
And then her face was right in front of mine, and she was kissing me. The cool tip of her nose touched mine and it was a hell of a lot better than smashing lips together.
Thus began the greatest time of my life.
Soon to be squashed, of course. By the dark secrets.
When I was growing up, I figured it was only a matter of time before I developed mutant powers. Sure, a steady diet of comic books may have produced unrealistic expectations of how life was going to go (maybe I’d die a few times, only to be resurrected in an alien body, maybe I’d turn evil for a spell, maybe I’d get cloned—who knows?), but I thought that my outcast status was a sure sign I was chosen for greatness and/or mutation.
In fifth grade, we took a tour of the local GM plant. It was a vast, cavernous space that smelled like acid and metal. Skeletal sections of massive trucks, Suburbans, slowly jerked their way down conveyor belts, occasionally tended by guys with beer bellies and unfortunate haircuts. We were forced into a long, snaking, single-file line and marched through the place for two or three weeks, up and down staircases, and into and out of hell itself. A lot of our fathers worked there (mine didn’t—he was at the Parker Pen plant, which was another kind of hellish factory, except they made, you know, pens instead of huge trucks).
“It’s tough when you start out,” said our guide. “But once you build up seniority they move you to the easier jobs.” He laughed and gulped from his can of Shasta soda. “Bob over there has been here thirty years—now he just taps on the windshields.” Bob waved, holding up his tiny rubber hammer.
My classmates nodded. Some of them joked. Some of them were seeing their futures. Working on the line, tapping on windshields, and drinking low-grade soda. (Shasta? Seriously? What the hell?)
I watched as Kaitlyn and her friends giggled and clustered together, perfectly at ease. Some of the boys were running around despite the continuous shouts of “No running! Hey, I meant no running! Damn it. Quit your running! Shit. Whoops, I mean shoot.” I stood in the back, watching.
I didn’t know how they did it. And even though Brian had joined our class fairly recently, we weren’t close friends yet. I didn’t have any close friends, actually. I didn’t know how to make it work. It was like everyone else knew how to swim, and I was waiting on the edge of the water, terrified to drop into it, certain I would drown.
Even in fifth grade I knew that I didn’t belong. I didn’t belong in this factory, spending my days tapping on windshields, but I didn’t belong with the other kids either. I imagined something more, but I wasn’t exactly clear on what “more” was.
When I get my mutant powers, I’m so fucking out of here.
My mutant powers, sadly, were late in development, and at ten, I probably wouldn’t have used the f-word, but you get the general idea.
My plan was to get out. If that required joining a super-team of misunderstood crimefighters, so be it.
Actually, the above story probably would have done better as my college admissions essay than my eventual paper on Dostoevsky, which contained phrases like “Dostoevsky sensed the ugliness and the beauty of human suffering.” I was big into beauty and suffering.
But the way out arrived the summer after my sophomore year. It was my first piece of college mail, a glossy, high-quality pamphlet showing a bucolic campus filled with a group of very attractive, racially diverse students smiling and holding their books. They were laughing—clearly life was very humorous on this campus. Here, finally, might be the place where I would belong. It looked like everyone belonged. I should note that none of the people in the photos were wearing a dark, woolen trench coat, but still, it looked amazing.
It said Oberlin College but might as well have said THIS IS A MORE REALISTIC FUTURE THAN BECOMING A MUTANT.
“No,” said Dad when he saw that one. “Absolutely not. Under no circumstances. That place is for hippies.”
So I put that one in the “maybe” pile.
The mail kept coming. Sometimes two or three a day. By the end of my junior year I had amassed a stack of pamphlets two feet thick. Some of them were offering fancy things like computers or trees or a pack of druids roaming campus.
Kaitlyn was getting the mail too, but early on she had settled on UW-Madison. Madison was a good school, but I didn’t want to go there because it just seemed like a vaster, more intense version of high school. Plus, my sister would be there. I needed something smaller. I decided to list it as a “safety” school and then focused on picking the kind of schools that would send my dad into epileptic fits.
This one costs a billion dollars? Awesome. Apply.
This one requires everyone to become a vegetarian and wear beads? Done.
Co-ed dorms? On it.
This one encourages students to howl at the moon during finals? Perfect.
Anywhere that seemed to have a small number of students, a large number of trees, and a safe distance from home fit the bill. Now all that was left was to winnow down the list, find a place to visit, and apply.
And I was all set to do that until I kissed Amy, at which point my priorities shifted radically.
“I need three hundred dollars,” I said, a week after the magical day in front of the YMCA.
It was dinner, and, like most dinners Mom made, it sucked. Usually, we had breaded cutlets of some kind of unidentifiable fish product. Nobody complained, because the alternative (my dad cooking) was worse. There was a time when she ceded responsibility of the cooking to my dad, but after our sixth consecutive meal of burned meat sculpture, we went back to Mom.
“I need three hundred dollars,” I repeated.
Dad looked at me. “Is this for drugs?”
Yes, Dad. You’ve hit the nail on the head. I’ve got a shipment of heroin coming in from Colombia, and I need to pay my dealers.
“Craig’s not cool enough to buy drugs,” said Kaitlyn.
“What does that mean?” asked Mom.
“He wouldn’t even know where to get drugs.”
“I know where to get drugs!” I didn’t know where to get drugs actually, but I wasn’t about to let Kaitlyn be right about anything.
“Craig!” cried Mom.
“Where, then?” Kaitlyn demanded. “Where do you get drugs?”
“I know people,” I said.
“Craig!”
“You’re such a liar.”
Mom turned to Kaitlyn. “Do you know where to get drugs?”
“Of course. I’m not socially illiterate.”
“I hate it when you talk like this,” said Mom, eating her fish.
“Can we get back to my pressing need for three hundred dollars, please?” I tried to hand Dad the little handout Amy had made explaining our need for a crap-ton of cash.
“What is
this for?”
“It’s Youth in Government. We’re going to take a field trip to Madison in December. We go to the capitol and hang out and pass bills and stuff.”
“It’s drugs,” said Kaitlyn. “‘Youth in Government’ is new slang for cocaine.”
“Shut up!”
Dad scrutinized the handout and tried to determine if this was, in fact, code for white gold.
“It’s good for my college application!” I stammered, hoping that would convince him.
“Well, son,” he said finally, springing his trap, “I think I can find the money…if you go deer hunting with me this year.”
Wisconsin doesn’t really celebrate Thanksgiving as much as it gives thanks that it’s time to send the menfolk into the woods with guns. ’Cause there are deer in them there hills, and they are asking for it, prancing around with their little hooves, eating stuff, and looking very shootable. At least, I suppose that’s the logic that draws five hundred thousand men with guns, decked out in silly orange vests and hats with earflaps, into the woods. During deer hunting season, Wisconsin has the third-largest standing army in the world. I am not making this up.
I hated hunting.
Kaitlyn was never forced to go, because she was a girl, which, despite the many inequities of the patriarchy, at least gave you a free escape from hunting. I had been dragged along exactly once—when I was eleven. I guess my dad figured my ability to kill our pets could best be utilized killing deer in the wild.
“You know, I’ve just got so much on my schedule right now,” I lied.
“Like what?”
For the last six years, I had gone through every conceivable excuse. I had faked illnesses. I had hidden in the basement. I had performed an exquisitely choreographed mental breakdown. Anything. Each time my dad would finally surrender and say, “Next year you’re coming for sure.” But this time, the hunting trip would interrupt my new relationship with Amy—what if she forgot about me when I went into the woods? What if I forgot about her? Could we survive being apart for half a week?
“There’s a lot of reading I need to get to—in preparation for—”
