Unstoppable Moses

by Author Tyler James Smith

  EIGHT: … AND BUDDIES.

  THAT NIGHT, WHILE THE RESPONSIBLE Buddies were rallied in the den, breaking ice and building teams, and the kids were huddled around the fire, I walked into the forest. Despite the voice in my head saying that they were just people my own age looking to be friendly, I imagined Michael, Faisal, and Matty smiling when they saw me walk up, right before beating me to death and feeding my body to a bunch of starving teacup pigs—vividly enough that every twenty feet or so I would stop, shake my head, and ask myself what the fuck I was doing because there was no chance anybody had watched the Olympiad and even less of a chance that those improbable people wanted anything positive to do with me.

  I told my stupid brain to shut up.

  The camp was nestled far enough into the woods that the darkness had, outside of the cabins and the bonfires, a primeval depth to it. The kind of darkness that presses in on you, where each rattle of bare branches reminds you that there is a whole world of claws and teeth just beyond the firelight. The kind of darkness that stares back. The kind that makes you remember all of your worst memories and convinces you that snarling people in WARMTH shirts are waiting just beyond your sight line.

  I crunched through the autumn leaves, crisp and frozen under a sky that was the same, toward the distant voices below the rope wall. I couldn’t hear the words but I could make out the pitch and cadence, and they were the kind of sounds you only hear from close friends—words swirling safely together and drifting in warm tandem. As I got closer, the words fell into fragmented focus.

  “—Coach?”

  Laughter, faint and trailing in the wind.

  “—the end of—”

  “—kidding me?”

  I looked back the way I came. All I had to do was turn around and walk back. I’d see them later and shrug and offer some half-assed excuse and that would be it.

  But they weren’t talking about me. They weren’t cackling. It was becoming more and more likely that they were just normal, decent people looking to do normal, decent things. Still, even if I knew they weren’t going to go berserk on me, just turning around was the easier choice.

  Right as I thought about leaving—about turning around and heading back toward the cabins, where I could just put my hours in until it was time to go home and then get out—I heard something pop. It was either a stick underfoot or a knot bursting in a log roasting on the bonfire behind me, but to me, it sounded like a gunshot.

  Like a .38 fired at a child or a .45 slug put into the head of a teenager.

  Either way, I was tired of hearing gunfire every time somebody clapped their hands or slammed a door.

  “Fuck it,” I said. I said the words; I made the words come out of my mouth and put them into the air where they were real.

  I swam through the low-hanging spruce branches and past the skeletal birch fingers reaching out of the ground, just barely breaching the barrier between me and them. The taller shadow outline was nodding while inhaling from behind a cherry-red ember, listening to a smaller, girl-shaped outline while the third stood huddled close by. The air around them smelled heavy and sweet, and they stood in the shadow of a giant; the monolithic rope wall watched over them, fifty feet high, fenced with drooping barbed wire and surrounded by sand.

  “Hey, guys,” I said, louder than I meant to.

  They jolted and the cherry-red ember disappeared, followed by a fit of coughing.

  “Shit, hey, sorry. It’s just me. It’s Moses.”

  They stood hesitantly and quietly before all exhaling in relief at the same time. Stepping out from the shadows of the tower and into the puddled moonlight, Faisal started spitting and raking at his tongue.

  “I swallowed it,” he said to his friends.

  “You did what? Wait, what?” Matty answered. Their attention shifted, easy and seamless, away from me.

  “The joint. I swallowed the joint.”

  They asked him, silently, without words, What the fuck, man?

  “The marijuana,” he added helpfully, as if his friends didn’t know what he’d meant.

  “We know what you mean!” Matty said, arms out in theatrical outrage.

  “How was I supposed to know it wasn’t Test?”

  “Faisal!” Matty said, swatting at him.

  “I know! I didn—” He cut himself off by exhaling through his nose. “I’ve got another one somewhere. But I’m about to be pretty high because this shit’s potent as shit.”

  “Hey, Moses,” Michael said, and suddenly their attention was back on me. “You have any trouble sneaking out?” he asked me, shaking my hand in a very formal, fatherly way.

  “I don’t think they noticed. They were doing icebreakers. Something about pantomiming Two Truths and a Lie.”

  He smiled and said, “Sounds about right. Guys, this is Moses.”

  “I knew it was him!” Matty said as she walked over to me with her mittened hand jutted enthusiastically out. “I’m Matty.”

  I shook her hand. “Michael said he thought you recognized me on the bus. From the Olympiad?”

  “I did! I told you it was him, Faisal.”

  “Pretty blown away that somebody actually watched the Olympiad,” I said, completely honestly.

  “My AP Chem teacher made our whole class watch it. Some of us kind of got into it though,” she said, more generously than I’d ever heard anyone talk about chemistry. “Oh! This is Faisal,” she said, dragging him away from digging a joint out of a hidden pocket in his coat.

  “Hey, sorry about the whole—you know.” I gestured at the spit-up chunks of weed and rolling paper around his feet.

  “If I hadn’t smoked half of it already and if I didn’t have a lot more, I’d probably be more upset. Faisal,” he said, shaking my hand.

  “Yeah, you’re the guy who had to pee furiously.”

  He lit the joint and laughed through a mouthful of rolling smoke. “I … yeah. Yeah, that’s a pretty accurate first impression. Here: second first impression,” he said, holding the joint out to me, a complete stranger.

  * * *

  Less than five minutes later we were tens of thousands of feet up on the old ROTC equipment. I inhaled, the air sucking in through the joint and making the weed crackle just a little bit. I held it. And I held it. And when my lungs started to itch, I sent a cloud the size of the moon out of my mouth. I closed my eyes and the smoke kept falling through the hundreds of teeth in my mouth, cascading up and seeping through the silver pinholes in the night sky, circling the quarter-moon drain in the middle.

  “You sound like an asshole,” I either thought or said out loud.

  Faisal was not kidding about just how potent-as-shit the weed was.

  Everything was soft, and we formed a circle on the top of the rope wall, staring into the deep sky.

  “Okay. Matty. Your turn,” Michael said. The group went quiet with contemplation.

  “All right,” she said, after thinking for a few seconds. Then, like a starting pistol, “James Bond: Brown Finger!”

  “Glad-he-ate-her,” Faisal yelled, ratcheting the air up to a new level of urgency.

  “Dong With the Wind,” Michael called.

  “Twin Peaks!” I yelled, positioning my hands in front of my chest. There were bonus points for finding one that was already a porn title.

  “The Punisher but with butts!” Matty said. We looked at her. “The Butt Punisher! Starring Clit Eatswood. Bonus points!”

  Faisal started laughing but managed to say, “The Never Ending Erotica!”

  “Quigly Going Down Under,” Michael said.

  “V for Vengina!” I said.

  “Beauty and the Beef!” Matty nearly screamed.

  “JFK!” Faisal said. He sat up and said, deadpanning, “Stands for John Fuck-Master Kennedy. Historical biopic. Bonus points.”

  There were also bonus points for historic films.

  We all looked at Michael, who scrunched his face and said, “Shit!”

  Faisal shot up and roared with his f
ists clenched.

  Faisal claimed that no one could beat him at Porns. In the distance we could hear the camp coming alive with the night, and Faisal lay back down, completing the circle.

  “They took the tower down. The one with the spinny bit,” Faisal said after rejoining the circle and getting comfortable, gesturing awkwardly behind himself into the rolling waves of silhouetted trees.

  I propped myself up on my elbows and stared at him, then at the darkness beyond, trying to make sense of his nonsense. Sure enough, there was a shape separate from the endless trees. Through a break in the branches there was a thin outline with a heavy top.

  Something in my incredibly blitzed brain knew it was called an aerodrome beacon.

  It was something my incredibly blitzed cotton-filled mouth couldn’t articulate.

  “They did that last year,” Michael said, picking at the old wooden rope wall and tossing the pieces straight up, watching them land on his coat. Every time he moved his arm, the key he’d used to unlock the gate around the rope wall would knock against the wood.

  “No they didn’t; it was still up last year, they just didn’t have the spinny part on. Now there’s no lights on it at all.”

  “Maybe they just turned it off,” Matty said, while looking up at the stars.

  “None of this. None of it makes any sense,” I said. I was thoroughly impressed with how high I felt while also being able to make words that weren’t slow-motion gibberish come out of my mouth.

  “There’s an old airstrip about a mile and a half into the woods,” Michael explained to me. “It used to have a spinny light. Now … it doesn’t. Apparently. I think they’re in the process of decommissioning it,” he said, tossing more splinters of wood up.

  I started to say “aerodrome beacon” but only got through the first two syllables before I started swallowing too much and being too aware of how much I blink and then being positive that they knew I was swallowing and blinking too much.

  Being with them felt comfortable. It was funny. And it was weird. And it was terrifying. It was an old feeling and it was a new feeling.

  I laid back and it felt like I was looking down instead of staring up. Like something was holding me gently to the world’s ceiling and was about to let me plummet down and down forever; like I’d been tossed up to the very top of everything and was only lingering in the moment before the fall.

  “New game,” Matty said. “Moses, what’s your life story?” If we’d been sitting up or looking at each other, for just one moment eye contact would’ve been completely impossible, because my knee-jerk reaction to the question was to flinch away from it.

  Because she knew. She had to know. Why else would they have gotten me away from everyone else and in the dark and now they wanted to know why we hated so many people and just who we thought we were? Yeah, okay, realistically there wouldn’t be any violence, probably, but this was the real reason they’d wanted me to come out with them, and instead of just getting to be a stranger for one night, I’d get to be Moses Hill: Asshole from the News, Known Forever for the Stupid Shit He and His Cousin Did. The same as always.

  Then Faisal said, “Oh, shit.”

  “What?” Michael asked, sitting up fast like he thought Faisal had spotted Test zigzagging through the woods with a flashlight. A pile of shredded splinters fell off of his chest.

  “Two things. First: oh shit, that’s a good question. But also, second oh shit, we have to go to the bonfire. High. We have to go to the bonfire high. And I’m pretty sure we’re going to have to go soon.”

  Michael looked worried before saying, “Shit. This is going to be amazing!” His face broke into a grin and he and Faisal pointed at each other like it was something they had always talked about doing.

  “Wait, you guys!” Matty said. “We need to hear Moses’s life story!”

  I started mumbling and the weed didn’t help the outrageous paranoia that whispered how, if they heard my story, they would all suddenly remember me exactly like everyone else remembered me: as just one more douchebag that the legal system had let loose upon the world. One more fuckup kid who was guilty or who was innocent depending on who you talked to. The fear was compounded by the fact that I hadn’t realized that we were going to have to be around a bunch of other people while I was bafflingly high. Still, if it meant avoiding questions about my life, I’d take it.

  Through the dark we could hear the excited squealing of little kids around a roaring campfire.

  “There’s no time, Matty!” Faisal yelled. “We have a blaze to attend.”

  NINE: WHEEL SPIN

  “IF YOU LIKE HER, just talk to her,” Charlie says to me.

  We’re standing outside of Econ, just before lunch, trying to see how many pennies we can slip into the slot of Mitchell Marrington’s locker since Mitchell Marrington bought Charlie cigarettes and decided that he wanted payment with interest and Charlie decided to oblige. “This isn’t the 1950s, you don’t have to ask her to a fucking sock hop. Plus she’s like the nicest person in a school that is otherwise made up of douchebags and assholes.”

  I pull a fistful of coins out of the paper bag in my hand and plink four pennies into Mitch’s locker and say, “She’s dating Langston Dilford.”

  “Shit, I thought they broke up.”

  “Got back together.”

  “But that guy’s a fuck,” he says, dropping more coins in one at a time. Mitchell Marrington is, at last count, around six hundred pennies richer. After demanding interest, he went to California for a week with his family because Mitchell Marrington is not the smartest extortionist in the world. “How can someone like Lana Mills date someone with a name like ‘Dilford?’ Even his last name is fucking stupid.”

  I shrug and plug some more coins into Mitch’s locker. I never actually told Charlie that I liked Lana Mills, but he’d picked up on it—whatever there was to pick up on—and decided to make it his mission.

  “Talk to her,” he says, his eyes landing somewhere past my shoulder.

  “No,” I say, smiling, calling him an asshole without actually calling him an asshole.

  “Talk to her,” he says again, smirking and moving his eyes to mine.

  “No,” I say.

  “Then pick a song.”

  “No.”

  “Yep.”

  “Charlie.”

  “I’m serious.”

  “So am I.”

  “Okay,” he says, using the same “You’re an asshole” grin I’d just given him. He pulls his Sharpie out of his pocket and scribbles “Wheel in the Sky” on the bag, then shows it to me.

  I know Charlie thinks the song is about God or the universe conspiring against us—after binge-watching Supernatural, he developed a Sam-and-Dean complex where Journey’s lyrics “the wheel in the sky keeps on turning” translated to, “Our teachers or our parents or God, et al, are being dicks and we need to show them what we can do.” If he’s picking this song for whatever stupid thing he’s about to do, it’s to show the powers that be that we have a say in the matter.

  If the movies we watched growing up have taught us anything, it’s that life demands a soundtrack. Especially when shit is about to jump off.

  He takes the half-full bag of pennies and gives me a handful as Langston Dilford walks by from behind me, holding an armful of lunch. When his back is to us, Charlie says, “Dilford!” and whips the bag of pennies at him.

  The copper fist explodes against the small of Dilford’s back and he arches forward, dropping his three-high stack of pizza slices and large fountain soda. Pennies rain down around us as his lunch explodes against the floor, and when he turns, I’m the asshole holding a heaping pile of them.

  And Dilford, fuck that he is, kicks my ass until Charlie heroically jumps in and pulls him off. That afternoon, as we head to my car, we walk by Langston and Lana—Lana, who is eviscerating Langston about his temper and his impulse control, and Langston, whose face is so red I swear I can feel heat radiating off of it as he stares
into the ground, taking it—and Charlie winks at me.

  They break up a few days later, and even though there’s this weird clenched-up ball in my stomach—knowing that I was involved in their breakup, even if I didn’t ask for it—there’s also a sweet little sense of righteousness.

  TEN: SMOKE IN OUR JACKETS

  “THEY FOUND HIM ON the fifty-yard line?” Why Kid asked, his voice barely audible above the crackling fire.

  “That’s right.” The Buddy telling the story nodded solemnly, like he couldn’t help seeing the grisly story playing out in his head. Our campfire was big—as big as the other ones that mottled the woods around us from the other campers and their Buddies from the other counties. The flames painted him in dancing shadows. “Found him chopped up in a neat little pile. And what’s more? The really nasty and terrible part?”

  The kids were enthralled and, on account of the marijuana, so was I. If the weed hadn’t been military grade, I would have recognized the Buddy’s smug-coiffed hair sooner as belonging to the annoying guy, Jeffrey, from the bus. Test was shaking his head and fumbling with a chintzy can opener and a giant can of beans that was supposed to complement the hot dogs roasting on sticks.

  Under the campfire and wilderness smells, Michael, Matty, Faisal, and I reeked overwhelmingly of mouthwash and body spray.

  “They say that it happens every ten years on the anniversary of the murder,” the Buddy said grimly to the firelit ring of children. “That when the moon is just right and the town has forgotten about what happened to him, he comes back to possess a new victim and exact his brutal revenge by gutt—”

  “Jeffrey!” Test barked, making Faisal yell “No!” and grab onto Michael. Test was rubbing the bridge of his nose. He adjusted his glasses before looking up at Jeffrey, whose face was still a caricature of agony and whose hands still formed rigid claws. Test put the still-unopened can of beans in the shallow cast-iron skillet and wiped his hands on his shorts. “They have to spend the next week out here—just because it’s going to be Halloween in a few days doesn’t mean they should go home with PTSD. Tone it down.”