The Light Years

by Chris Rush

  Inside, we watched TV, the three of us laughing at nothing. My brothers had probably watched the same stupid show—a couple of hours before. The concept of time zones suddenly seemed so strange. I barely knew where I was.

  After lights-out, two men came into the room with flashlights to check the premises. I pretended I was asleep.

  In the morning, Alaska was gone.

  * * *

  THE SHELTER GAVE all of us breakfast and then a Jesus talk. As the minister lectured, Peter and I wolfed down everything we could get our hands on: spoons of jelly, cream cheese, cereal, donuts. Afterward, we walked back to the park.

  Kurt was nowhere to be found.

  Peter told me not to worry. “Forget about him. They let you stay at the shelter for up to a week. And then if you spend a week somewhere else, you can go back.”

  I didn’t want to say I’m not a runaway, so I just said, “I don’t think I’ll be staying that long.” It amazes me now that I didn’t just call my mother or my sister immediately. Maybe I didn’t want Peter to think I was a baby.

  He took me to meet some of his friends, ragtag teens bumming cigarettes and change. He told everyone my name and that I was good people, to trust me. How does he know I’m good? I had barely told him anything about my life.

  A girl in pink pajamas and a bridal veil handed us blotter acid, saying “Prepare yourselves.” It was a powerful dose, my hands trembling as it came on.

  Peter and I sat on the grass, tripping hard, laughing like kids on a playground. By late afternoon, we were saucer-eyed and quiet.

  I asked Peter why he’d run away.

  “Oh, my stepdad found pot in my room. He already hated my guts, but now he had an excuse. He made my mom choose between him and me. Otherwise, he said he’d call the cops. My mom took his side but I’m not mad at her. She has to take care of my baby brothers. And she needs the asshole’s money to survive.”

  I could hear the bravado, the false tenor of his voice. Still, it amazed me that he could just come out and say these things—that he knew so clearly what his story was.

  When I considered it, I suppose my mother would have made the same choice. Still, my own position wasn’t as clear-cut as Peter’s.

  What was obvious, though, was that Peter was a soft boy, like me.

  “It was just best for everyone if I disappeared,” Peter added.

  Before going back to the shelter, we climbed a peak above town to watch the sunset. Walking over red rock and sage, I wondered if the story of my life was just beginning. But what kind of story would it be? Romance? Mystery? Horror? From the mountain peak, I could see Dorothy’s Kansas to the east, black with tornados. The wind from the Rockies was icy. I felt rain again.

  Peter put his arm around me. Not sex, just kindness.

  “I hope you don’t leave,” he said. “I like you.”

  I was thrilled, but at the same time I was surprised he could like me; I didn’t think I was a likable person.

  That night, in the cot next to his, my acid brain went on for hours, trying to figure it out: If Kurt is gone, what should I do? Peter from Florida is nice—maybe I could hang out with him for a while, stay in Boulder. Maybe I’d never go home.

  It was a brilliant, shocking idea.

  But then I remembered Donna—waiting for me in Tucson.

  Maybe I could hitchhike to Tucson, take Peter with me? I still have a bunch of money in my wallet.

  * * *

  THE NEXT MORNING we strolled to the park, and there was Kurt—plaid shorts, mirror sunglasses, all fake-glad to see me. “Chris, where have you been? I looked everywhere for you.”

  “That’s such bullshit, you never looked for me. I was here the whole time.” I pressed my lips together, afraid I would start crying.

  “I met a chick,” he said, and began to enumerate the charms of pussy. “Anyway, it doesn’t matter. I’ve got some excellent coke.”

  I ignored that comment. Coke was not on the Jesus-approved list of drugs. In fact, I remember watching my sister actually flushing cocaine down the toilet.

  “Kurt, this is my friend Peter. Who took care of me when you split.”

  “Cool. Peter, you want to do some coke with us?”

  “Sure,” said Peter, looking at me to see if it was all right.

  He looked like an elf, a happy elf.

  “Okay then,” I said. I just wouldn’t tell Donna.

  We got in the van, and Kurt drove us into the mountains. I was intoxicated by the sharp smell of pine, the prehistoric rocks balanced above our heads. Kurt parked, and the three of us hiked through some scrub toward a foaming brook.

  From his shirt pocket, Kurt got out a syringe.

  “What are you doing?” I said.

  “Chris, it’s the only way to do cocaine. No waste.”

  “No, I just want to snort it.”

  “My father’s a fucking doctor. I know what I’m doing.”

  Peter spoke up. “Chris, he’s right. It’s the best way.”

  Tipping a bag of powder into a spoon of stream water, Kurt boiled the mixture with a match. Removing all the fluid with the needle, he squirted a few test drops from the silver tip. Kurt handed Peter the needle, and I watched as my new friend stuck out his little-boy arm and how calmly—how expertly—he plunged the needle into the whitest part of his flesh. Instantly, he was rubber, neck falling back, mouth breaking into a huge smile. Peter moaned a little, then reached for my hand. “Go now,” he said. “It’s sooo good.”

  How could that smile come from the Devil?

  “Sooo good,” he repeated.

  I let Kurt administer my medicine. Instantly, something like a huge orgasm swept through my body, the menthol-metal taste of coke flooding my blood with pleasure.

  I leaned back, in love with the candy-blue sky.

  Even Kurt was transformed. He couldn’t stop gushing. “I needed to share this with you, Chris. I just had to. I mean, I just … I feel so normal now, don’t you? My dad does lobotomies on people and he’s always saying there’s no such thing as the soul. Well, he’s wrong. We’re proving it right now. He is so fucking wrong.”

  Peter and I nodded vigorously, as Kurt rambled on. “I mean, cocaine’s not even a drug, really. This is, like, who we really are.”

  * * *

  IN THIRTY MINUTES, after three more rounds with the needle, the powder was gone. This fact was profoundly unpleasant. Kurt stared at the empty plastic bag as if waiting for it to replenish itself. I felt dull, sad, lost. No trace of the magic remained—the opposite, in fact. As we sat by the bounding brook, nature suddenly seemed hollow and annoying.

  On the way down the mountain, no one talked, as if something terrible had just occurred. Kurt was driving badly. He got angry when I asked him to please slow down.

  At the park, the crowd was lazy, the afternoon hot. Peter walked away to bum a cigarette. Before he left, he gently touched my arm.

  Kurt shook his head in disgust.

  “What’s wrong?” I said.

  “Your friend’s a fag.”

  “No he’s not.”

  “He’s just another hippie faggot bum. Look at them. Bunch of pathetic losers.”

  “But Kurt, you’re a hippie.”

  “No, I’m not. Fuck this. Fuck Boulder. I’m leaving.”

  “No. I’m not ready.”

  “It’s not up to you. My van! Come with me or not. I don’t give a shit.”

  I had no choice. The truth was, I was too afraid to leave Kurt—and I wanted to see my sister. But there was something about these kids on the lawn that suddenly seemed like the real world. But if I stayed here, maybe I wouldn’t be able to find my way back to the world I came from.

  I found my new friend to say goodbye. Surrounded by other lost boys, he lounged on a green blanket with his sneakers off, wiggling his toes.

  He saw me and got up. “Are you okay?”

  “I’m leaving—in five minutes. Kurt’s going. I can’t stay. But I want to. I don’t know what
to do.”

  “You can stay. I told you—I’ll watch out for you.”

  “No, I have to go to Tucson. My sister’s waiting for me.”

  It was the first time I’d mentioned my sister to Peter. His face changed. “If you have someone, you should go. That’s better. This place sucks.”

  When I asked if he was mad at me, he said, “No. I’ll just miss you.”

  He hugged me, whispered, “Be careful, okay? I don’t trust that guy.”

  I walked away, teary. Then Peter screamed, “Wait!”

  From a girl in a baby-doll dress, he got a pen and wrote out his mother’s address on a scrap of paper. I did the same and left.

  * * *

  A YEAR LATER, Peter sent me a tab of Orange Sunshine and told me he’d made it back to his mom’s. I still miss you, he wrote. I wish someone had taken a picture of us.

  We never saw each other again.

  9.

  You Don’t Belong Here

  KURT LIKED TO PICK UP hitchhikers. I took it personally, as if he was bored with my company. Of course, Kurt wasn’t very nice to the hitchhikers either. He seemed to relish his superior position—saving kids from the side of the road and then kicking them out of the car as soon as they’d ceased to amuse him.

  South of Denver, he stopped for two rough-looking guys—not kids. They got in the back with their duffel bags, smoking, while Kurt talked and talked, telling them how dull the scene in Boulder was. “I’m just driving around looking for something authentic, you know what I mean?”

  It was obvious he was trying to show off.

  “Yeah, man,” one of the guys said. “Us, too.”

  The other one said if we drove them to Albuquerque, they could offer us a place to stay. When Kurt said that sounded cool, I tried to get his attention, mouthing the word Tucson.

  “Albuquerque’s on the way to Tucson, retard,” Kurt replied, and the guys in the backseat laughed.

  I was surprised Kurt was so comfortable around them—but I guess it made sense. Like Kurt, the guys were twitchy, boastful.

  Roy and Bill—one dark-haired, one blond.

  As soon as my bag was out of the van in Albuquerque, Kurt left with the guys to score some dope. I was told to wait inside.

  The men’s house was tiny, with almost no signs of habitation except for rotting food in the fridge. In the living room was an old couch, dirty ashtrays, an army blanket nailed across a window. The bedrooms had mattresses and little else. The disgusting bathroom, which I didn’t want to use, was spotted with dead cockroaches and dried blood.

  I looked around for a phone, but there didn’t seem to be one. Dusk was coming on. I decided to roll out my bag and sleep in the backyard.

  I woke later, hearing the van roll in. I went in the back door. Kurt sat with Roy and Bill at the kitchen table. No smiles.

  Roy asked me if I wanted to get high. He held up a tiny bag of brown powder.

  “No, thanks.”

  “Your loss,” said Kurt.

  I asked why it was dirty.

  “What?” said Kurt.

  “The coke.”

  Roy laughed. “It’s not coke.”

  “Uh, how old is he?” asked Bill.

  Kurt shrugged, already fingering the bag of dirt.

  I sat down at the table, half-asleep, trying to understand what was happening. Why wasn’t I in school? I felt the heat and remembered: Summer. New Mexico.

  Equipment was assembled on the table. I thought of science class at St. John’s, Brother Gregory holding up a test tube full of chemicals. I watched Bill tip heroin from the glassine bag into a spoonful of water. Using a lighter, he heated the mixture until it boiled and spit. In his shaking hand, the syringe slowly withdrew the fluid from the spoon. Roy tied up Bill’s arm with a length of rubber tube, his movements sure and steady.

  A moment later, as Bill sunk the needle into his arm, a wave of gravity passed through the room. The walls contracted, the air was heavy. Bill’s eyes grew dull and distant as the syringe emptied into his vein.

  Roy took care of himself with the same slow-motion intensity, extending the moment of injection as long as possible. Both men were now altered, eyes fixed, unwilling to focus. Kurt was fidgeting like a child, anxious for his chance. “Is it good?”

  “Right-chuuussss,” Roy said in a slur.

  A few moments later, the men roused—Kurt’s arm was tied off. With quivering fingertips, both men searched for a suitable vein, petting and coaxing Kurt’s skin like feeble vampires. When the syringe went in, Kurt looked terrified. Then his face melted into an idiotic mask.

  The needle slid out bright red.

  Roy and Bill smiled: another soul initiated into Dark Life.

  The three of them moved to the couch in the living room, silent, fumbling to light cigarettes in the gloom. I thought of my father, the way he sometimes smoked in the dark, saying nothing.

  Suddenly Kurt ran to the bathroom, the sound of his retching echoing through the house. I sat on the floor, frightened. “Is he all right?”

  Roy mumbled something about it being normal, the first time.

  Then Kurt came out of the bathroom, bleary, announcing the news: “Amazing.”

  Over the next few days, I observed a way of life.

  On the clock of heroin, each day repeated itself. At the kitchen table, the three men injected, three times a day—a simple diet, without the nuisance of food. Leaving the house only to score and to buy cigarettes; no additional effort was made to do anything. Roy and Bill never left for work. No meals were prepared. Sometimes a radio played in the bedroom while the men slept or smoked.

  I continued to sleep outside, the heat of the desert sun making it impossible to lie there much past dawn. By six thirty each morning, I had peed in the bushes and started walking. I wandered the neighborhood, passing shabby houses, highways, and shopping centers, trying not to get lost. Behind barbed wire were stretches of desert trapped by the city.

  Walking through garbage and cactus one morning, I saw an army of red ants dragging a grasshopper across the sand. The grasshopper was taken into the ground to be eaten alive.

  I had no idea where I was.

  I found a restaurant and ordered huevos rancheros, glad to be in the bright little room, with holy pictures on the wall and the smell of greasy food. Without asking, the waitress poured me coffee, the first I’d ever had.

  When I got back to the house, Kurt said, “Give me a hundred bucks. I know you’ve got money.”

  “No,” I said. I told him I wanted to leave.

  “We’ll leave when I’m fucking ready.”

  That night, I hid my wallet in the yard.

  * * *

  THE NEXT DAY, I heard a firecracker—then lots of them.

  It was the Fourth of July. I’d been in Albuquerque a week.

  Later, Bill bought two cases of Coors, and the four of us drove into the night, as fireworks lit up the sky. The men opened their beers and cheered.

  We ended up in Taos, looking for some friend of Roy’s, who was nowhere to be found. It didn’t matter. The dudes just bought another case of Coors. Ten miles out of town, Roy told Kurt to stop on the Taos Bridge.

  Roy got out and walked to the guardrail. We all followed.

  The view was breathtakingly unreal. Balanced on a tiny ribbon of steel, we stood a thousand feet above the Rio Grande. The canyon was huge, a hollow world beneath us, the river hissing and turning in the dark. It sounded like the ocean.

  “This is America,” Roy said. “Fought the gooks for this shit!”

  “Fucking-A, brother!” shouted Bill.

  I understood now—they were Vietnam vets.

  Leaning over the guardrail, drunk on beer—a thousand feet in the air—I tried to understand what it meant to be there with those crazy men who’d probably killed people. I thought of the dead—my grandmother, my father’s brothers, the suicides of Star Farms.

  The river is time, I thought. Time before me, time after I’m gone …<
br />
  Kurt was less reflective. He went to the van and grabbed the five-gallon can of gasoline he kept for emergencies. Taking off his T-shirt, he doused it with gas, stuffed it back in the can.

  Roy and Bill started screaming, “Fucking Fourth of Joo-lie!”

  Kurt balanced the gas can on the railing and lit the cloth. As he pushed the Molotov cocktail over the edge, its flame seemed to disappear. But a few moments later there was a terrifying explosion, turning the canyon a hellish red. It was insane.

  “Motherfucker!” Roy screamed.

  “Fuck yeah!” answered Bill.

  Kurt made a sudden move like he was going to push me off the bridge, too, and when I gasped, everyone laughed, too hard.

  * * *

  IN THE MORNING, I didn’t feel well. Everyone else seemed fine.

  Roy and Bill were getting ready for a party, and by late afternoon the house was full of people. Finally, there were women—and food. I ate a hamburger by myself in a corner of the yard. One woman came over to me and asked who I was. She introduced herself as Roy’s ex-wife. I was shy at first but she kept asking me questions, and eventually I opened up a bit. It was a relief to speak to someone who wasn’t a zombie. She had big hair, long fingernails, and a skinny cigar.

  Her name was Cheryl—from Texas.

  She told me she and Roy had a little girl, which was hard to imagine.

  I asked how old her baby was.

  “Not a baby anymore. Just turned four. She’s a little doll, though. And how old are you, sweetie?”

  “Fifteen.”

  She said I looked younger. “And your parents? Do they know you’re here?”

  I told her yes, I had their permission.

  She took the skinny cigar out of her mouth and spit. “Listen to me. You don’t really know these guys. Okay? Roy can be great, but he came back from Vietnam with some very big problems, including Bill, who is retarded.”

  “Is he really?”

  The woman laughed. “I exaggerate. A little.”

  “But you still like Roy?”

  Cheryl puffed. “He’s the father of my kid. And I have my own reasons for coming around.” She asked if I’d partaken with Roy and Bill. I knew what she meant and said no.