Us Kids Know

by JJ Strong

  As I left in search of my garage-fridge beer, I saw her pick up the sandwich and take a bite.

  * * *

  The next day was Saturday. Bri, Amir, Ray, and I took the pistol down to the Pine Barrens in south Jersey, where nobody would hear us firing it. We brought along a box of bullets that I bought from a local sporting goods spot, twenty-four empty beer bottles that we lifted from a curbside recycling container, and lunch—hot dogs, rolls, and two cans of beans.

  After about an hour south on the Parkway we headed west toward Harrisville and then into the part of southern, rural Jersey where nobody lived. We followed back roads and dirt roads and finally off-roading paths through miles of woods. There wasn’t another soul within earshot. I jammed the old car off roots and boulders and cracked through icy mud pits, happy for those new shocks. Amir and Ray sprung and rebounded across the backseat like a couple of hysterical little pimple-faced pinballs, while Bri yelped in the passenger seat, digging into my arm, trying to stop laughing for long enough to beg me to slow down. We settled the car in a muddy mixture of sand and scrub on the shore of a half-frozen pond outlined by rows of dead trees.

  We set the bottles on a pine log and aimed the Glock from a sandy clearing twenty yards away. After an hour and not a single broken bottle, we moved closer, and the shots started hitting home.

  I built a small fire and stood over it with Bri to roast the dogs, which we’d speared with mossy twigs. Bri crouched across from me to focus on her cooking. Behind her in the distance, Ray stood beside Amir, whose shots struck one bottle after another—the explosion of gun and glass one big shattering echo that never stopped. Ray flinched with each new shot, but Amir stood his ground, his shoulders taking the recoil as sturdily as his squat figure would allow.

  Bri wore an argyle scarf that covered her mouth and nose, so her eyes were just about all you could see of her face, and they were those perfect eyes of hers—big, brown, wet eyes. Her hair too—brown all down her shoulders, and her hands in red gloves but also perfect, thin, and girlish beneath the wool. All of her there through the smoke, heat rising from the campfire. She turned her eyes from the fire to me in a way that suggested she’d known all along I’d been staring, and at first I looked away like an oaf, but then I met her gaze with some amount of suggestion.

  “Your wiener’s on fire.”

  I pulled my dog from the flames and blew out the charred, burning edge.

  “Nice,” I told her. “Nicely done.”

  “It was right there. An easy one.” She ran a finger over the underside of her thumb.

  “What’d you think of the gun?”

  “Fun. Scary, but fun.”

  She’d taken a turn after me and suffered a small burn under her thumb but until that point had hit some pretty good shots and seemed to be happy about it.

  “What are you going to do with it?”

  “Have to ask Ray about that.”

  “I’m asking you.”

  “Nothing bad.”

  “But nothing good.”

  “It’s just a prop, really. We’re not even going to fire it.”

  “So why not get a prop? Why drive down here and go through all this trouble learning how to use it?”

  I dropped the dog into a bun and squirted mustard on it. “Because,” I told her. “What else were we going to do today?”

  When Amir and Ray had exhausted themselves with the pistol, they joined us around the fire. I cracked open the beans and shoved them in the coals, building the flames up to a respectable height with the pathetic supply of twigs available. A ton of pine grew in the sandy soil down here, but it was all rubbery and oozing with sap and most of it didn’t want to burn. Ray and Amir volunteered to bring back some real logs from the other side of the lake, where there seemed to be an entire warehouse of dead wood. Bri and I watched them march away through the brush in their winter getups—oversized hand-me-down coats and hats and boots, like two little orphans clomping along through the great outdoors.

  From the car I grabbed two wool blankets I’d bought from the army surplus store. We laid one before the fire, and she sat between my legs and leaned back into me. We sat there, watched the fire, and didn’t talk. Winter birds piped in trees. The wind came in across the water. We shuffled closer to the fire and huddled under the second blanket.

  I had the thought in that moment that I didn’t want to hurt anybody. If I were a different sort of person, I might have taken this as an excuse to call off the whole thing. But the thought went away as quickly as it came in. I could’ve held on to it if I really wanted to, but I let it go and didn’t think about it anymore after that.

  I rubbed a hand across Bri’s side and dared to move it up to her breast—mostly a soft mound of clothing—and she shifted to kiss me. We kissed like that for a long time, not risking to go any further with her brother across the lake, and the cold preventing any real chance of baring skin. Still, I grew hard beneath my long johns, and she pushed herself against me.

  Ray and Amir came back with what we all assumed was way more firewood than we’d ever need but that proved to be just the right amount, given the disaster that was about to hit us. The sun had dropped below the clouds and trees, and the general feeling was that it was time for home. But the muddy patch where I left the Buick had frozen over, and the car’s tires were wedged in a foot of ice. I spent an hour chopping at the ice with a dinky little hand shovel and then a good forty-five minutes rocking the car with the boys while Bri spun the wheels deeper into what was still mud beneath the layers of frozen dirt. By the end of all this business we’d made a serious mess. Despite the bottom layer of mud, it was still the ice that locked us in. There was nothing to do but wait until the day warmed up tomorrow and melted us out. I thought about running the engine in hopes that it would melt the ground beneath it, but a car stuck in ice was better than one without gas. So we settled in for a long wait.

  The night was damn cold, and we threw tree-sized branches onto the flames, which grew six feet high. We scooped off the second can of beans into leftover hot dog buns and told jokes and had a good time for a while. When Amir stepped away to take a piss, a loosened-up Ray whispered to his sister how we were going to rob a convenience store on Christmas Eve.

  She didn’t say anything at first. Maybe she nodded a little. Looked into the fire.

  “Why are you telling me?” she asked.

  “Cullen said you kept asking about it.”

  Bri tightened her lips and wiped a gloved hand across her nose. They were a funny brother-sister pair. Sometimes I wondered if they’d ever even talked to each other before I came along.

  “I won’t talk you out of it,” Bri said.

  “That’s not why I told you.”

  “Do what you want. I won’t talk you out of it.”

  Ray kicked at some leaves at his feet. He was expecting more from her, I could tell. But Brielle wasn’t going to be roped into being the responsible one. The boring one. Good for her, I thought.

  Amir skipped back toward the fire, tugging at his fly. We all stood silent in the darkness for a while before Amir asked the inevitable question. “What now?”

  We took the army blankets into the back of the Buick. I dropped the gun and the bullets in the trunk and, after failing to find a sleeping bag or towel or some other source of warmth in there, grabbed a headlamp and a torn-up copy of J. G. Ballard stories. We crammed ourselves into the backseat, and I read a science fiction story aloud about a group of scientists who undergo a procedure to do away with their need for sleep. The scientists lose their hold on reality, quickly and predictably slipping into a waking nightmare. By the time I finished, the others had drifted off. I clicked off the lamp and let my head fall onto Brielle’s, which had found a spot on my shoulder.

  There might have been times after that night when the four of us were together like that, but I don’t remember the
m, or if I do, I choose to ignore them. Cramped in a car, heads on shoulders on heads on shoulders, legs flung all crazy across each other’s laps. You might have even thought we were happy.

  Ray

  SHOOTING THE GUN felt like a punch to the heart, just like I wanted it to. The guy in Elizabeth had given us a Glock 21. It looked like a cop’s pistol, which probably should have made me doubly nervous about getting caught with it but which actually made me more excited to try it.

  It was lighter in my hand than I thought it’d be, but it took a long time to figure out how to hold it the right way so I could actually fire it. Cullen showed me how to fix my left hand around my right wrist, which he said was too flimsy and helpless against the gun’s kick. I fired one round after another, missing every time. It felt so futile to incite this terrific explosion but then have no results to show for it. No payoff. Where did the bullets go? Did they ever hit anything? Or did they just keep sailing until they finally ran out of momentum and dropped to the ground?

  Like all of us, Amir hadn’t ever shot a gun before, but he was much better at it than we were. He’d fire off a quick five or six shots, and each one of them would blast a bottle into nothingness. We laughed like crazy at how good he was.

  Cullen drew a line in the leaves halfway between the bottles and me and told me to move closer. I held out the gun from this new distance and felt dumb.

  “They’re right there,” I said. “Anybody could do it.”

  “Just try it,” he said.

  I fired off another six shots and hit two bottles. Two. But those two felt good. It was like the bottles were connected to something inside me and I could explode them with the slightest twitching signal sent from my brain. I felt in those brief moments something like I’d felt in the stolen car—that the junk of life was far away and couldn’t touch me. But when I moved back to the original line, I was back to casting round after round of bullets into the great unknown.

  “It’s fine,” Cullen said. “We won’t load it on the day anyway.”

  “Why not?”

  “Uh, you know . . . so we don’t kill anybody.”

  Of course I didn’t want to shoot anyone, but I was no good at lying to myself, and the gun wouldn’t give me what I needed unless there were bullets in it. I needed it to be real. All of it.

  “What if you need to shoot the ceiling or something?” Amir said. “To show the guy you mean business?”

  Cullen looked at Amir. He spoke very slowly. “There are a lot of reasons,” he said, more to Amir than to me, “to not load the gun.”

  “Whatever,” Amir said. “If you’re gonna do something, do it all the way. That’s what I think.”

  “Exactly,” I said. “I want it loaded.”

  Cullen kept watching Amir, his eyes narrowing. Finally he turned to me. “Okay,” he said. “Figured you might want to play it safe, Ray. But hey, if that’s how you want to roll . . . I’m all in.”

  * * *

  Later, after lunch, Amir and I were cracking our boots through icy dirt, across a muddy pond from where Brielle sat with Cullen next to a little fire. We dragged tree-sized pieces of wood behind us, stomping around the half-frozen lake, hurling much more wood than we would ever need into a giant pile. The sky was low and gray, and the forest of pines stretched to forever in every direction.

  “The problem is you’re in your head,” Amir said.

  “Huh?”

  “When you’re shooting. You have to stop thinking. Just see the thing and shoot. Look.”

  He took the pistol out of one jacket pocket and a bottle out of the other.

  I glanced across the pond, where smoke twisted from the flames of our fire. Cullen and my sister appeared as one shadowed figure beside the fire.

  “Does Cullen know you have that?”

  “He won’t care. Watch. This’ll help.”

  Amir shoved the pistol into my hand, marched across the clearing, positioned himself against a tree trunk, and balanced the bottle on his head.

  I laughed.

  “See it and shoot.”

  “You’re kidding,” I told him.

  He didn’t say anything. He stood very still, so as to not let the bottle tip over.

  “Amir,” I said. “Come on, man. Stop.”

  “See it and shoot!” he said. “It’s so simple.”

  “I’m not going to.”

  “I’ll wait.”

  I shook my head and watched a squirrel dart up a tree. I knew what he meant. Whenever I aimed the gun, a million doubtful thoughts would swarm into my mind like a cloud of wasps. I needed to detach from myself, just like I had that day in the woods when I met Cullen. I needed Zen. I needed to connect myself through some metaphysical string to the target. I needed the kind of focus that only comes with the most intense kind of fear—the fear of shooting your best friend, for instance.

  But still.

  “Okay,” I said. “Point made.”

  “Shoot the bottle, Ray.”

  “I won’t.”

  “Shoot it!”

  “No! Amir! Stop!”

  “Shoot the fucking bottle off my head!” He was screaming like mad. His face went pepper red. “Do it! You coward!”

  “Shut up!”

  “What are you so afraid of?”

  “Shut up!”

  “Do it, you fucking pussy!”

  “Fine!” I shouted. “Fine! Fuck you, I’ll fucking shoot you. That’s what you want?”

  “Do it!”

  I raised the gun. Clicked off the safety. Shut one eye. Aimed.

  Amir’s eyes were locked on mine, his face still flushed from yelling, the pale scar on his forehead turning pink. The bottle quivered slightly. I held it in sight. It’s right there, I thought. So simple.

  But I didn’t do it. I couldn’t. I was forever stuck. Stuck in my head, and stuck in my body, and stuck in the world. There was no way out of myself.

  I lowered the gun. Amir took the bottle off his head and, disappointed, chucked it against a tree. I sat on a mossy log that was so rotted away I thought it might turn to sand when I landed on it. Amir came over and sat beside me. A long time passed before one of us talked.

  “Why do we have bodies at all?” I said.

  “What do you mean? What else would we have?”

  “If we have souls, I mean. If we have souls, and the body carries the soul, why do we have bodies at all?”

  “Because we don’t have souls.”

  “But if we do, I’m saying. If we do have souls. We gather wood, because our bodies are cold. Our bodies get tired. They get hurt. And they get dirty. And they stink. And they’re ugly. And they so rarely, or ever, perform the way we want them to perform. Why not just have souls, if that’s the way it is? We could all just . . . be.”

  “Because we don’t have souls.”

  We sat and watched the pond. Dead branches came out of the water like an army of haunted swords.

  “My father believes in God,” Amir said. “Prays to Him five times a day.”

  “But not you.”

  “Nah,” he said. He rubbed his hands together.

  “Why’d he send you to Catholic school?”

  “Good school,” he said. “That’s all.”

  “You like it?”

  “School? Who likes school?”

  “I mean, you know . . . Amir Shadid. At a Catholic school.”

  Amir shrugged. “Last summer my brother told me it’s easier at St. John’s than at public school because at St. John’s you can’t forget you don’t really belong. It’s when you forget that you get in trouble.”

  “You feel like that too?”

  He shrugged again. “It’s only been a few months.”

  He stood and stepped around the edge of the pond, dunking the tips of his boots through the skin
of ice.

  “Okay,” he said. “Say a mother bear runs out of those woods right now. Right? And the cub is, like, over there, so we’re between them. What would happen?”

  “We’d be dead.”

  “We’re all just dumbass animals, totally oblivious to the ways of the universe. We’re just, like, food for each other.”

  “You believe that?”

  “I know it. The bear doesn’t know God. Why should we be different?”

  “But we are different. We know about God.”

  “Just ’cause we can imagine Him doesn’t mean anything. We can imagine plenty of things that aren’t real. Dragons. Unicorns. Aliens.”

  “So then what’s the point? Why even bother?”

  “The point is don’t worry about the point! You can miss out on a lot of good stuff worrying about the fucking point of it all.”

  My butt had caught the cold from the log. I stood and stretched, staring up into the gray sky, which was so low it looked like it had crashed to earth. Amir gathered his woodpile. He’d been serious, I thought. He’d really wanted me to shoot that bottle.

  “But for the record,” he said, fussing with the mess of branches at his feet, “I think you have a nice body. Not ugly at all.”

  “That’s not what I meant.”

  “I know, but I only mean our bodies aren’t so bad. They’re kinda nice, actually.”

  I hauled in my stack of branches. It was a half mile around the lake back to Brielle and Cullen, and we dragged the sticks along the lake’s shore. After a while, Amir paused and looked at me, breathing white.

  “Does it make you uncomfortable? What I said?”

  “No.”

  “I just mean it’s okay to feel good about yourself sometimes.”

  “Yeah.”

  “You scared?” he said. “About Christmas Eve?”

  “I don’t know. Maybe.”

  “My dad always says if you’re not nervous, you’re not ready. But don’t sweat it. It’s gonna be so sick. I wish I was going with you.”