Clay's Way

by Mastbaum, Blair

  I can see her underwear for a second--silky and leopard-printed, with mud stains. I burst out laughing, then feel horrible for her. I tell Clay, “Shouldn’t you go inside or something?”

  He falls back into the wet grass shouting, “I don’t know what to do.”

  We both stand up and a curtain of rain showers us, making smacking sounds on the pavement and aluminum roofs and cars. A raindrop catches his eyelash and sticks. Another drop streams down his face and caresses his lip. “Come on, man.” He walks to the front door.

  I follow him inside, watching sexy-looking raindrops evaporate from his neck. Being in the house makes what happened outside seem even more outrageous. Situations like that can only take place outside, with all the forces of chaos around. I don’t know where Tammy is.

  She’s probably making herself over in the bathroom.

  Clay sits down at the dining room table and lights up a cigarette, like he hasn’t done anything wrong.

  I watch him, waiting for the moment when, in his own dumb ass way, he’ll smack his forehead and realize that he just fucked Tammy over for me. It doesn’t happen. Instead, he just keeps taking hits off his cigarette and looking vaguely out the window.

  “Girls are weird, right?” He shrugs his shoulders. That’s supposed to be enough.

  “I came over to see if you wanted to go watch the storm from the park.”

  “That sounds nice,” he says in a sort of jokey way that makes me feel like the joke.

  The radio music goes off and the local report starts. “Waves are building to eight and 10 feet on Oahu’s eastern shores from Makapu to Sunset. Damage reports have been filed from the Big island to Molokai. Stay tuned for further developments.”

  Clay puts out his cigarette in a plant and says, “Fuck, I wanna surf.”

  “You’re crazy.”

  He looks like a dog on a chain, ready to bite through it. “You wanna go down there with me?”

  “Where?”

  “The beach, stupid.”

  “Uh... no. You can’t surf. You’ll kill yourself.”

  He gets up and scratches his head.

  I see the waistband of his underwear and the thin line of hair going down to his dick when his shirt rises.

  He raises his arms and takes his shirt off in one solid motion. “Well, I’m going. You can come if you want.”

  “OK, let’s just hang out, though. Watch the wind.”

  Clay goes out the back door and brings in a long board and a short board.

  “Who’s that for?”

  “Tammy.”

  My heart drops.

  “Just kidding.” He smiles at me in a very direct, confident way.

  “Ha. Ha. Fuck you.”

  I get my backpack from the screened-in porch and follow him into the kitchen. He hands me the short board and grabs a towel from the laundry room, flinging it over his shoulder in the kitchen doorway.

  I cower behind him, trying to be invisible. “Laters, Momason. We’re outs to surf.”

  “What do you mean out to surf? You’re not leaving Tammy here. You deal with this. Go in there and take a shower with her.”

  She doesn’t want to hang out with Tammy, either.

  Clay smells his armpits. “I’m clean. Why’s she so upset, anyway?”

  Fuck. I feel like I’m gonna lose it. I want to kill him.

  He knows why she’s upset. He knows everything.

  Susan turns red. She’s gonna start screaming any second.

  Clay steps closer to her. “Mom, seriously, she’s fine. You’re gonna be here, aren’t you?” He rubs her shoulders, lowers his voice and whispers with a babyish tone, “You can take care of her.”

  “I’m too tired for this bullshit, Clay. I mean it! Don’t leave this house! This isn’t my responsibility!”

  Tammy appears at the end of the hall, and stares at me, with chunky crap in her hair and still wearing her muddy dress. She looks like Carrie from that horror movie.

  I get a chill in my spine that makes me squirm. I want out of here. I can’t take the guilt of being the person who caused Clay to lose interest in her.

  “I’m outs. We’ll talk later about your hippie rules.” Clay storms down the hall.

  I glance at Tammy, then look at Susan.

  She’s furious.

  I feel responsible for all of it. They’re all going to end up hating me. I walk out to the front yard. Clay straps both boards into the back of his truck and we get in the cab. It’s quiet. I zip my pack open and closed over and over. “Tammy’s gonna be pissed off.”

  “What? Oh, no, she’s cool.”

  “I saw what you just did. You know that, right? The whole surfing thing’s bullshit.”

  “Uhh, yeah, I know,” he says sarcastically.

  “Well, that fucking sucks. Why don’t you just tell her we wanna hang without her around?”

  He just ignores me and almost smiles.

  I grab a beer from a sixpack on the seat between us and open the cap with my teeth. I fill my mouth with beer, nearly downing the whole bottle. “Fuck!” I throw the bottle out the window and it smashes on the driveway.

  “Dude, you look sexy when you’re pissed off.”

  “Fuck, Clay, be serious.”

  “I was.”

  I ask him if he knows how fucked up he is.

  He says, “Yup. I was born fucked up.”

  A big palm frond hits the hood of the truck.

  He starts the truck and backs out of the driveway. He drives off fast over debris-covered streets like it’s a sunny day.

  I grip the dashboard and reach around to put my seat belt on.

  “You don’t need that. Relax, man.”

  “Like I trust you.”

  We pull into the beach parking lot and he jumps out, grabs his surfboard from the back of the truck, and runs to the ocean. He looks back at me. “Laters.”

  I get out of the truck and stand in the wind. It’s so strong, I can lean into it with all my weight.

  He paddles out through wide areas of storm-strewn, bubbly white water. He looks like a seal, getting smaller and smaller. The winds start up strong and gusty again. A strong salt mist and foamy bubbles coat the beach. The cold rain picks up to a full-on pour. I get back inside the truck. Fuck him. He’s a fraud and a liar. I feel like shit about the way he treated Tammy. Why should I be the only one?

  I start up the truck, peel out on the slick fallen leaves, and take off down the road.

  The second band of the hurricane is here. It’s hard to keep the truck straight as I barrel down the road.

  I feel like I’m going crazy. Is Clay thinking about me, or about Tammy at home with his mom? I wonder if he’s thinking at all, or if he’s relying only on survival instincts now, out in the water that looks like an old oil painting that’s shoved in the back corner of my garage where the world is flat and the big wooden ship is almost falling off the edge. I pull over and down a beer for confidence. I light a cigarette that’s wet halfway up. The noise of the storm is deafening. There’s a sharp crash every couple seconds. I’m soaked and my teeth are chattering. The beer tastes good. I’m one with the chaos. I’m as careless as the storm. I peel off from the side of the road and turn up a dirt sugar cane road. The dirt is bright orange. It splashes up on the windshield as I bounce along the road. I slam on the brakes and the truck starts to slide off the road toward a ditch.

  “Fuck!”

  Everything stops. The rain picks up. I don’t remember getting here. The truck sits diagonal in a three-foot ditch. I rev it up and slam on the accelerator. It sprays bright-orange mud behind. I’m stuck. I guess this is where I’m meant to be.

  I can distinguish every scent inside Clay’s truck: cigarettes, spilled beer, dirty clothes, some oil, gasoline, Clay’s skin, cum on my dirty T-shirt.

  I practice looking tough, doing Ninja jabs, slicing through the air. I make mean looks at the mirror, trying to look like a samurai or black belt.

  “Hi yah!” I break a
plastic fast food drink holder. “Man, Clay. Why won’t you just tell her to fuck off? Why are you so fucked up?”

  The future just isn’t what it used to be.

  I put in a tape. It says Punk Rock 93 on the front in Clay’s chicken-scrawl handwriting, with some hieroglyphic looking drawings of skateboarders doing tricks on the back of the scratched up plastic case.

  A song by DI plays. Fast drums, high treble guitars with a low, half-intelligible young scratchy voice screaming. “Down with the government! Down with the cops. Down with the government!”

  Clay’s like this music.

  I open another bottle of beer with my teeth. I feel like pouring it all over myself.

  I look in the mirror. Dark circles under my eyes, sweaty face. I hit myself right below my eye. I do it three more times. My eye becomes hot and numb. I do it 20 more times, harder each time. My brain feels like it’s being jarred, woken up. It starts to feel like a need.

  I take a huge gulp of beer, keep it in my mouth, swallow as much as I can, then spit the rest on the dashboard and windshield in front of me. My eye is swelling.

  I grab the mirror off the dash and lie back on the seat. I look up to myself in the mirror. I have an incredible-looking black eye. It’s blue and purple already. It looks Japanese, swollen into a slit. I reach down and find Clay’s old skate shoes, with soles barely left, and throw them as hard as I can at the roof. They ricochet and hit me in the chest.

  “Fuck!”

  I throw the shoes over and over as fast as I can. One cracks the interior dome light. I’m falling. There’s no bottom and I don’t give a shit. A vision of Clay floats above me, like a pink candy heart on Valentine’s Day with fucking “Won’t you be mine?” on it. I take out my haiku notebook and try to write, but I’m seeing double, triple. The notebook slides off my chest and onto the floor. The deafening punk rock music disappears. It slips into my unconscious as a monotone of shallow guitar noise. I’m slipping. I reach over, but miss the door handle. My hand slams the door panel. I reach up and pull the handle. The door flings open.

  I fall out of the truck upside down and backward. My body slides out and lands in a mud puddle. I roll over, then give up.

  It’s pouring warm large tropical drops. I taste the water in the puddle. It’s orange. I’m orange.

  Four inches of rain fall over my body.

  I’m filthy and drunk, almost passed out.

  I picture myself from above.

  A muddy, fucked-up pickup truck shoved in a ditch across the road pointing at a tree, a boy beaten up, lying pathetically outside the truck’s open door in a big orange puddle with an empty beer bottle in his hand. The truck’s radio blaring punk rock across miles and miles of sugar cane fields. Storm clouds and the biggest storm to hit all season looming overhead, appearing steady and predictable in contrast. As my mind flies farther up, I see the ocean on all sides. Farther up, the shape of Oahu, then the chain of islands, then, the pure isolation of where I am.

  How small must I be, and how far away, until I disappear completely?

  Chapter 12

  Mad typhoon left cracked

  Trees, littered leaves and sacred

  Broken dreams for me.

  I’m wet and coated with red dirt. My eye is swollen and my mouth is dry. My head pounds. The light looks like morning light, white and fresh and defused by fog -- but I’m not sure.

  “Fuck, I feel like shit! Ahh!”

  No one can hear me. The trees and mud suck up all sound.

  I feel like an animal that lost its ability to survive in the wild. I look on the outside how I feel inside--like someone not capable of being in public.

  “I hate you, world! I hate you, Clay! I hate you, Sam! I fucking hate you!”

  I get up and slam the truck door shut, then I spit on it. I run into the forest on the other side of the road, over rocks and streams, with twigs and branches scraping me and tearing cuts into my face. Part of me thinks the cuts will look cool when I finally emerge from the forest and confront Clay. I jump into a stream and small fish scatter. They probably know what I’m feeling better than I do from analyzing my sweat dripping into the stream. I jump up and do as many pull ups as I can on a low-hanging branch till I’m sweaty and hot. I compose a haiku in my head and scream it out. “Shit fuck asshole fuck, liar fuckface shithead boy, asshole dumb ass fuck!”

  The humidity is high, and the forest is the same temperature as my body, which makes it all the easier to go crazy. I jump out of the stream and duck through a banyan tree’s complex root system. A rock turns my ankle the wrong way. I fall hard and fast, onto a dirt path covered with vibrant pink petals from a mountain apple tree. I’m out of breath and my heart is beating fast, making my chest rise and fall dramatically. I fall back and look up to the blooming mountain apple tree.

  Clay enters my mind like a flash of lightning enters the atmosphere.

  I start crying as a pink blossom fall on my chest. It’s such a shame to ignore true beauty. The great Haiku poets would look down on me for wasting this moment.

  I haven’t been living. I’ve been acting, for myself and the forest, which probably thinks I look pretty stupid. I grab a stick and draw Clay’s dragon tattoo in the mud. I get my dick out, thinking of Clay’s tattoos, inked on his thin muscular arms. I stand up and arch backward. My dick is the center of my existence. I come on the drawing of Clay’s dragon, proud of myself for having such an inspired orgasm.

  An unnatural-looking point of light shines through the trees. I follow it with my eyes till I make out a spiked punk rock bracelet.

  It’s Clay.

  I pull up my pants as fast as I can, panicking that he’ll see this whole weird scene and judge me as psycho or a weirdo or someone he doesn’t want to be involved with.

  He looks tired, with gray circles under his eyes. He’s still wearing his surf shorts. He stops in front of me. The tiny hairs on his leg are glued to his skin with salt crystals. He looks at the dragon in the mud. He sort of glances at his arm, then looks down again. “Man,” he says, “I can’t handle this.”

  I feel helpless and busted. “Can’t handle what?”

  He ignores me and takes a deep breath. He closes his eyes.

  Why won’t he comment on my black eye, my cuts, my mud-covered body? I think I’m short-circuiting his brain. I want to hear his master plan. I’m sure he has one, hidden in his expressions and silence and contemplative looks. I’m sure that maybe some day soon, he’ll face himself and admit he likes me, then leave Tammy, and start being real. Isn’t that why he left with me last night? Why isn’t he telling me the timeline, in charts and graphs, like stock performances on the news? Maybe he’s not capable of loving. Maybe I’m too young to be in this sort of position, and this kind of shit shouldn’t happen to me. It might fuck up my ability to trust or love or be loved.

  Maybe he knows this and he’s downright evil. Maybe he wants to toughen me up like he’s done to himself, and he wants me to lose faith in him -- so I don’t expect too much.

  I feel desperate in his silence.

  He gets up and takes a good look at my face, showing no emotion.

  I want to look him in the eye, but I’m too scared, so I stare at his shark tooth necklace. Why can’t it just be like it used to be? We aren’t supposed to be angry with each other. We are each other’s happiness, each other’s escape.

  He starts walking back to his truck.

  I get up and I follow him.

  He gets in. “Throw some wood or some shit underneath the back tires so I can get out of here.”

  I find some big stones and wedge them under the back tires, and Clay peels out backward. Orange mud flies up and cakes the wheel well.

  He puts a tape in the deck, turns it up really loud.

  I think he wants to leave me here. I run to the passenger door and jump in, shoving my notebook into my pack and zipping it up so he doesn’t see.

  We fly over bumps and muddy puddles. He doesn’t seem to care if I get knoc
ked around.

  I’m confused, because I can’t remember why I came here last night. I just remember the feeling I had. Disillusioned, abandoned, exploited, and guilty for him leaving Tammy, even though that should make me feel good.

  We turn onto the main beach road that leads to our houses. A view of the ocean rises over the horizon as he drive over the last hill.

  He stares out at the water. “Why’d you leave last night? Trying to get attention or something?”

  “I don’t know. I don’t want to talk about it. You never want to talk about anything, anyway. You must do all that with Tammy.”

  “No, I don’t.”

  “You never say shit.”

  “Why does everybody always expect me to talk about shit? Fuck, brah, I just wanna go to Japan and become a Samurai.”

  “Whatever, Clay. You’re full of shit.”

  “You are, man.”

  “How’d you find me?”

  “I was hiking. I wasn’t looking for you.” He turns a corner way too fast.

  “Like I believe that.”

  “You’re just freaking out. Just chill. You’re fucking crazy.”

  “Look in the mirror, dude.” I grab the mirror from the seat and shove it in his face.

  He smacks my hand and the mirror away from him.

  It hits the windshield, cracks, and lands on my lap. It hurts my leg.

  “I should fucking hit you, man. Swear to God, I don’t know what’s wrong with you. I fucking looked all night long for your sorry ass.” He freezes. He realizes what he admitted. This pisses him off even more. He speeds up faster and runs a stop sign. Veins throb in his temples and arms under tattoos that already look pissed off and tough. He’s becoming a pit bull.