I checked my ass again.
For as long as I was awake, I was convinced that I was shitting on the floor.
DRYWALL
I woke up and stepped out onto the porch. The ice in the trees let light through and skeletons coming up over the tops of the section 8 housing was the most beautiful thing I’d ever seen.
I felt new.
Charlie was leaning into the guts of the Mustang. Hood propped up and buckling with the wind.
When he saw me he stopped what he was doing and turned.
“What’s the big thing?”
“What big thing?”
“Shane. What Shane was talking about?”
“I don’t know.”
“Whatever it is, don’t do it.”
“Okay.”
“I’m serious.”
“Okay.”
“I’m serious. I love my cousin. But that motherfucker is nuts. Before you met him, he was in prison. Do you know why he was in prison?”
I just wanted to look at the ice on the trees. “No.”
“He came home one day. He had this big pit bull. While he was gone, the pit bull had eaten a chunk out of his drywall. So he dragged the thing out onto his front yard and beat it to death.”
I kicked a rock off the porch. I suddenly realized how cold it was.
Charlie wiped his black hands off on a rag. “Be careful. That’s all I’m saying.”
THAT’S THE WAY
Last Call hosted a fake orgasm contest.
We got drunk and headed over. Shane entered and sat down looking pleased with himself. I tried to picture him murdering a dog. He stuck his split tongue out at me. I could maybe see it. Charlie had been quiet all day. He kept with that vibe at the bar.
Shane said, “I found out this morning that Cassandra’s boyfriend has been beating on her.”
Charlie said, “She’s a stripper. That’s part of the job.”
Shane said, “I invited the entirety of the Comanche bloods over to his house tonight. Told them it was a big party. Lots of beer.”
I couldn’t help it. I laughed.
Shane had a way about him.
Some of the contestants were very good. The young girls imitated what they’d seen in porn, which was fine by us. An old woman with big hair and a sparkly Eiffel Tower shirt moaned monotone and said, “That’s it. That’s the way.”
We repeated that throughout the night. “That’s the way.”
Shane got up and took the mic. Tone Loc’s “Wild Thing” faded into the background. He said, “Ah! Awe, shit. Sorry about that.”
Everyone went wild.
He sat back down and we killed more beers and he leaned over to me and said, “We’re gonna sell hippy crack at the Rage Rave down in Texas.”
“Yeah?”
“I got the nitrous from a local. We’re gonna go down there and they’re gonna give us two grand each.”
Charlie looked over at me, his beer poised halfway between the table and his face.
A large woman lay on her back on the stage with her legs in the air and yelled, “Fuck me till I go back in time. Right there. That’s dead center. Right on the money!”
I said, “Hell yeah. I’m in.”
HIPPY CRACK
Rockville was two gas stations and a post office. Farmland. Tobacco fields out to the horizon. The festival sprung up from the sparse trees. Steel spires and flashing neon lights and girls in belly shirts, their skin painted pink. Boys with no shirts at all. Hyperventilating kids lay prone in the bitch tent, EMTs asking them if it felt strange when they touched their arms. I bought a funnel cake.
I inhaled a balloon before going out to sell. Curiosity. Everything went white and my head rang and then it was gone.
Five dollars for this?
Shane inhaled one every fifteen minutes or so. He’d giggle and I’d tell him to focus.
I didn’t try to make sense of the appeal. No point. White people are smiling enigmas.
The unwashed masses had lined up through the parking lot, this long snake, and I filled their balloons, took their five or made change, and they’d inhale it right there, some of them stumbling, flaccid Mohawks plastered against their young faces already going tight and lined with abuse.
I saw most of them two, three times. Everybody seemed to sweat under the cool sun. I shed my hoodie early in the day, but once night fell I went back and put it on. Texas weather swinging.
At the end of the day we left the empty canisters in the parking lot and walked to our car. Set the heavy bag of cash in the floor and covered it with our backpacks. We sat down and started the car. We saw the women moving toward the rave, the cutoff shorts and long legs and smooth skin, and I turned the car off.
Thought about it.
We went back through security and into the party.
I bought a beer from a vendor and watched a DJ play a set. Kids in giant glowing fish costumes walked by on stilts. Hippies rode tandem bikes. Women hula hooped and men wore gloves with LED tips, spinning them, the colors flashing. I drank another beer.
We decided to roll.
Three minutes to find a kid with a backpack. Little green X pill down the hatch.
The bass swept over and through me. My chest expanded.
Shane scampered off to the foam machine.
I wandered.
A giant, hairless man stood in a field between two large Tesla coils. He held a metal rod in each hand. Arms outstretched. Webs of current flowing through him. The coils cracked and buzzed. He smiled electric blue.
I popped gooseflesh and felt the music. It rained and I shivered and I was a creature inside of a tree in a bed of mud in a rainforest. The women passed me and I could feel the tightness of their bellies and I could picture their faces twisted and how I could take them in my hands and lay them down.
I went to piss in a port-a-john and my legs shook. Zipped up, sure that I’d wet myself. And then I was sure that the port-a-john had blasted off into space and that if I opened the door I’d fall back to earth. Stayed cooped in there forever, steady breathing, trying to convince myself it would all be okay. Folks banging to get in.
When I finally opened the door, the ground rippled like the ocean and I stumbled through the tangles of bodies and saw young men and women lined along the fence. I joined them and vomited with them and saw the stars swirl in tight whirlpools, the last little bit down the drain forever over and over.
Shane laid his hands on the fence and hurled. He looked at me with eyes as wide as a child’s. “There was something wrong with that X.”
We stumbled back to the car.
Out my windshield, I saw the music festival disappear and reappear, blinking in and out of existence like a turn signal.
SPIDERS
I dreamt I had a son. I called my mother and told her. I went shopping and the kid was in a stroller. He looked just like me. Then he turned into a tiny blue and red spider and a dog came out of nowhere and ate him, so I shoved my hands down her throat and made her throw him up. I woke up sifting through the pile of vomit, wondering how I was gonna tell my mother that she wasn’t a grandma anymore.
HE SAID
A CLOUD
We woke up to a cop rapping on our window.
In that moment you take stock of everything you’ve done with your life.
He told us to move on.
I turned on the car and my head felt heavy and we drove.
He found us at a Love’s not fifty miles from the rave. Had to have clocked us instantly: two fuck-ups hunched over taquitos at a Formica booth. He loomed. I recognized him. I grew up with him. Shane must have known. He picked up his phone and hit a button.
“This is all being recorded.”
Danny Ames borrowed a chair from a neighboring table and sat down. “My throat hurts. I’m gonna sound bad.”
I said, “It goes to a cloud.”
“Yeah,” Shane still had a taquito in his other hand. “Saved to a cloud.”
Men in sandals
bought bags of chips and soda. Women browsed dreamcatchers. Kids pointed up at the animal heads mounted over bottles of motor oil.
Ames laughed. “He said ‘a cloud.’”
We looked at each other.
“No, but seriously. That’s cool.” Ames cleared his throat. “Am I sounding hoarse?”
Shane said, “You sound good.”
“Oh, okay. I hate to tell y’all this, but you’re gonna have to give me all that shit in your trunk.”
For a moment, we just looked at him. At each other. Ames saw it all click and his muscles relaxed.
Shane said, “They’re gonna kill us.”
Ames shrugged. “Yeah.”
We loaded the canisters into the Impala. Ames slammed the trunk and put his keys in his pocket. Anubis on the keychain. He copied our names and addresses from our driver’s licenses onto his smartphone.
Shane toed rocks in the asphalt. “So what happens now?”
“I’ve seen it go both ways.”
“Which ways?”
Ames peeked in the bag at the cash. “Imagine the two ways it could go. I’ve seen both. I won’t see it either way.”
The Ozarks hid behind a fog. Shane said, “At least beat our asses or some shit.”
Danny Ames took a vape pen from his pocket, pressed the button. Cinammon. “We’re in the parking lot of a Love’s. Beat your own asses.”
He got into his car. Shane said, “They’re gonna kill us,” again.
“Don’t care. Make sure you tell Eloise that Danny Ames took her shit. Make sure you’re clear about that.”
I pointed at his teeth. “Do those come out?”
“What?”
“Your grill. Are the teeth permanent, or can you take them out?”
Danny Ames opened his mouth and pulled out his platinum dentures. Grinned bare gums. “I can take them out whenever,” he said.
THE
NEAR-MISS
“It’s slippery out,” Shane said on the drive home. “We could flip the car. We could say that we flipped the car and when the cops showed up they confiscated the money.”
I shook my head.
“We could do what we said. We could hit each other.”
“I’m not going to hit you. Or get hit.”
Shane turned in his seat. Prairie rolling by out the window. “Do you understand how fucked we are?”
I nodded.
“There was a lot of money. That was a lot of money.”
“I know that.”
“We should flip the car. The cops come.”
“We’re both still a little high. I’m not flipping the car.”
“I should have brought a gun.”
“You don’t have a gun.”
“I should have bought a gun.”
“You wouldn’t have used it.”
“I would have shot him.”
“You were just as scared as I was.”
Shane chewed his thumbnail. “Your aura is different.”
I took a deep breath. “Oh yeah?”
“It’s yellow but I don’t know which yellow. You’re either afraid or you’ve come to some new point in your life.”
“I don’t know if I came to a new point in my life. I think I remembered a point from before all this. You know the feeling you get when you almost get in an accident? You just barely miss the car coming at you. You know that adrenaline? That’s what I’ve got right now. I feel like I forgot. I feel like I forgot that I’m the guy who gets pulled over for running a red light. I forgot that the universe has this conception of me as someone who does the right thing. Good things. I don’t know how I forgot that.”
Shane was quiet for a bit. “We’re just different.”
“I think so.”
“I’m the guy who can’t ever see his mother. You know she has a restraining order on me?”
“I know.”
“We owe a ton of money to people who have made other people disappear for far less.”
“We’ll figure it out. I’ll get a job. We’ll pay them back.”
“You’ve still got that adrenaline going?”
“Definitely.”
“I wish I could say I understood it. You’re the near miss, but I’m the oncoming car.”
He reached for the wheel and turned it. I stomped on the brakes and the car spun. It stopped on the side of the road and the engine died.
When I started hitting Shane, I’d only meant to knock some sense into him. Eventually he was yelling stop, and after a few more I put him out.
I fired up the ignition and drove us home.
NEW BOSS
A week later we were sitting in the living room. Charlie cut out lines on the coffee table. None of us spoke. We hadn’t said more than a couple words to each other since we got back from Rockville.
Two large men came through the door carrying guns.
Charlie hopped up and said, “I know you’re not coming in here on some bullshit.”
They pointed the guns at Charlie.
He said, “At least knock.”
The big man on the left said, “I’m Turtle, and this is Little John.”
Charlie said, “Turtle. John.”
Turtle noticed Shane sitting on the recliner. “Shane! Why don’t you answer your texts, fool?”
Shane looked at his hands.
“The rave was several days ago, homie. Where’s the spoils?”
“Danny Ames took it.”
The color went out of Turtle’s face. “Come again?”
“Danny Ames took it.”
Turtle rubbed his face. He said, “Do you know how to use your phone? Phones are pretty amazing. You could have texted that to me and we wouldn’t have bust in this motherfucker and been all rude to our host.” He pointed at the coffee table. “May I?”
Charlie extended his hand.
Turtle did a line.
Little John did a line and yelled, “Holy cows!”
Turtle said, “Don’t pay attention to him. Pay attention to me. He’s a waterhead.”
Little John said, “Better bring my floaties.”
“So Danny Ames took the money.”
Shane nodded.
“It was what…”
“I don’t know. I didn’t count it.”
“We priced it out at about fifteen k. Would you say that sounds right?”
Shane thought about it. “Sounds right.”
“Okay. So, do any of you have fifteen thousand dollars?”
Turtle looked at me. I shook my head. He looked at Charlie, who said, “This isn’t my fuck-up. I didn’t have shit to do with any of this.”
Turtle nodded. “All right. Now, a part of me is wondering if there’s not some subterfuge going on here.”
Shane’s eyes went wide.
“Hold on. I’m not done. You coming back here, just sitting there waiting to get fucked, that’s not what guilty people do. So I believe you.”
We all deflated a bit.
“But you still owe us.” He turned to me. “How much do you have on you?”
I went into the guest bedroom and opened up the drawer. Brought them back around five hundred bucks.
“Don’t you motherfuckers sell drugs?”
I told him, “Mostly I eat them.”
“You ever heard ‘The Ten Crack Commandments?’”
“Yes.”
“Didn’t take?”
“No.”
Turtle and Little John stood up to leave. “It’s like this, guys. Your buddy here hooked it up. And we’ll subtract the four grand we were gonna give you guys. That puts it at ten-five. I don’t want it from this little faggot, I want it from you, Shane. It was your job, and this is your fuckup.”
Shane drummed his fingers lightly on his knees.
Turtle waved. “I’m being nice, but only because I hate Danny Ames even more than you do right now. Holler.”
Little John said, “Don’t holler in the house!”
They left.
Charlie
held Shane in a bear hug. The tattooed man thrashed and screamed. Black gums bared.
I watched.
Shane calmed and eventually fell asleep.
Charlie got a blanket out of his room and covered his cousin sleeping there on the floor.
He said to me, “If you’ve got somewhere else to go, you’d better go there.”
I slept in my car.
Like that it was over.
I lived my whole life on a path and for a moment there I strayed. I lived low and found out that I wasn’t equipped for it. Charlie didn’t call me anymore. I lived in my car for a bit.
Shane disappeared.
I just kind of floated.
Then I decided to try life again.
III
FALLING BACK INTO IT
At one point my wife and I fell back into it. I called her and sobbed into the phone and she told me to come back over. The dog was happy to see me. When I walked back into the apartment I could smell who I was. She showed me her paintings and we listened to the songs she’d had on repeat.
All the old nicknames and shorthand came back. I was learning how to speak again. There are hundreds of tongues out there but you only really speak when you’ve invented your own language.
After spending the night together talking about everything, she left for work early the next morning. I lay in bed looking at the Christmas lights strung up along the wall and everything there was heavy. I thought about the bed. I thought about when I used to wake her up with a song and she’d stay quiet til I fixed the coffee and we went our ways.
I took a shower.
I left.
I lucked out. A friend of mine was out of a roommate. She offered to let me stay for a month without rent. She had four Chihuahuas. I sat on her couch and played with the dogs and slept on an air mattress in the guest bedroom.
I walked back into the hot dog restaurant. I filled out an application and the owner read it over and said, “You look familiar.”
Black Gum Page 5
