Out the bus window Sam saw guts gored cherry into the rumble strip. Seventh or eighth time since leaving the city. The mess reminded him of human meat he’d once seen dangling in a tree.
Trembling deer peeked out from interrupted forest. He was on a trip to see an old roommate and illicit mentor, his aunt’s former mailman, Fox.
Fox had been addicted to many things but now was hooked solely on the police scanner. Well that and visiting the grisly aftermath of local mutilations. It’d been that way for seven years. Sam remembered when that started. He’d just come in from a skipped class. Fox leaping up, “Hey! Somebody got eaten by a chipper. This we must see.”
“What kind of animal is a chipper?”
Fox with wild eyes, “Chipper loose in the neighborhood, big as jaguars. By the playground. Gruesome, gruesome. Let’s go.”
How those people blended together into one tumultuous mass of sweat and goo. Shameful haircuts. This one’s face on that one’s life. With catshit breath.
On the first pass they’d cruised by a little tan house, unsure if it was the place. Fox spotted the mailman who actually had that route and drove around the block before parking in front of a shade-thick, mossy yard, crime scene tape a-flapping.
“We’re too late.”
The tow-behind, gas-powered woodchipper, orange and black, was still on the lawn. No blood. Nothing sprayed on the vinyl siding or splattered on the crumbling steps. Sam had seen a snowy movie where a man was shoved in headfirst, viscera arced in a plume.
“Dammit, they already cleaned up.”
“Too bad.”
“A shirtsleeve yanked the tree man in. Something this good hasn’t happened since our Lamborghini. Oh shit—fuck our luck.” Ed Skrupski’s police car pulled up. Skrupski had twice confiscated Sam’s skateboard, thrice issued him loitering tickets. He ducked under the yellow tape. Stooped around the yard, looking lost. “Tree man’s brother.”
Sam slapped the dash. “I bet he did it.”
“Did what?” Fox had his hand on the ignition. “No. You’re being a dumb prick. I knew him in another life. Before he died and came back a cop. This guy did some foul deeds before he was a cop. And believe me, Sammy, I was right there with him.”
They saw Skrupski stand upright and wipe away tears.
Fox continued, “Poor guy. We shouldn’t be here.”
Then they all saw it. Way up in the branches of the oak tree, something dangling like a cluster of grapes, crimson speckled leaves that should’ve been green. When Skrupski spotted them, his eyes clouded with sorrow, burned with rage.
These days Cecile treated each night like her last. She scrolled her DMs, weighing possibilities. Three profiles were worth hitting back, one she realized was her stalker with an improved false profile. She pecked out replies. She took a shower and worked in her sketchbook. Her roommate knocked on her door, said the married crypto bros were coming over again. Cecile said she had big plans, frantically searched for metal shows, punk shows, parties, movies, exhibits, anything. She opened another app and found three messages. One was a photo of an unsolicited, lackluster cock, the other appeared to be a man’s asshole. The third photo was a blurry streak of drunken red light followed by the word me. She realized it was the neon sign outside last week’s warehouse party. She clicked on the account. She scrolled Sam’s timeline and tried to recall if he was British. She remembered cackling together at midnight with the trash blowing down the avenue, huddled inside his trench coat. He’d lit her cigarette, and they’d gone inside; a girl had eaten her out while he put his balls in her mouth. With the douchebags in the living room trying to sound young and no better option, she hit respond.
Another dead doe. Bloated and too close to traffic for the turkey buzzards. Sam climbed into his phone. Someone he went to high school with had died in real life and then again on social media. There was a wake that night. He had no intention of going. For one thing, he wasn’t allowed in the funeral home. His bus slid south and south.
Sam couldn’t place the face. He found a picture of himself and the dead boy, in a group of people at Fox’s house, ten years before. Backyard fire pit. Sparks erupting against the blueblack. Their eyes shining like green UFOs. The comments said he’d served his county with distinction. No one was sure how Adam Dickinson had died.
Ah, yes, he could picture Dickinson—a spry leprechaun dangling from Fox’s shower rod, the rod about to snap. Seventeen or eighteen. How those people blended together into one tumultuous mass of sweat and goo. Shameful haircuts. This one’s face on that one’s life. With catshit breath. Your graduating class of forgettable mutants. Until one bubbles to the surface, deceased on Facebook. Dickinson, the li’l bitch who drilled a hole into the water tower and pissed in it.
Fox was at the bus station, leaning out of the Kia. A pink polo shirt that used to be crimson, threadbare Mets cap. He was fifty-three, tan, retired, stifling a grin.
Sam gave a quick hug across the center console, and they drove past vacant storefronts and into the maze of sad yards. Waft of lawn mold. Burning burgers. Sam giddy and twirling his hair.
Fox said, “What’s so amusing?”
“Everything. I don’t know.”
Sam was here from Chinatown while a crew put his kitchen ceiling back where it used to be.
His various roommates had scattered to families or fuckbuddies. Sam had moved in with Fox his sophomore year of high school after his aunt fled to Florida for some job. She’d said, “Live with Fox, it won’t be boring.” Never saw her again.
It had been fun. For six years. Party house, young girls jumping off the roof into the shallow kiddie pool. You’d help them out of the mud and fall in love. Samuel DiSanto, whose mother died in the first Iraq War. “Did you know, Sammy, when you hear a storm, it’s not thunder. That’s your momma cluster bombing Saddam Hussein up in Heaven.”
And one morning Fox was gone. Walked to rehab. Sam figured it out calling around. His history teacher, Mrs. Munson, who he’d seen coming out of Fox’s room more than once, knew the name of the facility. Sam fielded questions from people slipping in to buy an eight ball. Fox returning a month later in this gleaming Kia, the first of the lovely lady holy rollers in the passenger seat spouting Ecclesiastes.
The car gleamed no more. Things rolling around. Snapple bottles clanking Sam’s ankles. The police scanner on Fox’s dash babbling.
Sam asked, “What’d Dickinson OD?”
“Can’t get no good answer.”
“You know everything.”
“His dad’s the sheriff. Nobody’s talking.” Fox jerked the wheel. “Let’s take a little look.”
They parked in front of a brick house. Carport. The trees were pink or white or yellow. Cherry blossoms, pear, dogwood. Sam had déjà vu of déjà vu. Of houses where a husband had shot a wife. Husband cut the face of a husband. A man sucked into a machine and spit into a brace of branches. Sam stuck a stick of mango gum in. Didn’t bother offering to Fox, who’d forgone sugar in tandem with most other earthly pleasures.
“Dickinhismouth died right there.” Fox pointed at the steps. Plain blocks, four risers high. An Easter flag flapped in the breeze, shaggy brown rabbit with scrunched face.
“He didn’t live here.”
“Never said that. He just died here. I hated that scumbag.”
In the years since Sam had moved away, one of the inhabitants of the house, the son, started slinging dope, the parents oblivious. The son had something to do with Dickinson’s death. The details were obfuscated. The bumper sticker on the gray Ford Escort read Mom’s Winemobile.
“They’ll get busted soon. I’m looking forward to catching the raid. Maybe we’ll get lucky tonight.”
The front door opened, and a blonde woman walked out hefting a lumpy trash bag. She walked toward the curb, shooing them.
They sat at a red light. The light turned green. Fox was talking, then noticed, didn’t care. No one was coming. Fox kept asking what Sam had been up to. Sam was hesitant. As if mentioning tranquilizers or drinking would send his old roommate spiraling.
“You want to get this thing out of the way?”
“Sure.”
Since getting sober, Fox had taken up real dancing, as he called it, to meet good women.
For the second year in a row, Fox’s dance partner, if they even existed, couldn’t make the competition, and Sam had to fill in. He’d brought a backpack with four changes of clothes and his laptop, to work remotely, in the basement dungeon he used to call his bedroom.
They went to the park by town hall, with its gazebo and duck pond, left the car running, stereo on. The park’s emptiness amazed Sam. In New York, there would be hundreds of people on towels, making use of almost every square foot of grass. Here, even the duck pond was vacant.
With salsa music blaring, he watched as Fox demonstrated the new routine in the concrete pavilion. This one was much more complicated than last year’s, which won them the competition. Seeing the moves, Sam understood there never was another dance partner. He had been played. A ruse to get him to visit.
“I’m not gonna do it,” Sam said.
“You’re crazy. You said that last year.”
They had been dancing together since Sam was thirteen. At first it was breakdancing, Fox a b-boy six stepping across the living room, everyone cheering as he spun on his head on a sheet of cardboard. Sam jumped in with his own moves, graceful and dexterous. He remembered someone losing control and busting the glass coffee table with their work boots. Not him. He was a natural. Fox and Sam were the main event, popping and flipping in the living room.
Since getting sober, Fox had taken up real dancing, as he called it, to meet good women. Fox sat next to Sam on the stone steps, shirtless, catching his breath.
“We can try later.”
“What happened to Rita this time?”
“Broke her fibula in a zip-lining accident.”
“Sure, dude.”
“Or maybe she’s lying. Could be I came on too strong.”
“Hands in unwelcome spots?”
Fox didn’t defend himself.
Sam said, “Yeah, they got this thing called consent now. I was at a play party last week in Bushwick. Ask permission, excuse me miss, would it be acceptable if I eat your ass? A cop showed up and tasered people for ten dollars.”
“People like that?”
“Some guys tried the taser, I didn’t. The cop got so excited. I saw three women holding hands, sharing the shock. $3.33 each.”
“I’ve seen cops do worse.”
“It’s all pretend.”
“I could tell you some stories.”
“You have.”
“Good looking girls at those things?”
“Gorgeous. Come up sometime.”
“No thanks.” Fox had never left the county. “I’ve seen enough cop cock.”
“It was findom. Handcuff you. Pay to get out.”
“And you pay for this?”
“I’m a free man.”
“I mean to get in the door.”
“Yeah. There’s an application. They approve you, it’s a yearly fee, like a gym.”
“I don’t go to the gym.”
“You’d get a laugh. Two friends of mine were rolled up in a carpet, yelling, ‘Stomp harder!’”
Fox keeled over, head on his knees, cracking up with no sound coming out.
He’d seen her do incredible things to dull people.
“The hostess stomped and stomped, and the couple was on the brink of squirting, and Cecile, this crazy girl I know, jumped on them with stilettos.” He began laying it on thicker, seeing Fox couldn’t breathe. “But Cecile’s phone rang in her purse, and that’s a big no-no. The hostess was screaming at Cecile, and I got involved, yelling at the hostess, I don’t know why. So we can never go back. But there’s other sex parties. Better ones. Let me show you.”
“I’m good, Sammy. You indulge. Love can come to me.”
Fox wasn’t scared of group sex. He was scared of the computer, the subway system, finding a bathroom. “I heard the food up there makes you shit your pants.”
“What?” said Sam.
Fox made ham sandwiches on Wonder Bread, Kraft singles, no mustard. The clock on the stove was the wrong time. His whole life, whenever he fixed it, some drunk knocked down a telephone pole, or a squirrel burned out the transformer. The only sound in the house the crunch of their potato chips. Sam got a message from Cecile.
“Speak of the high-heeled Devil.” He couldn’t get the smile off his face.
She’d always come to fuck parties alone. They’d done things together with strangers. Twice he’d caught her eye in the middle. She looked so amused, like she’d walked through the wrong door. He was surprised she had messaged him about wanting to hook up one on one. She wrote, I don’t know your situation. Tell me your situation.
He replied that he was in the suburbs an hour and a half south. There’d been a huge flood on the thirty-seventh floor of his building.
You’re in the burbs? Hot.
Fox began to shimmy in place. “Let’s run through the routine again, I got an idea.”
Sam looked up, “One sec.”
Cecile had written back, Would it be crazy if I came down? I want to.
You get off on ratchet sprinklers and chocolate labs? We’ll orgy up the Rotary Club.
He scrolled Cecile’s profile. She was a tiny creature. Usually in herringbone blazer over bright dress. Not interested in flogging, the last person you’d catch in a cage, but would climb in to be polite. He’d seen her do incredible things to dull people. Lustrous blue eyes. He suspected she was on some radical mission of joy.
He texted, Come see me, we’ll kick it private.
Cecile’s texts came in rapid-fire. Did the house have a garden gnome? Lawn jockey? Weathervane? Did the house have a tire swing?
He stared at the texts. She wants to be my girlfriend, she wants to cuddle. He couldn’t continue without being cruel. But what the night needed was another person, before the awkward silence between him and Fox slipped in. They used to fill it with beers and powder, but those distractions were gone, and he worried about the real. The scanner sat dead. This would be a slow night. He looked up at Fox. “You mind if this girl comes to see us? Would that be weird?”
Fox turned on the stereo, music filled the house. He shimmied his way into the kitchen and motioned for Sam to get off his butt. “No such thing. Lemme see a picture of your lucky lady.”
“Sure, one sec.”
Cecile wrote back that she’d be there in two hours. They’d only had a few conversations. She’d mentioned growing up in Times Square. Her street magician parents. A Harry Houdini imitator father and assistant mother. Living above the M&M store before it was the M&M store.
A batch of nudes dinged in. He searched his photo roll for his own go-tos, volleyed an equal amount back. He then showed Fox the nudes Cecile had sent. Fox kept making quenching sounds, tongue behind teeth. “She could be in Playboy.”
“They don’t care about that anymore. They send pussies direct. No middleman.”
“The bunnies! Not the bunnies losing self-worth.”
“The opposite. They got free, found it, went freelance.”
“Tell her hurry up and get here.”
Fox danced out of the room, came back with a huge photo album. A cursed object to Sam, something Fox thought he was revealing for the first time. But Sam had found the album a long time ago in the man’s closet. He spread the pages open. Crinkled cellophane. Feathered hair and smeared lipstick. Ancient toys. Greasy lighting. Bushes and rouge. The page flipped, and there was Sam’s mom in a batch of bikini shots. Fox was oblivious to the relation. He flipped the page, and there was Sam’s mother naked, alive, sitting in front of Fox on a dirt bike. Fox raised his eyebrows. Sam looked away. A photo he’d had seen before on accident and tried to erase from his mind.
“Not your type, huh.”
Cecile was the last one off the bus. She’d cut her hair. Had a duffel bag. A dark night with clouds strangling the moon. She got in the Kia, took a good look, liked what she saw.
“Great to see you. Is there a football field around? What’s the population here?”
Sam looked it up. “Thirteen thousand.”
“My fetish is any place with a creek and at least three gravel roads.” She must have been a theatre kid. The way she projected her voice.
“I even know a dirt lane,” he said. “I’m into redheads and nurses and being choked. But you know that.”
They shook hands, laughed, locked rubbing and pawing. The police scanner chirped. He slapped it off. “That’s my mentor. He’s a deathgawker.”
“He get off on it?”
“Maybe. I used to go with him to the scene of the crimes.”
He leaned in to kiss and touch and she said, “You get off on it?”
“No.”
“What’s the worst thing you’ve seen?”
He wanted to tell her about the woodchipper and the red meat in the branches of the oak tree. The stuff the cleanup crew had missed. Wanted to gross her out. He was thinking how to say it the sickest way.
“Come on, tell me. I’ve seen Faces of Death.”
The chipper was the grizzliest, but the Lamborghini had dead kids.
“Two years ago, these thirteen-year-old choirboys stole the keys to their uncle’s Diablo, went racing on a foggy night, got up to 125 around a bend, lost control, hit a dirt ramp, went airborne, into a second story dining room, upside down. Crushed. Kaput.”
“You went and looked? You saw the car?”
“We drove over, yeah. The police were yelling at Fox to keep driving, but he said it was a public road. Our tax dollars. The paramedics had already peeled the choirboys out. I could show you the house, but they’ve fixed the hole. In daylight you’d be able to see the difference in the cedar shake.”
She didn’t believe it. He thought she was too battle-hardened from growing up in the city.
“No matter how quiet a place seems, bad things are happening. Even in these little towns.”
He didn’t tell Cecile that he and Fox had gone to the funeral. When a distraught woman asked who they were, Sam had heard Fox say, “We just love cars.”
That was the night Sam and Fox were banned from the funeral home.
Little kids were playing freeze tag on the football field, leaping in and out of sectors of shadow and streetlight. Sam parked. “We’ll go somewhere else. I know a gazebo.”
“It’s past their bedtime.” Cecile pointed at the rusted sign on the fence. “Permit required. They don’t have that.”
“You like fields? I know a soccer field.”
These average failures couldn’t even pretend to care about her.
She got out of the car, ran into the game, and somehow caught one of the kids by his shirtsleeve. Sam heard her shouting she was with the park service.
“I’ll haul you all to jail! The judge won’t see you till morning!”
This girl was out of her mind.
Kids fanned off in all directions. Wheeling into spooky yards. Hopping tilted fences. Cecile waved Sam over. They went to the fifty-yard line. Tree frogs chirping. Wind chimes clattering.
Cecile told him this was on her bucket list.
She ran her hand down his chest and fumbled with his fly. She was humming something.
“What is that?”
“‘Love a Rainy Night.’”
He hadn’t noticed it’d begun to sprinkle through the cloud cover.
He was so spaced out, she wondered what was wrong with him, what chemicals he’d been on when he was good company. He climbed on top, his erection pushed against her. They kissed and traded positions. She began to grind and raise her shirt. She slid her underwear to the side.
A figure stepped out of the shadows. Cecile saw it first, a monster here to brutalize her. But no, it was Skrupski with a flashlight aimed on her naked breasts. She rolled off Sam.
“What the fuck,” Sam said, then noticed the flashlight, pulled his pants up in a hurry, felt the teeth of the zipper pinch his penis. He cursed in the cop’s direction. Couldn’t talk his way out of that.
Cecile said again and again it was her idea and please don’t write one for Sam, but Skrupski refused to be told what to do. He wrote up indecent exposure and handed the sole ticket to Sam. All his life Sam has been issued tickets by this man. When Cecile apologized, Skrupski flinched. He couldn’t recall the last time he heard someone apologize to him. But he refused to take the ticket back. “Miss, I recommend you find some better company.”
Fox was pedaling past the duck pond when he heard the call come in over the police scanner mounted to his handlebars. Some perverts fornicating on the baseball field. He took a short cut across a moonlit field, under buzzing power lines, and came out on the main drag. The police car was pulling away as he rounded the corner. He saw Skrupski behind the wheel. In the parking lot, there was his own Kia. He saw Cecile and Sam get in the car and drive off before he could react. He pedaled in the direction of Skrupski, knowing the man would be parked at the speed trap in the dark stretch of highway where they pull over the out-of-towners.
Sam’s knees were grass-stained in the brightly lit supermarket. He picked a squished worm off Cecile’s dress. She wanted ingredients for a stir fry but didn’t like the produce, glared into the bin of genetically modified, factory-farmed, faraway-sourced, non-fair-trade, pesticide-laden artichokes.
Dickinson with a shopping basket in each hand, tuna fish in one, chop meat in the other. On roids, twice as wide as high school.
Sam stopped to consider an endcap of tuna. A pyramid so tall it would kill somebody if it fell. He saw the ghost of the dead boy, Adam Dickinson, walk past in full dress uniform, blue wool and gold buttons, a rifle with bayonet over shoulder.
Cecile squeezed an artichoke. “Did you know these are almost sunflowers.” She looked to him, but his eyes were glazed over.
Dickinson became a memory in black muscle shirt and green cargo shorts. Dickinson with a shopping basket in each hand, tuna fish in one, chop meat in the other. On roids, twice as wide as high school. “Bro, what’s up?” Dickinson said Afghanistan made him tough. They’d talked for five minutes in front of the bread, Dickinson trying to find out if Sam knew anyone selling pills. Sorry, not since Fox found Jesus. Dickinson’s glare hollowed out. Sam said something about moving to the city. Nothing was good since Fox cleaned up. Dickinson said, “Word.” Sam said, “Word.” See you later. Walk off to your mysterious death.
Cecile took his hand and tugged him back to reality. “The aisles are so wide, I could lay down and stretch my toes and fingers and not touch the other side.”
“The bars close at 10 p.m. is the trade-off.”
Cecile led him to the freezer section, picked out some frozen stuff with a family of farmers hugging on the bag. The Johnsons. Something was off with the Johnsons.
“They’re CGI.”
“They are. Look at that.” Just ones and zeros, part of some crude design. An artificial family, cross-eyed and cornfed but never actually born. They took the Johnsons with them anyway.
In Health and Beauty, he grabbed a box of condoms, said they should be more careful. Cecile thought he was looking at the pregnancy tests, but it was a DNA test. He was beginning to think Fox was his biological father. It had come up a few times, the mathematical possibility.
“He said, ‘You want to know who your dad is? Most likely, me. But you don’t want a dad like me.’ I used to agree. But he’s changed.”
Cecile was touched he would say these things to her in front of the lube and diapers, baby powder and dental dams.
“I want to know what’s up, but also I don’t want to know. Things are good how they are.”
She couldn’t believe he’d opened up like that. Hadn’t seemed capable. “What if I do something nice for you?”
“Don’t.”
She had the DNA test in her hand. Shaking it at him. He took it back and placed it on the shelf and told her he didn’t need anybody doing anything nice for him.
The squad car was half-hidden in the trees, the rest by a billboard. Skrupski screamed when Fox knocked on the window.
“What’d I catch you, whacking off?”
“What in the fuck do you want?”
“I’m just a concerned citizen. A call came over the scanner.”
“Boy, those things are illegal. Want me to haul you in?”
“Ed, I’ve known you a long time.”
“Too long.”
They’d been tight for years, but there’d been a fight over a girl. Fox couldn’t even remember which one. Neither could Skrupski.
“This is about what you just did to Sam DiSanto.”
“What I just did?”
“Indecent exposure. I know what that means, I’ve done plenty. Now that they built that annex off the middle school, that park’s a thousand feet from a school zone.”
“Sure is.”
“That kid’s gonna have to register as a sex offender.”
“Serves him right. He knew not to mess with the bull.”
Fox felt a rage coming on. He’d been taking lemon-coconut cakes to the police station for years, making friends with the detectives, offering them unofficial blips of information he’d learned while dropping paper in people’s mailboxes.
“Listen, you’ve got to tear that ticket up. He gets on that list he’ll have to knock on every door in his apartment building. There’s hundreds! Why you smiling?”
“Because you’re making me.”
“He’ll lose his job.”
“They shouldn’t have been on that field.”
“He’s a good kid. He just never had nobody. No mother, no father. Don’t file those charges.”
“It’s too late once I done wrote the ticket.”
Fox leaned in the window. He grabbed Ed’s hat.
“Give me that back.”
“I may be the local kook.”
“Yeah the whole town knows that.”
“They know what I done, but you’re the long arm of the law, ain’t you? Wanna be sheriff next election? Tear up that citation, or you’ll be sorry.”
“You don’t have shit on me.”
“I’ve got photos of you, fucker. I’ve got you on camcorder.”
“I had no idea you had this in you.”
“You’re a lot more like that kid than you know. You and him both lost someone important.”
“You’re not going to change my mind.”
Fox flicked the hat through the window and caught Skrupski in the nose.
As the squad door opened, Fox pedaled away. He heard the car start up like Skrupski was going to chase after, but he never followed. Fox pedaled to the sheriff’s house, but of course he was at his own son’s wake. When Fox got to the funeral home, Skrupski was parked outside, waiting by the door with his hand out the window, “Take this fucking thing.” He handed Fox the citation and drove back to the speed trap.
Near the front of the store, Sam saw an actual old friend, alive and well. George, in an ill-fitting black suit. George with his sideburns down onto his neck and friendly plump face, a hand basket full of strawberries. “Dude, amazing to see you. Are you going to The Dick’s wake?”
“Nah, not gonna make it. What’s with the strawberries?”
“Don’t want to show up empty-handed.”
Sam did not introduce Cecile. George did not acknowledge her presence with even a nod of his square skull. She wondered if she was really even there.
George asked Sam, “Beers after? My place.”
“Let’s see.”
Fox wasn’t home. They put the groceries on the counter and went downstairs to Sam’s old room. She’d never done it in a house before, with an owl hooting in the yard. He said they were mourning doves. She said he hadn’t gotten her off earlier. Now was his chance to make it up to her. He rolled the condom on. But just two minutes in, there was a sound like thunder. She leapt up. Sam told Cecile she was about to meet the salsa king himself.
She cooked for all three of them while fielding Fox’s friendly questions. Sam could tell he was trying to charm her. Wine made it easier. She wanted to open her own restaurant someday. While Fox separated the vegetables from the meat, he told her he sold hot dogs on the side of the road. He could use her opinion on a few things, “Come by the RV tomorrow, check things out.”
Cecile gave Sam an interested look that seemed to ask, Will I annoy you if I stick around? He gave a tight smile she knew meant she wasn’t welcome another day. Fox sensed the tension and wiped his mouth.
“Let’s show her what we can do.”
George shrugged and was thinking about gray hair, limp dicks, no future, and Alzheimer’s.
Fox turned the stereo on. Sam let his hair down. Fox did a 720-degree flying twist over the ottoman. Sam met him under the ceiling fan, cheek to cheek, hip to hip, palm to palm. Now turn—cheek to cheek, hip to hip. Once closer to the couch, Fox lifted him over his head. Sam splayed in midair, only to be lowered smoothly and gently, his hair cascading and Cecile clapping. Sam took a knee. Fox stepped to the side and did a crotch-grabbing, double-elbow chest pump in time with the final snare.
Sam and Cecile walked the block, saying nothing. They turned another corner. Came up a driveway, down a side yard, George’s fire pit glowing. Beer in hand. George in that baggy suit. Again, she was not introduced. George didn’t ask her name. Didn’t look her in the eye. He called up to his wife, “Helen! Helen, come down, we have company.” But Helen never showed.
Cecile hadn’t expected these guys to be like this. This was not an art gallery. She was not with deep-pocketed men. These average failures couldn’t even pretend to care about her. George wanted to talk about people he and Sam had gone to school with who Sam seemed to have forgotten existed.
She thought, This is what a prick looks like when they don’t know their father. The unspoken. The looming questions. The lack of self-examination. No romantic view of life. Cecile checked her phone. There was time to get a bus to the beach, which would be cold. But someone would loan her a sweatshirt. Her world was full of people hoping to loan a sweatshirt in the wee hours.
She looked up from her phone and realized the light had gone on in the yard and lit up the purple picnic table, the deck painted green. And in that far kitchen window she could see the figure of a trim older man, oblivious that anyone was watching, bobbing his head and spinning in circles. She felt a warmness. They were behind Fox’s house. She had spotted Fox.
“I’ll be right back.” She shook her phone at Sam and George, then walked through the gate.
Sam asked, “What’d you hear about Dickinson?”
“You don’t know?” George was shocked. “Dude, he got stabbed though the back with a sword. Couple blocks from here. Through his back, out his guts, intestines on the lawn.”
“Tell me the truth. What actually happened.”
“I am. Heroin happened. This was the chipmunk, the soccer fairy, who used to get all our chicks. Comes back a junkie. I never liked any version of him.”
“Do you remember when Fox damn near caved his head in?”
George just nodded, kept telling the death story like it was the best thing ever happened to him.
“His dealer lived over on Pigeon. Younger than us. Still lived with his mom and dad. Had the shit in his sock drawer. One night Dickinson decides to rob the dealer. He smashes out the kid’s window and starts ransacking, but the dealer’s parents come home. Dickinson ties them up, gags them, carries on. Then the dealer came home, finds his parents bound in the living room, hears someone turning his dresser drawers out so he pulls one of his swords off the garage wall.”
“It’s too stupid.”
“I swear. Dickinson heard the garage door, and he tried to run out of the house, but—”
“I saw the steps earlier today. They were clean.”
“Bled out and died on the crab grass.”
They sat quiet, looked at the fire. A samurai sword through your back. George shrugged and was thinking about gray hair, limp dicks, no future, and Alzheimer’s. One last time he hollered for Helen. Sam was looking at Fox’s house now. Fox so full of life.
George asked, “Where’d your girl go?”
“She’s not my girl, she’s just Cecile. I don’t know.” Sam looked out into the darkness. Up in the golden window, through all the leaves, all the branches, two figures flashed by with terrific speed and grace. Cecile and Fox dancing. Both young men saw them framed golden in the track lighting.
“I think they’re butt-ass naked.”
“Good for them.”
“You don’t care?”
“She’s a really nice girl. With a kink for the suburbs.”
In the morning he drove her to the station. The sun was just coming up. Commuters were lined up and waiting. He said he’d had a nice time and hoped they could hang out again soon.
“I don’t think so,” she said.
He said he didn’t really want to either. She said she’d had a good time, but this was it. But there was something that might help him, if he could get over himself. Not be a baby about it. Cecile opened her purse and took out a pill bottle. She’d peeled off the label the night before. She’d gone into the bathroom after and spit Fox in there. Held the bottle up to the interior light. Inside was a dark shadow. She tilted her hand, and the shadow oozed back and forth.
“Do you want it?”
He didn’t say anything. She set the bottle on the dash. Got out of the car, went inside, woke the clerk. Cecile was surprised the Kia was still there when she came out with her ticket. She could see Sam, glancing in her direction. Some of the others were stealing looks at her too. She must look really cute in the bus line. The last of the morning mist sat in the wide cup of the drainage ditch, hiding out as long as it could.
He looked to the bottle again. This was the oddest thing that had ever happened to him. Someone spat Fox’s jizz into a pill bottle and gave it to him as a present. No biggie, you’re welcome. What was he supposed to do? Thanks? Mail it to the lab, let them tell him his destiny?
There was a garbage can outside his window. He picked up the pill bottle, rolled down the window. Stuck his fist out. Stopped. Decided against it. Set the bottle in the cupholder. Rolled up the window and started the car. She watched him coming her way and wondered if he’d have one last thing to say, but he just honked friendly and drove past the line.
She felt sorry for him. He’d never figure out who he was. He’d keep sleepwalking and would never wake no matter how loud the thunder. Her incoming bus swooped past his dented little car, and the trees bent and shuddered as he hooked the curve slow, wide, and automatic.