AFTER WE’D PASSED A TINY bottle of hand sanitizer around, Matty had insisted that we all have another beer since we were drinking her baby weight away. No one argued; no one said anything for lamps and lamps. The moonlight filled the pines around us and it was bright enough to see our breath.
“Do you want to talk about it?” Faisal eventually asked.
“I’m all right,” Michael said, sounding more legitimately upset than I’d expected him to.
Faisal looked at him but Michael was staring into his beer. Faisal cleared his throat. “Right. Matty, do you want to talk about it?”
“I’m okay,” she said. There was a sad, distant smile on her lips that didn’t quite reach her eyes. “It happens. And we did the best we could. Sometimes you can’t save them. I just hate it.”
I fumbled with my coat, trying to work the zipper down without taking my gloves off. I expected to open my coat and see flames pour out of me between the black and white lines of my referee shirt. It was adrenaline. It was beer. It was the glowing coals and the melting gods. I pulled my hat off.
My gloves were sticky. I couldn’t see anything against the black fabric but it had to be blood. I turned my hand around and tried to find red, but it was invisible on the black gloves in the primal dark. Some engine inside of me started working harder, pumping my heart at more beats per minute and making my stomach vibrate and churn. There was no good way of getting the terrible gloves off. If I pulled one off with the other it meant getting the sticky blood on my skin where it would stain my wrists and work its way up my arms and eventually cover every inch of me and everyone would know that I was covered in blood that would never wash off. The other option was pulling the gloves off with my teeth. Pulling the gloves off with my teeth and getting the blood in my mouth until it drowned me or until it transfused all of my blood. The engine deep inside me that made my heart beat faster started making my breaths come out on hobbled legs and clipped wings.
“Gotta pee. Hang on,” I said. I clamored into the woods, deep enough that they couldn’t see me, and dropped. I had to get the fucking gloves off. I looked for a branch or a stick or some leaves, anything I could use to pry the bloody gloves off, but they’d been right: it was just pine needles. My breath was matching my heart and my mouth was dry and the gloves were wet and I finally stepped on my gloves and pulled my hands out. They were red from being dragged under my boots but I couldn’t see any blood. Until the fingerprints. There were traces of blood around the pads of my fingers.
“Matty, can you throw the hand sanitizer in here?” I said, and then threw up.
* * *
When I came out they were hunkered down on the other side of the road by an old and battered wooden fence tangled in barbed wire. They were sitting with their backs to it, drinking beer and eating snacks out of Matty’s stomach. Past the fence and past the thin line of trees, there was a field that was all frozen mud and splotches of tall, dead grass moving lazily in the night breeze. At the far end of the field, lit by the crisp moonlight bouncing off the fresh snow, there was a busted-up barn with its roof blown mostly off.22
The way the moonlight came through the trees, the three of them were in a clean ray of light, separate and divided from the other shadows.
“Better?” Matty asked me.
“Much. Thanks,” I said, holding up the bottle of sanitizer and tossing it to her. Behind the pines, I’d counted until I felt my chest stop shaking.
“Okay,” Michael said to me. “This is the tricky part.”
Fifty yards away from the broken-down barn there was a single-story home with a bank of windows emanating soft yellow light. One of the darker windows was lit by the colored, flashing light of a television.
“Farmer Browning,” Faisal said, the way you say the name of your oldest adversary.
“Browning because he’s got a shotgun,” Matty said.
“Are you kidding me?”
“He shot at me last year,” Michael said.
“He shot at you? With his shotgun?”
“Right. Last year.”
“And we’re back at the same farm?” I said, not trying to hide my disbelief.
“He’s old. We weren’t sure he’d still be alive.”
“And,” Faisal added, “to be fair, Mike touched his horse.”
“I didn’t touch his horse.”
“Why would you touch his horse?” I said.
“You didn’t even buy it dinner it first. You didn’t even bring it a salt block,” Faisal said.
Michael directed his attention at me. “Obviously that was before we knew about the shotgun.”
“And,” Matty said, “since he’s a thousand years old, he can’t really shoot all that well. Especially at night.”
“None of you are making this sound any better.”
“You’ve got that look in your eye,” Faisal said to me.
“Which look?”
“The ‘Why don’t we just go around the guy with the shotgun’s house’ look. We’ve all had the look.”
“It’s a reasonable look,” Matty said.
“The road we need is right through his property. Right on the other side. You can’t see it because of the trees, but his house is on a little land bridge that cuts through the marsh back there. It would be an extra mile or two to take the road around the property since it’s swamp that way,” Michael said, pointing, “and it’s all lake, that way,” he said, pointing the other way. He looked at me to see if the answer had worked. “He’s still got the look in his eye.”
Matty smiled. “Because it’s important. He called us animals the first time we snuck across his property, a couple years back.”
“Animals?”
“Animals. And I don’t know how to describe it, but you could tell he meant it. It was a bad fucking word for him, you could tell.”
“And this was before Mike touched the horse’s bathing suit area,” Faisal chimed in.
“I don’t molest horses,” he said, like someone trying to talk their way out of a speeding ticket.
“But so now it’s important. We do it to know that we can and to prove that there’s nothing wrong with being an animal. Especially if being an animal means smoking weed and loving your friends and not arbitrarily calling someone ‘Coach.’”
“It’s reclamation,” Faisal said. “If we’re animals, we’re going to show him why he should be jealous.”
“Plus, look,” Michael said. “He’s watching TV—I don’t think he’s going to bother getting out of bed to murder a bunch of kids.”
“He would be in his legal right though,” Faisal said.
“More of a legal gray area, probably,” Matty said.
“Fuck though,” Michael said, pulling his hat off and scratching the back of his head. “I don’t feel like dealing with that asshole tonight. Not after we mercy-killed a porcupine.”
Faisal made a “pfft” noise and mumbled, “We.”
“Moral support,” Michael said, pointing at himself. “And also Weapon Getter.”
“Failed Weapon Getter,” Faisal said, also pointing at him.
“What do you think, Moses?” Matty said. She didn’t have the same energy and color about her that she’d had when we left, but her eyes were still bright.
“I don’t mind walking around,” I said. Most of me just wanted to keep the walk going—to keep hanging out and laughing—and that part really didn’t mind walking the extra distance. The Charlie part of me, though, was shaking his head and calling me a coward. The Charlie part of me saw a missed opportunity for adventure.
As we skirted the farmer’s property, the lights came on one at a time. Almost immediately we saw someone appear in the big rectangle of the farmer’s living room, staring out at us, followed by faraway barks.
He was watching us and his dog knew that we were out there. Even though we couldn’t see features, the figure and his dog stayed in that window and watched us until we were out of sight.