The smoke in the village was so thick that if you threw a rock you couldn’t see it land. Even when the wind kicked up there was still a haze. The forest fires raged for a week, suffocating everything, putting some jobs on hold and even closing the school for a couple days. And since all the planes were grounded—nothing was coming or leaving—Go-boy told me another few days of this and AC Store would run out of food. But he laughed and said, “We got fifteen bags of French fries in our freezer.” I checked, and we did.
At the smokiest times the world was reduced to twenty-foot sections, like islands of visibility—gliding into view of dim houses and telephone poles, then vanishing—the smell of burning in every sweatshirt hood and jacket collar. The streetlights blinked on at noon, or earlier, or maybe never shut off. The occasional Ford tried to shine through with high beams. Everyone in town stayed home and sealed their windows, and even the post office was closed. The entire village shut down.
This was when Go-boy told me about his idea of taking a boat from village to village, around the Norton Sound, letting people know about the good news.
I asked, “What good news?”
He reminded me there was a conspiracy in the works. A good conspiracy. One that would bring heaven on earth.
“I almost forgot,” I said.
This conspiracy was why he would cruise up the coast to a place he called Shak Town—Shaktoolik—a village smaller than ours. He would let them know about the good news. And he claimed I needed to come with.
Go said, “The good news is that everyone is saved. Everyone is invited to heaven on earth.”
He told me after Shaktoolik we’d hit Koyuk and Golovin and Elim and keep going right up the Sound to Nome. People were waiting for the good news. People were dying to hear the good news. People would feed us and give us places to sleep in exchange for the good news.
I said, “That’s just begging.”
And he told me he only listened to his heart. He said, “This is what I’ve always been meant to do. What we’re now meant to do.”
Kiana called on the smokiest day, asking for Go. She called every day to check on him, but this time was different. I’d slept past noon that morning because it was so dark outside, and when I woke up I couldn’t even see our neighbor’s house.
I answered the phone and Kiana didn’t give me her usual attitude. She was desperate. Urgent. She asked for her brother and I told her I hadn’t seen Go-boy all day, and then she made a noise like she would almost give up on something, a type of exhale. She said Uncle Stanley had passed out and needed to be at the clinic. All the smoke was getting to him. I knew Kiana didn’t want to talk to me or ask for my help—she was still trying to ignore me, still trying to be mad—but I liked Stanley because he was always giving Go-boy shit in an uncle sort of way, so I said, “I’ll come over.”
I walked from Happy Valley to the other side of town, through the dark-gray shadow. Everything was empty. It was weird but kind of nice, like I was someplace else. When I got to Stanley’s house he was hunched over the kitchen table and Kiana was forcing him to drink sips of water. It was no mystery why he was sick—the windows in his plywood shack just hung in the frames, with two-finger gaps in places. Other windows were covered with condensation, making the smoky view outside look watery.
“If he falls down I can’t help him up,” Kiana said, holding Stanley by the elbow.
Her index finger and thumb on both hands were stained a deep purple from picking and putting away blueberries. She had been out there on the tundra every day, despite the smoke.
We walked Stanley outside and Kiana put a ski mask on him. We helped him onto the back of the four-wheeler and I let her drive. I said I would ride my bike, but I didn’t have a bike. So I just grabbed some neighbor kid’s and pedaled off after the fading red taillights.
The nurse at the clinic said Stanley would be fine and put a breather on him and gave him air. There was nothing to be worried about, but Kiana was still acting nervous. A few more elders came in for oxygen. We sat in the lounge, waiting to hear if they needed to keep Stanley until the smoke cleared. Waiting to hear if we should wait.
Kiana said, “These places are starting to make me anxious.”
She leaned forward and smoothed her stained fingertips through her hair, and I could hear her breathing. She’d been spending all her time either in the Anchorage hospital with Sean or at the city jail with her dad, and it was wearing her down. I could see that now. I turned and looked at a painting on the wall. It was a colorful village scene—a small house with a pill-shaped fuel tank and a Native in a red coat, happy and shoveling snow from the roof.
I said, “We can take off. Stan will be fine.”
Everyone and everything around Kiana was breaking down. Everyone in the family depended on her, and Go was ignoring it all. And right then I felt bad. I wished I had agreed with her when she tried to convince me Go was crazy. I knew he was.
“We can leave now.”
Kiana rocked her body back and forth, her black hair pooling onto her lap. She was wearing a thin, long-sleeved green shirt that hiked above her waist when she leaned forward. I didn’t know if she had heard me, so I said, “Ready?” She was breathing hard now. I put my hand on the side of her shoulder and then lightly wrapped my fingers below her armpit, and pulled, and she didn’t protest my hand on her arm, she just got up out of the chair. It was the first time I had touched her in months. It was nice.
We left the four-wheeler with Uncle Stanley and walked down Main Road. I couldn’t look Kiana in the face but I knew she hadn’t been crying. She was tough and wouldn’t break down in front of me if she could help it. She was just stressed. It was getting close to supper and the smoke was still thick, but the sun had been dropping behind this grounded cloud. We walked in the empty gray tunnel like we were going nowhere.
Through the fog I could see a homemade banner of some sort—it said, #98: YOU DON’T TREAT DOGS LIKE PEOPLE. Kiana didn’t see it and I didn’t say anything.
We didn’t talk at all. It was the first time we had done anything together since I’d pissed her off and I hoped not to ruin that. The road couldn’t disappear into the smoke long enough. I wanted to keep walking like this. I wanted this to last. But I didn’t think she cared. And when we got back to Mom’s place it was over, and all I could do was head back to Go-boy’s.
She said, “Thanks.”
She stood in the doorway and I stood on the bottom step, leaning back and holding on to the two-by-four railing. We could hear a truck coming down the road. The air was charcoal now. A lightbulb shined above us. Headlights popped through the smoke and passed the house in a blink. Then it was silent. Next door, at Stanley’s house, we had left the front door wide open. I couldn’t see his place through the haze, but I could hear a faucet running in his bathroom at the end of the hall. The high-pitched whistle of water washing into the sink seemed extra clear through the smoke. This was the faucet Stanley left running around the clock all winter to avoid frozen pipes. Even Stanley was expecting the first freeze any day now.
“What’s that scar from?” Kiana asked and pointed at my cheek, drawing a boomerang shape in the air between us with her purple fingertip.
I touched the hair by my left ear and traced down to the corner of my jaw. “Accident,” I said, lying.
“Car accident?”
I nodded.
She looked curious, like maybe she didn’t believe me. I didn’t want to tell her it was from a knife, from a fight. She knew a few things about my past and I didn’t want to give her any more hints of who I had been in LA, or what I’d done, and I didn’t want her to know I was trying to move back. Go might have told Kiana that my old friends would want me dead because I’d left the gang, but neither of them knew about the gang rape, and none of that seemed real while I stood there with her. Talking about LA with Kiana embarrassed me.
She didn’t say anything and looked ready to walk into the house. I wanted to keep her there a little longer. She was holding the doorknob, and I could hear it start to spin and the door start to scratch open.
I said, “I think you’re right about Go-boy.”
She leaned away from the house, not breathing. She was looking right at me now, right on top of every word. I was waiting for another thank you, or some kind of sigh of relief. I was waiting for everything to slip into place. Ready for her to apologize, and mean it. But she didn’t talk.
I told her, “I think he’s crazy.”
The smoke started to thin later in the week. Planes were still grounded and the town was still empty but from time to time an ocean breeze would push the smoke back and reveal a blue sky for a few minutes. This was when Go-boy left me a yellow note stuck to the on/off button of our TV—MEET ME BY THE BOAT, TWO O’CLOCK. WE’RE SPREADING GOOD NEWS.
He was talking about Shaktoolik.
The short walk to the slough seemed a little farther with the haze. I could see the sun behind this gray fog, a scar in the middle of the sky. Houses that were two blocks down the gravel road looked blurred. And the campfire smell, which had soaked into everything, no longer seemed like an issue.
I walked on Main Road, cut between a garage and a log fish rack, and walked down an embankment to the slough. Everything was dead and brown—the knee-high crabgrass, the weeds growing in the corners of buildings, the tundra that climbed the surrounding hills. Even the gravel roads had lost color. Before the smoke came it seemed things still had life, but now that the haze was lifting it looked like fall had already come and gone. This wasn’t the typical forest-fire season and people were talking about that. People couldn’t figure out why all those trees were burning so late in the year. And people couldn’t figure out why, in spite of everything turning brown, the cold weather hadn’t yet come.
Go-boy wasn’t at the shore. In his boat was a rusty lawn chair next to the steering wheel. Next to that a backpack that had a rainbow flag sewn on with yellow fishing line, a box of Sailor Boy crackers, and a six-pack of pop.
I sat in the boat waiting for Go, floating a few feet from shore.
A cop in a pickup drove along the road that paralleled the slough, past a truck and two Honda four-wheelers parked along the edge. He drove slow through the haze, past the dumpsters and the garbage compactor to the edge of the bridge, then turned back around, rolled his window open, and yelled down to me, asking if I had seen Go-boy. I said no, which wasn’t a total lie.
“We’ve got a restraining order to issue him,” he said.
I shook my head and the VPO drove off.
I grabbed a soda and opened it. Soda was part of the reason the cops were looking for Go. He had been posting signs all over town. One big one said, REASON #55: YOU LIKE PEPSI, and it was stapled to an abandoned building across from the church. He’d started putting the signs up when the smoke was the thickest, and now, with the haze lifting, we could see them everywhere. Each poster was part of the list Go-boy had written for Valerie—101 Things I Love About Valerie. I’d read a few in his letter to Yoko Ono, but I didn’t think he had written all one hundred and one reasons.
I opened the backpack to make sure it was Go-boy’s stuff. I found wads of yellow sticky notes and legal pads and a couple books. I read some of the things he had written. Most of it was the kind of stuff people jot down to remember ideas. I dug around in some of the other pouches. He had a pocketknife. A foot-long chunk of black electrical wire. A cinnamon granola bar that had been in there so long it was now just a wrapper full of powder.
Then I found a small yellow package—an envelope—much like the manila envelope I had mailed for Go weeks before. It was addressed to Yoko Ono, again, and the address was framed in thin blue lines. Outside the lines, it read, IT’S JUST A BLUEPRINT. On the back, the flap side, there were a few philosophical quotes and prophetic drawings. Quick statements. Observations. The letter was also handwritten, but this time more like a formal letter and less like an outline. Some parts were crossed out but still readable. There were notes in the margins. I read the first paragraph—
Dear Yoko Ono,
Forget about the 7,000,000 dollars for a moment. I want to share a profound idea—a t-shirt design! I’m envisioning yellowgold shirts with the phrase SAME-SAME across the chest in gold print. It is a village saying meaning two people are similar, like, “Man, real same-same you two.” On one person the t-shirt might not mean anything. But on two people it begins to mean something. So it’s my plan to make thousands of these t-shirts, or maybe millions. Then it will begin to mean what we know it means.
I didn’t read the rest.
When the cop was gone Go came running out from under the bridge, down the sandy shoreline. He had a can of Krylon spray paint, and he looked to the left and right.
“Ready?” he said, and walked past me and pulled in the back anchor.
I asked him where he was taking me.
Go fired up the motor, said, “See it?” and pointed at the Kuuk Bridge.
Right there, almost on top of us, in bright orange spray paint, crooked and covering about a quarter of the wall, it said, #37: YOU WEAR T-SHIRTS INSIDE OUT.
“And you’re running for mayor?”
“Real upside-down world, ah?”
I gave him a confused look. He turned and picked up a red gas tank, shaking it, checking that it was full enough. He did the same to a second one.
He said, “It’s like at this Indian’s initiation one time. An elder told the boy, ‘As you go the way of life, you will see a great chasm. Jump. It’s not as wide as you think.’”
He backed the boat into the channel, its engine rumbling like a street-rod’s, and I said, “Maybe it’s not a chasm, maybe it’s the deep end.”
“Same-same, man.”
“You know the cops are looking for you?”
He pushed the hammer down, and we took off toward the ocean.
The cop was after Go-boy because this list was scaring Valerie. She’d turned down his marriage proposal a few months back, but Go was still posting his love for her all over town.
The first sign I saw was while walking through the smoke with Kiana. After that I saw them everywhere. I read #53: YOU SAY CROOK’D INSTEAD OF CROOKED on Native Store’s bulletin board pinned between a snowmachine sled classified and a Fish and Game flyer. I read reason number one at the post office and reason number seventy-six at the airport. I remember number sixty-one, tacked on the side of an abandoned Conex container. It said, YOUR THUMB IS MORE WRINKLED THAN THE REST OF YOUR FINGERS.
Go slowed the boat as we rounded a corner by the fish plant. He waved to an old woman who was backing a little flatboat into the water with her four-wheeler. The lady waved too. Around the turn, the mouth of the river opened up into the ocean. Buoys marked the channel.
Go-boy hollered at me above the engine noise and pointed at the seawall. Attached to the chain-link barrier, ten feet above shore, was a white bedsheet spread out like a banner. It said, #71: YOU THINK THE APOSTLE PAUL WAS A REPRESSED HOMOSEXUAL.
I looked at Go and he was smiling.
The boat thumped toward Shaktoolik and I had to talk myself out of getting seasick. I looked up at the patchy sky. I breathed deep. This was nothing like boating in the river. Even though the water was pretty calm, we were paralleling the coast and so the waves were hitting us at a side angle, jumping the boat in quick little S-shapes.
Just outside town we saw two guys sitting on the beach by a fire. They were drinking booze from Gatorade bottles and throwing rocks at an abandoned shoe that was set up as a target. Go-boy waved, and they waved back. He said it was Tom and Yobert.
“Yobert?”
“Yeah,” he said. The guy’s name was Robert but he always walked around town saying Yo! to everyone. All day every day, Yo! I hadn’t met these guys. Go-boy said Uncle Stanley gave him the nickname after Yobert said Yo! to him.
Go said, “Until last week, those two hated each other.” He said this like he had something to do with it, like it was because of him they were friends again, and this convinced me to find out if Go was crazy or not.
“How old are they?”
“Tom and Yobert?” Go said. “They’re my age. We all graduated together.”
“Do they work?”
Go paused, gave me a little smile that was supposed to mean something, and said, “Man, they’re working right now.”
When we were ten miles out of town we could see an island on the horizon. Go called it Besboro. It was shaped like the silhouette of an old Converse high-top. Besboro was how the airport knew if it was safe for planes to fly or land—if they could see the island from town, visibility was good enough.
“So what’s your tattoo really mean?”
He held out his arm and looked it up and down. And then he told me he’d tried to kill himself after he’d asked Valerie to marry him, after she’d said no, when he’d disappeared for a month. He drank himself miserable till he was holding a gun against his head. He said if there were bullets, he’d be dead. But he passed out before he could find any. After that he changed everything—he discovered the meaning of life. At that moment, when Go decided he wasn’t going to follow anybody anymore, he said he literally went to heaven.
“That’s what your tattoo is about?”
He said, “I had been living for everyone else. I never trusted my own instincts, or my own thoughts or ideas. Only what others thought.”
This was just days after I told Kiana I suspected he was crazy, and this was why I hadn’t believed her in the first place when she said Go needed help—he always made sense. He always said the exact right thing at the exact right time.
“Look,” he said, and shut the engine off. “Here’s the truth. I’ve never liked myself. I’ve subconsciously believed there would always be heartbreak and trouble in my future. But when I finally realized that I was my own destiny, I realized that life or death was up to me. That’s when I chose to follow my heart and live for myself. Victor Frankl said, ‘Suffering, once articulated, ceases to be suffering.’ I no longer suffer.”
We were about halfway to Shak Town. The boat faced away from land. We were silent a few minutes and then Go-boy quoted a few more people—Socrates, Bob Dylan, Muhammad. He stood up and looked out over the ocean and exhaled, as if he was exhausted with his explanations too.
We floated. Then Go pointed about twenty yards ahead, said, “Right there!”
“What?”
“Beluga whales!”
I looked around but couldn’t see anything.
I was looking for big fish-colored bodies, but then saw white. It was two, maybe three white whales, like Chevy Suburbans floating at the surface.
“We eat those,” he said.
“They’re white.”
Go said, “You’ve seen muktuk at potlucks. It’s their skin and blubber.”
I grabbed another soda from under the lawn chair. Now the boat was facing the waves and the up-and-down motion wasn’t as sickening. The whales blew out of the water a few times and disappeared.
I still didn’t know if Go was crazy. I didn’t have proof either way. I said, “You love this girl because she drinks Pepsi?”
Go-boy laughed a little but didn’t say anything.
Sometime after I opened that pop we both sat on the floor of the boat, facing each other. With our knees bent in front of us, we leaned back against the welded blue walls. The silence of wind and water was audible with the engine off. We just floated. The boat rolled front to back over a constant line of waves and slurping, but we couldn’t see the ocean over the sides. Just sky. Saltwater shot onto the floor and washed toward the rear drain, sliding past our legs like spit on windshields. And the air above us hollowed out, not near as smoky as in town.
“I originally was going to make the list ten thousand reasons.”
I laughed. But Go was serious. I said, “Where would you have put them all?”
“I wanted to show myself that I could simply appreciate another person.”
“But there’s not even ten thousand places in town,” I said.
“I wanted to prove that I could appreciate a girl without always wanting something back.”
Go pulled out a bag of coaster-sized crackers and offered me one.
I asked, “And now the cops are after you?”
He told me that the notes all over town might not be the real reason the cops were looking for him. It might have been something he’d done on the smokiest day. It was the same day I had gone to the clinic with Kiana. Go-boy had been trying to talk to Valerie, but nobody would tell him where she was. All her relatives were protecting her. They thought Go was being too forward, too aggressive. Her dad had just died. She needed space. But Go-boy called it honesty. Called it destiny. He even used the word free. Valerie didn’t see it that way—she was freaked out.
Go-boy said he wrapped himself in red Christmas lights from head to toe and wired them up with nine-volt batteries. He walked to Valerie’s house like this, carrying a boom box. He said in the smoke it must’ve looked cool. The daytime, dark, choked inside a cloud of dishwater gray. The town empty. The airplanes grounded. The whole village on pause until east winds would be trumped by stronger winds from the west. And Go was in the middle of it all, walking alone, walking down a gravel road, glowing red, a boom box on his shoulder.
I laughed.
He told me it was just like Valerie’s favorite movie. I didn’t know which one he was talking about, but I guessed how Go’s story ended—he stood outside the girl’s bedroom window, afraid but shameless, her favorite song booming from a stereo; Go-boy, in love, laying it all out there, letting nothing get in his way of pursuing this girl. And that was what he did. But the stereo died before he got to Valerie’s, so he sang a Ben Harper song called “Forever” with no music.
I said, “I’m not surprised she called the cops.”
“Pretty good, ah?”
“That kind of stupid’s got to be illegal somewhere.”
Go said, “Give me a lever and a place to stand and I will move the world.”
He pulled a small baggie from his coat and tossed it to me. It was weed. My weed—the weed I’d left in Uncle Stanley’s cabin on one of my bike rides up the road. Most of it was gone.
Go smiled, said, “When we see ourselves without judgment, then we’ll begin to see and accept others without judgment. We’ll turn the volume down on the external world, and we’ll see we’re all connected, we’re all same-same.”
He passed more crackers. It seemed the waves had stopped.
I thought about the fact that Go’s actions never seemed crazy when he was explaining them to me, or when I was witnessing them. It was only later, after a day or two, when all his stories blurred together and I knew something wasn’t right. But maybe I just wanted to believe he was nuts because of what I had told Kiana. I wasn’t sure. Go was acting crazy and doing dumb shit, but he still didn’t seem like he needed help. He knew who he was and what he was doing and what he wanted. For once, Go seemed content.
At some point we both stood up and saw that the boat was beached, stuck hard in black muck. The motor buried in mud. We had floated too long and the waves had pushed us at an angle till we’d hit shore. We checked up and down the coast. Nothing was anywhere except this enormous mound of rock, towering above us. A cliff, hundreds of feet high. The face was cut with diagonal lines as if hacked by a butter knife. I remembered asking a girl in town what had caused those crooked grooves. She was an MIT grad and told me rocks weren’t her field, but it was probably from glaciers. We were stuck right below this. And there was something comforting about it.
“Tide’s going out.”
“Shit,” I said, not worried.
He started laughing, and we each sat on an edge of the boat.
“Is this part of your plan?”
He laughed again.
I grabbed the Sailor Boys and we ate more crackers and drank more pop, and for about an hour we watched the ocean pull away while the sun beat down on top of us. Down the coast we could see the clouds of smoke from the forest fires, still burning, still fogging Unk. We didn’t talk about anything, or if we did, I don’t remember what we said. It was the perfect moment to forget. It was the first time in months that there was no tension pushing and pulling between us. We were just living. Wanting and needing nothing. Planning nothing. We were ourselves and in agreement with everything else around us. Long after this day passed, I would look back on this moment—the moment I couldn’t remember—and feel as if it were my first religious experience.
After an hour or so, Go said, “How much you need for a plane ticket?”
“To LA?”
“Yeah,” he said.
I hadn’t even checked to see what it would cost. I didn’t expect to get an offer. At least, I didn’t expect it to be so easy. Since our bet—when I’d first arrived in town—Go had been convinced that I would stay in Unk forever.
I said, “Maybe.”
“Okay,” he said, and pulled a wallet from his backpack and counted out a thousand dollars in twenties.
“What?”
“Yeah,” he said. “Take it.”
I waited. I wanted to tell him about the gang rape, the girl, and everything that had led up to it. He had just given me his life story and now he was trying to give me this money, and I felt like he didn’t really know who I was. I felt like he maybe thought we wanted similar things and believed similar things and had experienced similar things. But we hadn’t. And I was afraid to tell him about the gang rape because I was afraid he’d realize we weren’t the same.
He said, “I think we need a member of the conspiracy in California.”
Then he smiled, and I took the cash.
We both fell asleep in the sunshine and when I woke up the sun had started to set behind the water. Go was gone, and I wasn’t surprised. Go was always walking off without telling anyone. Even when we were doing things together he’d manage to vanish.
I took my shoes off, rolled my jeans, and hopped out of the boat into the mud, sinking to my ankles. Go had tossed an anchor onto shore so the boat wouldn’t float away when the tide went back up. I hit the shore and cleaned my feet with my socks, then left the socks on the stones and slipped barefoot into my shoes.
I walked for what seemed like hours. I got a blister on each heel and I didn’t even mind. I knew if I followed the beach long enough I’d get home. Even in the trailing smoke that was getting thicker the closer I got to town, if I walked too far I’d run into the river and the seawall.
I thought about stopping by Kiana’s place. I now had a reason to talk to her and wanted to see her again. I’d tell her the cops were looking for her brother. That Go had planned to make the list ten thousand reasons long. That he’d given me a thousand dollars cash. All proof he was crazy and needed help. All proof that Kiana should be okay with me again. That I was on her side. But was I convinced?
After Kiana and me took Stanley to the clinic and I first told her I thought Go-boy was nuts, she didn’t say anything for a long time. I stood on the bottom step and she was in the doorway. I continued to listen to the running water from Stanley’s house. After a while Kiana shook her head, said, “I don’t know anymore.” She said, “I don’t think so.”
“But you’ve been saying this for weeks.”
And she said she knew that, but now she thought it was more simple. She thought Go was in love. “You really think he’s crazy?”
“He disappears for a month, then comes back acting like nothing is weird, then he decides to run for mayor. You’ve been right this whole time. Something’s off.”
She said, “But that’s just Go. He’s always been impulsive. I think he’s just lovesick.”
Afterward, before I turned to walk home in the smoke, Kiana ran her stained fingertips through her hair, and when she did that, the sleeve of her shirt fell to her elbow, and I saw she was wearing a wristwatch. My wristwatch. I had left it on my dresser along with all the other things I’d left behind in my room, along with all my stuff that Kiana had boxed up and moved to storage. The wristwatch was simple—leather band, black face, silver trim and hands—but there was nothing simple about her wearing it. The watch looked good on her bony wrist. It was good to see she wanted to wear—and have—something of mine.
Kiana then said good-bye, smiled, and said thanks, like maybe me and her had a chance. And then I didn’t care about anything else.
I knew I was close to town when I walked past those two guys sitting by a fire. Through the lingering gray fog I saw a small flame. They were burning a big chunk of driftwood, the smoke rising up from shore and then blurring into the rest of the cloud. One guy was passed out. The other looked at me like he didn’t know what was happening. I nodded, stepping over the branch of driftwood that wasn’t on fire. He acted like he couldn’t see me. I said, “Yo!” as I passed. He kept looking and squinting. I just walked.
Piles of dull driftwood ran parallel to the beach, pushed up by storms. I turned away from the shoreline, climbed the logs, and walked along the chain-link fence that bordered the airport runway. There were signs attached to the posts every thirty feet or so, saying AIRPORT, KEEP OUT. I knew I was close to the road.
Then I saw a homemade sign tacked below one of the airport’s. It was a coffee can, no label, cut vertical and flattened. In white paint, I read #101: WHEN WE HELD HANDS FOR THE FIRST TIME, WALKING ACROSS THE BRIDGE, AND IT WAS PERFECTLY SILENT, I COULD HEAR YOU SMILE.
As I walked farther down the beach I smoothed the stack of twenties between my fingers in my jacket pocket. I had a thousand bucks. I had possibilities. I had known people to get shot over this kind of cash. And it was right there in my pocket, and I could use it. I had wanted to leave the village all summer and now could do whatever I wanted. Anything. But for some reason, it was unsettling.
So I kept walking and smoothing the cash, the thick stack in my hand. I kept walking even when I got back into town, right down Airport Road, right past our house. The smoke was the thickest it had been. I stepped around puddles and watched the hazy gravel road unravel ten feet in front of me. There was a loose dog in the ditch next to a rusted dump truck. The mutt scratched at something in the dirt. And I kept walking with that money, all over town, like maybe if I stopped walking, it would disappear.