There’s ice cream if you and Jinxie want some: that’s what my mom had written on the note she left. I’d seen her tape it on the refrigerator just before she and Dad went out for the evening.
I was surprised that they were letting me stay alone at home with a girl; it was an indication of their trust, or, more likely, of their belief—their conviction—that I would be a boy forever, a boy with lean legs and clean white briefs: my mom called them undies. I was fifteen. Jinxie was fifteen. My buddy, Mosey Shargool, used to pipe her. That’s what he’d called it: piping, laying pipe.
I brushed my teeth, ran my dad’s electric razor around my face, used his deodorant and a spritz of cheap blue aftershave. I didn’t want to eat ice cream with Jinxie. I didn’t want to pipe her. A kiss, a hand up her shirt, that was enough for now.
At eight-thirty I made sure the ringer was turned on, checked the freezer to see what kind of ice cream we had—peanut butter. I dialed the first six digits of her number. My hand trembled. I cleared my throat. Someone knocked at the door and I hung up.
I wiped my palms on my shirt, checked my corduroys to make sure the crotch slack wasn’t bulged up as if over a boner. More knocking, knocks I recognized. Mosey: he used both fists. I went to the living room. He was standing on the front porch with his nose pressed into the screen. “The cunt’s in the car,” he said.
I didn’t believe him. I went out to the porch. His car was in the driveway, Jinxie was in the front seat. She waved me over. “Come on,” she said. “We’re going to find out which one of us’ll die first—you, me, or Mosey. Plus we got beer.”
“After midnight,” Mosey said. “It won’t work until then.” He explained that we were about to speak with the dead: you say their name three times on the anniversary of their death, and the dead tell you the name of someone who’ll die soon. They whisper. You have to concentrate.
“Baloney,” I said.
Mosey laughed. “Baloney? You sound like my grandma.”
“What’s wrong with sounding like your grandma?” Jinxie said.
“That’s a worthwhile quandary,” he said, “it’s a supercharged pickle, it is. Grandma, grandma, burning bright, up the poop chute every night.”
“What’s that?”
Mosey got in the car. “It’s poetry, it’s a public service announcement.”
They laughed. I slunk into the backseat. Jinxie tossed a pill into her mouth and turned around in the seat. “Want one?” She and Mosey had been drinking beer and smoking grass since they were eleven. At that age I was collecting baseball cards. I had the whole Pirates team with some doubles.
“No,” I said, “not now.”
Mosey tossed me a beer. “Drink up, Superfly,” he said. I didn’t know why he called me that. I liked it, though. It cheered me up some. We drove. There was a stretch of road on Mill Run where we hit eighty miles an hour over dips that make your balls buckle. We talked about music, we talked about ghosts. I wanted Jinxie to sit in the backseat with me. Mosey sang a song about his grandma’s ass.
I rolled my window down. The night was clear and starburnt. The stars all along the horizon, above the ridges and slopes and treetops. We cruised around, halfway to Billings and back, waiting for midnight. I looked at Jinxie’s hair.
“Anymore beer?” Mosey asked.
We stopped the car, got out, and opened the trunk to get to the cooler. I fished through the ice water for the last two Yeunglings, set one on the car roof and opened the other. It fizzed and spilled on my shirt. I drank, thinking of excuses to my parents: they made me do it, I lost track of time, I just had a sip. The ice cream: I’d left it melting on the kitchen table.
Across fences families slept. Crickets chickered and an owl hooted twice. “How many times do we have to say their name?” Jinxie asked. Her collar was up, everything was up, her eyelashes and her hair, and she was hovering on the little pill she’d plopped under her tongue.
Mosey set fire to a newspaper left in a plastic roadside delivery box. “Three.” He took his beer from the car.
“Mine’s skunked,” I said. “Tastes like death.”
“Now you’re talking,” Mosey said. “We need more beer first. Then we’ll hear from our ghost.”
“Mueller’s has a six-pack shop,” I said.
Jinxie spat. “Not Mueller’s. They card. Last chance.” She held half of the last cigarette out to us, pinching it near the cherry to give us a grip on the lipsticked butt. I knew Mosey wouldn’t take it, so I did. I thought Jinxie and I were kind of together, and I wanted to show her what together meant, and I wanted to show Mosey. And I hoped he’d die next; I wished he was dead then, or at least gone.
“That shit’s gross,” he said. “You might as well let her spit in your mouth and get it over with. Instead of being so sophomoric.”
“This again,” Jinxie said. He’d been ridiculing our sophomore status at Windfall High since the school year started.
The newspaper box flared up. Flame tongues reflected in the three crescent moons in Jinxie’s earlobe. A breeze twitched her bangs and branches shook, dropping leaves. They landed on the car. “Give it here, Superfly,” she said to me. I handed her my beer. “Are we going to do this or what?” She drank.
“Y’ins two make me sick,” Mosey said.
Jinxie stretched her arms up and yawned. She had silky blue eyes, worn down like they’d been dragged across a washboard. A falling leaf stuck in her hair. She finished the beer and handed the empty can back to me.
I started goofing off, pretending I was drunk. I crawled through the window into the backseat of the car. I had a reputation for being clever and moody, a twisted genius. I nurtured it. I wanted at least to kiss Jinxie. I’d never kissed anyone. “We going to sit around here like assholes all night?” I called out the window.
“We’ll get a sixer at the Nestegg,” Mosey said. Jinxie reached for his beer now. He took one final suck and gave it to her. “Keep it,” he said. “I already got as much as I wanted.” He opened the passenger’s side door for her. “Let’s go, bitch.”
“Hey,” I said. “Hey.”
“A bitch by any other name would smell just as sweet,” Mosey said. He put his slanty eyes on my face. Sometimes people mistook him for a green-eyed Jap. His last name was Shargool. He said it was Mongolian, his dad told him that. The burning paper-box dripped blue plastic that glowed and stunk. In the glare of that fire Jinxie looked like a figure in a painting, she looked like a girl stepping out of a dark bath. She took the leaf that was stuck in her hair and crushed it in her hand.
She finished Mosey’s beer, looked at me, and stuck out her tongue. Then she got in the front, opened the glove box to get her tapes, and jumped over the seat into my lap. Her face was too close to look at. I leaned back. She dropped forward and kissed me. Little texture pricks from her hard thin tongue. When I went deep I could taste some old mouth stink that she probably couldn’t get rid of. I guessed I had the taste too. She put my hands on her waist. I steered her over where I was hard. She plunged her fingers into my neck and tongued the backsides of my teeth. I thought for a second about home. My parents didn’t know where I was, they’d be waiting up or even looking for me.
Mosey got in the car. “You might as well be giving me head,” Mosey said. “By the properties of geometric transitivity. A equals B equals C. She sucks my dick, you suck her face, you suck my dick.” Jinxie told Mosey to go jerk off, but she said it with a smile.
Mosey pulled into the Nestegg. Its sign showed a tipped martini glass with a bloody eyeball spilling out. Behind the darkened lounge windows, comatose silhouettes. Mosey went inside to buy beer. Me and Jinxie kissed again. My hands ached at her waist but she wouldn’t budge up. She flipped her Tweety Bird T-shirt out and I touched her warm belly. Some guy’s dick was in her mouth before I even had a chance to kiss her, the past slugged now like a tarp between us. She put her hands under my shirt. Her fingers were cold. I jerked back from her touch and she laughed. “Cold?”
I took her hands in mine to make them warm. I looked at her. She was pretty. One of her upper front teeth was brown at the bottom. Her neck was white. Her blue eyes. Her gaze said not impressed. “What are you doing tomorrow?” I asked her.
“Sleeping,” she said. “All day long. You can come over if you want.”
Mosey got in the car and handed a six-pack of Yeunglings back to us. “Smells like popcorn butter,” he said, looking at us in the rearview. Jinxie told him to shut up and started laughing. Mosey kept saying, “Popcorn butter, popcorn butter.”
I asked what he was talking about. Jinxie shook her head. Her cheeks and chin trembled. “Nothing,” she said. I put my hand in her hair. She told me not to fuck it up. It was Irish-setter red, marionetted up with pins and spray, dry as old husks.
“It’s past midnight, right?” Mosey asked.
I looked at my watch. “Twelve-thirty.”
“Hand me one of those,” Mosey said. “I’ll open it myself.” He steered with his knees and opened the can I’d handed to him. We were going across Muleshoe Bridge. Over the old tracks and a line of cars that never moved. People threw garbage off the bridge. It landed in a coal car. I’d thrown my baseball cards in there weeks before, some comic books, too, Spiderman ones.
Mosey pulled the car over. “Hold on, I have to piss,” he said. Jinxie was holding my hand. Her eyes were closed.
“Why didn’t you piss at the Nestegg?” I asked.
“Place is dirty. I can’t pee in places like that. It won’t come out, I’m serious. Hand me any empties you got back there while I’m at it.”
I gave him the empty cans. He threw them off the bridge, then unzipped and pissed in the middle of the road. It curdled against the black top. I stroked Jinxie’s arm. She opened her eyes and watched Mosey piss. The wind swept in the stink of his puddle. He zipped up and got back in the car. “Henry Orly wasn’t really killed by the state police,” he said. “Well, he was killed by them, only not the way you think.”
“Like hell,” I said. “It was in the paper. He pulled a twenty-two pistol and the cops shot him.”
Mosey started along the bridge again, and hooked a left on Collier to slink up the hill to the graveyard at Loyal Knob. “He was more fucked up than anybody knows. We’re all fucked up, though.” He turned up the radio and said, “Attention all sophomores: Ozzy rules.”
“We’re all fucked up, though,” Jinxie said.
Mosey and I were neighbors and that’s how we got to be friends. Our dads hunted together each fall, our mothers watched soaps and determined the bitch of the week. The year Mosey started senior high, Jinxie and I were still in ninth grade in junior high. The two buildings, senior and junior, were separated by the football field. That’s where he and Jinxie used to meet. He’d wait for her at the goalposts in the practice field and chase her into the woods. For most of that year I didn’t see much of him. But I had Algebra and Spanish with Jinxie. She smoked in the bathrooms, got caught stealing another girl’s leather jacket from her locker. She sat in front of me—she was Dudek, I was Few, and there were no E’s in our school except for Scott English, who was half retarded. They said his mother was on something when Scott was inside her. One of his eyelids was lazy. He had a crazed and betrayed look. He had a drunk’s bloodshot eyes. And under his red eyes purple shadows. He said, “Jesus Mary and fucking Joseph,” when you walked by.
Scott had a crush on Jinxie. He used to call her at night and tell her about his soldiers. He said he had them in a defensive formation. An attack was coming and they would be ready. The fortress would not be penetrated. Jinxie told Mosey, and Mosey waited for him one day after school.
“You been bothering Jinxie?” he asked.
It was January and Scott was wearing a long scarf. His mother must have knit it for him. It hung from both his shoulders all the way to the ground. It pulled his neck down, I thought, to keep his head from dizzying up into the atmosphere.
Mosey asked him again. A circle of people gathered around. I was there, and Jinxie too, and about ten other people. “You stop bugging her, okay?” Mosey said, and pushed Scott’s shoulder. Scott said, “not my fault.” He said it again and again. Mosey took Scott’s scarf and wrapped it around his face. He spun Scott in circles and shoved him against a wall. Scott’s head, bundled up in his scarf, banged against the brick side of the building. He slumped down. His head looked exploded and bandaged. He started shouting. All of it muffled, like bawling through a capped pipe. Everyone started leaving. I grabbed Mosey’s arm and led him around the corner of the building. “He’s retarded,” I told him. “He doesn’t know what the hell he’s talking about.”
“Get Jinxie for me,” Mosey said.
I went back around the corner and saw Jinxie leaning down beside Scott. She unwrapped his head. Gentle and slow like a nurse undoing gauze. She took the end and kept unraveling it from his face, folding it over her other arm as she went. Finally his face was there, ballooned red from crying. He looked down, saying, “Jesus Mary and Joseph, Jesus Mary and Joseph.”
“Help me get him up,” she said. We took Scott under the shoulders and stood him up.
“Mosey’s waiting for you.”
“Tell him to wait in our spot,” she said. I went back around the corner, but Mosey was gone. Probably flew off it when he saw Jinxie fawning Scott.
I went back to Jinxie, and we started to walk Scott home. We didn’t know where he lived, and he didn’t know the address, but he knew how to get there. We walked behind him and talked a little, but really said nothing. Tufts of melting snow leaked into drainage gratings. Sunlight ricocheted from ice patches to widths of glass and back. Jinxie and I talked about Mosey and Mr. Duluth, our algebra teacher. “He’s a total fucking asshole,” Jinxie said. “I never met such an asshole in my life.”
“Duluth?” I asked.
“Whoever you want. Everybody.”
Scott started running across the street and up onto his front porch. “The fortress will not be penetrated,” he shouted, and sat on his porch steps, watching us wave good-bye. We’d walked nearly a mile, I guess, cutting up alleys and drawing aside sheets on laundry lines, to get to Scott’s house, only to discover that Scott’s place was only about two blocks away from the school.
“That kid’s a fucking retard,” I said to Jinxie.
“Shut up,” she said. “Be nice to him.”
“I will,” I said. “I mean I am.”
She asked me if I’d done my Spanish homework yet. “Yeah,” I said. “I finished it in the homeroom period.” I realized then that she might have wanted to study together. I was two weeks into fifteen. I’d never even walked along the street with a girl before. I was honest, just gave her the answer. I wanted to change my mind or tell her she could copy my homework, but she’d already turned around and started heading back toward the school, toward the football field, and to her spot, where Mosey would be waiting for her with a six-pack and a blanket.
It was at a party, once me and Jinxie were about to start sophomore year at the senior high, that we talked more. She and Mosey had broken up. It was August and I was sitting on a sofa. Everyone else was on the back porch getting high. I was afraid to smoke dope. I tried it once and yelled at some people, telling them to stop touching me.
Jinxie came in, lay down on the sofa with her head on my lap, and fell asleep. A few guys slobbed up, jocks with necklaces and cologne and stupid, thumbtack eyes. “You getting some of that too?” one of them asked me. He was called Schmidt. “You should have seen her out back before.” He smacked her thigh, he turned on some music. He and the other guys stared at her legs.
“Yeah,” I said. “I hit that shit.”
“Hit it and quit it,” Schmidt said. The other guy high-fived him and they both whoo-hooed like they’d just won the lottery.
When Jinxie woke up, I walked her home. It was still dark, but giving up stars to dawn. The birds in the trees started winging in the leaves over our heads. When we got to her house she said thanks and tripped on the steps into the side door. I hoped she’d ask me in and blow me in her bedroom. Instead she slammed inside the house and immediately a light went on upstairs. The screen door yawned shut behind her.
She called me that night. “Wayne, a girl for you,” my mom said. She gave me the phone and I felt my face turn red. I never wanted my parents to know anything. After a shower I slapped water around the tub to send the hairs from my balls down the drain. The night of that party my parents had thought I was dreaming of sugarplums in a pup tent in Darren Harlenburg’s backyard.
“Hey, you,” Jinxie said. Her voice was like a berry being squeezed. We talked for a few hours every night for a few weeks. I invited her over to watch a video.
“Sure,” she’d said. “That sounds cute, Superfly.”
Mom had said the same thing: “Cute, that’s cute.”
One A.M.
We parked on the cemetery road and tried to pick threads of noise from the silence: crickets, footsteps, motor clicks, dead noises. Jinxie thought she heard a scream. A song we all liked came on, and I was happy, Jinxie high and holding my hand.
We drank some more beer. Jinxie and I kept kissing. Mosey watched in the rearview mirror. I thought about getting down her pants. I made myself wait. I wanted to wait.
“Okay,” Mosey said, watching us, “either progress to phase two or else let’s go.”
Jinxie kissed my nose and pinched my earlobes in her fingers. She whispered: Super-fucking-fly.
We got out of the car and wandered among the vandalized stones. Some of them were busted off at the edges, others tilted at weird angles as if from the force of roots or spirits. “So what happened, if the cops didn’t shoot Henry Orly,” I asked Mosey.
“The cops did shoot him,” Mosey said. “Seven times in the back and neck. My uncle has a scanner. Wait.” He leaned down in front of a grave marker. There was a little empty pot there in the grass in front of it. It was too dark to read and Mosey ran his fingers against the name chiseled into the marble. “Owens,” he said. “Not it. But he’s here somewhere.”
Jinxie was walking behind me, reaching up to keep hold of my hand. “I’m tired,” she said. “Anyways let’s forget about it. It’s fucked up. I don’t believe in ghosts or souls. You die, you die.”
I was surprised. I didn’t know a girl could really feel that way. I didn’t want her to.
“Take it easy,” Mosey said. “You just say their name and that’s all. They can’t do anything to us. They’re dead.”
Jinxie sat down and I sat beside her. “Hold up, Mosey,” I said. He sat opposite us. The moonlight handled his face. His skin glowed like a shot picture tube. His hands made shadows on his legs.
“A few weeks ago I was over at the Orlys’ place,” he said. “I used to deliver papers to them and sometimes I still take the route when the other kid gets sick. Actually I used to know Mr. Orly pretty well. He buys a lot of tackle from my dad’s shop. We went fishing once up Blue Creek. Henry came too. This is before he got mixed up with those guys from Huntingdon. I was about twelve and he was maybe fifteen. He was cool. I didn’t catch any fish but he gave me one of his.
“So I was delivering their paper last month and I see a cop car pulling away from their house. I slip up on the porch to tuck their paper under the mat. And there’s Mr. Orly looking right down at me like he wants me to come in. He opens the door. Mrs. Orly’s in there begging me to come inside. She offers me hot chocolate like I’m some cheery sled-rider and starts talking about how she remembers that one summer Henry’s dog bit me, and it wasn’t even true, but I was just nodding and looking back and forth between him and her. She’s going on and on, and Mr. Orly’s like, don’t bother him with this, and she goes, ‘Why not? Mosey was Henry’s close friend. I want Mosey to judge for himself.’ She keeps yapping away about how once I stayed over night at their place and she gave me strawberries and then called my mother at three in the morning to ask if I was allergic to them. You sleeping?”
“No,” I said. “She is. I think.”
“You like her? Give me another beer.”
“Last one,” I said. “We’ll share it.”
“I drink first,” Mosey said. “You already got my germs. I don’t want yours.”
I didn’t care. I was against a tree with Jinxie’s head on my shoulder. I was her boyfriend. The night had turned out okay. I gave Mosey the beer. “Keep going,” I said.
He slurped at the pop-top hole. “Okay. So Mrs. Orly says, ‘Oh, I don’t blame Henry for getting mixed up in drinking and gambling. What kind of society do we live in where we can judge someone like Henry while at the same time we’re playing cards and drinking beer, even if it’s only a sip, I mean? Don’t get me started on that for now,’ and all that kind of crap. All this time her nipples are poking through her shirt—no bra—and we’re talking about huge saggers, boy, and hard nipples. Mr. Orly keeps shaking his head like he wants her to shut up but he doesn’t have the balls to slap her. Plus he and I are both looking at her tits. And get this—Mister Wonderful, she called him. She goes, ‘Mister Wonderful here was supposed to keep him out of trouble.’ Mister Wonderful? What a bitch. And Mr. Orly, Mister Wonderful, he’s just sitting there, letting her dump on him right there in front of me. My mom ever talked to my dad that way, he’d kick her in the fucking spine.”
“Hey,” I said. “Light a cigarette for me and hand it over.”
“Do it yourself, retard,” Mosey said. “What the fuck.”
“I don’t want to move my arm. I’ll wake her up.”
He pinched the butt in his lips, swiped a lit match across the end, and flicked the cigarette in the grass in front of me. “Sorry,” he said. “Sorry, Mister Wonderful.”
“Get on with it,” I said.
“Alright. So she’s like, ‘Oh, I know he was sleeping off hangovers. What did we expect? He was seventeen.’ And then she starts talking about how Henry gets busted for indecent exposure. But get this. You know what Henry did? To get arrested for indecent exposure? He was stoned and took a piss on a fire hydrant. And here his parents are all serious-looking about that, like he flashed his wang to a little girl. Shit, I about bust out. Then it’s time to get serious. Mrs. Orly tells me Henry got busted for possession. He had a bunch of dope on him, possession and intent. And his parents had to bail him out. And after they bail him out, he takes off. Gone for three months. Next thing they heard he was married and living in Huntingdon. That’s when he started betting on college football, and then his luck shifted hellward. I heard they cut off one of Henry’s toes when he couldn’t come up with the money.”
Mosey sipped some more of the beer, weighed it in his hand. “Not quite half,” he said. “She still out? Fuck it. Anyway, after Henry disappears for a few months, the next thing you know he’s on the highway, swerving around like a maniac, and he gets pulled over.”
“He had a gun,” I said. “Right?”
“Guess again, shit. That’s why the cops were at the Orlys’ place last month. Turns out it was a suicide mission and nobody knew for three years. There was some cover-up and finally the cops had to tell the Orlys about it. You should have been there to hear Mrs. Orly, she just keeps yapping and yapping until I thought either me or Mister Wonderful is going to have to slap her. And shit, I was still waiting on that hot chocolate she never made. Then she starts talking about some dude named Sergeant Smith. ‘He killed my boy,’ she said to me. ‘What’s he think he’s doing coming up here with that cockamamie.’ Dude, cockamamie. These people are from the old country or something. And then, unbelievable. She shuts up. Shuts up her fucking mouth and closes her eyes. It’s all quiet. All you can hear is Mrs. Orly on the verge of whimpering. It was quiet quiet quiet, shit. Finally Mister Wonderful says, real calm: ‘Henry wasn’t carrying a real gun. It was suicide. The gun was apparently a toy. The cop who shot him found a note tucked in the barrel.’ He stops there, not another word. I wanted to know what he wrote on the note, what the hell was wrong with him.”
“It wasn’t a real gun?” I asked Mosey.
“That’s what I’m saying. He was trying to get shot. He was waving that toy pistol around trying to get the cop to kill him. And Mister Wonderful he’s all like, suicide, and I’m thinking, suicide, that’s a whole nother ball game. The Mrs., she knows it’s another ball game too, and she goes to Mr. Orly, ‘You get everything all wrong. Everything you say doesn’t make sense.’ That shuts up Mister Wonderful and the bitch starts up again. She’s talking shit about Sergeant Smith, who transferred the actual cop who shot Henry over to Philadelphia. These are state troopers, man, they do what they want. The cop who shot Henry just hid the toy gun and took off to get a real one. He came back and stuck it in Henry’s hand. Just like that. But that’s not enough for Mrs. Orly. You won’t believe this. She wants to know why they bothered to tell her. And then you know she believes it, right, that it’s no lie. She keeps going on, like, ‘Oh, dear Jesus, why would they come here and tell us this? Nobody needs to know everything.’ But they didn’t want to file a complaint or whatever. They’d rather have people think their son got shot.”
“Christ,” I said. “Why did he want to kill himself?”
“I don’t know,” Mosey said. “Here.” He stood up and handed me the last half of the beer. It felt like more than half; still heavy and cold enough. “He was about to lose more than that toe they cut off, I think. But his parents never really told me. They just mentioned something about the note. He wrote like, this comes as a surprise to all of us, some bullshit like that. They made me do it, blah blah blah. Here’s the weird thing: Mr. Orly asks if I want to come back the next day and fuck her.”
“Who?”
“Mrs. Orly. He goes, ‘Come by tomorrow. She’ll be feeling better and could use a young hard dick in her.’ I’m serious. They swing, after all that, they swing. So I was thinking even though those two seem to hate each other and their kid’s dead, they keep on fucking. I’ll bet he plows her ass silly and she goes, ‘oh, how wonderful, how perfectly delightful.’ How often you think your dad nails your mom?”
I didn’t answer, just shrugged. I’d heard them once, heard my mom suppressing a moan. “So did you go over?”
“I took their paper up and kind of cleared my throat, but I guess nobody was home. Later I saw Mr. Orly but he didn’t say anything else about it.”
“Do your parents still do it?”
Mosey laughed. “I seen a video of my dad fucking my mom. They make tapes. I showed it to Jinxie. You ought to come over some time and watch it.”
“That’s fucked up,” I said.
“Fucking’s the only reason people stay together, Superfly. You don’t think that old Orly bitch sucks Mister Wonderful’s cock? You don’t think he hits that clit and she loves it? I’ll bet Henry knew all about it: the Orlys seem like a noisy couple. I’ll bet they kept him up all night. Let’s go find his grave and ask him. I’ll bet him killing himself had to do with a bitch. It had to have had to do with some skanky bitch. That’s love: people overlook their differences because they want somebody to fuck and indulge all their little kinks. You got to take it like it is. Grandma, grandma, burning bright, in the asshole, so damn tight, what immortal hand or eye … help me out.”
“Quit it.”
“Okay,” he said. “Actually it’s not so funny. My grandma’s dead. She’s buried here, too, somewhere. I guess we’ll end up here. Maybe sooner than we think. Do you love Jinxie?”
“No,” I said and squeezed her hand in mine. I thought I could love her, but not the kind of love Mosey was talking about.
“You will,” he said, “once she gives you a taste of that hair pie. Come on. Let’s find Henry. She’ll be all right. She doesn’t believe in the dead anyways.”
“I don’t believe in ghosts,” I told him.
“You will,” he said. “You’ll believe in love and ghosts before the night is through.”
We ran through the graveyard, jumping over headstones. The night was warm and damp like a glass just out of the dishwasher. Indian summers past I used to make fires outside and run in circles around them, squirting turpentine from turkey basters into the flames.
Mosey saw me light the last cigarette of the pack he got at the Nestegg. “Give me a hit of that,” he said.
“It was already in my mouth.”
“Fuck it,” he said. “Just this once.”
We smoked and then set out to find Henry Orly’s grave before sun-up. Henry Orly. A shit, I thought. He gave up. Too easy to give up here, in the middle of the Alleghenies, in Windfall, where there’s nowhere to go but across and down. Still you can get away on the tracks, or a bus, or just hitch. Plus he chicken-shitted some poor cop into doing it for him. That’s who I felt sorry for. Imagine coming up on that toy gun and reading some pathetic note. If I had been the cop, I thought, I would have shot Henry Orly again for pulling a stunt like that, and I wanted to tell Mosey what I was thinking, but he had run off in another direction, looking for Henry Orly’s grave.
The moon had slipped sideways and sunk somewhere. I was lost and tired now from running. I tried to get back to the tree where I left Jinxie. Maybe I could wake her up with a kiss. She was my girlfriend.
And then I heard her. She was breathing a name. Mosey. I sneaked up. He was on top of her.
It sounded like love. Mosey, she went. I turned behind a tree and leaned against a tombstone. I wanted to fall under the leaves beneath my back and say okay. I said I didn’t care, I told myself not to. He pushed into her a few last times and grunted. Maybe it was love. I thought it was fine. I was easy. She wasn’t mine or anybody’s.
Mosey got up, came over to me and sat down. He put his hand up for a high-five. I hesitated. When I finally reached up he slipped his finger under my nose. “Her pussy smells like popcorn butter. I told you it did.”
I pushed his hand away and punched his shoulder. I stood up.
“Take it easy, Superfly,” he said. “It’s your turn. She’s waiting for you. Lay some pipe, buddy, seriously, time to penetrate the fortress. Hope you don’t mind sloppy seconds.”
He started to stand, then paused in a kind of squat. I punched him in the throat and he started gasping. I had tears in my eyes but I didn’t want him to see so I kicked him in the stomach and he started puking.
Jinxie called me: “Hey, Superfly.”
I went over. She was on her back like everything was wonderful, her jeans and denim jacket slopped beside her, her little tennis shoes flipped off below her feet. She still had her socks on and her T-shirt was pulled down to her hips. The birds in the trees started making the leaves whistle. “Come here,” she said. I could hear Mosey spitting.
I pretended not to hear and not to understand.
“Come over here and fuck me,” she said. “I know it’s your first time. I won’t hurt you.”
I thought it would make her mine. I pulled my pants down, got on my elbows over her. She wrenched my underwear to my knees and she touched and then guided my dick inside. There was a damp texture like her tongue. I slipped in deeper. It was easy as taking a nap. I lay there and concentrated on the feeling. Jinxie had me by the hips.
“Car,” Mosey shouted. “Car, car.”
I looked at the ground beside Jinxie’s head, the Tweety Bird on her T-shirt. Her eyes were closed. Her bottom lip behind her top teeth. She shifted me where she wanted. Her hands were cold on my sides. I looked up and there was Henry Orly’s grave lit up in headlights, ten yards away. Mosey was running behind it through trees. The car drove past us up the hill.
In the dark the car looked like my father’s sedan. The windows were down and the radio was on, carousel music, an advertisement for the county fair in New Germantown. I pulled out of Jinxie. “Sorry, Jinx,” I said, “sorry.”
Jinxie gripped me tighter, put my dick back in, and said “close your eyes.” She whispered my name. “Superfly,” she said. I heard a car door slam. I closed my eyes.
I opened my eyes. Hers were open too. She nudged me off and we jumped and turned away from each other, pulling our clothes on. I looked back. Jinxie was already darting through the headstones. I watched her disappear.
It was colder now. I stood there looking at Henry Orly’s grave. I said his name three times, hoping he would respond with Mosey’s name, even Jinxie’s, someone soon to die. I concentrated.
Then I heard it: Wayne.
Wayne. The name sounded strange, like the name of someone forgotten. And the voice was unfamiliar. It wasn’t until I saw my father coming toward me that I recognized his voice and was able to breathe. Before he saw me I turned and ran.