I slept hard as hell. I’d never worked like that before. I’d done homework and I’d done lawn work, and I’d had my job sacking groceries, but I’d never done the kind of work that kicked your ass and you got paid for. It was a different kind of feeling. It was claustrophobic.
Running dishes for Homer, scrubbing pots with him, was painful, but I felt like I couldn’t leave if I wanted to. I was stuck there doing what I was doing. It’s the same when you’re at school. When you’re in your desk. When the teachers are going on and on. But it’s different with school because you don’t want to be there at all, so you just sort of zone out. Go into max-chill mode. Dick with your phone or doodle on paper or look off at other kids and wonder what they had for breakfast. Their mouths hung open. Their faraway eyes. But at Broth, part of me wanted to leave, but something in me also made me want to stay. It was hard work, but I was making money. And if Chef had come up and said, “Leave,” it would’ve broke my heart some. Even though washing dishes was a pain in the ass. Being at school’s not nearly as brutal, but when my principal suspended me, I was a happy-ass struggler.
There’s this weird internal tension in working. Like when you touch the north poles of two magnets together and feel that push. It’s a good push. But it eats energy. Because to get done what you want to get done—touching the same poles, getting your work finished—it takes something out of you. I slept and had heavy and dirty dreams of work and steam and dishwater. I floated on bubble-capped seas of brown liquid with bits of food bobbing here and there, and I clung to a hunk of bread to keep me afloat in the vast ocean of dishwater. I smelled the stink of slurping drains, the warmth of heaving garbage. And I woke in a way I never had. My eyes crept open and the room was silent and my skeleton felt clean, and my meat felt filthy. My muscles. My tendons. I dunno. They felt gross. But somewhere deep inside, I felt new.
I woke to text messages. Bennet was hitting me up and telling me about school. He said the kids were taking a vote to see who would be the best teacher and worst teacher to have a gun. Also, they were voting to see who was most likely to come to school and shoot the place up.
He was on some new number.
(317) xxx-xxxx: Who you got, man? We’re taking bets.
Me: Huh?
(317) xxx-xxxx: Most likely to shoot up the school?
Me: I dunno. What’s everyone else saying?
(317) xxx-xxxx: I think that kid Shelby Frank. Fuckers always got angry fists.
Me: He ain’t that bad.
(317) xxx-xxxx: Who then?
I thought about it. It’s an odd thing to consider. Who might break? Who might go home one day and decide they’d had enough of something? Who would curl up to violence like that? Like a blanket to protect yourself from the cold of the world with. Because violence is warm. Have you ever gotten angry? So angry you could hurt a thing? Your body feels like fire. And maybe that’s what those kids are looking for. That feeling. Because it’s so strong, it must be there for a reason.
I don’t think I believe in God entirely, but I believe in something. I believe that we exist for something. That things happen for reasons. That our paths follow something like orbits.
My parents never really told me what they believed. My mother took me to church a few times after my father died, but we didn’t go enough to learn people’s names. My father’s funeral was a small thing. A few of his family members. We went to a golf course in a community where his oldest brother lived and we sat in a clubhouse with so many windows it felt like an aquarium. A player piano played hymns and there were about a dozen of us, and people sat in a circle telling stories about my father, and there was a picture of him on an easel. Most of the folks there were relatives, but there was a trucker or two who knew him from work, and they sat quiet with their faces aimed at the carpet, and I don’t know that anyone ever mentioned God.
But I remember my mom after Dad died, and I remember she had two modes. She was either staring off at nothing and holding her face, or she was slamming things around and cussing under her breath. And one time I told her that she was always angry, and she said that if she wasn’t supposed to be angry she wouldn’t be angry.
“When you’re thirsty it’s because your body needs a drink,” she told me. “When you’re angry it’s because your body needs something else.”
“What?” I asked her.
“You heard what I said.”
“What does your body need? When you’re angry.”
She scooped me up and held me to her. “Who knows?”
I think she was right. Sometimes you feel so terrible that all you know is that you need something, and when people feel that way, they go out looking. My uncle went out looking for drugs. My mother went out and found death. I think those shooter kids go out looking for violence. They think it will stop the ache they have, but my guess is it doesn’t. I wanted to google it. I wanted to search up how school shooters felt afterward. Did it help them? Did it give them purpose? Did they get to jail and feel free from the pain, or did it just give them new pain to deal with? Or if they die there in a shootout or by turning the gun on themselves, do they get something like closure? A final bit of peace? A miraculous answer from God?
I think, if you asked an adult, they’d say it just gives them more pain, but that’s probably not true. It probably gives them different pain.
I feel like there are two types of misery in this world. There’s not getting what you want and being angry. And there’s getting what you want and being sad.
If you’re either one of those—if you’re miserable—you don’t know what will fix it. You go back and forth forever. Wanting a thing. Pursuing a thing. Getting a thing. Not wanting it. And you start all over again.
So the question wasn’t who would shoot up the school. The question was: who might think shooting up a school would make them feel better than they feel right now.
And I didn’t know how to answer that.
Me: Fuck if I know.
(317) xxx-xxxx: Fine. What’s your porn name then. We’re also doing porn names.
Me: Porn names?
(317) xxx-xxxx: It’s your first pet’s name. And the name of the street you grew up on.
I had never really had a pet, but in my fourth-grade class we hatched chicken eggs in an incubator, and each of the students was responsible for a chicken for a short time, and my chicken was named McCluck. He was a Rhode Island Red, and when they are chicks they are black like crows, and I remembered watching him climb out of his brown shell and slump gross and slimy onto a Styrofoam plate, heaving breath and exhausted. The street I grew up on was Forester Way.
Me: McCluck Forester Way?
(317) xxx-xxxx: You had a dog named McCluck? You can leave off the way part.
Me: A chicken.
(317) xxx-xxxx: McCluck Forester is a pretty good porn name.
I didn’t know if it was or not, but I sat thinking about my life on Forester Way, and my time with McCluck the chicken, but then it occurred to me that the apartment was quiet as fuck. So I bounced out of bed and scraped around the place, calling out “Peggy,” but no one was there. I was hungry, so I made four toaster waffles and brewed some coffee. I’m not very good at brewing coffee. I’ve watched it done plenty, and I follow all the right steps, but every time I make it, it tastes funny. Too weak or too strong, but maybe it’s just something that’s better when someone else makes it. Like sandwiches or jokes. Like, when you tell yourself a joke, it’s never as good as when someone else tells it to you. I could listen to jokes I know all day so long as they’re coming out of someone else’s mouth, but when they come out of my mouth, they never seem new.
That was one of the great things about Remote. He could tell me things that I already knew and they’d be funny again.
Here’s how Remote told me Thursday got its name:
There came a disease called thirst that could only be cured with rain. Before that, we never felt compelled to drink anything. After thirst, we’d check the skies hoping for clouds.
“Do you think it will rain today?” we’d ask each other. If it didn’t, our tongues would go dry and we’d have a hard time swallowing. Our heads would ache. Our muscles would cramp. It was god-awful.
We went to Wed to see if he could catch the disease and release it in his tree, but he was busy keeping the sun where it was with his arrow, his gross penis hanging nude between his legs.
“What will we do, then?” Remote asked aloud to no one in particular.
“Just drink rain when you can and deal with it,” said Wed.
Our knowledge of weather wasn’t fully formed so Remote said, “Well, can you move the sun back a ways? Whenever it rains, it seems like the sun is farther away. And we are terribly thirsty.”
“It’s not farther away,” said Wed. “The sun just goes behind clouds. In the hills there is a woman named Jupiter who can tame clouds. Go to her.”
Remote did. I journeyed into the mountains and found Jupiter sitting on a throne of mist. She had beautiful legs that had never been shaved and breasts covered by long black hair. Other than that she was naked.
“We are plagued by a new disease,” Remote said in a raspy, thirsty voice.
“It is not a new disease,” said Jupiter. “It’s an old disease that you only just realized you’ve always had. You’ve grown into it the way young people grow into wanting sex.”
“Either way,” Remote said. “What do we do? We need rain. We heard you can tame clouds. Can you make it rain more for us?”
Jupiter made it lightning. She made it thunder. “There are other people in this world and they need the rain too. I can tame the clouds, I can’t make more of them.”
Remote was not happy at all. If I was less thirsty, I would have cried tears.
“Also,” said Jupiter, “think about how much better the rain tastes after you’ve been thirsty a while. Think about how grateful you’ll be when it finally does rain.”
Remote tried a final plea. “Help us and we’ll name a day after you.”
“I don’t want anything named after me. I want to be remembered the way lightning is remembered: as thunder. The way rain is remembered: as puddles. I want to leave an impression, not a memory.”
“What if,” Remote said, “you just make it rain for us once. Just one hard rain. That way we can all cure our thirsts one last time. And after that, it will just be a thing we have to live with. But we will remember you always for the thirst that you took from us, and we will call your day Thirstday and it will be your impression upon us?”
Jupiter leaned back into her throne of mist. “I like it,” she said.
With a flick of her wrist, she sent all the clouds on Earth to the place where Remote lived, and a great storm broke out, and Remote and the Earthlings all drank deeply of Jupiter’s rain.
But it kept coming down. And coming down. It was more rain than we’d ever seen. It was way more rain than we’d ever hoped for. It was too much rain. The streets washed away from us. Anything not fixed to the Earth was lost to the flood. We sought refuge inside.
I was in bed with my phone, thinking about being McCluck Forester, and then I remembered what the waiter had said about the houses on Schort Way.
I texted the last number that had hit my phone, and I said:
Me: Look up a street for me.
I figured I was texting Bennet, but the message came back:
(317) xxx-xxxx: Who’s this?
Me: Riggle
(317) xxx-xxxx: Oh, bennet texted you. Not in class 2gether now though
Me: Sorry
(317) xxx-xxxx: What’s the street?
Me: Schort Way.
A little time passed.
(317) xxx-xxxx: Wait why don’t you look it up on your own?
Me: Bennet used all my data, and my uncle would kick my ass
(317) xxx-xxxx: Bennet does that.
Whoever it was sent me a picture of a Google map, and Schort Way was at the south side of town. I didn’t know what time it was, so I got dressed and headed out.
The last time I saw my uncle, he was smoking a Swisher Sweet on the sidewalk, looking up at ragged clouds. “When I was a kid,” he said, “your grandpa smoked. A ton. We’d drive around in his station wagon and he’d have beers and cigarettes and we’d listen to Cubs games on the radio, and I was so young that I thought weird things. Like, I sat on the passenger side, and he’d be blowing his smoke out his window, and in my head it was like all that smoke floated up and got caught in the sky. Like it hung there and became the clouds. And I’d watch him smoking. And I’d look at the clouds. And I’d see things in the clouds, you know? The way kids do. Bears and horses and shit. And I’d tell Dad, blow me an elephant. And he’d be like what? And I guess somehow I explained it to him. Because it became our thing. He’d take a big hit off his cigarette,” my uncle took a big hit off his cigar and puffed a mess of smoke toward the sky, “and he’d say, here comes a Cubby. Like the mascot. And he’d blow that smoke out his window, and I’d get to looking in the sky for whatever it was he said he blew.”
“Ever see it?” I said. “The Cubby?”
“Hell,” my uncle said. “People always see what they want to see.”
I was walking through Opioid, on my way to Schort Way, when I spotted the Bicycling Confederate standing on a corner with his bike between his legs. I wanted to ask him about Remote again, but something in me just made me see his flag and made me think how bizarre it was that a half-delayed Hoosier would snag such a crummy symbol and devote his life to it.
“Struggler,” I hollered at him. “Struggler.”
He looked up at me, a sort of spooky blankness in his face, a kind of slack to his mouth, sleep in his eyes. “Who me?”
Now, I don’t advocate hitting anyone. I don’t. This is mainly because I’ve been hit before, but it’s also because if you hate somebody that much, why would you want them on you?
And I mean, if you beat somebody up they get on you. Their blood and spit. Their skin. Their sweat. We show violence as so dreamy in the movies. Even when people bleed it glistens like sex. Folks will fight a dozen people and never roll an ankle, never sprain a wrist. Go punch a punching bag with no gloves on and see how long you can do it before you start crying.
In Black Panther those Wakandan bros swung their fists at everything and everybody. I get T’Challa. Dude’s swallowed the Black Panther magic, but what about everyone else? Charge into some terrible fight, then run a mile to fight some other fight? No one ever gets tired, has to shit, needs a drink. The only thing they ever do is crack their necks. That right there, to me, seems to be a flaw. If you need to adjust your spine then you can twist your ankle. It only makes sense. And they’re always glistening. Beads of sweat just pouring of them. If you can sweat, you can get thirsty.
I guess I hit the Bicycling Confederate about six times, once I caught up to him. The first two shots landed in his right eye, and then maybe the rest hit his shoulders and the crown of his head and the knuckles of my right hand broke open, and I was bleeding wherever else I stuck him, so I didn’t know if had gotten him good, or if I was just bathing him in my own blood, but he dipped out like a kicked puppy, covered his head with his hands and ran off down an alley with his noggin leading the way. I didn’t wait long. I pulled the flag from his bike and sailed it like a spear in his direction, jumped on the bicycle and pedaled away.
My dad gave me my first bike. It was one of the best things I could remember about him. He had come home from a route one day and for some reason his semi was parked on the street. At least that’s how I remember it. My mom took me out to see him in the front yard, and she was like, “You brought the rig home?”
“Had to,” he said. “Got special cargo in the back.”
My dad wears navy Dickies in all my memories, and he always has on a plain white T-shirt. He had a few tattoos on his forearms, but I don’t remember what they were of. So, in my mind they change all the time. But, in my mind, he always smells like coffee and car trips.
“Special cargo?” my mom said.
“For you and the little man. You my little man, right? Were you good?” I nodded. “Was he good?” he asked my mom, and she held up her hand and waggled it like so-so.
“Gave you the shakes?” my dad asked.
“Shut up,” Mom said. It’s my best memory of her smile.
He picked me up and held me to him, and threw his arm around my mom, and my mom kissed him and we stumbled over to the back of his rig, and my dad set me down and fished a giant key ring from his pocket. It jangled and clanged. He thumbed through them, found the right key, undid a lock on the roll-up door and told me to close my eyes.
I did.
“And cover them with your hands.”
I did.
“And cover his hands with your hands.”
My mom did.
I heard the door shimmy its way open, and then my dad said, “You can look now.”
My mom took her hands off my hands. I took my hands off my eyes. And when they were open, there was a bike for me sitting lonely in the giant cargo space, and there was a package for my mother, but I don’t remember what she got.
I do remember, though, how much our excitement echoed in the empty cargo space whooping and hollering and all, and my dad said, “Don’t say I never . . .” He shook his head. “I always forget how that saying goes.”
“Gave you a bike,” my mom said.
“Yeah,” my dad said. “Don’t say I never gave you a bike.”
And I spent the rest of the afternoon riding up and down the street with my training wheels.
My mom took them off after Dad died. The training wheels. But I don’t really remember learning to ride without them. I think one day, I could just do it on my own.
But there I was in Opioid, Indiana, a struggler on a stolen bicycle with the wind in my hair, my hands numb from the cold, snot leaking down my face, the houses whipping by. I rode out to the edge of town, through cornfields dead with winter, along streets glazed with salt and snowmelt. They looked near silver, the roads. Twinkled like sweaty skin. And the air was huge. And above, clouds hung like exhaled smoke. And I tried to find my grandfather’s shapes in them.
If the events of it all hadn’t been so awkward, I think I would have been having a good time.
Schort Way was a crooked little street with three houses on it. Two seemed straight out of a catalog for suburban dream living, but the third looked like a cavity in a mouth otherwise empty of teeth. The rest of the road was nothing but a stretch of abandonment, a curved thing dotted with broken corn-stalk patches, but I biked up and down it a few times thinking about what to do. There were cars in the driveways of the two nice houses. The other house seemed deserted, and I figured it was the house the waiter was talking about.
The land sloped toward the house. It seemed to heave up like castaway blankets—a janky thing of spent and splintering boards. I got off the bike in the front yard, leaned it to the earth, and the front tire spun the way front tires do, coughing off salt water until it came to a still.
“Hello,” I called. As though someone might hear me. I stared up at the windows of the second story. They looked like haunted eyes. Like an old person staring off, trying to remember something. “I’m looking for my uncle,” I hollered up again, moving toward the house. And then I wondered what I would even say. If someone came to the door, opened it and was like, “Looking for who? Your junkie uncle? You don’t say.”
But of course there was no one home. In the yard, there was a for sale by owner sign that looked pretty new. There was also a sign closer to the house that said trespassers will be shot. That sign looked old as hell. Weather broken. Like it had seen a couple dozen winters and summers, and the letters seemed to bleed out at the edges, lose definition and fade off.
I went to the door. I knocked. My knocking seemed to sink away into a vacuum. Nothing stirred. No dogs barked. No footsteps. I knocked again and I watched the windows to see if any of the curtains moved. I knocked again and I decided the house was empty.
I walked around back. The house must have sat on a half-dozen acres. The yard behind it was tree free, and the sun hung bright in the sky. There was a back door and I knocked on it, but I got the same results as in front except this time my shadow was cut crisp against the side of the house, and I flashed Remote against the house. “Schort Way,” he said.
“But ain’t nobody here.”
“Not my problem,” he told me, and I put him away.
I looked out toward the sun. At the far edge of the land there was a hedgerow of trees I didn’t know the names of. Leafless things on account of winter. The limbs of them clustered together like noise.
I turned back to the house. I put my hand on the doorknob and twisted my wrist. It was unlocked. I leaned into it a bit, and the hinges coughed open, and the door swung into a dark and lonely abode. I stood there in the kitchen and breakfast nook. But there was no table or anything. The countertops were ancient. The linoleum floor seemed gummy. The refrigerator was a shape they don’t make anymore. My shadow cut across the room. Up to my waist was across the floor, the rest of me climbed a wall. My head was where my head would be if I was standing with my back to the wall, and I kind of looked my shadow in the eyes. It didn’t say anything, and I didn’t either.
In the movies death has a terrible smell. Well, in certain kinds of movies. I guess in most movies people just die and the action goes on. But old death, detective-contemplated death, where, like, seasoned investigators cover their faces with a rag and new recruits puke at the crime scene—in those movies death is stinky. But I guess, owing to it being winter, my uncle didn’t stink. I found him in the living room. The second room I entered. The sun from the kitchen hung in shafts and dust danced in the otherwise stillness of the light, and it was like these odd corridors, and my uncle was sitting in a beam of it, his dead-opened eyes twinkling, his teeth shining in his frozen-opened mouth.
There is nothing more still than dead people. I knew that from finding my mom. They seem so far away when you touch them. Like all the life they once had has retreated down to live in the marrow of their bones, but you can still feel the energy of it down there burning. Like a hot coal sunk down in mounds of ash the morning after a campfire. And the surface of them feels bizarre, because it’s not warm like it should be, not soft like it should be. The only thing like it is taxidermied deer. The kind that hunters hang the heads of on walls.
My uncle’s pants were frozen with piss, the wood floor around him too.
I kneeled to him and touched his chest. His clothes seemed miles above his lifelessness.
I’d heard of cats dying with meows in their throats. Like you’d go to pick up a dead cat, and the jostling of its dead body would purge one final, bungled meow that slips from their mouths clumsily. And I pressed on my uncle’s chest, I guess, and a sort of “humph” purged from him, but I smelled his frozen breath.
All of a sudden, the reality of it came shocking through the room. The whole place seemed to gag. Like the universe was puking. And I stood up and bounced back from my uncle, the dust rushing in the light now because of my disturbing it.
“Fucking A,” I told myself. I put my hands on my face. I thought and thought.
The biggest difference between Opioid, Indiana, and South Texas was timing. Well, and weather. Well, and the language and the color of the people. But there were tons of similarities. People were just people, you know. They came and went, they had children they loved. Yards they mowed. Things they hated. They ate food. They listened to music. I know these are trivial things, except they really aren’t. They hung US flags from their houses on Memorial Day. They went to church on Easter. Again, I know, but I don’t know.
Opioid, Indiana, had happened. It had risen and gleamed but then it had fallen. You could tell it by the sag in the houses, the grit on the street signs. You could tell it by the slack faces on the dawdling junkies. You could tell it in the gray of the days. South Texas, on the other hand, was popping off. All the homes seemed to be fresh out of candy wrappers. All the streets seemed to sit new on the earth. The mall was clean. The bathrooms in houses weren’t drippy.
Opioid, Indiana, had a yesterday feel. South Texas seemed primed for tomorrow.
I don’t know how long my uncle had been dead, but he was longer dead than my mom had been when I found her. I thought that thought and wondered, who my age has done that before? Measured the death of one dead relative against another by the way they felt when you found them.
I was happy, though, that my uncle wasn’t the first dead person I’d found. And then I thought: Totally healthy thought to think. You won’t have to work this out in therapy ever.
My phone vibrated and I checked my texts.
(317) xxx-xxxx: Find that place?
Me: I’ll tell you when you tell me who you are.
(317) xxx-xxxx: Bennet my struggler.
Me: Then tell me whose phone.
(317) xxx-xxxx: She made me promise.
Me: Then I got secrets too.
I held my phone and dropped on a knee next to my uncle, and I looked at my uncle, and then I looked at my phone. I was trying to decide what I should do.
I had options.
- I could call the cops. This seemed like a not great idea for a few reasons.
- I had never called the cops before, and I wasn’t sure if on cell phones you just dialed 911 or what.
- I didn’t know if I was allowed to be out and about when suspended.
- What would I even tell them? That I’d found my days-old dead uncle who’d been missing for a stretch of time but who we hadn’t yet called the cops over?
- I could call Peggy, but what would I say to her? My gawd. It might be harder to talk to her about it than it would be to call the cops.
- I could text Peggy. But what would I text?
- “Found Uncle”
- “Uncle dead”
- A picture of his dead ass?
- I could leave. I could pretend I didn’t see anything. I could go home and just act like nothing had happened. Like I’d never seen a thing.
I decided on option four. I think it was because it was the least work and because it meant I didn’t have to blame myself for whatever happened. I mean, everything up to that point had nothing to do with me. I hadn’t made any decisions. I hadn’t done anything. So, I decided that what I’d seen, I hadn’t seen. That it wasn’t real at all. That I would continue on like normal, and I headed for the door, but my phone jiggled in my pocket.
I checked it.
(317) xxx-xxxx: Can you pay me back for Black Panther. I’m broke. Moms is being stingy this month.
Me: Shit, I’m broker.
And I was. I had gotten paid from the gig at Broth, but now what the hell would Peggy and I even do. If there was a Peggy and I. Like, if my uncle was dead, I’d probably just get shipped off again. I looked back at my uncle crumpled against the wall.
“Don’t fuck up, huh?”
I don’t know, I got angry, and I walked back toward him, and I think I was about to put a shoe to his face, but then something dawned on me: I should check his pockets. It’s what they always did in movies. Someone dies, you check to see what they got.
So, I dropped down to my uncle and started putting my hands in his clothes.
Nothing feels more bizarre than the pants pockets of a dead man. It’s a weird, unfortunate space. I went in and out of everything until I came to his wallet. It was fat with cash. There were some pills in his other pockets, but I didn’t want any part of that. And his phone lay beside him deader than him.
I counted the bills. It was about $1,300. Enough for rent and some more. It felt weird, the money. Like old leaves. Like the skin of something mounted.
The rest of the afternoon, I rode around on the streets through the cornfields. I didn’t know where to go. I just pedaled until the cold didn’t bother me anymore, until I couldn’t feel a thing.
Now, here’s a thing I guess I didn’t think through. The Bicycling Confederate really loved his bicycle, and when you get your bicycle stolen, you go looking for it. Also, the dude had family. I figured he had sprung from earth. Like he rose up one year from a cornfield fully formed and emerged from the crops just before the combines swept across the lands, with his bicycle in tow and his flag already flying.
I was out at the edge of Opioid, cruising, watching the sun crawl across the sky, breathing in the fresh farm air and letting my time pass. I’m not great at describing cold. It’s a newer sensation to me. I know heat like I know my skin. It holds you as if in manipulated time. A time that is slowed. A time that you meld with. You hover in it. Your molecules seem to stretch into a summer day, into a 100-degree scenario. Your water, the thing you are the most, abandons you to join the manipulated time. Your insides bubble to the top of you, purge and steam away against gravity. You pass through the shirt you’re wearing. You evaporate into the atmosphere.
But cold? What does it really do? It clenches you. Your skin tightens away from low temperatures. You shrink and pucker. You dry up to ash. It’s supposed to be that the molecules stand still. But that’s not how it feels. Your hands race with ache. Your fingers tingle.
Fingers never tingle in the heat.
It’s a collapsing, the cold.
If your body was a city in the cold, the buildings would implode.
If your body was a city in the heat, the buildings would launch like rocket ships and streak out across the sky.
All of this was spinning through my mind when an old F-250 pulled up and a shotgun was pointed at my head.
“Get the fuck off that bicycle,” someone said, and I hit the brakes.
Now, no one will teach you this, but if someone points a gun at your head, you have to pretend like it’s no big deal.
The best rapper from Texas, which makes him one of the best rappers in the world, is Scarface. I knew how to handle the situation because of him. In “I’m Dead” on Mr. Scarface Is Back he tells a story about a crazy guy who stabbed someone with a knife just because their eyes showed fear.
So, inside I was shitting my pants, which is a weird sensation when you’re on a bicycle, but outwardly I just kind of looked over at the guy who was holding the gun at my head and said, “Who me?”
“You see another motherfucker on a bicycle?”
I looked around. “Nah?”
“Willy, get out the truck and get your shit.”
The guy in the back seat of the driver’s side was the one talking at me, pointing the gun at me. The windows of the truck were deeply tinted, and I couldn’t see who was driving.
“In the old days they hanged horse thieves,” the guy told me.
“This ain’t a horse,” I told him.
He chambered a round, which meant two things:
- Up until then I was relatively safe.
- After that, I was a finger waggle away from being a headless struggler.
“Ain’t much different though,” he said.
The Bicycling Confederate had gotten down off the truck and he’d come around to get his bike back.
“Hey, Willy,” I said to him. I got off his bike and he took it away.
“I think we should hang him,” said Willy. “Like in the old days,” he said.
“Well, in the old days they woulda shot you for your Confederate flag for sure. If we’re, like, gonna be all old days about it.”
“Fuck off, faggot,” the gun holder said. “Bet you voted Hillary.”
“I’m seventeen.”
Willy, he looked different when he wasn’t on his bicycle with his flag flapping. I kind of felt sorry for him. But then he screamed, “Shoot him!”
“Calm down, Willy,” said the gun holder. “You got your bike.”
“He hit me though.”
The gun holder shrugged. “Put your bike in the bed,” he told Willy, and Willy did.
The street was still. I was quiet. The F-250 idled chuggingly. The exhaust of it pumping away into the frozen air, floating out toward the winterized cornfields.
Once Willy was back in the truck, they drove away.
Walking after you get off a bicycle seems slow as fuck. The streets that would have streaked by earlier just tumbled beneath my feet, and the slow progress of it all got me thinking about my uncle. And my mother. And father. And me.
Was it me?
Did I make them all die?
Listen, I’m not a good student but I know about causality, and I’ve read plenty of books. I’ve watched plenty of smart YouTube videos. Sometimes when I should’ve been doing homework. I understand relativity. I understand that time is a concept we’ve both invented and that exists. That it changes depending on where you are. That the present is not as simple as you’d think. That memories aren’t trustworthy.
People around me die.
They die for different reasons, but the outcome is the same.
My dad died from working an unsafe job. My mom died from pain. My uncle died from trying not to feel pain.
And maybe all of those are the same sort of thing.
Like, there’s no way my father wanted to be a truck driver. There’s no way my mom wanted to be a widow raising a child alone. There’s no way my uncle wanted to be what he was.
Was I the cause, somehow, for the deaths of everyone around me?
My dad probably just drove trucks so he could do things like buy me bicycles. My mom probably felt overwhelmed by life, because she would have to raise me on her own. My uncle only had the money to OD because he got my checks.
And it was a painfully cold walk, because the outside matched my insides. All gray and frozen. All despair and salted surfaces.
Peggy spoke the moment I opened the apartment door.
“Anything?” she asked.
My cheeks felt like oysters and they stung when I got into the heated room. My hands burned in the warmth. “Nah,” I told her. “I’m tired.”
“Wait,” she said, “I’ve been thinking . . .”
But I brushed past her and went to my room. I got in bed. I wanted to sleep it all away.
Then a knock came at the window. I went to open it. I knew it was Bennet.
“You got that money?”
“Yeah, hang on,” I told him.
“Man, you look sad or something.”
“Rough day.” I went for my pants to get him his cash.
“What you need is some curly carrot leaf?” He looked at me with his bald head.
“Nah, I’m good.”
“Know what, man, fuck it. I don’t need the money. Keep it.”
“It’s cool. Let me get it.”
“Nah, nah.” He touched his head. “I can’t wait till this shit grows back.”
“Yeah,” I told him. “You look better with hair.”
“Wanna know something?” he told me.
“What?”
“You’re my best friend,” he said.
I sort of looked at him. He was crouched there at the window. “What’s that about?”
“I don’t know. Just thought about it. See ya,” he said. And then he was gone.
“You too,” I said to the spot where he used to be.