So that’s where we were. We had questions, the police had questions, the school had questions, everyone had frickin’ questions. No one seemed to have any answers. The only thing everyone agreed on was this: Tommy was missing. Throckmorton being there kind of made it official.
Him being gone, it changed things for Mixer, Bones, and me. You could just sort of feel it. It’s like if you take one leg off a chair: You can still sit down, but you have to work a lot harder to find your balance and not fall on your butt.
I probably haven’t done a very good job of explaining this, but Tommy sort of held us together. I mean, first of all, he was new blood. That can be pretty important when you’ve been hanging out with the same few people since you were little. He also sort of balanced us out. It’s like he had some of the same qualities as each of us. Like he was sort of a scrapper, like Bones, and he was sort of clever, like Mixer. And he was sort of, well, I don’t know, whatever the hell I am. I always thought we had a lot in common, anyway.
And I know I’ve said how he was maybe a little nicer than the rest of us, but he was plenty tough, too. Like he was the one who taught us how to chew tobacco. Or he tried to, anyway.
All four of us were over in North Cambria last summer, because I mean, it’s not like it’s frickin’ Times Square, but there are a few things to do there. Like there’s a McDonald’s and some batting cages. Anyway, it was crazy hot that day. I guess it was late June, early July. We’d been hanging out in the little town park, the one with the ball field. We were under the big wooden whatever-the-hell-it-is, the thing with the rope grid you can climb up to get to the platform. We were mainly there for the shade, just standing around under the platform, leaning against the posts with our feet in the cool sand.
That’s when Tommy told us that he had some Skoal. Mixer was like, “No way,” but Tommy was like, “Yuh-huh,” and he looked both ways and reached into the back pocket of his jeans.
As soon as he looked both ways like that, I knew he really had it. He pulled a round green container out of his pocket. The word BANDITS was printed on the top, and the A had a little red bandanna painted on it. It was brand-new and he sort of fumbled with it, trying to figure out the best way to break the seal.
I’d never had chewing tobacco before, and it was pretty clear that Tommy hadn’t, either. He hadn’t even opened the thing until we were all there, and that right there tells you something about him. While he was trying to pop the top without spilling it all over the place, Bones was saying how chewing tobacco was pretty cool and packed a nice little buzz and how Skoal was like the best kind.
Bones didn’t actually say he’d done it before, but that was definitely the implication, you know? That made what happened even funnier.
Anyway, we heard the thing pop open, and I started making lame little jokes. I think I was a little nervous, which is funny because I’d done stuff way worse than chaw. Chaw’s weird, though. It made me think of the villains in western movies, like spitting into the bucket from ten feet away.
“All right,” I said. “If we’re going to do this, we need like cowboy names. I’m Shane.”
That might sound a little babyish or whatever, but we were just a bunch of kids under a glorified jungle gym in the summer. We were like a month past being freshmen. And that’s how Tommy became Buster and Mixer became Wyatt. Bones insisted on Masterson. I have no idea what ass he pulled that one out of, but it did sound kind of cowboyish.
I was like, “Masterson?”
And Bones was like, “Yeah. Don’t wear it out.”
I looked over at “Buster” and he started handing out the Skoal. It came in these gauzy little packets, prewrapped or whatever. That was good because I didn’t want to deal with loose tobacco, like when a cigarette split. He handed us one each, but Bones said, “Keep it comin’,” and he handed him a second one.
The only times I’d ever seen people chewing tobacco in real life was a few of the town softball games and things like that. I was trying to remember how to go about it, like how much to take, how to hold it, where to put it. I just held it in my palm.
“In between the cheek and the gums, ladies,” said Bones, still acting like a big shot.
I raised the thing up to my nose for a quick sniff, and it had this minty thing going on. Individually wrapped, mintflavored…The whole thing seemed much less rough than I’d thought it’d be. But I still didn’t put it in my mouth right away. I looked around and the others were still holding theirs, too.
No surprise, Bones went first. I guess he was showing off, because he put one in each side of his mouth, like the cotton rolls they put in your cheeks at the dentist. Now, I didn’t know much about chewing tobacco, but I was pretty sure that was the wrong way to go about it. That’s when I knew Bones hadn’t done this before, either. He’d just heard more about it.
He stuck one in the right side and one in the left. He just stuck his fingers in there like he was picking his teeth. For a second I could see his teeth and his gums, and then the tobacco was in and he was wiping his hand on his shorts. The rest of us held our Bandits in our fingers. We were getting ready to join in, but first we were going to watch and see what happened with Masterson there.
He gave us this puffy-cheeked, chipmunk smile, then sputtered something out. I think he was trying to say, “Double dip,” but he never got through it. He coughed on the juice and then just froze. His smile disappeared and all of a sudden he had this horrified look on his face. It took me a second to figure out what was wrong: The lump was gone from his left cheek. He’d swallowed one of the packets.
He let out a few short sounds, somewhere between choking and coughing, and then he just started hurling. The first few bursts of vomit came out while he was standing, but by the third, he was on his knees. He was kneeling down in the sand and spewing puke a good two feet in front of him. As skinny as he was, Bones always did like a big breakfast.
We all took a few steps back, and I dropped my tobacco in the sand like it had bitten me. If it was just normal puking, we would’ve started laughing right away, but this was some intense wretching. You could tell it was painful, and even when it was over, he was still down there dry heaving. His mouth was hanging open like a cat trying to cough up a hairball. So we held it in.
“Jesus,” said Mixer.
“Aw, man,” said Tommy.
The smell of puke was really strong. If I didn’t get out of there, I was going to boot, too, no tobacco required. I couldn’t just leave him there, though.
“Damn, man,” I said. “You OK?”
He looked up, wiping his mouth with his forearm. It was quiet for a second. Bones spat a few times into the sand and then said, “Damn.”
“Dammit, Masterson,” said Mixer. “That’s a waste of good tobacco!”
“Naw,” said Bones, a little smile creeping onto his face. “That stuff sucked.”
We laughed, but Bones wasn’t off the hook yet. He’d tried to big-time us by double-dipping and then ended up swallowing one of them. We were going to bust his ass, and he knew it. We waited for him to get to his feet, and then we got the hell out of Pukesylvania.
After a while, we walked over to the McDonald’s. We put our trays down on the table—just fries and a Coke for Bones, thank you—and it was like a firing line. Enough time had passed and he was feeling well enough and this is where we were going to start cutting into him.
And, I mean, we could’ve ridden Bones for forever about that, just ragged him mercilessly. But just when we were getting started, Tommy was like, “Same thing happened to Peter J, first time he tried it. Seriously, I saw it.”
Peter J was Peter Janklow. He was two years ahead of us in school and seriously, unquestionably cool. He was so cool that the idea that he’d puked his guts out on chaw made it seem like maybe that was the cool thing to do. It was serious cover for Bones.
Tommy didn’t have to say that. First of all, I don’t even think it was true. But he did, and it sort of let Bones off the hook. Anyway, that was Tommy. And that’s what I meant about how he kind of held us together, because Mixer and me, we really would’ve ripped into Bones. We probably would’ve gone too far, and he probably would’ve knocked one of us out. Just like that, we wouldn’t have been such good friends anymore.