As we sat there in the empty bleachers at Bennett Field, Rick sucked smoke from another crumpled Pall Mall cigarette. Me and Dennis sat on either side of him, my shoulders hunched as I looked down through the seats at the damp grass underneath. The field was wet with May rain, though it had died down hours before. The sky was a kind of purple and pink that looked almost like a galaxy, and Rick couldn’t take his eyes from it. The colors bled seamlessly into each other, rolling gently into a midnight purple. Rick was the type to lap up sunsets through reverent, dilated pupils. He said the difference between the miserable cynic and the lover of life was an appreciation of sunsets. The fading scars of cystic acne made him look older than twenty-three, but at the same time hinted at his youth. He sucked in again, blowing once more to watch the smoke drift up and disappear. Dennis was filling the air with talk of something, as he always did. He hated the quiet more than anything, so he liked to regale us with the same stories of lifeguarding at Grand Valley Rec, the community center near our school. He was telling us again how he lifted a vial of liquid mercury, and how dangerous it was. I was coming off of some horrible flu that week, so I hung around them quietly like a watchful ghost.
Dennis was the kind of friend who fed off of disagreements. Every time he called me a retard, he was affirming that our friendship was intact. We often had the same exact arguments over and over again, with just enough time between them to renew their entertainment value. My personal favorite was the “brother seizure” story, wherein Dennis claimed he triggered his younger brother to have a seizure by squeezing his ribcage from behind. According to Dennis, if you hold your breath for fifteen seconds, exhale, then allow someone to compress your lungs, you will suddenly erupt into a spasming, foaming seizure, regardless of your medical history. Whenever I doubted him, his lips would draw back into a shit-eating grin, like he was praying for conflict.
That day I was too tired to play the voice of reason, so I hung my swimming head and listened. Dennis prattled on about Emma, his coworker, and how she seemed to take advantage of his willingness to cover for her shifts. He gradually paused more and more, likely realizing just how quiet the two of us were. Finally, he stopped. I peered over at him. Dennis was staring at Rick, who seemed to be somewhere else entirely. The breeze tugged lazily at his gray crew neck as he stared skyward. His breaths were calm and deep, and his eyes blinked slowly and surely. His lips tucked up into a smile while we watched in strange silence, waiting for him to tell a joke or spill some sort of news. Rick always had something to say, and we could tell he knew something we didn’t. He exhaled audibly, eyes shifting from the sky for a second, like he finally escaped its clutches. He fished in his pocket for the cigarettes, pulled out another wrinkled paper stick and lit it promptly. As he spewed another wispy cloud, he finally spoke.
“I’m going to die soon.”
“You’re gonna die soon”, Dennis echoed. Rick nodded, smiling still.
Dennis paused and brought his eyes down to the smoldering cigarette hanging from his lips.
“So perhaps step one would be to stop sucking on Satan’s cock all the time”, Dennis proposed with a swift flick of his cigarette. It twirled and fell through the bleachers, landing on the grass below.
“Cancer is his fiery load, my friend. And that’s just National Geographic.”
Rick looked breezily ahead, refusing to let us in on whatever he was thinking. My interest was piqued now, but he seemed unrelenting in his commitment to the oblique.
“What’s going on? Are you sick or something?” I asked seriously, which merited an eye-roll from Dennis.
“It’s a lame joke, Cal,” he said. “Can we just cut the shit and leave?”
He shoved Rick’s shoulder, but he showed no signs of dropping the act.
“And why are we at this fucking field?”
Rick shook his head.
“I’m not gonna be around for much longer, Dennis.”
Dennis sighed. “Whatever.”
I felt a little pang of worry. Rick sometimes said things to mess with us, or to set up a later joke, but he was off that day. The hair on his arms stood up, and his hands seemed to tremble and buzz with strange energy.
“I’m dying soon. Fish is dying soon. There’s nothing that can change that.”
I was staring at his hands when I felt his eyes on me. When I looked up, I saw that they were sparkling. His pupils were wide and glistening. The sky reflected in his irises like water, and I could see tears slowly welling in them.
“But I’m gonna need you when I come back.”
I didn’t know what to say. We sat there wordlessly as Rick pulled us into a spontaneous hug, bringing the three of us together as the sun set over Bennett Field. He squeezed me into his side, which smelled like smoke and paint.
The walk home was long and dark. I snuck a look back at Rick as we left the field, catching a glimpse of his silhouette sparking another cigarette in the night. Dennis and I didn’t talk much on the way home.
We had met Rick two springs before, right around the time of year the crickets came out to remind us how empty Grand Valley was. We were fifteen and suddenly interested in drinking, so we claimed a spot outside Jonah’s Market, right next to the trash can. Handfuls of droopy alcoholics filtered in and out over the course of an hour, grunting as they pushed open the door, jingling the little bell as they shuffled in. Dennis took charge.
“Excuse me-” he would start, only to be waved off by an exceptionally hairy hand.
A stout little woman sporting a tote bag passed through.
“Hey, Miss-” he began fearlessly, stepping forward with the smarmy smile of a car salesman.
A gnarled finger was suddenly pointed between his eyes like the barrel of a gun. It trembled in his face as its owner scowled furiously up at him, her eyes narrowing in disgust. Her eyes spoke of curses, like little crystal balls dooming us both for eternity.
“You get the fuck away from me.”
Dennis dropped the smile and backed away, prompting the little old lady to put away her finger and scurry inside the store.
“Wow. Okay” muttered Dennis.
“You try a few. If it doesn’t work, then we give up. It’s time for you get your fuckin’ hands dirty.”
He leaned against Jonah’s brick wall, muttering something about almost getting shot. He handed me our cash pool of two crumpled tens, and I took up the mantle.
The next customer to walk up to Jonah’s Market was some old, scraggly homeless-looking man. No way, I thought. I glanced back at Dennis, who clearly wanted me to go for it anyway. So I did.
“Sir, I lost my-”
“Sorry, kid,” he said.
The man went inside and I turned to Dennis in defeat. He glowered at me like an angry coach.
“Maybe this isn’t as easy as we thought. I look too young for this” I said.
“Well maybe cut your stupid fuckin’ hair. You look like Johnny Depp. You’re fuckin’– Johnny Don’t.”
“And what, get a crew cut like you? Maybe I’ll show up in my fatigues next time. You think they’ll give me a veteran’s discount?”
Dennis ran his hand over his crew cut and sneered.
“We could cut off your leg and say you stepped on a mine back in ‘Nam. I’ll even help you hobble inside.”
Dennis sat against the wall, letting the seat of his pants make contact with the grimey liquor store pavement. My legs were tired, so I joined him. We sat in silence for a minute, considering the possibility that we might not get drunk for the next six years.
“Do you really think my hair’s stupid?” I asked in earnest.
Fifteen uneventful minutes passed before I noticed someone new step out of a white truck and walk in our direction.
“Do it. Come on. Do it. Do it. Do it” Dennis breathed in my ear.
“Okay, but this is the last one. Then we’re fucking off.”
I stood, brushing my stupid hair from my forehead. I stood there awkwardly waiting for him to get close enough that I could deliver my line. I felt like a Jehovah’s witness.
“Hey man, I lost my driver’s license a while back. Could you grab me a six pack? I got–” I fished the tens from my pocket. “I have twenty bucks.”
He stood there with this dumbfounded look on his face.
“Twenty bucks? What kind of beer company charges twenty bucks for a six pack?”
“It’s like– It’s like payment” I stuttered. “You can keep the ten. Or whatever the change is.”
I held the bills out like some sort of reverse beggar. He put out his hand, pausing for a second before snatching them with the speed of a viper. With a decisive nod, he turned and went inside.
“You think he’s a queer?” Dennis piped up.
“What?”
“I mean, do you think he’ll… you know,”
“You know what?” I pressed.
“You know what queers do. They do you a favor, and then you wake up on a bathroom floor somewhere with your pants around your ankles.”
I didn’t say anything.
“Just think about it, man.”
He walked out a few minutes later with a jingling bag of real liquor. No six pack.
“Do you think three beers is enough to get drunk?” he asked me.
I shrugged and shook my head cautiously.
“Let’s go,” he motioned for us to come with him. He started walking back to the white pickup truck he came in, striding confidently, not turning back. I looked at Dennis, who looked at me.
“I mean, we’re twenty bucks down,” I said. “We might as well.”
And so we went, jogging after the liquor man.
That night we drank on lawn chairs by Hidden River. The water stretched about forty feet across from where we sat, flowing steadily with a rushing sound that eased my mind. It snaked along our town, cutting right past the animal hospital and Jonah’s market on its way to Crooked Lake. The water was black and deep and in a hurry to leave. I couldn’t see the bottom. We were close enough to the tracks that we could hear each train cut past our town, ignoring it on its way. Grand Valley was the sort of town you passed on your way to somewhere – a place you watched blur by through the window. It was the nothing between two somethings. Dennis and I had grown to resent Grand Valley for its lack of creativity, sneering a little at every cliché like we were above it all. The town slogan was “The Midwest at its best!” but we thought “Don’t stop” was more fitting. Everyone in Grand Valley seemed destined to die there, wilting slowly until the lukewarm winds finally lift their ashes and spread them across some field by the train tracks. Its mediocrity grabbed at you like undead hands, pulling you farther down by the day.
“I’m not dying here” I said in my lawn chair.
Rick sat contentedly, staring up at the stars. Dennis was by the trees, pissing or throwing up or both.
“Have you ever thought about where you’re going?” he asked me slowly.
“I don’t know. Seattle.”
“Seattle.”
“Yeah. Seattle. I heard it always rains there. I mean, it has its own thing. There’s a thing it’s known for. It has personality.”
He sat up in his chair.
“I guess there’s always rainbows. I can imagine how they must stretch over the city. Over that space needle,” he said softly.
“Where would you go?” I asked him.
“Hawaii. They have this observatory where you can look out into the milky way. I’d go there.”
“So go there,” I said.
“I can’t leave Grand Valley. Fish needs me.”
I squinted at him.
“Fish?”
Fish was the infirm mute who Rick lived with. The first time we met, we locked eyes. They were cold and beady and glassy, made smaller by John Lennon frames which hugged his uneven nose. He was old, sporting a surprisingly full head of gray hair, with harsh wrinkles lining his face. There was always a strange expression glued onto it, with lips ever-pursed into a knowing smile. He seemed switched-on and off at the same time, like he knew something, but couldn’t access the facilities to express it. Every time we stopped at Rick’s, Fish would be in the living room, locked contentedly on the television.
One day in September we stopped by with plans to visit a quarry fifteen miles out of town. Rick stared at us blankly through the open door, like we were strangers there to sell him some shit he didn’t need. He left the door open and walked back through the living room into the kitchen without a word. We went inside and made ourselves at home, as we had many times before. Dennis walked up and waved his hand in front of Fish’s face a few times, disrupting his weather broadcast. Fish looked at Dennis the way he looked at everything else. Like it was all the same.
“Don’t do that” Rick barked from the doorway to the kitchen.
“Keep your fuckin’ hands away from him.”
He stomped back into the kitchen to fix them both sandwiches. I sat on the precarious wooden chair near the television, shooting Dennis a look of surprise. The chair’s legs were uneven, so it rocked side to side anytime I moved a little. Dennis took a seat on the end of the couch, leaving Fish plenty of room. We sat in restless silence while Rick loudly performed his caretaking duties, ripping open and slamming the fridge. He clanged plates on the counter, shaking the floor as he moved around. A knife fell and skidded across the floor, probably smearing butter in its wake.
He made some sort of primal sound and stomped his foot, rattling the cabinets.
I looked at Dennis, who looked back with equal bewilderment.
“What the fuck?” he mouthed silently.
My chair rocked a little too loud, so I held my weight firmly on one side. I watched Rick’s shadow pass to and from the doorway as he picked up the knife and threw it into the sink. He walked into the living room with two plates, setting them both on the coffee table with a metallic clinking sound. He stayed standing, gripping his pockets tightly as he turned his attention to me.
“Why did you come here?” he asked, indignant.
“I thought we were supposed to hang out,” I told him honestly.
“I can’t do this now. You shouldn’t be here. I need you both to leave.”
His voice buzzed with urgency. His tight fists trembled by his sides. He turned to face Dennis, stepping forward to point directly in his face.
“You need to get the fuck out of here. Now. I won’t ask again.”
We left the property in a daze.
“What a fucking freak” said Dennis as we walked from Rick’s street.
“Yeah, I don’t know,” I mumbled.
“If I knew he was that touchy about his little gimp I would have laid off.”
The rest of the Fall went by with no word from Rick. Me and Dennis hung out as we always did, albeit one hundred percent sober. It was undoubtedly more lame without Rick, as he had a truck and a house and knew a lot more than us. We couldn’t drive wherever we wanted to drink and laugh and team up on Dennis about his bullshit anymore. I missed Rick’s advice about where I should go when I graduate, how I should look at things and what brands are for dicks. Grand Valley had personality with Rick there.
A lot of evenings were spent in the shittiest of places, like the abandoned Barber Paper Mill just outside of town. Its walls were covered with graffiti, stretching almost to the rusty exposed rafters. The floors were coated in sawdust and dirt, and spindly metal twisted out of the ground in places like industrial grass. We explored Grand Valley together, and I saw things in it I hadn’t before.
“Life is fast and death is slow here, Cal,” he told me. “But you can’t lie down like everyone else. Everyone you see has taken a cynical bow to mediocrity, praying to it like it’ll keep them safe. And so they never take the flight they need to take. They never shoot the shot that will really save them. I mean, you can do fucking anything. It’s a beautiful world outside these boundaries, I’m telling you.”
Rick was dangling his legs off the side of a ramp inside the mill, twenty feet from a mound of rubble. I was standing with one leg atop the pile.
“When Fish is gone I’ll catch a flight and meet you by the space needle,” he grinned. “You can show me what you did with all the money you made.”
“Yeah,” I mumbled.
A minute passed while I paced the drafty room, soft wind blowing through a massive hole in the brick wall.
“Why do you call him Fish?” I asked. It took him a while to answer.
“He was Mr. Fisher. He was a teacher. We called him Fish.”
Dennis wandered in from the other room, carrying a heavy-looking metal wheel. He dropped it with a thud, letting it reverberate throughout the room.
“Did he mind it?” Dennis asked once the echo had finished.
“No. He was cool.”
From just outside Rick’s peripheral vision, Dennis pursed his lips in an awkward smile and stared at me unblinkingly. He had gotten pretty good at imitating Fish. The sun was setting overhead, and red-pink light was pouring through the gaps in the roof. We walked back through the mill, our shoes crunching against rocks and little pieces of glass. I pictured leaving Grand Valley, soaring over the midwest with nothing but opportunity ahead. I could do anything.
• • •
Rick called my house in December. He sounded upbeat, like he was smiling, but apologetic at the same time.
“Hey Cal. Just checking to see if you and Dennis wanted to stop by the house. It’s really quiet out here. If you’re busy, I get it.” He paused for a solid ten seconds. “See you, buddy.”
We went that night in the cold. The air bit at our fingers like a rabid dog, surrounding our extremities with bitter elemental hatred. It was like the town itself didn’t want us to leave our houses, so it punished us with angry air and black ice death traps. Dennis walked with his hood down and his crew cut exposed, never being one to wear a hat or a pair of gloves. I think Dennis saw seasonal clothing as an admission of inferiority.
“I swear to God, if this guy freaks the fuck out on me again” Dennis said vaguely, puffing out a misty cloud as he did.
“I think he’s fine now”, I told him. “Just don’t mess with Fish.”
“You know that Brian guy from my pool? The sort of chinky one. Like he’s got the eyes and stuff but I think his dad is white. Maybe his Mom is from China or Japan or something.”
We turned a corner and I checked my watch. 8:50.
“Well, Brian pulls me to the side and tells me I’m teaching the wrong strokes or some shit during class. That I’ve really shown a lack of respect to his authority, like he’s some kind of kingpin lifeguard. I mean this guy…”
“It’s coming up,” I said.
“This guy was really on some power-trippy shit. Like he was still brewing over his country’s loss in the war and wanted to stick it to the white man or something. I still don’t know which war – it could have been ‘Nam or the atomic bombs – take your pick, but this guy was just making shit up on the spot. So I pull him aside when my shift ends and I tell him that if he wants to fuck with me while I’m working, we can just settle it in the parking lot, right?”
We stepped over a snowbank and made our way down Rick’s street.
“He shits his trunks. Doesn’t even talk back. I mean this guy couldn’t fight if his life depended on it. So if Rick pulls that shit again, I’ll just do the same thing. These motherfuckers never expect you to just not listen to them. It’s like they think that just because we have rules and laws and regulations and shit, nobody is gonna just fight back. I’m not gonna take that shit.”
When we got to Rick’s porch, I knocked with frigid, brittle knuckles. Rick opened the door like he was waiting right there, grinning from ear to ear like a cartoon character. Inside, the first thing I noticed was the smell. The chemical smell of paint permeated the whole room, filling it up with an unsettling kind of ammonia odor. Paint cans were stacked messily in a corner next to a pile of stained shirts. Paintings filled the walls with color, placed kind of neatly and strategically. A lot of them seemed abstract, like vague oceans or skies, but some of them depicted real things. Fish sat on the couch in one, and streams of color shot from the television, reaching out for him like a crowd of adoring fans. I saw the dock at Hidden River in another, with someone casting a line from their place on a lawn chair. Each and every one seemed complete and done with care. They were impressive. The detail and volume of his work was shocking, like this was all he had been doing.
“Wow,” I said as I looked around.
Dennis wandered over to the coffee table, taking note of the new ashtray.
“You smoke now?” he asked casually.
“Yeah,” Rick nodded. “I have drinks, though.”
We left that night abuzz with alcohol and a sense of relief. Rick was back to his old self, and his hiatus was just some random bout of stress. Maybe Fish had gotten sick, I thought. Everything’s gonna be cool again.
And it was for a while.
I hung out with Rick at least every week, and we shot the shit by Hidden River or Fish’s house or the outlet mall. We shot his gun in the woods by the train track one day in the spring, and he showed us how to draw and fire on someone.
The cicadas sounded like summertime as we wandered the town without aim or need for anything in particular. Evergreen mall was placid every time we visited, just like every other pedestrian square foot of Grand Valley. One day we stopped by the food court and scanned it while we ate our fried chicken and fries. Dennis liked to open those little plastic condiment cups and slurp their insides like marrow from a femur. He held one over his coarsely-pursed lips and slowly sucked some ketchup into his mouth, pretending that this was normal for him.
“Would you do that if you were sitting here alone?” I asked him cynically.
He finished his little meal.
“Why wouldn’t I? It’s kosher,” he said as he dropped it back onto his tray.
Rick was sitting next to me, across from Dennis. He was staring at the girl we ordered our chicken from at the other side of the food court. His fingers drummed rhythmically on the tabletop and I could hear his foot bouncing on the squeaky floor.
“I’m asking her out,” Rick announced, his chair scraping back loudly as he rose to his feet. He was buzzing with that sort of intensity I sensed in him that day he freaked out on us. He smirked with confidence as he eyed her across the room.
“Watch out for casablanca over here,” Dennis chimed.
“Casanova?” I mumbled.
He walked with conviction past empty seats, looking so tall under the low ceiling of the food court. He talked for way too long with the girl at the chicken stand. I couldn’t see her face, but if I went by just his body language, Rick was living out the story of how he met the mother of his children. He walked back to us beaming a smile that reflected all the light in the room. When he sat down next to me, he put a hand on my shoulder and sighed.
“See, I need to teach you how to do that. Once you’ve got it down, you can’t lose.”
“You think I can pick up chicks at shitty malls too? We can hit up forever twenty-one and check out the clientele,” I cracked.
Rick looked dreamily at the chicken stand again. I don’t think they ever went out.
• • •
We were sitting on the bridge overlooking Hidden river on a lazy afternoon. Me and Rick were alone on the edge of Grand Valley, where it was quieter and greener and overgrown. Brown and green weeds stuck out of the bank on either side of the river, which ran under our dangling shoelaces, spitting up little flecks of water. Weeping willows hung around us, bending over and dipping their branches right above the current. They looked tired, like Christmas trees burdened by ornaments. The drop down to the water was maybe ten or twelve feet down, so I imagined myself diving headlong into the blackness and swimming downstream. I never did much swimming. There was always the risk of spiny fish and algae slithering along my leg, which would be enough to make me climb out and walk home. The water ran without salt or chlorine to purify it, so I imagined there was tons of fish shit and piss floating around like leaves in a strong cup of tea – not to mention the human waste in there as well.
I turned to Rick after too many seconds of nothing. The sky was covered in gray like a sad quilt, and I felt tired every time I looked at it.
“What do you think about a job?” I asked him.
Rick looked at me curiously as he set his cigarette-holding-hand on his leg.
“What do you mean?”
“I’ve been thinking about a job this summer. Like Dennis has at the rec center.”
He paused and thought about it.
“Well, you could always try detailing cars at the mall. Or tutoring kids.”
“I don’t think I’d be good at tutoring. I barely have a seventy in biology. I think you need to be prolific at shit before you tell other people how to do it.”
Rick shook his head and stared back down the river.
“Then what are you thinking about, Cal? ‘Cause I don’t think you want to be sitting there at the rec center pool with Dennis, praying for strength while he explains how to do your job for the fortieth time. He’d be like an asshole boss who isn’t even your boss.”
“Well, I wasn’t thinking the rec center exactly. I was thinking more like that thrift store – ‘whatch-a-ma-call its’, or the supermarket.”
Rick tossed his cigarette and let the river have it. He scoffed, puffing out a little smoke that was still hanging around in his lungs.
“You don’t want a boss, Cal.”
“Why not? I want shifts. I want consistency.”
“You don’t want a boss because you’ll only learn dependency. And you don’t want to be dependent until you’re old like Fish. Plus, those motherfuckers will suck your soul like Nosferatu. They turn children into monsters like them.”
“How am I supposed to make any real money without a boss?”
“Look, I never had a boss. My first job was taking care of Fish, and I started when I was nineteen. Before he had his accident, I knew him, and I knew he didn’t have any family. He knew he couldn’t live alone forever, what with all the blood pressure and the whatever – old people problems. So I saw an opportunity to change my position in life, and I took it. And I never had to jerk off any managers in the process.”
Rick stared off at the willows, which were swaying in the wind like dreamcatchers. Their drooping branches moved like locks of hair in slow motion, drifting back and forth and up and down all together. I looked at them as he did, having nothing to say. One of my shoes was tied especially loosely, barely remaining on my foot as it dangled indifferently in the breeze. The air was like a soothing hug that wrapped me up, just warm enough and just breezy enough to balance out.
He brought his attention back to me.
“And that’s what you’ll be doing if you rely on bosses and managers forever. You sit there on your knees in your collared shirt, jerking off mister whoever and holding your hand out under his Johnson for the money shot. ‘Oh, thank you mister, thank you so much! I’ll be sure to up my whatevers next quarter!’”
I smirked as he mimed this scene for me.
“What if I get to be the boss?” I posed. Rick tilted his head and considered it for a second.
“Well, I guess the plus side would be all the jerk-off sessions. You’d get a few thousand more dollars and live in Grand Rapids or Ann Arbor. You could tell people to do the same things and rub aloe vera on your chafed nuts and stuff your problems in queen mattresses. I mean, man–” he paused.
“Isn’t that the life?”
My shoe slipped a little more, inching closer to the water.
“Wait– why are your nuts chafed?” I asked him, befuddled.
He squinted at me.
“All the jerking off.”
We sat there on the bridge for a moment together in silence, soaking in the pale light cast on all of our town that day. Birds chirped every so often and so did the crickets, scraping their little wings together in the grass. I felt like I might fall asleep by accident and go crashing into the water, baptized by boredom.
The silence was cut by the sudden splashing of my shoe into the river, which sank before I could see it go. I shot to attention and stared down at the water, which rushed on as always.
“There it goes,” Rick sighed. “Straight to hell.”
• • •
May passed over into June, starting the summer we were seventeen. I had a lot of time to think about what Rick meant that day in Bennett Field, but it still made no sense. I took up stocking shelves at Family Fare supermarket, which I quickly realized was worse than Dennis’ lifeguarding gig. It was dull and repetitive, and at no point did I find myself in a parking lot brawl with my manager. With each item I shelved or priced or packaged, I imagined Dennis sneering at me to do it differently. I got so bored that I started imagining conflict just to make it more interesting. I felt like Dennis.
We spent one night in early June by the dock, sitting in the same lawn chairs that had always been there.
“You think he’s alright?” I asked Dennis.
“Alright? He’s over there painting some bullshit right now like last time. It’s not weird for him to go a little psycho every now and then. What are you, his girlfriend?”
I dropped the subject.
Every night, the crickets came out to do their symphony about mating or whatever. The Chinese would say it was a sign of good fortune. It made it impossible to sleep, so I spent hours with pillows squeezed over my ears and the sheets kicked down to the bottom of my bed. It was too hot and too loud. I wondered what the weather was like in Seattle.
The days and nights got worse, dragging on in a summer haze, like a very long and unsettling dream I couldn’t pull myself out of. Sometimes I would fall asleep with the early morning sun begging to get through my curtains. There was something nagging at my subconscious every now and then, cutting through the surreal ambience of my insomnia. I knew something was very wrong deep down, but there was nothing I could do about it. I started to feel like the town I walked through every morning was evil, like little eyes were peeking through every store window I passed. The music at Family Fare seemed to repeat more and more, like a song was pulled from the playlist each day. I had read about psychological torture, like when the FBI blasted horrible soundscapes through the walls of the Mount Carmel Center in Waco the year before. I had never been so asleep and awake all at once. I was tired of it. I felt it was time to leave. All it would take was one little flare for everything to go up in flames. One little sign and I would leave Grand Valley forever, just like me and Rick always talked about. I only hoped he would be there to see me leave in a triumphant adieu, giving a grand finger to the mediocrity of life.
One July afternoon I got home from work at eight with the same three summer hits still echoing in my head like an infestation. With my eyes almost closing themselves from exhaustion, I nearly tripped over a beat-up package on my way up the front steps. As I exhaled in the coolness of the main floor, the screen door slammed itself shut behind me as if kicked by an angry poltergeist.
My Mom was at the dinner table, sipping something from a mug and reading a book. The setting sun poured through the glass doors to the backyard, reflecting in her glasses as she ran her eyes down the pages.
“How was work?” she asked.
“You know. The same.”
At the kitchen sink, not-cold-enough tap water slowly pissed itself into my glass as I watched the sun set out the window.
“Did you see the paper this morning?”
I turned the water off and walked over to the dinner table. On it sat the newest edition of ALLAMAKEE DAILY, our county’s very own journal. For the first time ever, the front page headline caught my eye:
MAN FOUND DEAD IN GRAND VALLEY RIVER.
A staff reporter named Leigh Dunick penned the cover story, which began like this: The body of a 23 year old man was pulled from a river on Thursday after fishermen found an elderly man along the shore. A father and son were unpacking their gear when they noticed a man sitting by the water some distance away. 79 year old Patrick Fisher was soaking wet and wearing only his underwear when they approached him. When asked questions, Patrick answered only by pointing at the water. Investigating officers believe he was brought there by his live-in caretaker, Richard Landrie, 24, who was found dead shortly after. Police are hoping to speak to anyone with information on this incident.
I stopped reading. There was Fish on the front page, dripping wet in nothing but his underwear. He was staring straight down at the water, his lips tucked into a little frown. I had to sit down.
“Is something wrong?” my mother asked with a tender touch of my arm. I shook my head and stared at the picture. “Just terrible,” she cooed and took her hand away.
Sitting in the kitchen, I looked up from the paper and into the most beautiful sunset I’d ever seen. In that moment, nothing felt real. I thought of Fish – wherever the cops took him – and I thought of Rick, staring at the sky over Bennett Field back in May. Blood rushed to my head all at once and I waited there for a while, listening to the crickets chirp outside.
Finally I thought of the brown box outside – an unmarked package left neatly on the third step to the porch. I already had a vague notion of what it was. The walk to the front door seemed to take longer than it should have, like everything was far away.
The box was tucked against the step, sealed with a messy capital I of duct tape. Water stains darkened the edges and the smell of acrylic was overpowering. I carried it back into the kitchen, where I cut it open on the floor.
Sitting at the very top of the box was a painting of a city. Rain poured from an orange-red sky, like the sun was pressed up against the earth. There were dozens of buildings set against mountains, and I could see the space needle in the foreground. I pulled it out and set it down on the floor. Underneath it were several more paintings, mostly messy colorscapes of red and black and blue, swirling and scribbling in circles. I couldn’t tell what they were supposed to be.
The last painting was something else entirely. There were two figures engulfed by a current, their fingers gnarled and grasping just above the surface. Their eyes were hollow and black under the water, with their mouths stretched in agony. Black figures were lined up along the shore like bulrushes peering down. Shadowy fingers pointed at them like grim carnival goers. Frozen in time, they were drowning forever. A note sat loosely on the floor of the box. It was written in blue ink on that sort of hole-punched lined paper you would buy at the dollar store.
“We can see stars now.
See you soon, brother.
-Rick”