What can a boy do with such
information but store it in his body?
—Robert Boswell, “Smoke”
All Alan wanted to do that last summer was go over to John's and smoke cigarettes with his friends. We'd wait until John's mom backed her car out of the drive—she had the late shift at the county hospital—then start rustling around in the pantry. If we got lucky, there would be a few cans of warm beer or some cooking sherry, and we'd kill the rest of the night up in his drafty barn loft out behind their ramshackle house, shooting the shit and listening to Zeppelin and Hendrix. The whole summer seemed to go that way.
In a few days we'd all be starting high school—Alan a Catholic school over in Concord, John the local public school, me all the way across the country. I couldn't have articulated the feeling then, but I remember the whole summer having this sense that something big needed to happen—that Alan and I had to make it happen—before it was too late. Before what was too late? I wasn't sure. Before the summer ended maybe, and with it my childhood. As if a screen door might somehow slam shut in the wind and mysteriously latch.
It made sense, then, when John's sister agreed to buy us a case of beer, to throw a big end-of-the-summer party. Made sense to hold it in John's loft, the perfect party spot. If Alan kept hanging on John's every word, following him around like a puppy, it wasn't like I had much choice. John and Alan called up everyone they knew, then John drove us to Concord in his beat-up Duster (though he only had a permit), his long hair whipping in the wind. We sat waiting in the New Hampshire state liquor-store lot for over an hour, paranoid about cops. I felt bad that we skimmed ten bucks off John's mom's stash, but John said he did it all the time, she never noticed, not to worry.
His sister finally showed, on her lunch break from Papa Gino's, sexy in her candy-red uniform. She had to pass alone under the new highway—her quick, staccato steps echoing inside all that concrete, signaling her arrival before we could make her out in the rearview. Then her pretty, other-side-of-the-tracks face there in the passenger's-side window, expression blank when she saw who was in the car.
“You're just kids,” she said. Her name was Cindy or Sherry or something like that. “I shouldn't be doing this.”
We laughed nervously. Alan fiddled with the radio knob. I had this terrific urge to lean forward and take Cindy/Sherry's face in my hands and kiss her. She looked at me like she guessed my fantasy and stuck her tongue out, darting it like a cat. Which was, in and of itself, almost enough. She got us the beer, though, and when John stepped out into the afternoon sun with a case in his arms, a shit-eating grin spreading full across his farm-boy face, I almost liked him, almost forgot that he was trying to steal my best friend. We hooted and hollered like we were at a rodeo.
I remember that drive back down the highway as one long rush of wind and blaring radio rock and roll. Little flashes of it filtering back. The cracked leather seat, the case of Narragansett under my arm, its cool cardboard pressing on my skin. John stiff-arming it down the highway. Alan turning back and smiling, crooning along with Tom Petty, She's an American girl.
John stored the beer in an old cooler full of ice while Alan and I pulled out all the best records. Styx. Kansas. REO Speedwagon. Aerosmith's "Toys in the Attic." I'd been listening to new music ever since the move, stuff John had never heard of or would ever like. Had been turning Alan onto my secret stash of New Wave 12” singles, some inner-city soul and prehistoric rap. But tonight it was classic rock all the way.
Alan and I tried to clean the place up, but it wasn't easy. John left his shit lying everywhere. I cracked Alan up by throwing a whole pile of John's shirts onto the floor. John walked right over them. So we went outside and made road signs out of old cardboard with magic-marker arrows pointing where to park. We knew we were acting queer; we just couldn't help ourselves.
Then, in a kind of stupid upping of the ante, we cancelled the party. Just like that. I forgot whose idiot idea it was. Probably John's. Either way, it was too late to call anyone—the windows already curtained with dark—so we just turned out the lights, crawled behind the couch with the beer and hid. Opened a few cans and started waiting for the world to go away. Every time a car drove in, we stifled our laughs and kept our heads low. People would yell up, stomp around a while, then get frustrated and leave. One group of John's friends actually climbed into the loft: four of them piling up the ladder. They had seen the signs and knew we were there but couldn't find the light switch.
“Pussies,” John hissed.
Eventually people stopped coming, and we crawled out of our hiding place. By then we were piss drunk and amped up with adrenaline. Alan and I thrashed around in the dark, knocking over table stands and old lamps. We threw ourselves down on the dirty mattresses lining the walls as if enacting some wild ritual dance of hormonal joy. John flipped the light on and dared us to join him in drinking the whole case ourselves.
“Long live the Three Musketeers,” he cried, and he and Alan threw up their arms in camaraderie, beer foam showering the floor.
I am not sure what I looked like standing there, but Alan threw me this furious glare. He started chewing on one of his shirt sleeves, like he did when we were kids. I knew he wanted me to join in, but I couldn't. Things were moving way too fast.
John said: “Let's go to Robin's!”
I was flipping through a stack of records and didn't respond, hoping the remark would pass unnoticed. But Alan nodded, which was enough for John. He climbed onto the old couch and shook his finger. He reminded me of my brother, always coming up with the plan, always commanding center stage. I felt a small jolt of sadness, a weird kind of pressure behind my eyes and in my chest; it seemed as if something was about to burst inside me and flood everywhere.
“We'll head east on Schultz's road,” he said. “Walk until we hit the crossroads. It's a mile down the old logging road before we hit town.”
I thought, no way!
“A half-mile to the highway, three more to Pittsfield,” John said, a lukewarm beer up at his mouth. “No problem.”
He was drunk. Pittsfield was too far away to walk. Besides, his mom would get home and hear us sneaking out and know we'd been drinking.
“Good idea,” Alan said, joining him in the center of the room.
“The town pump,” John said, moving his arm up and down like a piston. “And I'm going to get me some water.”
I made my way over to the trap door and started walking along its edge. My hands out like a trapeze artist, I tried to get close to falling but keep my balance.
John stomped over, knocking the beer out of my hand as he passed. The can spun to a stop, foam pouring out of its mouth.
“Fuck you,” I said. “That's it for beer.”
“Fuck you, too, Dubba!”
“Fuck you both,” Alan said.
John's face lit up. He shouted, “Fuck! Fuck! Fuck!” and started dancing around the loft.
As John laced his shoes, Alan stared over at me again, the expression in his eyes, the posture of his body, shouting: “C'mon!” All I wanted was to go home, to talk back and forth across the dark room with Alan until we fell asleep. The way I saw it, we were sure to be caught. It was way too late for Robin to be up. Town pump or not. She'd be alone and scared to find three guys on her roof. Her parents would call the cops. But I wasn't going to admit any of that.
“Sure,” I said, stepping down off the ledge. “Let's go.”
What I remember most about that night is walking down the long dirt road, then passing through the apple orchard. How for a while there was only the sound of our feet crunching on the dirt, the whoosh whoosh of Alan's corduroys rubbing together. How my eyes eventually adjusted to the dark, and I could make out the far northern tip of Locke Lake through a stand of yellow pine; could almost picture the square of the dock out in the water, the moon drifting along the treetops like a buoy. How, later, we got separated from John.
And I remember all the times Alan and I shared on that lake: learning to swim one summer, then going for our lifesaver's license the next, joking around on the dock to impress the girls, even swimming across the thing once despite the shouts drifting out from the shore. We treaded water to get back our wind, out where the water was an impossibly dark blue. We laughed wildly, proud of ourselves, singing loud enough for anyone to hear.
The previous summer I had insisted we see The Deer Hunter. It was my fifteenth birthday, and I badgered my mom into taking us to the old theater off the Portsmouth circle. I can picture it clearly: coming out for intermission (they still had them then) as if we were the ones helicoptered out of our lives into the heart of Vietnam, fast-forwarded into men. As if me and Alan were the ones working side by side at the factory, then out in the wilderness together, silently stalking up through the trees, rifles materializing in our hands. I can remember just standing there looking at each other, shell-shocked, sipping our Cokes mutely until the lights blinked us back into the theater.
And I remember how we kept walking down that road, until it was way past midnight and we started getting cold. How I was about to suggest heading back when out of the blue Alan turned to me, an intense look on his face. He must have been thinking about The Deer Hunter because what he said could have come right out of it.
He said: “Some people have it and some don't.”
He was staring right at me like he expected a reaction.
“Run that by me again,” I said.
“Some people have it, but most people don't.”
John leaned over, anger flaring up in his face. I could tell he didn't know what was going on.
“I see,” I said. I thought I had it but wasn't sure.
“You and me've got it,” Alan said.
Then I got it. “Like ‘one shot',” I said.
Alan nodded his head slow and serious. That's what the two friends talked about in the movie. Just one shot to kill the deer. Nothing wasted. Alan nodded even harder. I looked sidelong at John, and I could tell Alan knew what I was thinking.
“But John don't,” he said.
I started to nod but stopped myself.
John leaned over and gave me a push. “Shut up!”
Fuck him! He didn't get it.
“Tony Perez has it,” I said. Perez was my favorite player.
“Yaz has it.” Alan said. Yazstremski was his.
“Reggie Jackson has it,” John said.
Alan and I laughed.
I said, “Reggie Fuckhead thinks he has it.” This cracked Alan up. Reggie Jackson was way too full of himself.
I liked this game. And I was glad when John fell back a good twenty yards. I could hear him chucking rocks into the woods.
Alan said: “Mike and Willy have it, even though they're jerks.” We had spent the summer avoiding our older brothers.
I nodded. “Your dad wants to have it. And my mom has it, but isn't sure.”
Alan's hands were out in front of his body, palms grasped together, and he looked a little crazy. I was glad to be his friend. We went down the list of people we knew, putting them either in the “has it” or “doesn't” category. Tony, the only black kid in town, had it. And so did Freddie Morse, the boy with the tube in his head. Marie and Nadine had it for sure (and we wanted it).
Alan wanted to go get John, but I wouldn't let him. No way.
“Let him be,” I said. I wished the road would go on forever.
Over the years this story has taken on a mythic cast: the lost boy teetering at the threshold of young adulthood. I can't seem to help myself. Every time I start to tell it, the story swerves into allegory. I don't know anymore what is true, partly true or pure fantasy. If that boy is even me. Does it matter? I am trying to pinpoint a feeling here, a tangible sense of loss.
A few basic truths.
1) It had been three years since I last lived in Barnstead. My brother and I following my dad around, moving to a new school each year, visiting Mom in the summers. I had to keep building anew my friendship with Alan. This was the first summer I had to contend with John.
2) When my mom left her boyfriend, Arthur, she moved into a walkup apartment in Portsmouth, three towns over. She lived over the local pub, The Press Room, where she met Charter, a Zen Buddhist anarchist wearing a Gravity Never Sleeps T-shirt. She followed him out to his hand-built house in an old hippy commune beside a swamp, deciding that night never to leave. I liked it, too, with its unruly vegetable garden and outhouses and long dirt roads, slowly warming up to Charter's stern but friendly presence. But I wanted to get back to my old life with Alan. Wanted to reclaim that feeling of endless possibility we always seemed to move within.
What else? The summer came to its abrupt close soon after that night. I moved back out to Seattle to live with my father. Alan and I saw each other here and there, a few times calling each other up out of the blue. But we grew apart in increments, in that casual manner of old friends who carry the implicit, naïve trust that the next time they hook up it will immediately feel like old times. As if whole blocks of a life hadn't passed between.
One more thing. For years, when telling the story to a roomful of friends at a party, I would leave John out of the story altogether. When I finally put him back in—in my first clumsy attempts at writing this down—I'd have John get lost in the orchard or abandon us down by the schoolyard. I wanted Alan and I out there alone together on that highway. It makes sense that I wouldn't want John in the picture. If it's about anything, this story's about wanting things to stay the same. Wanting my brother to pay attention to me again. For my parents to get back together. For my father to stop moving each year. I wanted these uncertainties cut out of my life. Telling you this story now, I still do.
The way around the Lebreque place was through the apple orchard. The house looming over the crossroads like a dilapidated sentry tower. By cutting through the orchard, we figured we wouldn't have to deal with Lebreque's killer German shepherd, King, who we knew from childhood tales was ferocious, most likely rabid, entirely evil. There was a hole in the property fence about a quarter-mile before the crossroads and a ragged path through the apple trees that, if we could find it, would let us out far down the logging road, only a half-mile out of town. Alan and I had always gone through there.
The wind must have been heading straight for King, though. Even before the house was in sight we heard his deep bark. It stopped us in our tracks. Alan turned and shouted for John. No answer. He started to run back after him.
I grabbed Alan's shoulder and yanked him around. “C'mon!”
We broke into a run, side by side, arms pumping, running into the dark clutches of shadows reaching down at our heads. The cold air rushed past us. King's barking—I remember it as a mad, snarling howl—echoed in the trees. A feeling of exhilaration shot down my body like a vein of heat lightning. We were running together, my best friend and me. Alan turned once and smiled through a wild mask of fear. This had an eerie effect, as if he had died and turned into a ghost. I was his comrade, which made me a spirit, too. When the dark gap emerged in the trees on our left, a piece of the barbed-wire fence twisting back like in some movie, we plunged through it.
Alan and I must have lain on our stomachs like that for a long time. When we stood up we were sopping wet and cold. The wind had picked up and was howling through the branches above our heads. At this point we should have turned around and gone home. But something about the night—the coming end of summer, the impending separation, all that beer—led us forward, as if drawn forward by a magnetic pull into the heart of the apple orchard.
I remember Alan and I stumbling on, our hands before us, protection from low-hanging branches and the invisible cobwebs strung up like miniature clotheslines between the trees. How, moving around an apple tree, all of a sudden Alan was gone from my side. I called out his name, but the wind lifted my voice and pressed it down into the ground. I called out again, barely making out Alan's faint returning cry. I headed in that direction. The next time I heard his voice, fainter still, it was off in another direction. I was turned around. More than anything I didn't want to be in this stupid orchard, or in John's drafty shithole of a room, or even on the floor at Alan's. I wanted to be home.
The orchard was eerily quiet. I was worried that Alan had gone looking for John. That he might find him. And I wanted to know where that dog had gone. If he appeared out of the dark, I would climb a tree. I imagined Alan's dad, Mr. Yanski, out trolling for us in his old truck, his shotgun hung on a rack over his head and a Miller beer cold between his legs. He'd be angry as hell. I pictured my mother waking up with a dreadful intuition, afraid that I was hurt badly in a car wreck. I saw her passing nervously down the tilted hall, a glass of wine in her hand. I told myself that I had to find Alan, stay away from King, and find a way out of the orchard. I didn't give a shit about John. Let him freeze.
I walked for what seemed at least an hour, a strange feeling coming over me, as though I were passing up this long, scrolling hill that went on and on—as if I were walking the earth's curvature. If I kept going, I might see over the horizon into some new land. I knew that it wasn't possible, but there was something comforting in the illusion, and, for a few moments, I was an explorer, a lost hero making his way along the globe. Thoughts of The Deer Hunter resurfaced. The two friends separated by war. How they had to play that awful Russian roulette game to get out of the POW camp.
That made me sad and scared, so I started thinking back to the earlier scenes, to when the two friends were in their hometown just about to ship out for Vietnam, how they went out hunting together. I can't remember whether they bagged the deer or not. Maybe they let it go on purpose. I could almost see the deer darting away though the trees ahead of me. What I could remember was sitting in that theater wishing that they'd not have to go to war, that they could just stay together and hunt. But they get dropped into a sea of waving grass, dead bodies strewn around, and everything pushed down by this wall of helicopter noise and wind. Plumes of smoke rising from burned-down huts.
To cheer myself up, I remembered all the weekends I met Alan at the halfway point between our houses—out where the road switched to tar. If I got there first, I dropped my three-speed and stepped over the old stone wall that ran the length of Pitman's property. I was happy to wait among the pine and birch trees, content to rummage in the fern and dusty underbrush for phantom arrowheads. Soon enough I'd hear the scrape of pedals knocking against Alan's rusted-out bike frame, followed by heavy breathing, as he made it up the last few yards of the big hill, then the clatter of the bike being thrown down on gravel. He would be over the wall, suddenly beside me, and our long afternoon of adventure would begin.
I thought I heard a car on the dirt road, but its lights must have been off because there wasn't any light flashing on the trees. And it didn't sound like Mr. Yanski's truck—no rattle of tool chest knocking against truck cab. Only the thin, uneven hum of tires passing over dirt and gravel and the brief staccato rattling when the car passed over the river bridge. Then nothing.
The river bridge! Alan must have heard the car, too, and made the same crude calculations as I, because pretty soon I saw him up ahead, his arms out before him like a sleepwalker. I was chilled, worried for an embarrassing instant that King had gotten him, somehow transforming him into the walking dead. But then he saw me and ran my way. Together we made for the road.
Alan stumbled into the fence first. It was lucky he didn't cut himself on the barbed wire any worse than a few scratches on his hands. We moved along that ragged property line a while, eventually coming to a place where the fence had caved in under a fallen tree. I held the top wire gingerly between my thumb and forefinger, pressing down the middle and bottom wires with my shoe. By grabbing a branch, Alan got himself through. He did the same for me, and then we were on the logging road, only a short ways from town.
Alan kept saying that we'd run into John downtown, but I didn't think so. It was as if I had willed him out of existence. We walked with our heads down, pushed forward by momentum. The booze had worn off hours back. We walked and wished out loud that we had brought cigarettes. Looked for John by the stone bridge, then George Haller's Esso station, one solitary light on in the back. We looked for him at the center traffic light, but he wasn't there. We cut through the library's back parking lot and made for the schoolyard, standing in the middle of the soccer field and calling out John's name. Nothing.
Crouched out there in the cold, Alan and I talked about all the nights I slept over at their house. Big Mike getting drunk and terrorizing everybody. They'd never admit it, but all the Yanski brothers were afraid of their father. So was I. When Big Mike got going, their little house would be wired to blow. He'd settle in his Lay-Z-Boy chair after dinner and rule with the force of his stare, his unpredictability. His was a slow-burn anger that lingered underneath a smirking smile and placid eyes, a drunk's anger curled up like a rattler under a rock. We all sensed the silent rattle when the anger threatened. His fist pounding the kitchen wall, rattling the dishes. The screen door slamming behind him and the sound of his truck starting up.
I'd go to sleep in a sleeping bag wedged between Alan's bed and his big brother Mike's, a fluorescent Jesus tacked to the wall floating over me like some bad dream. Lying there in the dark we all wanted him to crash and, at the same time, would stay up waiting for the search beam of headlights to pass across the wall, for the slam of the truck door. The next morning everything would be normal, almost as if nothing had happened. Big Mike would go off to work or fiddle around contentedly with the Saturday chores, and we'd slowly ease our way back into our summer games.
One of us brought up that summer's Fourth of July fair. How we had hooked up with some older girls from Alton. We'd always tried to accomplish this feat, often pretending later that we had. Each year, as soon as Mr. Yanski found a parking space, we split off from the group and got lost in the crowd, free to roam the grounds for a few hours. We played carnival games and talked with friends from school, but most of our time was spent on the prowl. Would Nadine be there? Or Marie McCready, with her pretty Linda Ronstadt face? Maybe some new girl, her hair smelling of hay and saddle soap.
This time the two girls actually seemed to like us, and by midnight we'd sweet-talked them into coming with us to the graveyard. They stayed close to each other as we passed through the parked cars, whispering back and forth, splitting up as we passed into the front gate, the smaller one joining Alan. The skinny one with long blonde hair followed me to a nearby tree. She smelled like wintergreen Lifesavers, cherry lipstick. I held her close, not knowing what to say or how to make a move. She leaned against me, still and barely breathing. Then the fireworks were going off up in the sky. Alan's younger brother Kirk started calling our names from the parking lot, trying to get us back to the car before Mr. Yanski lost his cool. I was thinking that I had to kiss the girl or else Alan would have one over on me forever.
Eventually we gave up on John and went behind the school to look for butts. Lighting them in our cupped hands until the cold got to us. We agreed that it was time to start heading back. Which is exactly when John showed up. First a loud whoop out behind the playing field, then a shadow silhouette crossing like a ghost over the darkened grass, then John himself, larger than life, striding up with arms out.
Of course, John made fun of us for being afraid of King, who he had found tied up to a post, old and half-blind. And of course he wanted to keep going. We made three ragged loops around the school as we argued about it, passing through the basketball court, Alan and I swishing imaginary jump shots on the way out. Gradually, a vision of Robin's bedroom window shimmered back into sight. All we had to do was walk down the highway to get there—stride down the center of the street to the service road that would take us to Highway 14. It didn't matter anymore that we might wake somebody up.
When we got to the bridge, we dropped down to the small river trickling between the rocks. We used to hide there on skip days and had a little spot no one could find us in. Our outlaw hideout. We were standing in the stream, pissing, when Alan spotted the skulls. They lay in the dark water, glowing eerily among the rocks. Three cow skulls. One with big horns sticking out. I went in after them but couldn't get myself to drag them out. Something about putting a curse on us if they were moved. Alan made a lame joke, but we were too spooked. All we could do was poke at the skulls moodily with sticks and look into the empty eye sockets.
I need to stop for a moment and tell you something. It won't take long.
Last year I was out hiking on the mountains-to-sea trail, which up here runs parallel to the Blue Ridge Parkway, no more than half a mile from our home in Asheville, North Carolina. I'd been venturing down a side trail which turned into a narrow footpath that, after a few twists and turns, dead-ended in a small clearing. Before I knew it, I had stepped inside a small apple orchard. As soon as I was standing inside the rows of gnarled trees, I was teleported back to that night in the orchard with Alan. Scenes from it flashed in front of me like a waking dream. And have kept flashing with more or less intensity since. These days I go back at least once a week.
Often on these walks I try to make sense of that long-ago night. I bring pages of this story, folded lengthwise in my back pocket and pull them out when a new idea comes. Working this way, I often walk into the booby-trap webs the spiders spin across the path, stringy death masks forming to my face. (I must look like a caricature of a nature writer.) And you might not believe me when I tell you that a few weeks ago I discovered the entire orchard of trees yanked up by gnarled roots and dumped onto the ground. But it's true. Some sort of blight, I guess. But sitting there in the dirt, all I wanted was to stuff one of the bony roots in my bag, replant it in my yard. It felt like another blow, another thing I had no control over.
With the cow-skull visions in our heads, we climbed out from under the bridge. We stood around knocking the mud off our pants, and this little mutt of a dog appeared. Alan tried to pet it but the mutt kept backing up. I tried scaring it off by shouting and throwing rocks near it. But Alan got worried we might wake up the sheriff who lived down the street. The dog wouldn't leave us alone. We turned down Jenkins Road, doing our best to ignore it.
A street light sputtered out as I passed beneath, and that, too, felt like bad luck. I hurried up to catch Alan and John, who were passing down into an irrigation ditch. For a moment, all I could see was John's bushy head of hair peaking out over the embankment.
“Wait up,” I called. “Let's keep together.”
Not long after we reached the service road, we came to the outskirts of Pittsfield. The dim highway lights in sight. Our spirits lifted when we got out on the endless runway of tar: the open space eased the cold and fatigue that had overcome us. Everything had a majestic feel. If we have made it onto the highway, I thought, Pittsfield must not be too far away. Visions of a warm house rose inside me, temporarily easing the hunger pangs that cramped my stomach. I dreamed of a warm couch to sleep on, maybe something good to eat, the warm, sleep-fuzzy face of Robin floating at the door. John raised his arms above his head, started singing a song off the radio and kicking his legs out. I could understand what Alan saw in him, something of his wild spirit. He had brought us onto this highway. We had made it this far. Maybe we'd get to Robin's house, after all.
This is where things get spread out. Alan runs ahead, chasing after the dog, whistling for it. (Or maybe I'm just making up the dog.) Lost in my thoughts, I walk the road's center lines, doing my best to stay inside their little corridor. Like train tracks, only easier to manage.
“Stay on the side of the road,” I yell after a car comes upon us unexpectedly, zipping past in a receding tunnel of hum. I stumble along in the grass and gravel. If only we stay a little off the road, I think, we will be okay.
Next thing I know, I am standing beside Alan hunched over on the side of the road. I think he's just out of breath. The moon's not in sight; the sky washed out gray.
“Ouch,” Alan says softly, his hand up under his chin.
“What's wrong?” I ask.
“Ouch,” he says again, staggering toward me. He has his hand in front of his face: keeps putting it up against his neck then holding it back out and looking at it.
“It's blood,” he says. “It's fucking blood.”
I place my hand on Alan's neck. When I take my hand back, I have slipped a glove on. Alan's bleeding badly.
John walks up.
He says, “Get up, you pussy!” before realizing Alan is hurt.
“Shit, Alan,” he says. “You're fucked up.”
Alan looks at me, back at his hand, then up at John. He touches his neck again and looks blankly at John.
“No shit, Sherlock.”
I'm about to cry.
“He ran into something,” I say, just before Alan slumps into my arms. All I can do is lower him to the ground.
The reflector post Alan ran into stands a few yards off the side of the highway. You wouldn't see it unless headlights lit up the diamond-shaped metal in a glint. Alan sliced his neck open along its crude edge.
I take off my sweatshirt and press it to Alan's neck. I'm kneeling over my friend, rocking myself back and forth out of nervousness. John crouches behind me.
“Somebody call an ambulance,” I say to myself, knowing as I say it that it's a stupid thing to say. Alan tries to get up; I hold him down. Oh fucking God, I think, he's going to die.
“I need to get to the hospital,” Alan mutters. “I need to get to a hospital.”
“You'll be okay,” John says. He stands up and runs to the road. Then he walks back, stands over us, arms wrapped around his chest, rocking.
Alan tries to sit up again, and I have to struggle to hold him. Despite all the blood loss, he's manically strong.
“I'm okay. I can get myself to the hospital. I feel fine. I can run to the hospital.”
I have to laugh. It's the shock. He's all nerves and adrenaline. He's looking at me but through me, doing everything he can to break free.
“Shut up, asshole!” I yell, pressing the drenched sweatshirt even harder. This makes Alan moan.
“I'll go get help,” John says. He's ready to bolt.
“Just stay still.” I am talking to Alan, but John stays where he is. (Or maybe it's John who says this and me who is ready to flee.)
Alan's energy starts to run down, and he settles into an uneasy sleep. I sit with him like this for a while. John joins me. We watch the sky turn almost white. A haggard flock of birds cuts a path through the sky, a flimsy arrowhead disappearing over the treetops. I remember asking John to go for help. If Alan is going to die, I want to be alone with him. But that's a lousy thing to do. John runs all the way into Pittsfield, and Alan dies anyway. We both stay there with Alan. Somehow, everything will be okay.
I have been walking and writing again. A morning jaunt through this now familiar forest; heading back to the newly planted orchard. I have stopped to jot a note. It's about, of all things, On the Road, which I have been rereading for one of my seminars. In a passage late in the book, Sal and Dean are older, their friendship already tested by the years. They've just been schooled in a pick-up game by some youths and are heading back to a coldwater flat. They toss the ball back and forth between them playfully, improvising a little dance of togetherness. I write in the margins: this is it. Then underline “it.” What am I getting at? Is It the love men share when they slip back into being boys? Or is it the feeling best friends have for each other when they step together into that peculiar fantasy of growing up? I don't know.
All I know is that I want to tell this so full that the story bursts all over itself. For you to see without me having to tell you that the whole thing is really about my brother. Even though he only pops up in the story here and there. That I never tell you what he looks like or the shitty things he did to me just so he could feel superior. When I look up, I don't recognize the way. Must have turned down a side path. Almost turn back but then keep going, following the leaf-strewn trail over a trickle of stream and up to the other side of the orchard. Even though this is a new route, I know exactly where I am.
Half an hour later, I am back at the bottom of the hill, On the Road tucked in my back pocket. It's funny. Reading this familiar book of my young adulthood, after all these years, I find myself on a trail both old and new, simultaneously the right direction and off course. Like with The Deer Hunter, how the De Niro and Walken characters became larger-than-life versions of us up on the screen—the unspoken connection they shared in the woods during that first hunting trip embodying our own friendship. They had it. And how in this story I am both the twelve-year-old heartsick boy pulled from his mother for the first time and the fifteen-year-old teen yearning for the distracted love of his father. In both, the hero has fallen in love with his friend, a spirit brother. In both, he gets lost in the dark heart of being alone.
We hear the police car coming before we see it. Humming like in a dream, it pulls up directly behind us, headlights flicking off. The patrolman steps out, looking weary, as though he has just come from a funeral. He crouches down and takes Alan from my arms. I must have slipped into shock because I'm not able to get up for a while. Then Alan is up on the hood of the car, and the cop has me hold down his legs. He tells Alan not to move, that the important thing is not to move. The cruiser's hood is warm and the engine underneath clicks as it cools down. Then the cop radios in.
It takes the ambulance a long time to come. In that eternity I must tell Alan a hundred times not to move. Finally, I hear the siren and see the flashing lights play along the electric wires. The cop is over talking to John. Alan has fallen into a half sleep. I stand suspended over him forever. Then two men lift the stretcher and take Alan away.
I remember the cop asking us if we have been drinking. John starts to lie, but I tell him the truth. We've been drinking a lot. I expect him to lecture us on the evils of alcohol, but he doesn't say anything except that he thinks Alan will make it. I thank him, as if his saying it is going to make it true.
We get in the patrol car, and the cop drives us back to John's house. I wanted to ride by Alan's side in the ambulance, to stay with him through the morning, but they don't let me. I go to bed on John's cold loft floor instead, lying there in the dark wishing I am anywhere but where I actually am. That Alan is okay and I'm not going away.
The rest of it gets blurry. I've been told that my step-dad, Charter, came and got me the next morning. But, I must confess, I remember Mr. Yanski coming for me, as though it were still the summer after fifth grade, as though my mom had never sent us away to live with our father, as though we had never left Barnstead.
In my fantasy, I am on my own, walking around John's cold room looking for my socks. My mother is still unreachable. The remnants of the previous night are strewn everywhere. I am sick with sadness. Eventually, I get myself down the ladder and outside to find a thin layer of fog draped over the top of the grass. Mr. Yanski is sitting in his idling truck, strangely quiet, almost serene, with a pipe clenched between his teeth the whole ride. I want him to tell me stories about his wild childhood or his stint in the Navy, but he just sits there quietly and sucks on his pipe. When we pass off the blacktop onto the dirt road, the tires bumping into the tops of the wells, I start crying. I imagine Alan alone in that hospital bed, tubes in him, machines blinking. I think of going to Seattle, to a big high school without Alan. I try to picture my brother inside the house, but he has already moved out. Mr. Yanski doesn't say anything or try to stop me. The tears dry up before we get to my house.
The lights are on in the kitchen. My mom must've been waiting for me all morning. When the truck comes to a stop, Mr. Yanski leans over to open my door and gives it a hard push. I can smell his cheap aftershave, and his pipe, his sweat. I slip out of the seat, turning back to wave goodbye. The truck has already started backing up, so I go
into the house.