Stephen Markley - Ohio

WHAT WE HAVE HERE IS a truck cruising along on a hot July night with a small unmarked package strapped to the underside of the wheel well. This after a fourteen-hour drive from New Orleans to Ohio with the driver cranked out of his moon on LSD. This after Bill Ashcraft had pulled into his hometown and encountered two relics of his country’s imperial, war-savaged heart. After he found bemedaled hero Dan Eaton strolling aimless and hollow-eyed on the twilight roadside. After visiting Rick Brinklan’s cool, glass-smooth grave, his first time since Brinklan’s fractured body came home. After the bar fight suddenly extinguished by Eaton’s inventive use of a glass eye. Then throw in a few other schoolyard ghosts he’d yucked it up with at that bar: Jonah Hansen, the scion of a housing dynasty, and former Rust Belt football icon Todd Beaufort, and what a web of truly vexing remembrance these aging boys had constellated within him. Tuck all that away, though. Dan Eaton will explain all that eventually. For now just understand that stuff went down , but for Bill, the mystic, intertwining energy of the night was not exactly decelerating. From the moment he popped the tab onto his tongue and pulled into the swamp-ass heat of the bayou highways, he understood he’d be navigating some bends in the river on this one, but even by his standards the path felt oxbowed, unpredictable far beyond what one expects when returning to your frayed and haunted hometown to make a shady delivery to a figure from your deep, dank, dark damning past, which is to say, Dear Territory: I’m a stranger here myself.

Then, after dropping Eaton off at the Eastern Star Retirement Home to chase his own two-toned demons, the goddamned truck ran out of gas.

Hard to blame anyone but Bill Ashcraft on this count. He hadn’t anticipated so many distractions, and his truck’s gas gauge had the accuracy of a creationist biology textbook. Mostly he’d been thinking fondly of his bottle of Jameson, which had run dry in the spooky twilight amid the gravestones.

The old Chevy S10 clicked, tinkled, rattled, and wheezed to a halt, sounding like she pissed herself before her engine gave out completely. Bill guided her to the shoulder, coming to rest with a scrape of tall dry grass on the undercarriage.

“You dry bitch,” he told the truck. “You old, foul, no good—” He screamed bone-dry laughter. “Naw, I’m just kidding.” He wrapped the steering wheel in an embrace. “I still love you, girl. Ryde or die forever, boo.”

The headlights cut an off-kilter block of light over the yellowed crabgrass on this limp, tree-lined stretch of State Route 229, maybe a mile outside of New Canaan.

“Remember that time we drove out of Kansas with the entire fleet of staties chasing us like bank robbers? That was fun.”

He released the wheel and sighed. Neither Bill nor his truck had ever been to Kansas.

He was pretty fucking drunk, which for him was saying something. He was also still pretty wired from the acid. These tabs lasted For. Fuck. Ing. Ev. Er. You really had to be prepared to step into another dimension, accept the deregulations of that particular nuthouse, accept that you were never coming back, and imagine life under these new brain-bled, torch-fever-fed circumstances.

It was okay. This crazy rat of a day would just have to steam a little longer in its shithouse.

The thing of it—Bill mused—was this: You ran into people from high school whenever you came back to The Cane. That was double bogey for the course. But to spot Eaton on his way to visit Rick and then later sit across from Beaufort, who, having used up all nine of his football lives, now looked like a sad, soggy, bloated-corpse version of the titan he’d been in high school, on this night of all nights—well, that was pretty goddamned cosmic-hand mysterious. Though they’d been teenage enemies of a sort, he also felt the fraternity: once handsome, marbled, small-town athletes who couldn’t understand why they hadn’t conquered the world.

Whatthefuckever. Tonight the universe was a-humming. He could feel it through his urge to vomit. He didn’t believe in God, fate, or coincidence, but that left precious little to actually explain anything, and sometimes the right asteroid just strikes the right planet so the lizards lose a turn, and the motherfucking monkeys take over.

“Planet of the Apes!” Bill shouted into the cab. “It’s our planet. What a twist.”

He was at least a couple miles from the nearest gas station, and he’d thrown his cell phone out the window in Arkansas after briefly becoming convinced the NSA was tracking him. He plucked the kitchen timer from his pocket: 02:37:47. He would have to hoof it. He went rooting around in the glove compartment and found the roll of clear packing tape. Flicking off the headlights, exiting the cab, he walked over to the back left wheel. Crawling beneath, he found the small package secured to that nook with a complicated mess of duct tape and twine. He spent a couple minutes freeing all this handiwork, peeling at gobs of tape that lacquered his fingers, plucking drunkenly at knots, marveling at how the black configurations of an internal combustion system could look like a phantasmagoric dream-empire likely ruled by a barbaric autocrat (the dried mud, he decided, was the upside-down wasteland where most rebels were defeated and crucified), before the load fell away.

He crawled back out, dusted himself off. The package was a rectangle, the length of a standard No. 10 envelope. A few centimeters thick. A nice long brick secured so tightly beneath efficient rolls of plastic and tape that it gave away absolutely nothing about the texture, color, odor, or variations of the contents. Bill unbuttoned his flannel, laid it over the truck, and stuck the brick lengthwise along his spine, right in the small of his back, a strip of packing tape attached. He then wound the tape around his back and belly, fixing the brick to his person. When it felt secure, he tore the tape, which split with that smooth-butter silence that leaves one agog at the variegated achievements of industrial civilization. He tossed the roll into the truck bed. He peered at his stomach.

“Only too late did he realize that when he arrives he’ll have to rip this fucking tape off,” he said to his gut. His stomach hairs, mashed to the skin with suffocating, cloying adhesive, were now terrified little buggers.

Before he could follow the thought, he turned and barfed into the grass, which he knew would sober him up quick and be a true bummer in the near- to mid-term.

Returning briefly to the cab, he plucked a photograph from the visor and slipped it in his back pocket. This picture had taken a mercurial path. Many times he’d thought of leaving it wherever the wind happened to have blown him. How many dorm room corkboards or hostel bathroom mirrors or apartment refrigerators had he tacked, magnetized, or otherwise affixed it to, always with the thought that here would be its final resting place in this kingdom. That he’d leave it there like he’d left behind every other artifact. Somehow it was always the thing he remembered, the one crisp piece of buried nostalgic schist that he’d unearth before moving on. He sometimes wondered if this sticky photograph had its own agenda.

Then he set off toward the lights of the town that was still, for lack of any other concrete options, his home. After walking maybe half a mile down the road, he realized that while remembering the picture, he’d left the keys in the ignition and a thousand dollars in the glove compartment.

He didn’t bother going back.

Bill had chosen this particular weekend to make the return trip because he knew his parents would be out of town, so that when he stumbled up to his childhood home, a dark, pristine castle in the country with a neat lawn and a basketball hoop in the driveway where he, Rick Brinklan, and Ben Harrington had balled until the daylight gave out, he could be sure to wreck around the house half-wasted without his parents asking a thousand questions about what their twenty-eight-year-old semi-estranged son was doing with himself these days.