Ryan Thomas: The Summer I Died

To avoid the nightmares of that summer, I take caffeine and diet pills, any type of speed to keep me up for as long as possible. As a result, I haven’t slept more than a couple of hours a night in a long time. My eyes have sunken near to the hollows of my skull and I shake with malnourishment because the pills suppress my appetite. My face is bruised and my thighs are dotted with purple welts and half-moon scars from where I have punched and pinched myself to keep myself awake. I am eroding. But this is a far better alternative than the dreams of that summer. That summer of lost innocence, pain, and bloodshed beyond anything you can imagine.

The pills don’t, however, prevent my daily questioning and ranting, nor do they stop me from cursing at God. They don’t keep me from shaking my fist at the sky and crying with disgust, irreverence, gratitude, confusion, or any other of the myriad emotions I experience each day. Still though, I am unsure whether God played a part in it at all, or whether or not God even exists.

There are times, late at night, when the pills have worn off and I’ve slipped into a semiconscious state, that I wake myself yelling at the top of my lungs. I find myself back in that summer, only this time I am telling myself to leave the dice at home, or to put the gun to my head and pull the trigger. I wake up and continue to yell, until I am hoarse, until the bloody images dissipate. Then I yell some more. I don’t know why I keep yelling once I realize I am at home in the present. Perhaps to feel my own rage and fear, to know I still have emotions.

Perhaps.

People have asked me-therapists, friends, even a biographer-how I felt that summer when I got home from college, before the bloodshed began. I tell them I was happy. They seem to think they can return me to that point. But, trust me, that person-the me from then -is dead.

For all intents and purposes, the moment I picked up the gun the first weekend I was back was the moment that started it all. Tooth was excited to have me home from school and I was eager to hang out with him. He had convinced me to go shooting with him. .

BOOM!

The gun jumped back in my hand like a startled cat. I winced at the shot, a screaming thunderclap that cut off my hearing as if someone had snuck up behind me and shoved cotton balls in my ears. The empty bullet shell bounced off my foot and rolled onto the ground. When I opened my eyes, I saw a puff of smoke breathing out of the tree trunk a few yards away from the trashcan I was aiming at.

Shit, I thought, not even close. If I’d been aiming at Kennedy I would have hit Oswald.

Next to me, Tooth let out a whoop and slammed his palm against my back. “Well wrap my nuts around a pole and call me Mary, looks like you just popped your cherry.”

It was the first time I’d ever fired a gun. A.44 magnum to be precise, a big mother of a cannon that Tooth swore would make my dick hard. And he was right. I felt bigger, brighter; hell, I felt invincible. Holding a.44 in your hand, well, it’s a bit like being deified.

“You missed the shit outta the can though,” Tooth said, taking the gun and aiming at the target. He squared his feet, looked down the barrel, took a breath and squeezed the trigger.

BOOM!

With my ears still clogged, the shot sounded like I was underwater. Tooth’s hands, wrapped around the grip, went flying up over his head with the recoil. He burst out laughing.

The metallic bong and firefly sparks that erupted from the metal can proved he was a much better shot than me, but then again, he’d had all winter to practice while I was down at the university.

“Did you see that? Dead on!” he shouted.

I could barely hear him through the humming in my head, but I flipped him off good-naturedly and motioned for the gun back. On the road out past the woods a car drove by. It seemed to slow a bit, like it was trying to spy on us, so I quickly hid the gun behind my leg. Tooth read my concern, shook his head in disappointment and said, “Will you relax? Ain’t nobody gonna care about some gunshots out here. Besides, we’re too far out to be heard.”

That wasn’t exactly true. The spot we were at-a dirt clearing in the woods that overlooked a small valley of evergreens-used to be a popular hangout area for teenagers, and most everyone in town knew about it. True, it was set back far enough off the road that passing motorists couldn’t really see through all the trees, but no amount of dense foliage would dampen the echoes of a.44’s gunshot.

We’d been here many times before, whether to get high, drink beer or just shoot the shit on a Friday night. Used to be you could come here and expect to find at least someone you knew hanging around. But its popularity had waned of late

Two summers ago Mark Trieger, the prodigy running back for Lakewood High, jumped to his death here, and now the place had become associated with ghost stories and bad vibes. Nobody came up here much anymore.

“Yeah, I know,” I said. “It’s just-”

“Just what?”

“I dunno, people drive by here now. . they tend to check up on things. I’m just being careful.”

“Fucking Mark Trieger.”

“Yeah, fucking Mark Trieger.”

It happened on a Sunday afternoon after church let out. Some kids had come here to get wasted and accidentally knocked their six pack of Bud over the side of the cliff. Realizing what a bitch it would be to find another adult to buy them more, they climbed down to retrieve it.

At the bottom they discovered the beer bottles shattered from the fall. They were about to go back up when one of the boys spotted something sparkling in the fallen leaves. It was a necklace. Rumor is he was gonna hock it for more beer, so he reached down and yanked on it and up popped a blue and purple head, the mouth wide open and dripping maggots, two glazed eyes looking into oblivion.

The boy fell down screaming, his fist still clenched around the necklace. He tried to run away but because he kept gripping the necklace, the body slid after him like a zombie in a George Romero film and knocked him over. He finally let go, but he was in such shock his friends had to carry him back up.

Turns out Mark’d been down there for about two weeks, nestled among the heaps of beer cans and porno mags people had hurled over the side.

Like any small town in the New England mountains, the body had drawn a crowd as if it was the second coming of Jesus. I remember standing with Tooth when the paramedics hauled Mark up. The police kept everyone back, but you could still kind of see what was going on through the trees. They had this sort of winch thingy bringing up the body, and when it got to the top, the head bounced over the rocks and made this thwacking sound you could hear all the way back on the road. People gasped. Tooth put his Red Sox hat over his heart and said something I didn’t hear. He didn’t know Mark, but he’d gone to enough Lakewood games to respect him. Personally, I couldn’t care less about sports, but I remember my sister Jamie being real upset. She was a freshman at Lakewood at the time, and like all freshman girls, she thought she was gonna marry the football captain someday, despite the fact that about twenty colleges were interested in recruiting Mark before he’d even graduate.

Looking back at the trashcan, I lifted the gun.

“It’s easier if you pull the hammer back first.” Tooth reached over and made like he was gonna do it for me. Beating him to it, I yanked it back with my thumb and found my target. I wanted to hit it this time, because if I didn’t, Tooth would go telling everyone what a bad shot I was and I’d spend the summer the butt of sissy jokes. So I took a breath, and held the gun a little looser than before, a little more relaxed. The first shot had given me some idea of the compensation required in aiming. Since it had gone high and wide to the left, I aimed a little lower and to the right.