Kenneth Calhoun: Black Moon

It was the first time he had seen Jordan smile since he had serendipitously reconnected with his old high school friend three days earlier. Chase had gone to the Sunrise Music Store, hoping to talk his old boss Sam into giving him his job back, if only for the summer. After learning that Sam had been out sick for a week, Chase exited the back way, through the service road, wanting to avoid the coffee shop where Felicia used to work. They would ask about her. They would hope to hear that she had left him. All those assholes were in love with her. Walking along the back of the stores, past the dumpster corrals, he was happy to encounter Jordan on the pharmacy loading dock, slicing up boxes.

That first conversation was pretty one-sided, with Chase explaining that he was only back for the summer. He was sure Jordan would ask about Felicia. After all, he had known her longer than Chase had. But he didn’t. He was aloof, remote, eyeing Chase as he continued to hack up the cardboard. Strange, because they had been close once, before Chase ditched everyone to be with Felicia.

Maybe this coolness was about college, Chase had thought. Maybe he still resents that we went off to school and he’s here, working his high school job. Jordan had had the grades to go. In fact, he had been accepted to several good schools. It came down to money. His mother, Chase knew, had squandered whatever they had won in the lawsuit over Jordan’s eye injury. She lived like a movie star for a few years, driving an expensive car and dating an army of men, before landing her and her impaired son back in a shady apartment complex. Everyone had known this at school. It was always under the surface, especially when the topic of college became central to their conversations.

Fuck college. You’re not missing much, Chase wanted to tell him. His freshman year had been a disaster, as far as he was concerned. With Felicia dumping him and making new friends while he shut himself alone in the dorm room and struggled to pass his classes. She blossomed in every school setting—in the classroom, intramural sports, at the parties—and was offered a coveted lab assistant job for the summer. He found himself with nowhere to go but back home. Now he was finding that even connecting with an old friend was a challenge.

Jordan eventually did look up from slashing boxes and engage, but only after Chase mentioned that he was living at his parents’ empty house alone until they moved back from Boston.

“Maybe I’ll swing by tonight,” Jordan had said, snapping his blade shut. “There’s a lot you should know.”

That was three nights ago.

Now here he was, returning from his car with two more large plastic bags on his back, like some kind of junkyard Santa. It was a matching set to the two already on the premises: one black, one white. Jordan untied the white bag to reveal his entire stash of stolen sleeping pills.

“Check it out,” he said. “That’s a month’s worth.”

“A month’s worth of sleep, or you’ve been doing this for a month?” Chase asked as Jordan scooped up the day’s score and added it to the mix.

“Doing it for a month. It’s an eternity’s worth of sleep if you take them all at once.”

“What’s in the other bag?”

Jordan retied the white bag and looked over at the black Hefty, staring at it for a beat. “That’s my stuff, man. Clothes and shit. I was hoping I could crash here for a while. I can’t take my mom’s new boyfriend. Guy’s a major dickhole.”

He looked up at Chase, eyebrows raised.

Chase was quiet, weighing things out. In truth, he liked the idea of having someone else in the house at night. He never felt this way at school, always seeking out privacy and hoping his roommates would go away for the weekend. But nights in the suburbs had always unsettled him. As a kid, he had read too many police reports and followed too many serial killer cases, looking for details that put him outside the victim profile. He had a handle on it most of the time. But if left alone, he knew it could color his thoughts in a dangerous way. Jordan’s presence would prevent this, he was sure.

“Well,” he finally said, “we do have the same taste in luggage.”

THAT night the housemates climbed up on the roof and got drunk with their backs against the chimney. The TV aerial, an artifact from another era, rattled in the wind. A breeze had picked up with the setting of the sun, which had dropped like a warped copper plate through the low, grainy belt of valley haze. They threw the empties onto the lawn below, where the weedy mix of grass silently caught each can. Cricketsong flared up and Jordan silenced it, for a moment, with a belch that rattled the Spanish tile shingles.

“That’s talent,” Chase said, but Jordan didn’t laugh. He was different now, humorless, and the transformation was a little unnerving. After all, Jordan had been the class clown. He had always loved pranks, like the Sunrise Guyz calendar he had threatened to make. An ironic beefcake calendar, he liked to call it, featuring the nonhunky dudes of the dilapidated strip mall where they both had worked their high school jobs. He had walked the idea around, taking imaginary orders and signing up the most unlikely models from the mall’s ailing shops: sad-faced Sandy, the cook from the Pizza Palace; the obese Jerry Tift from the auto body shop; the mustachioed Mr. Sato at the nursery, who would add an element of Oriental elegance, Jordan insisted. It was a fantasy artifact that people now talked about as if it had really existed. This pleased Jordan. That’s so much better than if we had really made it, he liked to say, grinning.

But there was no sign of that whimsy now, as they watched bats swoop at the insects swarming the streetlights and listened to coyotes yapping in the chaparral foothills. Jordan stared intently into his surroundings, speculating aloud about the number of insomniacs sitting behind the glowing windows in the nearby houses. He said, “Look, we’re going to have to step it up. Over-the-counter stuff isn’t going to cut it in the long run. We need to get at the stuff that’s like a hammer to the head. Schedule two stuff that you see all those commercials about.”

“Can you do that?” Chase asked.

“ We can,” Jordan said.

Chase could feel him staring at the back of his head, waiting for a reaction. He sensed that Jordan was asking him to do more than merely swing by to pick up the stash. His impulse was to back out now, tell him he wanted no part of it. He was too paranoid, too fearful. But the fact was that he did want a part of it. It had occurred to him soon after encountering Jordan at the pharmacy. Jordan could help him. Knowing this had made Chase both tolerant—of Jordan’s new weirdness and delusions—and bold. But in two days of wrestling with it, he had yet to come up with a way to tell Jordan what he wanted without revealing his failure with Felicia. He thought he could get it across disguised as a joke—Hey, while you’re in there, grab me some of those man pills. Jordan would see into that. At least the old Jordan would, and he wouldn’t let it go until he knew the whole story. Maybe the new Jordan wouldn’t give it a thought. Maybe it’s time to say something, get it over with. The alcohol helped.

But when he turned to face Jordan, his friend’s piercing gaze shut him down. There was something tightly coiled, a lacerating energy, behind Jordan’s eyes. The guy really did appear to believe that the world was about to end, and the weird thing was, he seemed to be looking forward to it. He looked determined not only to survive it, but to rule whatever was left. It was spooky, but also potentially useful. At least for now.

“What do you need me to do?”

THE plan was simple, but not without risk. They discussed it while tripping along the winding horse trails between the houses, peering through wood-slatted fences or chain-link at the black glossy surfaces of swimming pools and into the TV-lit dioramas of identical homes. Wind chimes stirred, clinking musically in the late night breeze, and heat lightning flashed beyond the mountains, lashing at the warm banks of air over the desert. They kept knocking shoulders and drunkenly lurching off course as they passed a bottle of inky wine between them.