J. Osborne: Black Gum

I couldn’t help it. I laughed.

Shane had a way about him.

Some of the contestants were very good. The young girls imitated what they’d seen in porn, which was fine by us. An old woman with big hair and a sparkly Eiffel Tower shirt moaned monotone and said, “That’s it. That’s the way.”

We repeated that throughout the night. “That’s the way.”

Shane got up and took the mic. Tone Loc’s “Wild Thing” faded into the background. He said, “Ah! Awe, shit. Sorry about that.”

Everyone went wild.

He sat back down and we killed more beers and he leaned over to me and said, “We’re gonna sell hippy crack at the Rage Rave down in Texas.”

“Yeah?”

“I got the nitrous from a local. We’re gonna go down there and they’re gonna give us two grand each.”

Charlie looked over at me, his beer poised halfway between the table and his face.

A large woman lay on her back on the stage with her legs in the air and yelled, “Fuck me till I go back in time. Right there. That’s dead center. Right on the money!”

I said, “Hell yeah. I’m in.”

Rockville was two gas stations and a post office. Farmland. Tobacco fields out to the horizon. The festival sprung up from the sparse trees. Steel spires and flashing neon lights and girls in belly shirts, their skin painted pink. Boys with no shirts at all. Hyperventilating kids lay prone in the bitch tent, EMTs asking them if it felt strange when they touched their arms. I bought a funnel cake.

I inhaled a balloon before going out to sell. Curiosity. Everything went white and my head rang and then it was gone.

Five dollars for this ?

Shane inhaled one every fifteen minutes or so. He’d giggle and I’d tell him to focus.

I didn’t try to make sense of the appeal. No point. White people are smiling enigmas.

The unwashed masses had lined up through the parking lot, this long snake, and I filled their balloons, took their five or made change, and they’d inhale it right there, some of them stumbling, flaccid Mohawks plastered against their young faces already going tight and lined with abuse.

I saw most of them two, three times. Everybody seemed to sweat under the cool sun. I shed my hoodie early in the day, but once night fell I went back and put it on. Texas weather swinging.

At the end of the day we left the empty canisters in the parking lot and walked to our car. Set the heavy bag of cash in the floor and covered it with our backpacks. We sat down and started the car. We saw the women moving toward the rave, the cutoff shorts and long legs and smooth skin, and I turned the car off.

Thought about it.

We went back through security and into the party.

I bought a beer from a vendor and watched a DJ play a set. Kids in giant glowing fish costumes walked by on stilts. Hippies rode tandem bikes. Women hula hooped and men wore gloves with LED tips, spinning them, the colors flashing. I drank another beer.

We decided to roll.

Three minutes to find a kid with a backpack. Little green X pill down the hatch.

The bass swept over and through me. My chest expanded.

Shane scampered off to the foam machine.

I wandered.

A giant, hairless man stood in a field between two large Tesla coils. He held a metal rod in each hand. Arms outstretched. Webs of current flowing through him. The coils cracked and buzzed. He smiled electric blue.

I popped gooseflesh and felt the music. It rained and I shivered and I was a creature inside of a tree in a bed of mud in a rainforest. The women passed me and I could feel the tightness of their bellies and I could picture their faces twisted and how I could take them in my hands and lay them down.

I went to piss in a port-a-john and my legs shook. Zipped up, sure that I’d wet myself. And then I was sure that the port-a-john had blasted off into space and that if I opened the door I’d fall back to earth. Stayed cooped in there forever, steady breathing, trying to convince myself it would all be okay. Folks banging to get in.

When I finally opened the door, the ground rippled like the ocean and I stumbled through the tangles of bodies and saw young men and women lined along the fence. I joined them and vomited with them and saw the stars swirl in tight whirlpools, the last little bit down the drain forever over and over.

Shane laid his hands on the fence and hurled. He looked at me with eyes as wide as a child’s. “There was something wrong with that X.”

We stumbled back to the car.

Out my windshield, I saw the music festival disappear and reappear, blinking in and out of existence like a turn signal.

I dreamt I had a son. I called my mother and told her. I went shopping and the kid was in a stroller. He looked just like me. Then he turned into a tiny blue and red spider and a dog came out of nowhere and ate him, so I shoved my hands down her throat and made her throw him up. I woke up sifting through the pile of vomit, wondering how I was gonna tell my mother that she wasn’t a grandma anymore.

We woke up to a cop rapping on our window.

In that moment you take stock of everything you’ve done with your life.

He told us to move on.

I turned on the car and my head felt heavy and we drove.

He found us at a Love’s not fifty miles from the rave. Had to have clocked us instantly: two fuck-ups hunched over taquitos at a Formica booth. He loomed. I recognized him. I grew up with him. Shane must have known. He picked up his phone and hit a button.

“This is all being recorded.”

Danny Ames borrowed a chair from a neighboring table and sat down. “My throat hurts. I’m gonna sound bad.”

I said, “It goes to a cloud.”

“Yeah,” Shane still had a taquito in his other hand. “Saved to a cloud.”

Men in sandals bought bags of chips and soda. Women browsed dreamcatchers. Kids pointed up at the animal heads mounted over bottles of motor oil.

Ames laughed. “He said ‘a cloud.’”

We looked at each other.

“No, but seriously. That’s cool.” Ames cleared his throat. “Am I sounding hoarse?”

Shane said, “You sound good.”

“Oh, okay. I hate to tell y’all this, but you’re gonna have to give me all that shit in your trunk.”

For a moment, we just looked at him. At each other. Ames saw it all click and his muscles relaxed.

Shane said, “They’re gonna kill us.”

Ames shrugged. “Yeah.”

We loaded the canisters into the Impala. Ames slammed the trunk and put his keys in his pocket. Anubis on the keychain. He copied our names and addresses from our driver’s licenses onto his smartphone.

Shane toed rocks in the asphalt. “So what happens now?”

“I’ve seen it go both ways.”

“Which ways?”

Ames peeked in the bag at the cash. “Imagine the two ways it could go. I’ve seen both. I won’t see it either way.”

The Ozarks hid behind a fog. Shane said, “At least beat our asses or some shit.”

Danny Ames took a vape pen from his pocket, pressed the button. Cinammon. “We’re in the parking lot of a Love’s. Beat your own asses.”

He got into his car. Shane said, “They’re gonna kill us,” again.

“Don’t care. Make sure you tell Eloise that Danny Ames took her shit. Make sure you’re clear about that.”

I pointed at his teeth. “Do those come out?”

“What?”

“Your grill. Are the teeth permanent, or can you take them out?”

Danny Ames opened his mouth and pulled out his platinum dentures. Grinned bare gums. “I can take them out whenever,” he said.

“It’s slippery out,” Shane said on the drive home. “We could flip the car. We could say that we flipped the car and when the cops showed up they confiscated the money.”