Justin Taylor - Everything Here Is the Best Thing Ever

With him gone, it was as if her last anchor to earthly things had been cut, and her condition quickened. She was crazed, fervent, and implacable — a real banshee for Christ.

It’s scary when a person you have always known becomes a raving stranger before your disbelieving eyes. But there was nothing I could do. Time passed — crawled along, it seemed like — and I had my birthday. Legal finally to vote, smoke, and buy porno — not that I had a lot of interest in the first or much keeping me from the other two. I had my job at the grocery store and there were girls, Cass mostly, and drinking at the lake with my best friend, Joe Brown. Between all that and school I was hardly home, and Ma tended to go after whatever was right in front of her, so I was spared a lot, though on occasion she’d dial me up on my cell just to say that maybe I thought I could fool an old woman but there was One whom I sure could never fool.

All I ever said back to her was “Ma, you ain’t so old.”

My sister had a harder road. Ma used to just about torture Kyra, who was extra pigheaded on top of what comes naturally with being fifteen — that age when your situation seems like a life sentence, so you always act like you’ve got nothing to lose, but also no hope of ever winning.

Kyra took to rebelling, and snuck out and got caught sneaking in and shoplifted and got herself kicked out of the high school and generally drove Ma to distraction any way she could, which for a time seemed to about make them even, until the night Kyra nearly died. Fistful of downers some boy told her were a real good time. Probably he’d hoped to feed her a couple, maybe diddle her with his fingers after she passed out, but she swiped the whole bottle from his backpack and brought ’em home. Joke on him, right? Me and Joe Brown found out who it was from her friends, went by his place and had a long talk with him, you can bet you. But that’s not this story.

Like I was starting to say before, I was spending a good bit of my time with Cass. She was junior to my senior at the high school, a chicken-legged brunette with acne scars on her cheeks, hairy forearms, a perfect behind. She was a known slut, and the most serious student in our whole school, for she understood that grades could be a ticket out, and was only ever stumped by one question, which was why nobody else seemed to understand the same. She had a decent singing voice but didn’t use it. When we did it drunk she liked to be called things.

Cass encouraged me to keep up with my schoolwork, but if I didn’t — I didn’t — that was my own lookout. She let me hang around while she was working, so long as I didn’t put the TV up too loud. I liked this arrangement. I liked to be right there when she finished with her studies. “Okay,” she’d say, closing the day’s last book, and I’d look over her way, grinning, knowing it was finally time.

Which brings me back around to Joe Brown, one of maybe three guys in our school who Cass hadn’t ever fucked, or at least rubbed off in the lunch room through his jeans just for something to do. Joe Brown was breathless around Cass. It was stammering, moon-faced love. He didn’t have to hide it from me and made no effort to, even though she was my girl. That’s the kind of brothers me and Joe Brown were.

“She don’t even know I exist” was the type of thing he’d say about her, which was obvious garbage since everyone knows everyone in a high school, besides which shit towns like ours don’t have strangers. In fact she knew him plenty well, and couldn’t stand him. She was disgusted by his love, the sight of how she made him weak. She figured he’d eventually harden himself up or die a victim of his own witless yearning, and she expressed only the mildest curiosity — certainly no preference — about which one it might be.

Knowing all this about him, and about her, there was truly only one thing I could do, which was to describe in perfect excruciating detail every moment of every instance of my penetrating Cass to Joe Brown while we drove around the lake road, drinking our beers. It broke his heart to hear these things, and made him nauseous with longing, but if I’d stop he would beg and beg for more. He didn’t know it, and it didn’t seem to be exactly working, but I was giving him tough, fierce love, which is the best kind. I wanted to see him beat this thing. I did not want for him to spend the rest of his life a sweaty mouth-breather who made girls laugh uneasily, shake their heads, and walk away.

We didn’t have money to buy more beers, so we went to Joe Brown’s uncle’s place, where there was always a selection. His uncle’s name was Connie, but everyone called him Judge, since the night several years back when he got in a bar brawl that ended with him head-stomping an out-of-towner who’d been accused — by Connie, mind you — of looking down his nose. “Who’s judgin’ now ?” he screamed over and over at the man who was bleeding and curled up fetal on the floor. Cost Judge his badge, but earned him his nickname, and probably we were all better off with him having the one and not the other. Judge loved his name. He loved his nephew, and let Joe Brown come over and do as he pleased. This was very lucky for Joe Brown, and therefore for me, too, because Judge was a bad man. He even kept two women, who wore stretch pants and had lousy blond dye jobs. He was quick to beat either. One had a pair of identical boys, nine or so years old, and they were considered fair game, too. He listened to the kind of talk radio that makes your brain shrivel up like a salted slug. He hated Jews something awful, but respected Israel for its military balls. To sustain decency for five consecutive minutes would have been beyond his capacity, besides which he didn’t have two friends in ten who’d have known it for what it was. He ran a sideline business selling illegal fireworks, was the kind of man who’d swerve toward an animal in the road, and generally speaking he needed nothing so badly in this world as to be run through with a great hot knife.

Judge has nothing to do with this story. He wasn’t even at home. We let ourselves in, swiped a six-pack from his fridge, and went back to Joe Brown’s. Judge is simply a character on whom I can’t help but dwell some. Something pulls my thoughts back his way. He inspires a loathing so pure, to be silent about it seems no less a crime than denying love.

So we were at Joe Brown’s, down in the basement, which was his room, drinking Judge’s beer. My phone buzzed. I almost didn’t look, since I wasn’t going to answer anyhow. It was bound to be Ma on another psycho Jesus tear or else my damn sister wanting a ride home from some party out in the sticks. But then I realized it had been just one buzz, two pulses, like, he-ey, and so I looked. It was a text from Cass: COME OVER RITE NOW.

I showed the phone to Joe Brown. “Now what do you suppose this could be?” I said.

“Shit,” he said. “How am I supposed to know what that girl’s thinking? I’d give anything to get inside her head.” This was just a little yearn, a passing thing, like a stringy cloud. And yet I could not let it pass me by.

“Well,” I said to him, “maybe you need some inside perspective. Like do something she does so you can think the way she thinks.”

“Yeah? Like what?”

“That’s easy,” I said. “I can’t even believe I never thought of this before.”

“What, Troy? What is it?”

“Well Cass’s just about favorite thing in the whole wide world—”

“Yeah?”

“—is sucking me off. So you better get to it.”

“Aw, you motherfuck,” said Joe Brown. He looked punched, then gathered himself and lunged forward to punch me. I hopped up from my seat and out of his range. We were both laughing. I hated and loved myself. I got us a couple of fresh beers. They hissed our truce. I flipped the phone open and dialed.