John Darnielle - Wolf in White Van

But Kevin waved him over and Steve leaned in, and Kevin drew his index finger toward the recessed pit that lies due right of where my old nose was, and he held the tip of his finger near enough to the surface for me to feel his warmth, and said, “Bullet wound?” in a rhythm so casual that I felt like we were old friends, or coworkers, and I corrected him, saying: “Exit wound.” They both gave half-nods and kept craning their eyes around the broad surface before them: down the side, cresting the ear, banking back over above and across the chin, their slowly moving heads like lunar landers.

I got a good look at them while they were circling me as respectfully and surgically as they could: they were a living tableau of denim with some stray silver accents here and there — rings, necklaces. They gave off a vague throb of energy, like thermal images of people on a screen. I recognized that throb. Once I’d held it inside myself, just barely. I felt comfortable with them. So I asked them whether my face freaked them out; I put it exactly like that, because I felt as if I was among members of my tribe. “Does it freak you out, my fucked-up face?” I said.

I don’t really talk like that anymore. Those words, their sound, that summery lilt: all these came from somewhere in the past, or a buried part of the present. Whatever it was — past or present, or unknown future — it seemed to rise from the asphalt like a little invisible cyclone, swirling up around me in my mind. I felt like a panel in a comic book. In a different world, I might have looked like Kevin and Steve instead of like myself. I might have been buying beer and not candy, and smoking Marlboro reds, loitering in the parking lot and waiting for something to happen. The one constant in both possibilities was the liquor store, the parking lot. All roads leading to this quiet, empty place.

Steve answered first. “Well, dude,” he said, and something in his tone made me want to cry for joy, “it is for sure fucked up, your face. But actually it’s freakier before you see it up close. Up close, it’s like …” He wasn’t sure how to finish the thought.

“It’s like tire tread,” I offered.

Among the three of us I thought I felt a kinship. Sometimes I think I feel a bond when it’s only my imagination. I’m used to that. But they laughed about the tire tread comparison, and they lit new cigarettes and offered one to me, which I accepted, and it gave me a head rush so strong that my vision washed out and I saw nothing but pulsing yellow for half a minute, and the song on the radio switched over from “Renegade” to “Even the Losers” as they asked me what was the worst part about having taken a bullet to the face and I said it was actually the way it messes up your hearing, which is true. We had a long discussion then: If you could have your face back or your hearing, you’d take your hearing? Yeah, I’m pretty sure I would. But you can still hear stuff, right? Yeah, but it comes in over a constant throbbing hum that keeps me awake at night sometimes. But seriously? You wouldn’t rather look more normal?

This was Steve’s exact phrase: more normal. It registered with me so suddenly, so immediately. I felt a kind of bliss. I wanted to hold Steve like a child. It’s freakier before you see it up close. It’s like tire tread. It’s like a shag rug. It’s like rope burn scars; it’s like a badly paved road; it’s like bent wheel spokes pressed into taffy. I told him the truth: that I didn’t know; that I didn’t know anymore if I wanted to be more normal or not. I had stopped being normal so early that it was hard to imagine being any other way than the way I was. This was normal for me. As far as I could tell, except on days when something went wrong with the routine, I lived a normal life.

Steve looked at Kevin and Kevin looked at Steve and they both said, “Normal life!” while touching their beer cans together like wineglasses, only at waist level, so that no car going past the tucked-away-between-buildings little liquor store parking lot would be able to see them. You know: in case a cop went past. I understood this right away, at some basic level, without having to ask. And this was the source of my bliss, my total quiet contentment: that we were three people who, if it came down to it, could communicate with one another using only gestures.

In the natural course of the conversation I ended up telling them about Carrie and Lance and they asked me if I was going to go to jail. I told them jail wasn’t really on the table, but there was a good chance I’d end up going broke. Kevin told me he sort of knew how I felt, because his mom had kicked him out of the house a while back, and he’d had to sleep in the car until he got up the courage to call his dad. It had taken him a week to do it. He asked his dad if he could stay over at his house until he could save up enough money for first and last and security deposit. He had known that was the most he could ask. His dad didn’t really have any money.

The sun was bright by now. Sometimes you feel like such an old man. For example, when you ask young men what they figure they’ll do with their lives. And you see the look on their faces that says What the fuck are you even talking about , but they’re not saying it to you, they’re bouncing it off each other using a complicated system of facial tics and gestures, which they know they can do because you probably don’t get it. Which is what makes me different: I do get it. I see the gestural semaphore and can read it without having to think twice about it. It is an excruciatingly painful thing to see and feel, so I try to avoid it, but I sensed some connection with Steve and Kevin, so I asked them what they figured they were going to do, you know, after summer, maybe.

Steve said, “Fuck if I know,” and Kevin said, “I’m going to stay as high as I can,” and they bumped fists and then at the exact same moment raised their free hands flat into the air, their palms toward me. They were asking me to give them the high five. I gave them the high five. I felt like the sun had just risen inside me.

“What about you, though, dude?” said Steve. “What the fuck are you going to do?”

I knew what I was going to say; I paused for effect. “I’m going to go home and eat candy and stay high as long as I can,” I said.

Kevin and Steve said staggered No doubts , automatically, reflexively, but then Kevin said: “That whole court thing, though, dude. What are you going to do?” He pulled at his beer.

“Fuck ‘em,” I said. When I pronounce the letter f, I spit. Neither of them flinched. I thought a little about Carrie’s parents, to whom I usually bore no particular ill will, because I always try to put myself in the other guy’s shoes. If I had a kid who killed herself because she’d gotten confused about some game she was playing with some stranger far away, I’d hate that stranger, too. That is usually how I think. But I said it again, and I meant it. “Fuck ‘em.”

Again Steve and Kevin thunked their beer cans together. “Fuck ‘em!” they said, in near unison. I smiled my horrible smile.

I felt so terrible when Carrie died. Trying to explain the feeling I had is like trying to describe what you see when your eyes are bandaged: it’s not impossible, but it’s different from describing something you can actually look at, something you might see in the course of a normal day. It is trying to describe something at which you are unable to look directly.

She never wrote to me as often as Lance did; it was usually him writing the letters and signing on behalf of them both. They played as a team: L+C, two capital initials with a plus sign in between. In the margins of their letters, sometimes, or after the sign-off, she would also write something. Or if somehow Lance had been sidelined. One July, when his family took him down to Branson on vacation, for example: that was the week when Carrie sent in a turn so there’d be news for Lance when he came home. L is on vacation so I thought if I make a move & it’s good he will be excited when he comes home so here it is I know all turns are final but please don’t let me do something stupid we have so much fun together , she wrote. She had decided to have the two of them hide behind a dumpster until the sun went down, because it was hot in the town through which they were passing, and the mutants who had overrun the town were carnivorous and could smell less keenly once the air got cool.