Ethan Rutherford - The Peripatetic Coffin and Other Stories

These friends, two boys, they spend their days—all their days it seems, the one boy’s mother wondering what’s wrong with this house—in Laurelhurst, going to the beach, swimming, jumping off the high platform, mugging for each other on the way down, playing rag-tag in the water with a sock-covered tennis ball they peg at each other like Norwegian berserkers. They get splinters from running on the old dock, wooden shards they extract, painfully, with the mother’s tweezers. They roll the log-boom for hours, so good at it that eventually their suits actually dry in the sun. They scrape their elbows on cement, they hyperextend on trampolines, they tear their baseball pants sliding in the rec-field diamonds, wounds that weep clear liquid and require rubbing alcohol. They mis-time their tree-climbing dismounts and roll their ankles, they play butt-ball off the garage door until their backs are patterned with bruises, swing pillows like merciless cudgels, chuck super-bounce balls into traffic from the cover of shrubs. Their days are long and they are war buddies, forging experience. Long days, and enough time to explore the texture of friendly violence without consequence until one of the boys, while running, kicks playfully at the other’s back foot and sends him sprawling. An accident, an accident, he wants to shout even before his friend hits the ground, his arms so surprised by the physics of what is happening to him that they don’t even consider reaching down to break the fall. Accident, as one of the boys lands hard on his face, scrapes the bridge of his nose, blackens his eye, and screams like a bird of prey until his mother hustles from the kitchen to hold him in her arms; the other, unhurt, standing, guilty, numb, listening, is surprised to find himself wishing not that it hadn’t happened, but that it had happened, instead, to him. Back in the kitchen, he hands his friend an ice pack, and then takes one for himself; he puts it on his own uninjured face, and pushes it into his eye until it hurts the back of his head, says, oh, shit, ow, a thing so dumb to do, an action so transparent, that everyone at the table laughs. All is forgiven. It was a mistake. He will not be sent home. The pain subsides.

The next morning, in the garage, they trick their bikes out with Spokey Dokes and then pedal out into the neighborhood, jumping curbs, careening down stairs, and calling out their favorite parts of their new favorite movie, Rad, which is about BMX bike racers who jump over things larger than curbs until Jeremy, an older cousin, released to his own summer and suddenly present, tells them bike riding’s for faggots, since bike is German for dick, and so then what are you doing when you ride your bike? Neither of the boys are German, this is information they hadn’t known. Jeremy, and his rumbling skateboard, here to deliver the news. They are open to it, to this attention from Jeremy; or, at least, are interested enough to hear what he has to say. He’s about to enter high school. He’s got hair that is not buzzed, but ratty and long. Though he lives only a few blocks over he’s never once expressed even a passing interest in either of them; they are eager to prolong this exchange, and even feel, on this day, strangely blessed by it. They watch him kick-flip his skateboard. They watch his loping leg-push, and his deep lean as he carves back toward them, kicks again, and stops a few feet away. What’s wrong with your eye ? Jeremy says. What’s wrong with your hair ? What, he says, is with the matching sweatshirts?

They are caught off guard by the certainty of this questioning. They stand silently astride their bikes, one boy waiting for the other to speak up, not daring to defend the two of them himself. Jeremy is not his cousin. But his friend does not speak up, and the worry returns. Have they been wrong this whole time? Is their closeness being called into question? The thought hovers, takes hold, then disperses as Jeremy kick-pushes lazily down the street, back to his house. Hey, rich boy, he calls over his shoulder. Can you do this? Try copying this. The skateboard flips under his feet, once, twice, catching the sun like an airborne, twisting fish, and then is pulled out of its orbit and expertly stomped to the concrete by Jeremy’s mismatched Converse high-tops. I’m not rich, one of the boys says to the other when Jeremy is out of sight. It’s not a bad thing, the other says back. As they walk their bikes home, one of the boys runs his fingers through his hair. The Boz, somewhere, looks out disapprovingly at the prospect of his short career.

Soon bikes are out, Spokey Dokes are out, BMX movies are out, Velcro crotch guards are out, wheel-pegs are out, and skateboards are in. It’s not only Jeremy telling them this. They’ve just seen Back to the Future on VHS, where Michael J. Fox goes back in time and invents the skateboard, which he then rides while holding on to the back of a car. All information received from the movies they watch is stored and internalized and mulled over until it reemerges as want and necessity. How come we didn’t see this earlier? one of them says. The back of a car ! the other says back. They beg for the same skateboard, a Nightmare III model available only at one store, a store that happens to be near the motorcycle garage. This is the model Jeremy has.

When the skateboards are delivered they plaster them with Garbage Pail Kids and spend hours on their butts, luging down hills, braking with their heels— burning heel rubber, they call it—trudging back up to do it again. They carve great slalom curves in the asphalt, bracing themselves against the sound of the wheels on the concrete and the streaming wind. They are doing this for themselves, for the joy in it, for the concrete-streaking pleasure of it all, but who are they kidding? They want an audience, and at the bottom of every hill, they are looking for Jeremy. He is becoming part of their summer. In the driveway, they spend a weekend trying to unlock the secret of the ollie, which Jeremy can do but won’t explain, opting instead to rub his knowledge in their faces by ollie-ing anything available—curbs, footballs, tipped over garbage cans. One of the boys, the one who is related to Jeremy, watches Jeremy kick his board, sail over a patch of grass, and land in the street, and tells him that, for that maneuver, he gets the Dick Butkus Award. Jeremy eyeballs the two friends, sitting on their own useless skateboards, and says, that better be a good thing. They assure him it is. He’s three years older, and they want to love him the way they love each other, they want that to be allowed; they want him to love them, to need them, to show them everything he knows about everything because surely, surely, he knows. All Jeremy wants to talk about, though, are boners and how many girls he’s fingered, and how he’s going to bag-tag a pinup someday, just like the Boz, in that faggoty poster, hanging above the bed.

Jeremy, called home, ollies a football in the driveway, leaving in his wake a vapor trail of effortless superiority. The friends feel a relief in being alone again, or, at least, one of them does—unobserved, by themselves on their skateboards as the dimmer switch on the day is gradually lowered—but there’s also a new feeling of absence that bombards them atomically, nickels of doubt streaming invisibly sideways like a radio frequency. The sun is down, the streetlamps flicker on. But it is only the middle of summer, and an ocean of days stretches in front of them like an endless and gently whispered invitation, and they return to their hill to luge, strobe-lit, through the neighborhood.

These are their moments of gathering. At the house in Laurelhurst, in the June heated nights, in the July afternoons, down in the basement where it just feels like night and a Ms. Pac-Man arcade game stands in the corner unmoving like a dim-lighted guardian, they give in with slack-jawed fervor to the movies they’re allowed to rent: Ghostbusters, Pee-wee’s Big Adventure, Gremlins, Lost Boys, Goonies, Flight of the Navigator, White Fang, Explorers . Is there anything they won’t watch? They repeat dialogue and collapse, laughing, into the wide recess of the L-shaped couch, the couch they eat on, the couch they spill soda on, the couch they fort up, the couch they sleep on, in their matching sleeping bags, heads almost touching so that even after it comes from upstairs that it’s time, finally, to shut up and turn in, they can still whisper those moments in the movie they’ll see again, in the morning, before it’s due at the video store. They’re building a common store of references; they’re building a language. Before Godzilla 1985, they watch a cartoon they cannot get enough of; it’s part of the movie, leading in on the VHS tape, a short animated feature called Bambi Meets Godzilla . It’s a minute long, maybe less. Bambi, munching grass, minding her business, stands in a field. Then, without warning, a gigantic, green, dinosaur-scaled foot cavooms down from the top of the screen. Crunch. No more Bambi. Afterward, the Godzilla foot wiggles its claws, as if to say, what can you do?