Ethan Rutherford - The Peripatetic Coffin and Other Stories

They rewind it, and watch it again. They rewind it, and show it to Jeremy.

They watch him the way they watch each other, trying to gauge his response, eager to see the laughter on his face the moment before it breaks. He loves it. The two friends, these boys, don’t think they’ve ever been so happy. I’ve got a movie, he says, after they’ve rewound and watched it three or four times. I’ve got a movie. Give me five dollars, and I’ll bring it over tomorrow. The friends look at each other. I know you have five dollars, Jeremy says to one of the boys. It’ll blow your mind. The money is handed over. Their minds are already blown.

But Jeremy doesn’t show up, tomorrow or the next day. Is he on vacation? they wonder aloud. Does he have summer school? Does he have other friends? They have his phone number, or at least, his parents’ phone number—they found it in the emergency book near the phone—but can’t bring themselves to call because they have no idea what they’d say. Weeks are passed in the driveway, kicking skateboards back and forth. These friends, the two young boys, are crestfallen at the rejection, and not even the Boz, not even butt-ball, not even the Ghostbusters, not even the release of a new edition of Garbage Pail Kids can mitigate the heartbreak, the disappointment, the fundamental lameness they feel. They sit on their skateboards for hours at a time, unmoving. One of them senses the end of something approaching, and waits desperately for the feeling to dissipate. The other seems uninterested in rescuing himself. What do you want to do? Nothing. I want to do nothing. Movies? Skateboards? Ms. Pac-Man? No. Bikes? one of them says, and regrets it immediately. What’s wrong with you guys? the mother asks at breakfast. Cereal is stirred into chocolate milk mush. The day holds no promise. We suck, one of the boys says. Don’t say suck, his mother says back. She turns to the other boy. Doesn’t your mother miss you?

She does. They separate. Back in his own familial orbit, three miles away in a house that is larger but contains no motorcycles, no pizza, no Boz poster, no television even, one of the boys feels hollowed-out, cheated. He’s been cleaved from his brother, from his almost-twin, from what he considers a better version of himself. At night, he lies on his bed, staring at old, night-glow constellations, stickers stuck permanently on his ceiling, which embarrass him now, and imagines everything he’s missing. His friend hasn’t called. And for reasons he can’t quite articulate but have to do with wanting to be wanted, with needing equilibrium, the new fear that maybe, just maybe, he will say the wrong thing, he doesn’t call his friend. And with every hour that passes, the distance between them begins to feel like space distance; within days, they are galaxies apart. By himself, he organizes his Garbage Pail Kids and his Seahawk trading cards. By himself in the bathroom, he examines the flash lines cut in his hair, now growing in, his body recovering itself. By himself, he becomes a storm-system of self-doubt, unsure of anything except that wherever he is, he is not where he needs to be. His father draws up a list of chores that need to be done if he’s just going to spend the rest of his summer sulking inside, so he goes outside and plays butt-ball for hours against his own garage, refusing to have any fun at all, relishing the picture of dejection he’s painting for anyone and everyone watching. The tennis ball bounces off the garage door and gets past him, rolling for half a block before disappearing down a rain gutter. This, the boy feels, is about as unendurable as anything he’s ever experienced. What am I missing? he thinks. What is it? His mother, a woman so kind that even he knows it, asks him why he doesn’t go down a few blocks, and see what Charles Todds, the son of her friend, is up to. Because, he says, Charles is a fag. And a rich dork. And fat. His mother stares at him in disbelief, and looks like she might cry. And because, he wants to add, but doesn’t, because his mom is already laying into him about the importance of kindness, Charles doesn’t know anything about me . His dad walks into the kitchen holding a sleeping bag, playing a hunch, and sees the boy and his mother locked in some sort of silent push-pull, and, because he is unsure of what, just what in the world has happened, he hoists the stuffed sack aloft like he’s trying to keep it dry while wading through a river. How about some camping? he says. It’s camping season. How does that sound? The boy knows he doesn’t have much of a choice in the matter. Camping it is.

Sticks, rocks, heat, dust, bugs. His parents insist on parking the car and hiking to a campground, where it’s less likely they’ll run into any beer drinkers or loud partyers, and after what feels like hours of death-marching they finally stop, in the middle of the woods, and pitch their REI family-size tent. They do, in fact, see no one else for three days. The days, unpunctuated, feel like weeks to the boy. What is he supposed to do, he thinks, stare at banana slugs all day? Climb a tree? His parents are happy reading, reveling in the isolation after having given up asking him what’s wrong, what’s wrong with you these days? The boy takes his army knife and saws branches into kindling for hours. He knows, with a certain sadness that manifests as anger, and feels like some sort of accelerated aging, that he’d do anything, anything, to get back to the house in Laurelhurst. Finally they pack it in. When he gets home, there’s a message on the machine from his friend, wondering if, when he comes back, he could come over. The boy is elated.

His mother drops him off. His friend is upstairs, in his bedroom, sitting cross-legged on the floor, and when he stands with a hey there’s a mutual feeling of relief, of rightness, of completion, like a reflection meeting its source. It’s like that. But also, it’s not like that? The Land of Boz poster has been taken down. His friend’s haircut has been normalized. There is, at first, a strange formality to their interaction, as if years, rather than weeks, have passed. One of the boys looks at the other like a question mark, noticing his friend has closed a little, his face slightly different than he remembers, as if, in their time apart, his memory has played a small trick on him. This feeling hovers, just beyond recognition but threatening to take hold, until one of them tentatively unloads his pockets to produce three packs of unopened Garbage Pail Kids and then the uncertainty lifts the way it’s always lifted. It’s the middle of August, and the hot summer days are coming to a shimmering close, but there’s still time, now, to skateboard down the street, still time to rent a video, still time to call plays in the front yard, and cut matching streak lines in their hair with the closet clippers if that’s what it’ll take to erase whatever it is that has come between them. These two friends, they will never need anyone else. The gulf will be bridged. That’s what friends are, that’s what friends can do. They will be college roommates, twin terrors on the football field, playing not only defensive tackle but iron-manning it, switching off quarterback and wide-receiver duty, playing safety. Whatever this is, one of the friends thinks, there is time to figure it out. There is time to fix it. There is a lag-time between them now, though, a circuit delay, as if they have run two cans together with string and insist on speaking through those even though they are standing four feet apart. One of the boys wants to say to the other, what happened, you are not you (by which he means, you are not me), but can’t find the words to say it, and in fact thinks that maybe his friend knows something he doesn’t, and it’s this thought that he must put from his head.