Lydia Fitzpatrick - Lights All Night Long

They passed a clearing, and Ilya saw one of the trailers now, a box of light over a box of shadow. A handful of cars were parked under it. A spindly ramp climbed to the door, which was open. Ilya stared inside. It was empty as far as he could tell, but he thought of that other trailer, of the woman Sadie watched, and then the trees took over again. The blacktop gave out to a rutted dirt road, and Ilya couldn’t see the water, but he could sense that they were near it. The bugs’ chant got denser, and there was a new salty stickiness to the air.

The Pound sounded like the Tower, and when they got there, Ilya could see that it was. Oil-drum fires were scattered among cars in various phases of decay. Faces flared above the flames. There was an enormous school bus, spotted like a banana with rust. Its windows were filled with silhouettes. There were kids on the edge of the party too, and they looked like nothing more than dark on dark, the suggestion of movement, like creatures swimming in the deep. Sadie parked next to an enormous black truck. Its doors were flung open, the stereo roared, and a girl in the truck bed twisted and writhed to the music.

Sadie led him toward the bus, stepping over spare tires and a rogue engine and bumpers that had been crushed and splintered, their sharp ends glinting. J.T. was standing by a keg, wearing a hat that said RISE UP. Three other guys sat in beach chairs with girls on their laps.

“No way!” J.T. said, when he saw Ilya. “You came. Now that is a birthday honor. You want a beer? Or I got some vodka for you. That’s like the national drink, right?”

“Sure,” Ilya said.

“Lady Sadie?” J.T. said. He put an arm around her shoulder and kissed the top of her head, and Ilya looked away.

“I’ll have a beer.”

“Prudent as always,” J.T. said.

J.T. gave Ilya the vodka in a tiny paper cup, the kind Marilee and Molly used each night to rinse their mouths after brushing their teeth. The vodka was warm and singed Ilya’s stomach, but he managed to drink it with a straight face and say, “Tastes like water.”

“Damn straight,” J.T. said. He handed Sadie a beer. “So you’re drinking tonight? What would Papa Cam say?”

“He’d quote Corinthians at me,” she said.

Ilya and Sadie found vacant beach chairs and for a while they sat and listened to J.T. and the other guys—all basketball players, Ilya learned—talk about the various perversions of their coach. At one point, Sadie leaned over and said, “What did your mom say on the phone?”

He wanted to tell her the truth. He needed someone to know. Needed her to know, he realized, but the conversation had lulled and J.T. was looking at him like he was the punch line of a joke.

“Nothing really,” he said.

He took another shot and another, and then he drank a beer so light and flat that it actually did taste like water. He’d been drunk twice in his life before this: the night at the Tower and the day he flew to America, and in all three instances the accompanying sense of depersonalization was both terrifying and calming.

“In Russia on your birthday someone has to yank your ears,” Ilya said, after someone had sung J.T. “Happy Birthday.” It was the sort of detail about home that he was normally loath to share.

“Yank my ears?”

Ilya nodded. “How old are you?”

“Sixteen,” J.T. said.

“Then your ears get yanked sixteen times,” Ilya said. “Plus one more for good fortune.”

Two girls Ilya recognized from gym class were filling their beers at the keg, and J.T. said, “Can I get them to yank something else?”

Ilya looked at Sadie, wondering if this sort of talk would upset her, but Sadie was talking to another girl. Suddenly the other girl stood and grabbed Sadie by the hand, and Sadie said, “We’ll be back,” and they walked off toward the pickup truck.

J.T. had started talking with the girls about whether they’d rather bone Mr. Shilling or Principal Gibbons. Someone passed Ilya the vodka bottle, and he took a sip and passed it on. A wave of nausea crested in his gut whenever he tried to focus on the conversation. He stood, thinking motion might help, and managed to make it to the thicket behind the bus before vomiting. He retched until his stomach felt tight and empty and his vision cleared.

As he straightened, something glinted in the trees. A cool, lunar glow. He walked a few meters farther into the brush, thinking of the fairy story again, of lights leading some woeful soul into a bog. When his shoes sank into mud, he stopped and stared and eventually the silvery patch resolved and gained dimension: it was the pipeline, bending and twisting, catching the faint light of the moon wherever it emerged from the overgrowth.

Ilya stepped closer, the mud releasing his feet with a slurp that sounded like Timofey sucking down the last of his soup. The pipeline was higher than he’d thought it would be. He had to reach up to touch its belly. He put a hand against it and felt cool metal. This was a surprise too. He had thought it would be warm, like a vein, he guessed, with a hot gush of oil inside. Behind him, there was a honk, a scream, laughing. He tried to block it out. He cocked his head and listened, and at first there was nothing but the static inside his head, and then he heard it: a sound like a wave as it crashes over you, a sound that seemed to gain strength as he listened until it was a roar. He pulled his hand away, took a quick step back, and slipped in the mud. He landed on his back. A root jabbed him in the ribs, and his side pulsed with pain, and his arm—the one he’d held up over his head—quivered. He wasn’t sure whether the pipeline had shocked him or just scared him, but as he trekked through the mud back to the party, he had the ridiculous but distinct impression that touching it had been bad luck.

J.T. wasn’t at the keg any longer, and someone else was sitting in Ilya’s beach chair. Ilya looked up at the bus. A black guy was behind the wheel, and when he saw Ilya, he pulled the handle, and the door creaked open.

“Russia,” he said. “Welcome. Have a seat.” He smiled and stuck his tongue out, and there was a diamond nestled in the wet center of it, like an enormous pill he was about to swallow.

Ilya found a seat in the back, where it smelled less strongly of piss. The brown pleather seat had been slashed. Stuffing fluffed out of the cuts. The same stuff they used at the House of Culture to make fake snow for the New Year’s performance. Ilya pulled at it, let it fall and pile on the floor.

When he looked up again, Sadie was coming down the aisle toward him. She held out a cup of beer.

“Want this?” she said. “I don’t really drink.”

Ilya shook his head. “Papa Cam doesn’t allow it?”

“More like Mama Jamie,” she said. “But that’s not why.”

“I don’t drink much either. I was just sick in a bush.” He waved a hand toward the brush behind the bus.

“Is that why you’re all muddy? ‘Vodka is like water,’ huh?” She laughed and set her beer down on the seat next to him. She ran a finger down the cut he’d emptied of stuffing and plucked at its edge, and he had this feeling, like his future was close, like it was idiotic that he had not already scooted over to make room for her, and that if he did, there would be this tiny, celestial click and things would unlock between them, but instead he stayed where he was and said, “My brother isn’t dead. He’s in prison. For murder.”

Her hand stopped moving. That was the only sign that she’d heard. Her face was shadowed enough that her eyes looked identical, that tiny imperfection erased. “Shit,” she said softly, and then, “Did he do it?”

Ilya shook his head. He was so grateful for the question that tears clotted his throat and welled, hot and hard, behind his eyes. He looked up at the bus’s ceiling. Someone had graffitied it with swooping letters that looked more Cyrillic than Roman. He bit the inside of his cheek until he could feel the lump of tears loosen and dissolve.