Bud Smith - F 250

“No shit? I missed it. Damn.”

“There’ll be more,” I said. He closed the van doors, and we walked back towards the house.

More people were showing up. It was one of those kinds of parties. People were being sucked in magnetically. When I turned back and looked at the house, there was a bunch of people standing on the porch who were looking at me while they drank out of red solo cups.

“What?”

No-one said anything.

I went back up on the balcony. June was hugging K, who kept touching her face and then looking at her hand as if expecting to see blood … but there wasn’t any.

“You alright?” I asked.

“I can’t believe that maniac.”

“Sorry about that,” I said. “Honestly, I can’t believe them. This type of thing never happens.” A lie.

June hugged her girl and kissed her forehead.

“You’ll be OK, babe,” she said.

“Oh, I’ve been hit worse,” K said, “and the reaction is always the same.”

“What?” I asked.

“It turns me on,” she said.

June let go of K.

Down below, I heard someone vomit. Unrelated: I heard the police coming through the gate, a scanner radio getting louder, and saw a flashlight swoop up.

The party was over.

I woke up on the couch. My neck felt almost broken.I kept looking up at a giant clock, its pendulum swinging over the mantle. June and K were in the master bedroom. I’d fallen asleep out there like a castaway. I got off the couch and looked out the window. The swimming pool was full of floating red solo cups, as if that’s what the pool was put there for: a holding tank for red plastic cups.

A voice surprised me. Trish was sitting down there on a chair by the rock wall. She was wearing a flowing, bright, tie-dyed dress as she alternated puffing a cigarette and sipping the last gulp from a jug of orange juice. She was looking down at her feet as she sang “Sweet Child O’ Mine” to herself — just the first verse.

“She’s got a smile and it seems to me, reminds me of childhood memories, where everything was as fresh as the bright blue sky.”

I opened the window and leaned out. I realized I was hanging out of the same window that the housekeeper had yelled at me out of that first day, when I was just starting to build the wall down there.

“Hey, Trish.”

She looked up, surprised. “I forgot where I was, man.”

“I understand.”

“Been down here all night,” she said, rubbing her eyes. “I forgot there was anybody else in the world kinda, especially up in that house.”

“Understand completely,” I said. “I’m coming down.”

I walked through the house, each step echoing out on the lonely marble. Out back, the air was warmer than I’d expected it to be. Summer was setting in.

She looked up and waved weakly.

“Oww. I hid when the cops came. I was real high. I’m not now. I think I came down. The sun hurts.”

“Oh, I know,” I said.

“I hid underneath the deck,” she said. “It was kinda funny listening to everybody scramble.”

I’d known Trish ever since I was a boy. We went to grammar school together. In the second grade, I got it in my little kid brain that I wanted to throw a Halloween party at my mom’s house. She was sober then. A brief window when things were normal. Dad was gone. There was no Aldo yet. Mom said I could invite 25 kids. I went to school the next day and started handing out invitations to the cool kids. I was so excited. I was gonna have a badass Halloween party, impress them all with my goblin act. I got down to my last invitation, and Trish kept bugging me for one. She was the weird, chubby girl who sat next to me and smelled like cold Chinese food. Sure, she let me use her crayons, but she wasn’t pretty and she wasn’t cool. Trish kept pushing and pushing and pushing, and even though I wanted to give my last invitation to Allison Lewis, I gave it to Trish. When it came time for the party, we had cobwebs up all over the house, we had a big cauldron to bob for apples, we had spider rings and cupcakes with ghosts and Frankenstein’s monster on them. None of the other 24 kids showed up.

Just Trish.

We’ve been friends ever since.

In the backyard, I looked at her profile, her red puffy cheeks, and her squinty eyes with the low brows. I studied her little nose, which was a little crooked. It’d been fractured when Trish was ten. She tried to jump as high as she could off the playground swings.

She had a good heart. Trish was the toughest and funniest girl that I knew. Trish didn’t take crap from people. Trish cared. Trish worked at the Dollar Store but was going to community college; she was gonna be a nurse. Feral wasn’t good enough for her.

I pictured Trish, nine years old again, dressed in a witch costume as we played in the leaf pile in my backyard. She was trying to cheer me up because nobody came to the party. I remember she dug around in the leaves until she found a weird bug and gave it to me.

“What is that?”

“It’s a wooly bear.”

I had on rubber wolf man hands. She placed the super-hairy, brown and black caterpillar in my synthetic rubber paws, and I looked down at it as it curled into a tight ball.

“Thank you,” I said.

“It’s just a bug,” she said. “World’s full of ‘em.”

“Still, I like it.”

Now it was all these years later, and I sat down next to her on the cement by K’s family’s pool.

“Bright as hell out here,” I said.

“It sure is. I’ve been up all night,” she said.

“Doing what?”

“Thinking,” she said. “… and watching the moon set and the stars get fainter. Then the craziest thing happened.”

“Dawn. Gets me every time.”

“When are you guys leaving for your big California tour?”

“I don’t know if we are. They seem to think we’ll go. I have my doubts. And how could I go anyway?”

“You just go, that’s all. That’s how anybody does anything.”

“What about Aldo?” I said.

“What about him? He’s a grown-ass man.”

“He’s sick.”

“Yes, he is. I know him well. Know all about his sickness.”

“He has to check his blood every night. I’ve got to stay here and keep an eye on him. And I don’t know…”

“I’ll do it,” she said.

“He’s stubborn though. He won’t let you.”

“Then I’ll whack him in the face with a frying pan, and when he’s unconscious, I’ll check his blood. I’ll do it. Just shut up. Just shut up and stop making excuses not to go.”

“I’m not making excuses.”

“You make a lot more excuses than you realize.”

“The fuck I do,” I said.

“I just think you have a bunch of potential. Is that gay to say out loud like that? You probably should have never come back here. You’d already gotten away. I was pretty damn jealous.”

“I don’t mind it here. It’s nice. The ocean’s just over there. That’s nice.”

“Sure, nice. So nice. It’s nice if your family is loaded, like these girls you’re screwing around with.”

“You don’t like them either? Denise says she’s gonna give them black eyes.”

“It’s none of my business.”

“Kinda true.”

“I’ve been in plenty of dead-end relationships. Maybe I’m an expert at it. My job. Feral. School. Feral. My job. My cash register job at fucking Dollar Store. Living with my goddamn mom still. Ughhh. And did I mention Feral?”

“You did, three times.”

“Just don’t waste your time on people that don’t love you the right way. That sound fair?”

“Like a battle plan,” I said.

“Where is Feral?”

Trish pointed over by the storage shed where the pool stuff was usually stashed. I didn’t understand why she was pointing at it, but then I noticed all the pool stuff was spread all over the deck.