“Here I go,” I said, getting to my knees. I worked hard on Jay with my mouth, doing to him the things I’d imagined girls doing to me, being careful with my teeth, breathing through my nose as little as possible because of the onion tang of his unwashed skin, and when I got him to half-mast, I felt proud. One step closer, I thought. I wouldn’t spend another second more than I had to with that swampy Zimzee. My jaw ached from the sucking.
“Hey,” the Zimzee said, “now put it in his bootie.” He’d unleashed his own inflamed cock from his pants and was stroking it languidly.
“We’ve got to get down on the ground,” I said to Jay, and I didn’t add, like animals.
But that was okay: we were animals fighting for our freedom. I lifted my hand to Jay’s shoulder—I’d gotten taller, or maybe Jay was stooped over; I didn’t have to hold my hand so high—and told him that everything would be okay, but he only shrugged me off.
“No,” the Zimzee said. “You put it in the one with the tattoo. Fuck the Eye Whites out of him. This is something they would off you for, you know that, boys? They won’t have you after you done this.”
The tattoo, Jay’s godawful tattoo had trapped us. If the Zimzee hadn’t seen it, he would have taken our money and left, but Jay had to screw up everything for me once again. I switched places with Jay and fumbled with the soft head of my cock there at his asshole; Jay’s muscles were tightening up against my intrusion.
“Come on.” The Zimzee snarled. “You don’t want me to come over there and show you how it’s done.” He shook his fat cock at us.
I spat into my hand and rubbed it over Jay’s backside, and I tried and tried until finally I was fucking him.
“Don’t disappoint me, now,” the Zimzee said.
“We’re almost done.” I gasped. “Almost done.”
The Zimzee stood; I saw his feet coming closer. I worried that he might kill us. But instead he shot yellow-tinged cum across the back of Jay’s head. A hot dollop of it fell onto my arm. As he zipped up, he said, “Now you’re going to follow me. I’m to make for certain you don’t go the way of my boy. Come on. Get dressed.”
I fumbled with my clothes; he was going to kidnap us, just like in the ghost stories.
Jay and I dressed as fast as we could, like maybe the scraps of cloth would protect us. “Dinner,” Jay said, pointing.
The alligator, its rope trailing, had toddled into the swamp.
“Shit,” the Zimzee said as he ran after it. The gun knocked against his side. With each of his steps, my blood pounded harder. My leg muscles twitched.
When a tree half-obscured the Zimzee, I turned and snatched our backpack, then sprinted in the opposite direction. As Jay followed behind me, he wheezed, or maybe it was a sort of sob. A bug flew into my mouth. The swamp closed its thick, green curtain around us—a finale, no encore—and I ignored the shouts of the Zimzee, the booming discharge of the rifle, as noises from a restless but now irrelevant audience.
Chapter 18
Even when you think that you are probably going crazy, there are things to keep you busy. Once we were far away from the Zimzee, I started to count. The number of steps it took to reach the road: four hundred and two. The number before a car finally passed us: one thousand fifteen. The number of times I heard an unfamiliar bird cry, the number of littered Coke cans, the number of bug bites on my arms.
We must have looked terrible, even for Florida. No one stopped to give us a ride. Then again, it was me holding out my thumb, since Jay was too beat, and maybe that was the difference.
Neither of us were about to sleep out in the swamp again, so after dark, we found a neighborhood and snuck into some kids’ treehouse, really just a platform of two-by-fours and a couple of beanbag chairs. I didn’t say it to Jay, but I figured we were within screaming distance of a bunch of neighbors, if it came to another monster in the night.
“Dinner saved us,” I said, the closest we’d come to broaching the incident. “I will never be afraid of an alligator again.”
“Good old Dinner,” Jay said from his beanbag chair. “I miss hamburgers. We would eat hamburgers every Monday night.”
My stomach jerked in its usual spasm of hunger. I wished that the sack of it would vanish so that I wouldn’t have to think about its demands. If only my whole digestive system would disappear, then I wouldn’t have to eat or slurp oily puddles of water or shit in the woods or use waxy leaves as toilet paper. “Do you think it’s a Monday?”
Jay shrugged. “I miss jam. Jam on toast.”
Stars winked from between the branches of the tree. They were like flakes of instant potatoes or granules of sugar; I could only think of food metaphors. “Remember that time we—the three of us—tried to make cupcakes for the class? It was my birthday.”
“Yeah.” Jay shifted and the wooden platform of the treehouse creaked. “But it wasn’t your birthday. We were only going to tell the teacher that it was. And we were going to put weed in the cupcakes, get the whole class high. I wouldn’t do a girl thing like baking unless there was weed.”
I didn’t remember any of that stuff; in my memory, the whole episode had been innocent. “No; you’re wrong. We wanted to make vanilla with chocolate frosting. Where would we have gotten weed?”
“Toshi knew some guy, he said. But of course he didn’t really, and he brought us oregano or some shit, and the cupcakes came out tasting awful.”
I closed my eyes, trying hard to see things the way Jay had seen them. “I thought we were just bad at baking. That we messed up the recipe.”
“That’s okay, Bennet. You never had any idea what was really going on. Like you blind yourself on purpose.”
“What are you talking about?” Jay was starting to piss me off. “I have a great memory. An elephant memory. For reals.”
“Whatever you need to tell yourself.”
We lay there in silence for a long time, and I thought that Jay had probably fallen asleep and that maybe I should pinch him or whisper something nightmare-inducing into his ear for being such an off-target dick about my memory, but then he spoke.
“You think he’ll tell the Eye Whites what we did?”
Of course he was talking about the Zimzee. That same anxiety I’d quelled earlier by counting everything started to swell in my throat. A low-grade panic had followed me ever since that last time in New Veronia, and the constant dread was wearing me down.
Night had buried the twilight; the only things I could see to count were the stars; after I’d done them, I started counting up things from my memory, like the houses on my street, the rotating meals served in the high school cafeteria, every single friend I’d ever had—that last number wasn’t big—and then I subtracted Toshi. Tosh was gone.
“If he tells, that ruins all my plans,” Jay said. “They’ll think I’m sick. That something is wrong with me. But maybe they wouldn’t believe him, or I could kill him.”
I punched the beanbag chair I was sitting on, and I was surprised at how good it felt, so I punched the floor. The hard wood of the treehouse balked my fist. “Toshi is gone. You’re so upset about what that Zimzee man did to us, and look at what we did to Tosh. Basically, we’re no better than him.” The reverberation of my punches shuddered through my body, and something about the frequency of the vibration uncoiled the cold, dark portion of my brain inside which I had stored the details of that night with Toshi. Once the memory was freed, I’d never be able to stuff it back.