One of the pool players stood next to me. He had long black hair thinning on the top, and he was skinny and nearing forty. His small potbelly barely hung over the waistband of his Sergio Valente jeans.
“That your friend out there?” he said in a direct but not unfriendly way, pointing out the front window.
“Yeah,” I admitted.
“I’d appreciate it,” he said, giving a quick nod to a woman in one of the folding chairs, “if next time he wouldn’t be so quick to show off in front of my wife.”
“I’ll tell him,” I said.
He nodded and smiled. “You take care, buddy.”
“You too.”
I paid and thanked the woman behind the bar, put the bourbon in the larger sack, and moved toward the door. On the way out I smiled apologetically at the man’s wife and got a smile back. Out in the lot I took a last drag, tossed the butt, put the beers in the backseat, transferred the pint to my jacket pocket, and patted the dog on the head. Two of the beers came out of the bag before I settled in. ‹ s
Billy grabbed one, popped it, and tapped my bottle with his. He drank deeply and turned the bottle to admire the label. “That’s what I’m talkin’ about.”
“You ready? Or you going to do a beer commercial.”
“No, I’m ready. But I really had to let one fly.”
“I noticed. So did all those folks inside.”
“You talkin’ about those rednecks?” Billy said, pointing in the window. “ Fuck them.”
We continued south. The road ahead was free of commercial activity and hilly once again as we neared the Potomac. I lodged my beer between my thighs and withdrew the pint of Beam from my jacket. I twisted the cap, broke the seal, and handed the bottle to Billy. He had his and then passed me the bottle as he chased it with some beer.
“That’s good,” he said, wiping his mouth with his shirtsleeve. “Been a long time since I took whiskey from a bottle.”
“Listen, Billy…”
“What?”
“I was looking at you, back there, pissin’ on the highway. I saw you for a second, like it was you, man, fifteen years ago.”
“Yeah?” Billy looked at me briefly with a blank smile and returned his gaze to the road.
“I’m trying to apologize,” I said. “That’s what I’m trying to do. I’ve been kind of ice cold, man, since you walked into the Spot. I expected things to be like they were with us, when we were kids-like you were. You understand?”
“You’re drunk, Greek,” Billy said, turning his face in my direction again. Half of his was lit green from the dashboard lights. “You are drunk, aren’t you?” He smiled. “Or are you trippin’?”
“I guess I’m just drunk.” I had a slow pull of bourbon, then beer. “Not trippin’, though. Last time I did that I was with you. Right before you went away to school. Remember?”
Billy reached for the bottle. I put it in his hand. “That time in the park, right?”
I nodded, thinking back. The blurred dark limbs of trees rushed by against the night as I stared through the passenger window and recounted that night for Billy.
On a late August afternoon, at the tail end of the summer of 1976, Billy and I had eaten a couple of hits of blotter that I had copped through the back door of Nutty Nathan’s from Johnny McGinnes. We smoked a joint on the way down to Candy Cane City and once there began a round of pickup ball with a group of Northwest boys we had come to know. For the first hour we were on our game, but that ended when the acid began to seep in, and after a while our laughter caused us to drop out. I went home and took a shower, sneaking around my grandfather, unable to look him in the ey shimad a slowe. Then Billy came by and picked me up in his Camaro.
That night had started like any other-we had no clue at first as to where we were headed, only that we were headed out. Neither of us talked about the buzz-that would have been uncool-but when Billy asked me to drive I knew he was tripping as hard as I was; he had never let me drive his car, even on his most twisted nights.
Billy was wearing straight-leg Levi’s that night, rolled up once at the cuff, and one of those glitter-boy rayon shirts, from a store named Solar Plexus, in Silver Spring. The red lid of a Marlboro box peeked out over the top of the shirt pocket. On his feet were the denim stacks that he had bought at Daily Planet, a pair of shoes that he knew I had always wanted to own.
For some reason we ended up on Beach Drive in Rock Creek Park. I had begun to hallucinate mildly, but it was under control, and my driving up to that point had been okay. But then Billy popped Eat a Peach into the eight-track, and he turned up the volume, and when “Blue Sky” came on, and Dickey Betts moved into his monster guitar solo, I lost my shit. It was at that point that I was convinced that the car was going to lift up and fly right off the parkway.
I pulled over at a picnic area, Billy laughing over the sound of the tape, and he walked me down to a patch of dark, gravelly beach at the creek. I lay down by the creek and stared at the top branches of the oaks that lined the east side and listened to the rush of the brown water over the rocks and the loopy liquid guitar that was still flowing through my head. Then Billy took my shoes off and put his-the denim stacks I had coveted throughout our friendship-on my feet. And he talked to me for at least two hours. By then the branches had melted into the flannel gray of the sky, and there was a small throb in my stomach, and I had begun to come down.
“That was a night,” Billy said when I was finished. “After that we went down to some hippie bar, right next to the Brickskeller at Twenty-second and P, second floor, got sober on alcohol. Some band was playing, some cat blazing on lap steel, right?”
I nodded. “Danny Gatton.”
“How do you remember all that shit?”
“The funny thing is, I almost forgot. And the thing is, the thing you did for me that night, those kind of things are the only things worth remembering. Am I making any sense?”
“Yeah, pardner, you’re making sense. Hang on.” Billy eased off the gas and swung the Maxima into the turn lane. He pulled left across the highway onto Route 257. We passed a gas station and liquor store, then drove southeast, into a shroud of darkness.
THIRTEEN
We followed 257 for a quarter-mile, blowing by a hardware-and-bait shop lit only by a John Deere sign in the window. Then Billy abruptly veered left off the interstate, onto a roughly paved, unlit road that swept up into a grove of high shrub and pine, then ope vhimaded ned to acres of flat field.
“Where we goin’? I thought April’s property was off Two-fifty-seven.”
“It is. Mount Victoria road parallels Two-fifty-seven. We’ll come back out onto it at Tompkinsville.” Billy winked. “Watch this, Greek,” he said. Then he cut the headlights of the Maxima.
For a couple of seconds Billy and I were green, and everything outside the car was black. I grabbed the handle of the door and gripped it until the road ahead began to appear, slowly, in a bluish light. The moon was bright and almost directly overhead.
“You sure you want to do this, man?”
“Like we used to do, on that stretch of Oregon Avenue, down in the park.”
“We knew that road.”
“I know this one,” Billy said. “Roll your window down, man, it’s not too cold. Enjoy it.”
I did, as Billy maxxed out the heater fan, then rolled his own window down. Maybelle came forward and laid her head partly on my arm, partly on the door, leaving her face out, letting the wind blow back her ears. She closed her eyes.
The sound of the heater meshed with the wind. I had a slug of bourbon and passed it to Billy. Through the glass of Billy’s roof the moon shimmered above as if it were submerged in water. We passed a small gas station with an old Sunoco sign lit and suspended from two chains at the corner of a two-lane intersection, then moved on. No headlights approached from ahead or from behind.