“Yeah, Kurt Russell?”
“Right. Great flick. Yo, let’s cross here.”
They waited for a lone pickup truck to pass, its lights sweeping over their faces, one of the two dim, nearly padiddled out.
“The monster in The Thing is like this alien parasite that takes the form of the people it eats. It can become whatever it’s parasiting off of, if you get me.”
“Let’s assume I do.”
“So. You’re talking like the Great. American Thing, man.”
“The Great American Thing?” he asked, amused because he could hear Dakota placing the capital letters. He sucked on his cigarette. There was a pothole in the road and sticking out of this pothole was a stuffed animal, a lobster. He swore to Christ it was waving its claw at him. He started laughing really, really hard, choking on smoke and light. “Shit,” he said when he finally recovered. “The Great American Thing. That’s pretty goddamn hilarious.”
They arrived at the stadium: two sets of bleachers presiding over a football field now rough and patchy from drought and the cleats of summer two-a-days. A cancer patient refusing to shave her skull and letting the hair fall out in irregular tracts. Stadium lights stood sentry over the bleachers, and on the north and south ends of the field the orange goalposts took the watch. On the backside of the western set of bleachers, an enormous mural looked out at the road: a ferocious black jaguar bursting through a wall of orange, fangs bared, grapefruit eyes gleaming with savage Darwinian murder. The whole town was awash in black and orange, but this mural was the epicenter of the tsunami.
“Climb the fence?” Bill asked.
“Sure.”
Bill tucked his bottle of whiskey into the back pocket of his jeans. They each took to the chain links, digging the toes of their tennis shoes into diamond-shaped holds and scaling the eight feet only meant to keep out the laziest of intruders. They swung their legs over the top and dropped to the other side.
They made their way around the crossbeam jungle of the bleachers’ interior, pieces of litter from long-ago football games still decorating the dirt. Dakota returned to the earlier conversation.
“I dunno, man, it all rings kinda hollow to me.”
“What does?”
“You’re a prep, dude. College boy and a rich bitch back in the day.”
“What? My mom works at the paper. My dad’s a dentist. Do you have any idea what the word ‘rich’ actually means?”
“Not just that—good grades, good at sports. Hot girlfriend. Popular.”
“Not for a long time I wasn’t. Popular, I mean.”
Take for instance, the last home basketball game of his junior year in 2002, a must-win against Mansfield. Butterflies in the days leading up to it, he’d arrived in the stadium lot where the underclassmen parked wearing his good shirt and tie (as the players always did on game day). The start of the season seemed to be pumping water under the bridge in regards to the situation with his T-shirts the previous fall. He’d played a great season. People were forgetting. Then a car pulled alongside him, the back and passenger windows down, and two classmates he didn’t manage to get a look at opened fire on him with paintball guns. Multiple hits to the torso, back, and butt, one to the head that coated his hair in neon and made his skull ring, and one that drew blood when it cracked open the skin of his elbow. He’d stood stoically, feeling the snickers and whispers of the dozens watching. Turning back to his car, he winked at some anonymous sophomore and knew she would remember him forever. He drove home to shower and change. The pellets left enormous, painful welts, but he didn’t shed a single tear. He went back to school clean and furious and scored twenty points that night to prove to those who’d shot him, watched him, or gossiped about him, that he could not be fazed.
They climbed the rows of aluminum-can-colored bleachers. Dakota’s dreads waggled and his wallet chain splashed against denim. Bill took the opportunity to check his timer (01:18:23) and idly ponder how he’d slip away from this kid in the next half hour. Over the wrecked wind and quiet homes lay his destination and, he hoped, answers: to the contents of this package, to his guilt, to this last lost decade and its discontents.
“How ’bout here?” Dakota asked, pointing to the third row down from the top.
“Looks good.”
They sidled into their seats. Bill propped his legs up on the row in front of him and leaned back. His whiskey was about halfway gone and he made himself wait a bit before the next swig.
Dakota ashed his cig with two smug taps. “Think what you want. That’s why I live the way I do. No one owns me, no one tells me what to do. It’s more than most can say.”
“Oh, fuck me,” Bill started and stopped, hated that he could never let things go, and plunged ahead anyhow. In his idle moments, he prepared soapbox ramblings for arguments that would never happen. Like Rick would climb out of the grave to finally have a conversation of reckoning about the Iraq War. “You believe all the rap albums you grew up listening to, I get it.”
“Fuck you, man. I made my own way. I got mine on my own. No one helped me or gave me a fucking thing. Nobody took me shopping for the right kind of jeans when I was a kid.” He jerked his skull at Bill’s lap. “And believe me, I paid for that shit. For years in school I paid for that.”
Bill smirked. Amazing the way social dislocation manifested itself, the raw wrath roosting in the small towns, suburbs, and exurbs of Middle America. It could be the worst if your family had money and could afford to wall itself off behind home security systems and inside megachurches. If you weren’t rich or religious you could bang your head to thrash metal and ICP and wait to have your alienation harvested. If your job options amounted to “Paper or plastic?” you could deal dope and call yourself free. Some people thought they were born without the capacity to obey, and yet their only act of defiance was to believe they could never be conned by the powerful. Retain only the savory flavor of their own certainty. What had Dostoyevsky imagined at the end of Crime and Punishment? Raskolnikov dreamt of a virus that spreads the world over, causing each and every person to believe he or she is the sole possessor of Truth.
Dakota sniffed. “If all this shit is so evil, Ashcraft, what are you doing out here getting loaded? Go blow up some banks! Shit, I’ll point you in the direction of Fallen Farms right now and the Flood brothers will hook a white boy up. Otherwise, keep away from me, my porn, my money, my drugs, my life. Every man for himself and every man free.”
“You’ll see how all this ends,” he said.
Dakota made his scorn no secret. “How do you figure?”
“Eh,” he grunted, and batted a hand. “They won. They fucking won. It’s the divine right of kings updated for the secular age. Convincing people like you diddling on the fringes of their empire to subscribe to their philosophy. And for the rest of us to be so jaded we throw up our hands and allow all this exploitation to roll on until we all hurtle into total ecological and economic collapse. The usual.”
Dakota shrugged a shoulder. “So we go live in space like in WALL-E. Problem solved.” Then he angled one slim butt cheek higher and farted.
This let the tension out of the conversation, allowed Bill to laugh. “Dakota Exley, anarcho-capitalist. And I thought my life was weird.”
They sat in silence for a while staring out over the dusty field. The smell of a waterfall in Angkor Wat returned to him. He felt the strangeness of being alive and a part of time, the specificity of death and the holy beat it put in your pulse.
“You remember Rick Brinklan?” Bill asked. “Senior year we had a game against Marysville. Big conference rival—”