“Means I might be down the food chain, but there’s skeletons all over this town.” He popped his head up to check on the patrol car, a paranoid-snake motion. “I mean literal fucking skeletons. You know here and the three surrounding counties have double the missing-persons reports?”
“Double of what?” Bill asked, but Dakota wasn’t interested in explaining his arithmetic or citing sources.
“Jericho Lake—there ain’t no bottom to it is all I’m saying.” Bill didn’t bother pointing out the inaccuracies in this statement. Every New Canaan kid had heard the story of Jericho, most likely in Mrs. Bingham’s seventh-grade history class. When the lake was built in the fifties, the engineers had needed to buy up and flood an entire town. Supposedly, gangsters from Youngstown had financed the project so they had somewhere to dump bodies, but Bingham was always telling gory tall tales to keep kids awake in class. Dakota kept peering over the roof, but there was no sign of the police. Not even the glow of distant headlights. “We should all be more paranoid.”
“Have you even heard me tonight?” Bill gulped, wiped a sleeve over his mouth, thought about sucking out the excess sleeve-booze, rejected it. “I already got all the paranoia I can handle.”
Dakota turned his head to show that he did not care. Bill lapped the last vestiges of his whiskey and kept right on staring out over the lights of the city. Fireflies hung in the night, a vascular chandelier. He thought of all the places he’d been.
Dakota surprised him by raising his bottle in a toast. “Here then, Ashcraft. To The Great American Thing. Long may it run.”
Bill saw purple in the corners of his vision and figured it for sorrow manifesting on the ultraviolet fringes. “Long may it run,” he agreed.
He gulped down the last of the bottle, tasting mostly of the accumulated saliva at the bottom. He pulled the kitchen timer from his pocket. 00:48:37.
He looked up to see Dakota remove a pipe and plastic bag from the zippered pocket of his sweatshirt.
“Since we got time to kill, this high’ll be free of charge.”
Bill stared at the small rocks in the Ziploc, dread swelling.
“Doesn’t look like any weed I’ve ever seen.”
“Glass,” said Dakota. “Prior experience?”
“None. And I’m not sure I care to.”
“See, I didn’t actually bring any weed, son.”
Now Bill felt the crossroads. Crystal felt kind of over-the-top, even for him. Yet he smelled the ash descending from the sky, mixing with the rain and wind. Markers to measure the coming storm.
“One hit,” he warned and promised.
Dakota had already lit the pipe, a blue glass job the color of Walter White’s product. He held the smoke in his lungs while passing to Bill. Without giving too much more thought to the entire sad episode, Bill put the pipe to his lips and lit. As the wet axe blade scraped the back of his throat, he immediately hacked on the smoke. He and Dakota dueled coughs. His head spun two ways at once. Through his tears he could see the stars that appear above a cartoon character’s head blending with the lights of downtown. When his coughing began to abate, he said, “I really need to go. I gotta be somewhere.”
“So go,” said Dakota, whose head had fallen back against the wall, jaw slack. “No matter what you think, it’s still a free country.”
Bill tried to relax. The key to any new drug was to understand that there was some small chance you might freak and try to claw your own eyes out. If you knew these mental appeals would come you could resist them.
“Whoa,” said Bill—because there It was. It came flooding over him in one titanic wave that may have resembled chemically induced sensations he’d felt before but only the way a silent film resembles a modern-day summer action movie. Like take a child from 1922 and sit him down for Transformers: Dark of the Moon in 3-D. There was a semblance of familiarity but not really. It was pure bliss that sublimated every anxiety and sorrow that had built in him for the past fifteen years. All those faces that produced such deep shame and guilt and nostalgia and love, now a mist torched by the dawn. He felt only unattached, unwarranted, pure-as-the-driven-snow happiness. His skin warmed and tingled, every pore orgasming at once. He watched the loves of his life writ brilliantly across the mystic sky river, carrying summer stars, satellites, and dust from the beginning of creation.
As we all know, the way memory works is that the sweep of your life gets explicated by a handful of specific moments, and these totems then stand as narrative. You must invent the ligature that binds the rest. After LSD mixed with methamphetamine, with an interregnum of several quarts of booze, one really begins to interrogate those incidents that blaze neon, and this cocktail was creating particularly interesting transpositions of time. It was like taking a virtual reality walking tour of his own past, like he could hold his little egg timer, rub it like a lucky time machine, and zip back to the morning he woke up in a diaper in Rick’s backyard to the heart-shitting sound of a shotgun blast.
Obviously he fell right out of the lawn chair where he’d passed out. His central intelligence came back in denuded bits of soggy puzzle pieces:
Where am I? Who am I? What the fuck was that sound? I’m Bill. Brinklan’s backyard. Why? We got fucked up last night. Where? His parents are in Arkansas ’cause his older brother’s wife had a baby. Bottle of Smirnoff, bottle of Jameson, case of Miller Lite. But where? Kaylyn and Lisa got it for us. How? In the backyard lawn chair. Good-looking girls can always get booze. What the fuck was that sound?!
Rick stood by the backyard porch, cackling, his dad’s shotgun jutting from his hip to the sky. “Aw, did I wake you?” he asked.
“You’re a hick psycho,” Bill wheezed. He looked down at himself. “Oh for fuck’s sake.”
“You passed out first,” said Rick. “It was mostly Harrington’s idea.”
Hard to take it all in. Charred logs and shards of beer cans the fire had left behind. He was naked from the waist up and covered in Sharpie ink. He had about a zillion mosquito bites. And of course he was wearing an adult diaper.
He started laughing very hard. “Why the fuck am I wearing a diaper?”
“Hey, we didn’t like undress you and put that on,” Harrington called from inside the house. “The Sharpie-ing was my idea, but that was your idea!”
Bill looked to Rick for confirmation. Rick was wearing nothing but gym shorts and an apron that said You Don’t Need to Kiss Me but You Could Get Me a Beer.
“You said you wanted to try a diaper—who was I to stop you?”
“But…” Bill looked down at the ridiculous pair of plastic underwear moistly clinging to his skin. “Where did I even get this?” He couldn’t stop laughing.
“They were left over from when my grandpa lived with us,” said Rick. “Don’t laugh! It was a sad situation.”
His head was splitting but this made him laugh even harder.
“Did I actually piss in it?” he asked.
“Like we checked? C’mon in, I’m making breakfast.”
Rick set the shotgun against the garage door and went back to the skillet where, from the smell of it, he was making eggs, bacon, and pancakes. Harrington sat at the kitchen table reading the New Canaan News, and Bill could see his mother’s byline beneath the top headline. Most of the night trickled back to him. Their girlfriends had stopped by briefly, but this first night of post-graduation summer vacation had been designated as a guy’s night. They built the campfire in Rick’s backyard, shot at a bowling pin until they filled it with enough birdshot to kill it good, and then sat around getting loaded until the first person passed out.