In the Wilderness - Kim Barnes [63]
He had taken the crate out alone, too far. Laredo watched from the bank as the current caught, then tipped the Styrofoam raft. Laredo always wore heavy, square-toed boots, and had he thought to kick them off before going in, he might have made it to Larry. He was a strong swimmer and fought the swift water until he was exhausted. The others pulled him from the river and watched the white rectangle disappear in the distance, believing they still might see a dark shape pull itself up and on.
I locked myself in my room and cried as I never cried for Uncle Ed or Grandpa or Matthew. I wrapped my arms around my chest and hugged the shirt I wore and rocked, believing in my young girl’s way that all that was left of Larry remained with me, in the air between a layer of thin cotton and my own still-warm body. When my mother offered comfort, “Let’s pray he is with the Lord,” I jerked in disgust. Somehow this had to do with them, my parents and all the other adults who believed they owned their children’s lives. Better to live with our own dramas and deaths than allow the intrusion of elders, who spewed their nursery-rhyme dictates for good girls and boys. I added grief to my resentment, shaping each emotion to the bitterness I tended like a growing ball of wax—each candle drip first hot, then cooling into a hard, unmalleable core.
I began sneaking from beneath the nose of my Sunday school teachers to join others like me—church kids who bucked and chafed at the bit of obedience. We met at the corner Chevron station and bunched together in the women’s room, sharing our Marlboros and cursing the air blue. I no longer cared that my parents might smell the evidence on my breath or in my hair. Let them. I had found my company.
Weekday afternoons, my friends and I met at the house of one whose parents were working and whose older brother, Scott, scored ominous amounts of bennies and beauties, cross-tops and windowpane. I was often the one who volunteered to “baby-sit,” to remain straight and responsible.
I went there one day to be with Danny, a lovely boy with dark blue eyes and black hair. I wore the scar of his initials on the back of my hand, made by rubbing away the skin with the tip of an eraser, down to oozing flesh. I don’t know what he ingested that afternoon, what combination of chemicals reworked the circuits of his brain or what had gone into the making of the street drugs he took, but I watched in horror as he contorted on Scott’s bed.
I thought I loved him then, holding him down while he screamed and writhed. He was burning, he said. Every movement of his body through air, no matter how slow or small, created friction, speed-of-light combustion, and even his breathing brought on the flames that consumed him. I cradled him in my arms, rocking slightly, but this too was agony.
“Danny, listen. You’re okay, you’re in Scott’s basement, in Lewiston. It’s 1972. You’re okay.”
He moaned and opened his eyes wide. I could see the fear there, the vision he could not escape. “Slap him,” someone said. “Slap him hard.” I raised my hand but could not do it and thought for a moment to pray. “God, he’s dying!” I cried. “Help him, help him!” Someone pulled me into the next room, gave me a cigarette already lit.
“We’ve got to call the ambulance,” I pleaded. “He’ll die!”
“We call the hospital, we’ll all get nailed. He’ll be okay. Scott knows what to do. Stay cool.”
I looked around me in the dim light of the basement, at the friends who stood hunched and pale, holding on to whatever remnant remained of their own reality. Just then Danny let out a long and piercing howl. We stood for a moment, looked into one another’s stricken faces, then I bolted for the stairs. I ran from that house into the street, not caring who followed me, running for home.
In dreams that night I heard his scream again and again, felt it vibrate in my chest, echo off the walls of my room. I thought of possession and exorcism, remembered how violently his body had twisted, the fear in his eyes. The next day at school they told me Scott had tied Danny to the