Damaged Goods by Ryan Crider

       Kale took the Department of Corrections up on its offer of one month’s stay in a St. Louis treatment center, an alternative to sixty days in jail for violating his probation.  And then after he’d survived that month and was as cured as they could get him, he came back into Clofton and found his apartment as dirty and under-furnished as he’d left it.  The electricity was still off, as it had been most of the summer, and now the phone was dead, too.  Devon wasn’t there waiting for him.  She’d lost her game of chicken with a Burlington Northern train at the downtown crossing one bright July morning and now was tucked safely away in a shady plot at the back of the Odd Fellows Cemetery.  She wouldn’t have been waiting for him, anyway, not only because she wasn’t the waiting type, but also because she’d turned her attention towards first one of their old friends and then another.  And so far as Kale knew she’d never even heard he was gone or where he’d gone to.  Everything else was the same, though – spiders on the walls, no power, nothing in the cupboards.

            He called about the electric, and the money to turn it back on, plus what it took to square away his rent and the late fees, drained his bank account to basically nothing.  Old behaviors could trigger the craving, they’d told him over and over again the past month, and with a clean head he had enough common sense and knew better than to go after something on the owl shift in some factory or at one of the motels or a gas station.  So Kale did the obvious thing and went to see Myles Kramey about getting on at the supermarket.

            “Are you better now?” Myles asked him, not even glancing at the scribbled-in application, because Myles knew everything or had heard everything about everyone and maybe didn’t want the straight facts on paper to cloud his own preconceptions.  And, probably, it didn’t even matter how Kale answered this question now.

            “I’m clean,” he said.  “I’ll take whatever you’ve got, anything you’ve got.  Part-time, full-time – whatever you’ve got.”

            Nobody understood why Myles seemed to keep hiring kids in various stages of recovery, unless the rumors about his son were true and the kid had spent those first three weeks of the summer pulling his own rehab stint and now Myles had a soft spot for addicts.  He leaned back against the wood paneling of his little boxed-in office, built up three steps above the floor at the front of the store.

            “I need somebody to stock on the seven-to-three,” Myles said.  He lowered his drowsy gaze to Kale’s paperwork and pulled at the circles under his eyes.  “I just want to know that the Feds won’t be busting in anytime soon.  I ought to start my own local work-release program, after the excitement we’ve had around here, run a shuttle to the police station and back.  Or maybe we could have us a good old chain gang.”  Myles straightened up and looked Kale over.  They exchanged blinks.  “In the meantime, be here in the morning.”

            So Kale took the job that the previous employee must not have been recovered enough to handle.  He bought a loaf of bread, a carton of Marlboros, milk, potato chips, and some lunch meat, then hauled it all back to his newly-energized apartment. 

His place was a second-floor efficiency in a complex comprised of three dreary white two-story buildings, eight units to each, arranged in a semi-circle that opened up to a pool, a few benches, and the tiny hut-like structure that served as a laundry room and makeshift exercise facility.  Then there was the gravel parking lot, the ugliest thing about the view from the units ringing the courtyard.  But Kale’s four-by-eight foot balcony jutted out from the backside of the building at the base of the semi-circle, offering him a view of an open field tucked within the quarter-mile between the interstate and outer road to his right and the railroad tracks to his left, running parallel to the road.  There was just enough room on the wooden balcony for the lawn lounger that normally served as something of an armchair inside the apartment. 

When he got back from Kramey’s late that afternoon, Kale moved the chair to the balcony, then made himself a sandwich, poured a glass of milk, and carried the chips and cigarettes out to his perch.  He ate the sandwich, drank the milk, and chain-smoked the cigarettes.  Then he watched the sun set slowly over the burnt-brown field and the near-distant tree-line and the unseen town beyond all that.  He kept sitting there as the sky grew darker and felt himself fade into sleep.  He dozed, awoke, dozed and dreamed something in that vague, shapeless dream-state where nothing would ever stick in his memory later on, then woke again.  He scratched at his arm.  He slipped in and out of sleep, stirring whenever a train passed by and with it the warning horns and melodious, screeching cry as it clambered down the track.  He slept some more.      

*****

For now (until Myles was able to make a recruiting trip to a clinic somewhere, Kale figured), Hasbro was the only other stocker on seven-to-three, and, even though the rule was one of them be in the store at all times, they took their smoke breaks together and stood clad in their blue grocer’s aprons outside on the loading dock and smoked at regular intervals throughout the morning.  Hasbro was also his trainer, not that they did any training. 

“So I took this test,” Hasbro was saying, “this test they gave us at school last spring, that the Army and Navy recruiters gave us.  And it was a test to test your aptitude, to see what you might want to do in the military.  And my score told them I could guard nukes.”  He shook his head and spat against the concrete dock floor.  “They didn’t say much else, but that they could use me for that.  That sounds okay to me.  I was going to join up, anyway, next summer.”

Hasbro was two months shy of his eighteenth birthday, almost five years younger than Kale.  He was a burly kid with a baby-face and rather large, out-turned ears.  Kale thought he looked and acted like a combination of characters off two old cartoons he’d watched as a child, a cross between a G.I. Joe action figure and the fat guy off of Voltron.  It was nine-thirty and already ninety degrees, and Kale had spent the last five minutes watching a single bead of sweat track ever-so-slowly down the contours of Hasbro’s face.

“And this with you was all from a speeding ticket,” Hasbro said, and then he shook his head and squatted in place atop the concrete.

Kale pulled in a deep drag off his cigarette, then spoke as he exhaled.   “It was more than a speeding ticket, back the first time.  The original thing.  The first charge.  That was something more than a speeding ticket.  That, and I had something in the trunk when they pulled me over.”

“In for that, though,” Hasbro said, still shaking his head, “at least you got your money’s worth, in for that shit.”  He suddenly grinned.  “I’ll bet you could have picked up some crazy women, though, in a place like that.  In rehab.  Huh?”

Kale extinguished his cigarette and stared across the asphalt parking lot, which trailed off on this side into gravel that then morphed into patchy, dirt-strewn yards belonging to downtrodden houses cluttered together within the five blocks between here and the city park.  He absently found himself trying to remember whom he’d once bought from in this neighborhood.  Back in the other direction, over his left shoulder where he didn’t want to look, the parking lot ran all the way to the train tracks.  On the other side of those was the burned-out rubble where the turn-of-the-century Thompson Building had stood just three months prior.

“Hey,” Hasbro said.  He pointed across the tracks.  “Hey, did you see that shack burn down?  I had a front row seat.”

Kale stuffed his hands into his pockets and stared down at the ridiculous apron.  He shook his head.

“I’ve had a front seat for all kinds of shit,” Hasbro said. 

Kale still didn’t look at him.  Instead, he shifted in place.

*****

That was more or less the only talk there was about Kale’s recent vacation, which was just how he wanted it.  He hadn’t brought up the subject and, of course, if it were up to him there’d have been no mention, no discussion of it at all, the past four weeks just fading into the collective forgotten memories of the town, that place where all talk of the isolated local fragments of life and death ended up in due time as vague recollections that no longer needed talking about.  And if it’d been up to him, everyone would have left him alone, ignored him, pretended they hadn’t heard a bit of gossip or that they weren’t making an instant mental comparison between the tall, dark, thin but semi-healthy boy being given the grand tour of Kramey’s Market and the emaciated, hollowed-out, disheveled figure they remembered from earlier in the summer.  But every time he came around a corner, turned down another aisle carrying an oversized and awkward cardboard container loaded with boxes of cereal or pasta or canned vegetables, he’d come upon some other vaguely familiar face (or his face would be vaguely familiar to theirs), and then have to return the tight, glee-and-sorrow smile they’d flash his way that might as well have said to him, “I know everything about you.  All of it.”  Or these people would be in groups of two or three, and then his ear would instinctively zero in on the whispering, real or imagined, that transpired between them after he’d passed by.

Then he would walk home, because Kramey’s was no more than a mile and a half away from his apartment, and he was up for anything now that would condense time and maybe fill in the accompanying space, and so he’d taken to walking back and forth each day.  When he got back to the apartment, a soggy stickiness would have collected in clumps around every porous, faucet-like sweat gland along the surface of his skin.  The sweat would drip from his long black bangs, and his water-logged jeans would be trying to slip down from around his hips.  But cold air cost money he didn’t have, and he would sit out on the balcony and settle himself.  It would be so hot he couldn’t bear to smoke.  Sometimes he could hear girls laughing from the pool or kids playing somewhere back behind him in the courtyard, where he couldn’t watch.  And later there’d be a scant dinner of whatever he’d swiped from the store and music from the little boombox in the living room and trains along the track and finally a restless sleep.  No matter if he drifted off on the balcony or inside on the futon, it was always the same – the next morning he’d never remember the dreams, or if there’d been any.

*****

One day at the store, Kale was spending his time between smoke breaks – and with those breaks the stories Hasbro liked to tell him about the parts of the summer he’d missed – stocking Campbell’s cans in the soup aisle.  Often it was soup he’d commandeer and walk home with, because a single can fit nicely into the pouch of his apron and on the way out he could suck in his gut and tuck the soup into his belt-line.  He was having a hard time deciding today if he’d rather have chicken noodle or cream of mushroom for dinner.  Kale tucked a box of the former underneath one arm and climbed onto his step ladder.  When he reached the top and could peer out above the highest shelf, Kale glanced up and his eyes came level with somebody else’s.  Two aisles over, Myles was perched atop a ladder of his own.  Seeing the gray-black hair and hard-edged eyes staring sharply back at him nearly startled Kale off the ladder.  He had to brace one foot against the bottom shelf, and the metal rattled the whole way down the line.  Myles nodded at him, held up a product scanner in one hand and a notepad in the other, and smirked.  He was taking inventory.  Kale nodded back.

“None with dents,” Myles called over.  He shook his head and then looked away.  “Goddamn it, they can go to the Supercenter if they want banged-up soup.” 

Kale unloaded and arranged the cans with their red and white labeled brethren, tossed the empty cardboard to the tiled floor, and climbed down.  He bent at the waist and went for another box, and then he heard someone’s footsteps abruptly halt behind him and caught a flash of sandals out of the corner of his eye.  He whirled around and straightened up, and there was Janey standing rigid before him, her little boy tucked against one shoulder and an empty shopping basket hanging from her elbow.

Kale stared at her for what must have been half a minute, then said, “Jesus.”

Janey opened her mouth, closed it, and with one hand stroked nervously at the back of her kid’s neck.  She tried again.  “You look good,” she said.

This was someone more than vaguely familiar.  Kale remembered her looking far worse than she did now, which made him think of several questions he wasn’t going to ask.  Do you have anything for me? was one of those questions.  Is your husband in prison yet? was another.  He nodded.

“Are you okay?” Janey said.

Kale nodded again and reached down to one of the boxes.  One-by-one, he snatched up a half-dozen cans and shifted them into a cradled position against his other arm, then straightened and faced her again.  The cans felt cool and strangely comforting against the suddenly tingling skin below his shirt-sleeve.

“I’m good,” he said.  “I feel good.”  

“We tried to call you,” she said.  “Just the other day, Reggie tried to call.  We didn’t know if you were back or not.”

“My phone’s off,” Kale said. 

He knew she was lying, would have known it even if the phone were still plugged in, especially since the next thing out of Janey’s mouth, after what seemed like a lifetime of staring alternately at each other’s feet and face and cans and/or child and basket was, “I don’t know what to say to you.”

Kale kept staring.  “Then don’t say anything,” he finally said.

Janey bit her lip and looked down at the floor.  Kale looked at the toddler.  The boy had blonde hair like Reggie’s and green eyes that were aimed squarely, curiously straight at his own.  Kale couldn’t remember if the kid was talking yet, but he had nothing to say to him, anyway.

*****

That afternoon Kale snagged some tequila in lieu of the soup he wasn’t stealing.  The bottle was tougher to tuck against his gut, sure, but it would fill him up.  He took scalding swigs off the liquor as he plodded up Washington Avenue and then down Springfield Road, past two video stores and the phone company, and a bookstore and funeral home.  He stopped briefly at the new fitness center with the big window along the front wall through which people jogging on treadmills and gesticulating on weight machines could look out at the pharmacy across the street and fantasize about the painkillers they could take the next morning.  He watched the people running in place.  He passed the optometrist’s and the Presbyterian church next to the cemetery he had to avoid.  He went by three gas stations, and each time Kale wet his lips at the musky, bittersweet fumes.  And at every intersection, every parking lot, every window at the front of every business, he felt still more eyes leering, wondering at him.

Kale didn’t have to pass through the courtyard to reach his building and normally didn’t, but as he came sweat-strewn and throat-stinging up to the complex, he heard shrieks of laughter coming from that direction, laughter that wasn’t childish but somehow reminiscent and halfway sultry.  He trekked through the parking lot to the lawn and saw two girls, maybe fourteen or maybe twenty-two years old, laid out face down next to the pool.  Stealthily he watched their lips and hands moving in conversational tandem, their teeth grinning, their legs dangling off the loungers.  Kale stood there long enough to drink from his bottle and consider his options, then went on up to his apartment. 

But when he assumed his normal spot on the balcony, he could still hear the girls’ voices and laughter cutting through the still August air, and he couldn’t sit there alone, or didn’t want to.  He felt himself briefly swell and then soften through his jeans.  He lit a cigarette, went inside, poured the tequila into an old thermos, stripped and changed into his faded blue swimming trunks.  Then he threw a bath towel over his shoulder and hauled the liquor and his cigarettes down to the pool with him. 

The girls turned to glance and flash faux-smiles at him as he settled down on a lounger straight across from them, but when they rolled back into their tanning positions, Kale saw they were whispering now, smiling authentic girlish smiles and maybe gossiping about him.  One was a skinny redhead with long, crimped hair and freckled skin, and the other girl was blonde and a bit chunkier with hair whacked off at the neckline.  The mix of sweat and tanning lotion glistened in beads all over both their backs and legs.  Kale dropped his lit cigarette and the rest of his pack against the concrete, balled the towel up into a pillow behind his head, wedged the thermos between his legs, and shut his eyes to the brightness pouring down on him.

“You’re going to burn,” he heard not five minutes later, and Kale opened his eyes and the girls had rolled over and were propped up on their elbows facing him now, looking at him through their shades.  It was the redhead doing the talking.  “You need some sunblock,” she said.  She motioned down to the bottle lying between her and the blonde.  “You’ll burn out here.  You will so burn.  Look at you.”

Kale glanced down at himself, and it occurred to him he should feel conspicuous with his complexion all pasty aside from a faint farmer’s tan, and suddenly he did feel that way – conspicuous.  As conspicuous as he felt in the store or walking down the street.  He took a drink from the thermos and looked back down specifically at that spot just beneath the pit of his left elbow where he’d lost a layer of flesh earlier in the summer, where the skin still looked off-color and shriveled.  He lifted that arm in dramatic fashion.   “I think it’s too late,” he called back across the pool.

The girls roared with laughter, which wasn’t quite the reaction he’d expected. 

“You’re Kale,” said the blonde.  “I’m Sam.  She’s Amber.  Do you know us?”

Kale shook his head and squinted.  “Why would I?” he said.  “I mean, where do I know you from?”

Amber shrugged.  “Somebody’s house or something,” she said and smiled.  “Besides the fact that I live a hundred feet away from you.”

“I haven’t been around,” Kale said.

“Yeah, we know,” Sam said and laughed again.  

Then they went on and explained to Kale how they’d been freshmen when he was a senior, only the type of freshmen that seniors never bothered to notice, even in Clofton, but that Devon had known them and even been something of a friend two or three years back, enough so that they’d both gone to her funeral, anyway, like everyone else.  The funeral was a beautiful thing, they said, one of those funerals “that really means something,” with the church overflowing and lots of people saying lots of pretty things, and wasn’t it just too bad, and they were so sorry for his loss.  And Amber’s mother had lived here in one of the buildings since the beginning of May but Amber had spent all of June in Jefferson City with her father, and for obvious reasons Kale wouldn’t have seen them around during July. 

Kale felt himself beginning to stiffen up again through his trunks as he listened to them from across the pool, and then the next thing he knew they were coming over and on either side of him in new loungers, and he had softened again and given them cigarettes, and Amber was leaning in quite close to his burning face, and suddenly she said something else.  “Do you have any crystal?” she said, soft and glancing quickly about.  On the other side of him, Sam laughed. 

From out of nowhere a breeze swept over the courtyard, and Kale shivered.  “How old are you two?” he said.  They suddenly seemed much younger, too young for their story.

“Do the math,” Sam said.

“I don’t want to do any math,” Kale said.  He reached for his cigarettes.  “What makes you two think I’d give you any of that if I had any?  Why would I want to do that?”

Amber touched him, ran a single long finger up and down the skin just above his knee. 

“What do you want to do, then?” she said.  Her friend laughed again on the other side. 

Kale had pulled a cigarette out from its pack and it was sticking from his mouth now; one hand was poised chin-level with his lighter.  He felt another tinge of arousal and swatted away Amber’s stroking finger.

“Get the fuck away from me,” he said.  He stood up, splashing some of the liquor from his thermos, and whirled in place.  “Keep the fuck away from me, both of you.”

They stared back at him like nothing had happened.  Sam had this gum in her mouth that she kept working on, her jaw hinging at a frantic pace.

“What are you on right now?”  Kale said.  He lit the cigarette and waved it at them.  “X?  What are you, ravers?  Shouldn’t you be waving your little glow sticks around and all that?”

The girls both chortled with laughter.

“Don’t be stupid,” Amber said.  She stood up and started for the other side of the pool.  “Don’t be ridiculous.  We were just playing.”

Sam followed behind, still giggling under her breath.  A train whistle started blowing somewhere in the distance.  “Well, play with yourselves,” Kale said.  “Have lots of goddamned fun.”

Later on in his apartment, after all the tequila was gone and the cigarettes were running low and he’d stopped shaking, Kale ended up in the bathroom, naked and touching himself in front of the sink.  But no matter where he applied the pressure, what kind of vicious things he half-screamed at a choked whisper, all that came out of him was the sweat globbing up all over his body.  He spit on himself and tried again, and then he spit at his reflection in the mirror and then he was laughing.  Kale laughed, hysterical and chest heaving, laughed into the mirror until he started shaking again and he could taste the sweat and tears running down his face.  The sweat cooled him and his skin broke into goose bumps.  He shivered and gritted his teeth, screamed again at his reflection. 

He passed out in a heap on the living room floor, where the next morning he awoke violently ill and full of bad memories, real or imagined, nightmares. 

*****

Memories and nightmares, real or imagined:  A church and filled pews and everyone in black, organ music and hushed sobs and you’re at the front, at the casket, with all eyes on you, a black suit on, and hot as hell.  And her in that glorified cardboard box at the front of the sanctuary and looking filled out and made up and dressed in a pink dress and skin shiny and bronze and everything better now, on the outside.  Except for the head is gone, not where it should be.  And where the head should be there’s nothing but cartilage sticking out from her neck and blood still spilling out the hole and pooling up there.  And there’s some sort of puncture right above her groin that cuts right through her dress and into her abdomen and that’s leaking, too, and so maybe the dress is white and it’s just that the channels of blood running up and down her chest have saturated the fabric and that thick, musky smell hangs in the air to the accompaniment of a choir now – a choir at a funeral? – singing not church music but a heavy metal song you can vaguely recall, with the organ in place of an electric guitar, sopranos in the choir screeching out notes you’ve heard before with new, cry-filled passion.  And there are more wounds becoming visible now.  One leg has drag marks all over it. 

And you look down and you see that there’s blood all across the front of your suit, and in one hand you notice you’re holding something, and it’s her head, only it’s clearly been disfigured by some sort of impact and sort of flattened and the nose is mostly gone and one eye is hanging out of socket, the other so swollen it’s not really there, just a fleshy volcanic lump with a green dot in the middle.  And you look back up, and you know you’re sobbing, and all the eyes are still on you, on the blood all over your hands, all these stern faces, and then you drop the head and it rolls rolls rolls all the way down the center aisle (nobody watches the head roll).  Suddenly you’re thinking you’d give anything, any number of dead little friends and busted blood vessels, and whatever else you can’t remember having lost, for a special kind of tool – a handgun, a nice big-bladed hunting knife, even a syringe loaded with sweet, clean air that you could spike into your arm, your stomach, the side of your neck and blow out into a nice, non-collapsed vein.

Then just as suddenly (it’s unexplainable, frightening, your sudden clarity in dream-states), you realize that all stopped mattering long ago.  You don’t need all that.  Now it’s just as easy to stay still and wait for your insides to slowly leak out from your wounds and stink in the steaming sun until there’s nothing left inside and you die die die all alone and ready.  Or forget the heat of summer and the empty apartment and the daily reminders – you can just stand here, here in the overfilled church; you can stand here as long as it takes and let yourself slowly bleed out in front of the masses, let them watch the sad spectacle and let it be your funeral, too, and let them put you in a cardboard box minus the soup cans and bury you in the courtyard and say pretty things at your grave because that’s what we do with people no matter. . . .

*****

And it went like this for a while, a week or two, working literally every day because Myles hadn’t found any newcomers out of rehab, and the kids still maybe a little too young to be full-fledged addicts were getting ready to go back to school and couldn’t do the morning shift, and what else was Kale going to do?  There were some days he’d feel nearly satisfied, his system and psyche evened out, and others when that gnawing hollowness would still tug at his guts and play on his mind.  The days were full of cigarettes, music, progressively more alcohol, and, once the first paycheck came in, honest-to-God solid food.  Also, an actual dip in the pool every now and then and sometimes even a go-round on the rusting stationary bike in the exercise room.  There were trains that came and went, and Kale started trying to sketch a mental chart, a regular schedule of their coming and going, something else to fit his life around.  Because there had to be something, a routine, to fill the void even if it was more void, even if the routine was nothing but a trail of voids and you just called them things like work and food and liquor and cigarettes and music and freight trains.  What else was he going to do?               

*****

Late one morning Kale found himself on the loading dock with his trusty co-worker and their cigarettes, and he was staring off at the Washington train crossing and the rubble behind that and glanced quickly at Hasbro, who was saying something about seeing a wreck on the interstate the week before, and interrupted him to say, “Tell me what it was like, what you saw.”

“I just told you,” Hasbro said.  He blinked, then followed Kale’s gaze and took a long drag.  “What are you talking about?” he said.

“I want to know how it happened,” Kale said.  He pointed.  “I want to know what you saw up here, how it happened.”

“Electrical fire,” Hasbro said.  “Faulty wiring, sparks and shit.  I didn’t see that, the sparks and all, but that was it.”

Kale shifted impatiently from one foot to the other.

“I’m not talking about the goddamned fire,” Kale said.  “You know goddamned well what I’m talking about.”  He spun around at Hasbro.  “The middle of the morning, on your shift, and you’ve probably been breaking all those under-eighteen labor laws and whatever and worked just about every day all summer.  And you spend more time out here than in the store, and you didn’t see it happen?  I know you saw it.  Front row seat, you said.”

He looked at Hasbro, and they were both quiet.  Then Hasbro licked his lips and shook his head.  “Look,” he said.  “I don’t know what you want me to tell you.”  He blinked at Kale.  “All right, look, if people want to say the Blazer just stalled up on the tracks, coincidental and all, that’s fine.  But that was only after it pulled around the crossing guard and came to park in the middle of the track with the train maybe fifty yards away.  That’s all I know.”

Kale stared off at the crossing again.  “Was her head gone?” he said.

“Was her what?” Hasbro said, sounding irritated now.

“Was her head off?” Kale said.  “Did the train cut off her head?”

“Now how the fuck am I supposed to know that?” Hasbro said.  He shook his head in disgust and motioned at the dock’s concrete floor.  “I was standing here,” he went on.  “That’s all I saw.”

“It was a closed casket,” Kale said.  His hand shook as he raised his cigarette to his lips.  “They said it was a closed casket.  It was messy.  She could have been in pieces.”

Hasbro spat against the concrete.  “You’re sick,” he said.  “You’re in pieces.”

Kale nodded his head.

“Are you okay?” Hasbro said.

Kale didn’t move or say anything.  He wasn’t even shaking now, just staring pale-faced and sweating in the morning glare.

“The thing is,” Hasbro said.  “The thing is, they – the Blazer I mean, and her and that other dude inside there – were sitting there on those tracks for maybe, what, a few seconds before the train got to them?  And still I can remember every detail of that train.  Green and white engine and the coal car behind it – I could draw you a picture and you’d know how high the coal was stacked.”

Kale tried to visualize the scene.  He wished he had been there – not to stop it; just to see it and know, believe in the details, and then he could stop reliving the whole thing every day of his life.  That’s what he told himself.

*****

Maybe he was still trying to picture the scene inside later on and that’s why he dropped an entire crate of wine bottles against the tile and Myles came charging over wide-eyed and ready to blow when he saw the deep-red alcoholic mess pooled up in the floor.  And then he took one look at Kale and mumbled “Jesus” under his breath.

“It’s my fault,” Kale said.  “I’ll clean it up.”

“The hell you will,” Myles said.  “Get out of here.  Come back tomorrow.”

*****

That afternoon – or maybe it was the next afternoon or even a week or two later because time was swelling and shrinking now irregular and unchecked, and he could no longer trust even the barest of routine to regulate it – Kale was wading through the dense, breezeless air walking home when he heard the blasts of heavy metal getting closer and glanced over his shoulder, and the green Cavalier was slowing to an idle alongside him.  The music tuned out, and Kale watched as Reggie reached across the seat and rolled down the passenger side window.

“Need a lift?” he said, biting on an unlit cigarette between his lips.  “I’m going your direction.”

“I’m fine,” Kale said.  “I’m doing fine; just go on.”  But he didn’t move, and Reggie kept the car in park, and they stared at each other.  “I always walk,” Kale said.  “It’s good for me.”

Reggie cracked up.  He laughed and lowered his baseball cap down over his eyes and nearly doubled over into the steering column.

“Get in the fucking car,” he said.  He shook his head and pushed the passenger door open.  “Good for you, huh?  Jesus God, you look real good.  Get in the car.  Come on.”

Kale stood there momentarily.  He dug into his back pocket for a cigarette, then lit it.  Then he took a step and climbed into the car’s stale atmosphere.

“I heard you were all better now,” Reggie said as the Cavalier eased away from the curb.  “Congratulations.”

“Yeah,” Kale said.  He tried to look at nothing but the road, partly because he didn’t want to know if Reggie did or didn’t look the same as before.

“If you ever want fixed back,” Reggie said, “you know who to call.”

“I don’t think I’ll be calling you,” Kale said.

Reggie raised the tuner’s volume back to an audible level.  “I went to the funeral,” he said.  “Her funeral.  Of course, I went to the funeral and all that.”

“Great,” Kale said.  His arm was itching, and he scratched at it.  “That was real thoughtful of you.”

“It was nice,” Reggie said.  “It meant something to some people, I think.  Lots of people.”

Kale nodded.  “That’s what I heard,” he said.  He kept nodding after he said it.

They were pulling into his parking lot now. 

“What are you doing here?” Kale said.  “What are you doing over here?  What the hell are you doing in town?  Why aren’t you holed up out in the woods somewhere?”

“Visiting friends,” Reggie said.  “I’ve got friends who live here.”

He brought the car to a stop, put it in park, and turned the key.  Everything was quiet.  “I’m not your friend,” Kale said.

Reggie took a single deep breath, then pushed his door open.  “I didn’t say you were,” he said as he stepped out.

Kale climbed from the car and followed after Reggie, who was glancing back over his shoulder.  “My friends wanted to be your friends, I heard,” Reggie said.  “They mentioned it to me.  We could have all been friends, then, just like old times.”

Kale felt himself growing red.  He stopped at the edge of the gravel.  “You’re finding them younger these days, aren’t you?” Kale said.  “What are they, sixteen?”

“Who gives a shit?  So what?”  Reggie shrugged and turned away again.  “My little friends can handle what I give them,” he spat over his shoulder.  “They can handle it.  Little friends aren’t all the same, bud.”

Kale watched from a distance as Reggie stalked gangly across the courtyard, stopped at one of the ground-level units in the north building, and knocked against the glass patio door.  He’d seen all this before.

*****

After he watched Reggie disappear into the apartment, Kale could have just gone upstairs, turned on some music, finished off his pack of smokes and started on another, sat on the balcony and watched the day fade into the west.  Or he could have found himself something to drink and brought on an early sleep and maybe a different kind of dream this time.  Instead, he squatted behind the exercise and laundry hut and waited as the brightness leaked out of the afternoon sun until Reggie came back out.  The cigarette – or a new one – still hung unlit from his lips, and Kale watched as Reggie glanced around, then finally pulled out a lighter and ignited the stick and walked straight for the parking lot. 

And later on – sometime later – Kale would remember again the sound of metal and then peeling tires, and then nothing more until he was inside the girl’s apartment – the redhead, Amber, her mother’s apartment but her mother wasn’t there; it was only her and the blonde – and there was more metal playing on the living room stereo, very loud, and he was on the couch and the girls were both sitting cross-legged on the floor, Sam cutting lines atop the coffee table and Amber staring blankly at the crystal.

“It’s hot in here,” Amber said.  There was sweat beaded up along her brow.  She was twirling a soda straw in one hand.

“It’s hot everywhere,” Sam said as she sliced at the pile with a compact disc.

“What CD is that?” Kale said, and he motioned towards the disc.

The two girls looked at him like he was crazy.  They laughed, sudden and hysterical.  He laughed then, too, forcing it out.  He dragged off his cigarette.  He was still very hot.

Kale watched them attack the lines, saw the fire and elation in their eyes.  Then they turned those eyes to him.

“Do you want some?” Sam said.

“I don’t want anything,” Kale said.  But he said this as he was grabbing the straw, his fingers quivering.  “I want the weather to change.  That’s it.”

*****

Back at his balcony perch, Kale sat in his own fading afterglow and watched the sun bank ever so slowly towards the horizon line over the town, at the visible end of the ant-lined interstate narrowing off into the distance.  After it was gone there would come that post-dusk hour when the breeze would pick up, yet that lingering heat would still hover over the town.  But the summer was almost over.  That meant something.  The sun would set earlier the next night, and the next.  Then would come fall.  There’d be mild days ahead – cold, even.  That was something to look forward to.  And it was all according to schedule. 

Kale would welcome the oncoming chill, intending to embrace it.  He thought ahead, his brain pulsing and busy with scenes and dialogue past, present, and supposed future, the timeline growing confused.  He felt a tremble in his spine.  He looked down at his hands, semi-cleaned white and stilled to calmness in the auburn dusk-glow.

Off in the distance, an unseen train blasted its whistle, blaring that long, familiar wail into the waning light.