Faster Than Youth by Matt Dye

There is electricity in the city tonight and we fly through like two bats out of hell, breaking free.  We’re hyenas and vipers.  We laugh and snake and throw our weight around, and now as the Cadillac hits 85 and we’re rounding the turn, I can feel my balls drop.  This is what being a man feels like

Tony screams, “Fuck yeah, Mikey, we’re flying.”  I keep my eyes on the road.  I want to see it as it disappears.  Night time, and the headlights cut two holes on the pavement and the dark in front of us.  The Caddy was just sitting there, in front of the Circle K, engine running.  I remembered what my older brother Freddy had said to me after his birthday before he left for college.  He said, “Hey Mikey, the one thing I regret is I didn’t do enough crazy shit when I was young.  Now that I’m 18, fuck, I have too much fun, it goes on my permanent record.”  I didn’t know what exactly he meant, so he laid it out to me as he smoked a cigarette and I watched on the back porch.  He said he’d never spray painted his name on any wall.  He said he’d never really gotten into a fight, or done something real crazy like stolen a car.

“Check around, see if there are any cigarettes in here,” I say, and Tony starts flopping his head around the passenger seat.  I mostly keep my eyes on the road, but I can’t help glancing as his left hand gets all around my legs, searching under the driver seat.  “Watch it.”

It’s been ten minutes and I think we’re home free.  No flashing lights, and we’ve left Hendersonville and made it to Goodlettsville.  I slow us down to 75 and start thinking of what to do now.  The initial rush is leaving me. 

“Got one!”

“Just one?”

“Yeah, must of fallen between the seats.  It’s a Benson & Hedges.  Do you like those?”

“I haven’t had one yet, but my brother’s friend, JR, he smokes them, calls them ‘Bennys’ I think.”  I take the cigarette from him and punch in the console’s lighter.  Five seconds later it makes an audible ‘click’.  The hot orange circle lights the cigarette in my mouth, and I find myself drawn to it, taking my eyes off the road for a second.  Driving feels familiar, as if I’ve done it my whole life.  So does smoking.  I push the button on the driver door and send the window down, feeling the cold night run through my hair.  After a couple drags I hand the cigarette to Tony.

“So, now what?” he says, then, “Can I drive?”

“Have you ever driven before?” 

“Well, a four-wheeler on my uncle’s farm.”

“That’s not exactly the same thing,” I say.  Tony is my next door neighbor.  He’s a year younger than me, but we get along pretty good.  He’s clumsy, but he makes me laugh, and he isn’t scared to do things with me like walk across the railroad bridge.  None of my other friends will do that kind of stuff.  They all say that a train’s going to come when we’re halfway across or some shit.  I don’t know, I was scared the first time I did it too, like four years ago with my brother, but as he always said, everything’s scary in life the first time.

I doubt any of my other friends would have jumped in the passenger seat when I said, “Hey, let’s steal that car.”  But Tony didn’t even hesitate, just looked at me, smiled, and said, “Alright.”

“I can drive, Mikey.  C’mon man, you don’t get to have all the fun.”

“It was my idea, wasn’t it?”

“Yeah, but still…”  I look over at his face, all sad now, lost in the shadows of the cigarette and the passing streetlamps.

“Alright, alright,” I say, and pull the car over to the shoulder.  He hops out, and I feel the rush again coming to me, his excitement mine and both of us, this night ours to take.  Where will we go, where will we go?

I say, “We need some spray paint.”  I can feel it in my bones already.  I know where I’m going, what I want to see, where I want Tony to take me.  “Get off at Old Hickory Boulevard.  Take a left.  There’s a Michael’s a little up the ways.  We can get spray paint there.”

Tony starts the engine back up and hands me the last of the cigarette.  I taste it one more time before tossing it out the window.  I keep waiting for the flashing lights.  I know they’ll come.  I know what they look like.

Down Old Hickory, as you get closer to Hermitage, there’s a bridge that my brother used to take me to when he wanted to get away from my parents.  He’d tell them we were going fishing, and sometimes we would, but it wasn’t really fishing that he went to do.  The summers that he came back from college we started going all the time.  He’d take some line, throw it in the water, and then lean back on both his elbows and wait.  I’d sit there too, skipping rocks, waiting for him to start rolling a joint.  He wouldn’t let me smoke any of it, said that once you start you admit to God that you’re done learning anything, and that I still had to finish high school at least before I shut my brain off, but I liked to watch him roll it all the same.  It was the one thing I ever really saw him concentrate on, the way he’d pick away seeds and stems, telling me all the while about how if you smoked them you’d be infertile, which he didn’t think was necessarily a bad thing.

“You know Rumpelstiltskin,” he’d said to me one of those days.  “Spins straw into gold.  Takes the girl’s first born in return for his troubles.  Shit.  Most girls I know in college would be happy for that kinda reprieve.”  And then he’d laughed, and I’d laughed, though I didn’t really get what was so funny at the time.

I tell Tony to stay with the car, that I’ll get the spray paint.  I don’t feel comfortable just leaving it in the parking lot, like it could disappear in a moment’s notice, which is ridiculous so I don’t tell Tony that, but all the same, he stays without question.  Michael’s closes in twenty minutes, and the lady at the front gives me a look like I’m trouble.  I see her look at the clock, and I look with her, then nod, letting her know I know.  I want to think she smiles at this, like I’ve reassured all her worst fears, but I’ve already turned around, off to look for colors.

My brother had told me, “George Lucas was a genius.  I mean look at Star Wars.  He created a whole separate universe that functions believably.  And if you disregard the craptacularness of the new trilogy, and just look at it for the story it’s given us, I mean, that’s a pretty big story.  The rise and fall of Anakin Skywalker, and then the quest that his son makes for his father’s redemption.  That’s some seriously cool shit.”  And then he looked up at the sun like he was smiling at God.  “And to think, the temptation that led to his fall, man, that was all tied up in love.  He loved that girl so much, wanted to protect his unborn child so much, that he gave up himself, and in the end, man, it just wasn’t enough.”  Then he looked at me, joint dangling between his lips.  “Be careful Mikey, girls are trouble.”

I go with green and red, Krylon.  I don’t know if that’s a good brand for spray painting a wall, but it’s the most expensive.  The lady from earlier is on the register, and when she sees what I’m buying she gives me another disapproving look.  “Art project,” I say, but she doesn’t even smile.  I give her a ten spot, get my change, and rush out the door.

Tony’s digging through the Caddy’s trunk when I get back to the parking lot.

“Dude, check out all this shit,” he says.  The trunks got two cardboard boxes inside, filled with an assortment of little toys, like the ones I used to get in McDonald’s Happy Meals.  I remember when I was younger, fighting over them with my brother, who completed that month’s collections.  Now, I couldn’t tell you where any of my oh so important Happy Meal toys are.  In the trunk, there’s also a set of banged up golf clubs, half a carton of Benson & Hedges, an umbrella, a pair of rubber boots, a toolbox, a hatchet, as well as the spare tire and jack.  I take a pack of Bennys from the carton, toss the spray paint in the trunk, and close it.

“Want another cigarette?” I ask Tony.

“Hell yeah.”

I toss him the pack and tell him to get us two then.  I get into the driver seat and start the car back up.  I look at myself once in the rearview.  My hair looks wet in the night and the overhead lamp.  I smile at myself, trying to look the way they do in movies right before something amazing happens.  Beside me, Tony’s packing the cigarettes, the loud smack coming off the palm of his hand, and I start counting, seven, eight, nine.  “That’s enough,” I tell him.  “They’re not going to get any more packed.”  And I’m waiting for the blue lights to come, waiting.  I check my mirrors one last time and put the car into drive.

Two weeks ago, my dad called my cell phone.  Told me to come home early.  That there’d been an accident.  I wanted to argue, tell him that I was busy, but I wasn’t, and there was something tired in my father’s voice that told me this wasn’t the time for arguments.  The cop car parked in the driveway, its lights still on, baffled me at first, but when I saw my mom, everything started to make sense.  She was crying, and from the look on my father’s face, I could tell she’d been crying a while, the same way she was when my grandfather, her father, had passed suddenly, and I knew, because there was no one close to us left to die.

I take the left into the dirt too fast, and the Caddy fishtails a little, causing Tony to grab the ‘oh shit’ bar above his head.  I can’t help but smile.  I’ve got this all under control.  The bridge spans Old Hickory Lake, big arches making up each of its legs, and two hundred feet below, the water, calm and peaceful.  I remember my brother on the top of the bridge, looking down, arms outstretched, like he was flying.  “Sometimes,” he said, “when the world gets to be too much, I wonder…” And then he turned around, jumped back onto solid ground, took up a rock, and tossed it as far as he could.  The Caddy kicks up hard as we being our descent.

Tony breathes. “You’re going to kill us.”

“No,” I tell him.  I want to ask him if he’s still having fun, but I’m afraid of his answer.  We smoke cigarettes as I take the Caddy further down the dirt slope, a road it was never meant to travel.  I wonder how much farther it’s going to be before it gets stuck, and we bob up and down as the tires roll through holes and over rocks just smaller than boulders.  My brother had a Jeep, and we had no trouble getting down the hill and back up, and each time it felt like Freddy would go faster, and I’d fly up in the seat higher, thinking I was going to fly out of the Jeep entirely, up into the sky, and into the water below, a cannonball.

I park the car at the point where the embankment drops off at a forty-five, certain the Caddy won’t make the climb back up that, if it’ll make the climb already.  I pop the trunk, grab the bag with the spray paint, then sling the golf bag over my shoulder.  Tony’s behind me, carrying one of the boxes, pack of cigarettes riding on top.  I hop down from one dirt clod to the next, listening to the metal of the golf clubs clank together, mixing in with the sound of a random passing car.

The water’s a little lower than usual, but under the moonlight, it’s almost like we can see forever.  I pitch what’s left of my cigarette against the night, lay the golf clubs down on the ground, and pull the spray paint from the bag.  I look at the wall, the middle of three arches that make up the bridge before it falls into the river.  That was my brother’s wall.  I shake one can of paint, the green one, and I start spraying, a big F then R-E-D-E-R-I-C-K J-A-M-E-S W-H-I-T-E-H-O-U-S-E.  I can feel Tony behind me, watching.  I wonder what he’s thinking.  I’ve covered the whole wall, so much that the letters are dripping, green rolling down toward green, and I put my hand toward it, spray a little of the paint on my hand.  Then I take the red, shake it up, and cross out Frederick and replace it with F-R-E-D-D-Y.  Then at the end, I write W-U-Z H-E-R-E.  I stand back and admire my work.  It looks brilliant.

“Let’s hit some golf balls,” I say.  I stick my green hand into the bag and fish around for some balls and a tee.  I take out the driver and line up my shot into the river.  I think about my father, teaching me and my brother, keep your left arm straight, solid contact.  I swing.  I see the ball for a second, watch for the splash, but it’s so far out.  I tee up another.  Behind me, Tony is smoking a cigarette and playing with a miniature Transformers rip off toy, trying to make it back into a car.  I swing.  Tee up another one.  I wonder what my brother’s girlfriend is doing, how she’s holding up.  I’ll probably never get to meet her.  My brother only mentioned her for the first time the last time we talked on the phone.  I doubt my parents know.  I swing.  This one hooks hard left.  I take the club back, wonder where it went wrong.  I reach for another ball, but there’s none left.

“Hey Tony.  Toss me one of them toys.”  It’s one of the Seven Dwarves, Dopey.  I remember having the exact one.  “Dopey for Dopey,” my brother had said, then he put his hand on my head, ruffled my hair.  I can still feel his hand. 

I tee it up.  I swing.