The Outlaw Album: Stories

            McArdle and Fuller fell by toward the next sundown, or the one after, drawn by boredom and word of my return, wanting to remember high school, with a box of beer and bowls of smoke to make it seem those years-ago days might happen again tomorrow if only we got wasted enough. I left the house with them in McArdle’s truck and we drove to the river, built a jolly campfire on a gravel beach. Their memories are cleaner than mine, the silly details yet shine for them, are easily found and spoken as jokes or boasts. My head cramps trying to only call up the faces from the hallways. I should be glad for this visit, I know, so I hunt dry wood up the slope, stack it on the fire to grow the flames, and say I am, I am glad to see you two, your faces make me feel home.

            So-and-so got married, so-and-so moved away, so-and-so fell in the lake or was pushed, drunk as a skunk whichever. It takes only five minutes together before they lean close and ask the standard ghoul questions I expect from civilians, and I answer, Oh, you damned straight I did.

            Then, Maybe more’n used to ride our school bus.

            Then, Like tomatoes being busted open with hammers.

            Then, Sometimes all you can do is shovel red sand into a body bag and send that home with a name on it.

            The empties clatter into the fire, smokes mingle, dusk settles, there is laughter. I recall times together like this, drinking the day away in canoes on the river, chucking dry-ice bombs into blue holes and cheering the boom and spray, and as dark fell driving into town with more cold beer to circle the Sonic, round and round at half a mile an hour, biceps on display out the windows, hoping some town girls would of a sudden realize we were cute, kind of sexy, even, and want to go for a ride in the country, then switching to whiskey when none did.

            I guess I joined to become more interesting than that.

            Fuller had been our alpha, our main instigator, with showboat muscles and a habit of bruising you good in horseplay, then saying it was only a joke, bro, don’t be mad. In the firelight I can see he’d like to mess with me some again, as he did back when, give a demeaning Dutch rub, or clamp on a headlock ’til I croak “Uncle,” but he’s just not sure anymore, not sure I won’t go Kill! Kill! Kill! in my head, yank something deadly from my watch pocket, zip-cuff him to a sapling, and feed his ass to the fire a pound at a time. I can see the itch is in him, and the doubt, so I help him clear the confusion, saying, “After the desert, bro, the list of things you’re totally certain you’d never ever do gets a lot shorter.”

            Ma’s breaths scrape together traveling her throat and have short hisses at their tail, plus something come undone in her chest clatters. Her sleep is a busy place and she speaks mushed words into the sheets, her legs walk to yesterday and back across the mattress, her eyelids totter as the eyeballs rush about in darkness, wanting to see everything they’ve ever seen again. The bed she chose for the dining room is small with no headboard, low to ground, a short fall if she rolled loose in her rambling and tumbled.

            Another rough day before noon there was this cemetery in the sand, with row after row of markers for the dead, mud-colored or white, each big enough to hide behind, and a high dun wall around the whole place. We cleared one row then crept toward the next, each small distance electric with the idea that this gravestone ahead could be the one Ali Baba is hid behind and waiting, finger on the trigger or arm cocked to throw something that explodes. The air smelled of shit roasting in oil and carried that shrill music that made your skin tighten. One row at a time, crawling inch by inch, from marker to marker, the pressure building with each scoot forward, sweat dripping, hands turned white squeezing, and after several rows you heard some guys go empty, moan themselves into the dust, become still where they were, not about to move on. They make it ten, twenty, thirty rows, but can no longer imagine making it through all the rows. Each marker, each row, who knows what’s there, anything could be, you might soon become a chunky breeze exploded sideways or get shot through-and-through, and those possibilities nourished dread. Your own mind can gut you good so easy. With sprung nerves soldiers lay faces to the sand to avoid seeing ahead and had to be booted by sergeants.

            Mary wanted to be a bride again and announced she soon would be while we all splashed in the river. Joe and Nora hopped on stick legs in the shallows above the one-lane bridge, and Ma sat in a folding chair with her feet under water and a scarf over her fuzz of hair. I had my goggles to hunt treasure spilled from tourist canoes upstream and had found a wristwatch with a rotted band. Mary wore a white T-shirt over her suit and said, “It’s official, y’all—me’n Darden are gettin’ hitched.”