Nick's Trip (17 page)

I left the car, walked to a glass door, pulled it open, and entered. It was only ten o’ clock, but the place was lit up like last call. I guessed they didn’t go much for atmosphere—a look around the place confirmed it. There were three scarred pool tables standing on the industrial-tiled floor, with some metal folding chairs scattered around the tables. A jukebox was against the left wall, though it wasn’t lit and there was no music playing. A narrow wooden bar stood against the back wall, also unlit, with a small selection of low-call liquor racked behind it.

There were two games being shot, and the entire patronage of the bar was grouped around the games. The men wore designer jeans circa 1978 and sweatshirts with the sleeves pushed back to reveal uniformly pale and hairy forearms. The few women in the joint, teased hair and also in jeans, sat in the folding chairs drinking beer and smoking cigarettes, the ashes of which they
flicked to the floor. The men’s cigarettes were balanced on the edges of the pool tables, lit end out.

I moved to the bar and on the way got a chin nod from one of the players, a nod that I returned. The woman behind the bar was blond and maybe fifty, with a raspberry birthmark on her right cheek.

“What can I get you?” she said in a businesslike but upbeat way.

“Two sixes of Bud bottles to go,” I said, “and a pint of Old Grand-Dad. Thanks.”

“Don’t have the Grand-Dad. Something else?”

“A pint of Beam, then.”

“The Black or White?”

“Make it the White.”

She wrapped the bourbon and handed me the bag. “Let me go in the back and get you the beer.” She winked. “Rather not pull it from here, have to restock the cooler later.”

She left the bar and entered a walk-in to the left of it. I turned, rested my back on the bar, and looked out the plate-glass window onto 301. Billy was standing in the gravel next to the Maxima, looking down at the rush of his own steaming urine as he peed toward the window. His hair was unmoussed now, full and ruffled as I remembered it from his youth, and his mouth was slightly open, with that dumb look of stoned concentration he had perpetually worn as a teenager. I felt a sudden sting of guilt and looked away. I drew a cigarette from my jacket and lit it, keeping the hot smoke in and giving it a long exhale. Someone tapped my shoulder.

One of the pool players stood next to me. He had long black hair thinning on the top, and he was skinny and nearing forty. His small potbelly barely hung over the waistband of his Sergio Valente jeans.

“That your friend out there?” he said in a direct but not unfriendly way, pointing out the front window.

“Yeah,” I admitted.

“I’d appreciate it,” he said, giving a quick nod to a woman in one of the folding chairs, “if next time he wouldn’t be so quick to show off in front of my wife.”

“I’ll tell him,” I said.

He nodded and smiled. “You take care, buddy.”

“You too.”

I paid and thanked the woman behind the bar, put the bourbon in the larger sack, and moved toward the door. On the way out I smiled apologetically at the man’s wife and got a smile back. Out in the lot I took a last drag, tossed the butt, put the beers in the backseat, transferred the pint to my jacket pocket, and patted the dog on the head. Two of the beers came out of the bag before I settled in.

Billy grabbed one, popped it, and tapped my bottle with his. He drank deeply and turned the bottle to admire the label. “That’s what I’m talkin’ about.”

“You ready? Or you going to do a beer commercial.”

“No, I’m ready. But I really had to let one fly.”

“I noticed. So did all those folks inside.”

“You talkin’ about those rednecks?” Billy said, pointing in the window. “
Fuck
them.”

WE CONTINUED SOUTH. THE
road ahead was free of commercial activity and hilly once again as we neared the Potomac. I lodged my beer between my thighs and withdrew the pint of Beam from my jacket. I twisted the cap, broke the seal, and handed the bottle to Billy. He had his and then passed me the bottle as he chased it with some beer.

“That’s good,” he said, wiping his mouth with his shirtsleeve. “Been a long time since I took whiskey from a bottle.”

“Listen, Billy…”

“What?”

“I was looking at you, back there, pissin’ on the highway. I saw you for a second, like it was you, man, fifteen years ago.”

“Yeah?” Billy looked at me briefly with a blank smile and returned his gaze to the road.

“I’m trying to apologize,” I said. “That’s what I’m trying to do. I’ve been kind of ice cold, man, since you walked into the Spot. I expected things to be like they were with us, when we were kids—like
you
were. You understand?”

“You’re drunk, Greek,” Billy said, turning his face in my direction again. Half of his was lit green from the dashboard lights. “You
are
drunk, aren’t you?” He smiled. “Or are you trippin’?”

“I guess I’m just drunk.” I had a slow pull of bourbon, then beer. “Not trippin’, though. Last time I did that I was with you. Right before you went away to school. Remember?”

Billy reached for the bottle. I put it in his hand. “That time in the park, right?”

I nodded, thinking back. The blurred dark limbs of trees rushed by against the night as I stared through the passenger window and recounted that night for Billy.

ON A LATE AUGUST
afternoon, at the tail end of the summer of 1976, Billy and I had eaten a couple of hits of blotter that I had copped through the back door of Nutty Nathan’s from Johnny McGinnes. We smoked a joint on the way down to Candy Cane City and once there began a round of pickup ball with a group of Northwest boys we had come to know. For the first hour we were on our game, but that ended when the acid began to seep in, and after a while our laughter caused us to drop out. I went home and took a shower, sneaking around my grandfather, unable to look him in the eye. Then Billy came by and picked me up in his Camaro.

That night had started like any other—we had no clue at first as to where we were headed, only that we were headed out. Neither of us talked about the buzz—that would have been uncool—but when Billy asked me to drive I knew he was tripping
as hard as I was; he had never let me drive his car, even on his most twisted nights.

Billy was wearing straight-leg Levi’s that night, rolled up once at the cuff, and one of those glitter-boy rayon shirts, from a store named Solar Plexus, in Silver Spring. The red lid of a Marlboro box peeked out over the top of the shirt pocket. On his feet were the denim stacks that he had bought at Daily Planet, a pair of shoes that he knew I had always wanted to own.

For some reason we ended up on Beach Drive in Rock Creek Park. I had begun to hallucinate mildly, but it was under control, and my driving up to that point had been okay. But then Billy popped
Eat a Peach
into the eight-track, and he turned up the volume, and when “Blue Sky” came on, and Dickey Betts moved into his monster guitar solo, I lost my shit. It was at that point that I was convinced that the car was going to lift up and fly right off the parkway.

I pulled over at a picnic area, Billy laughing over the sound of the tape, and he walked me down to a patch of dark, gravelly beach at the creek. I lay down by the creek and stared at the top branches of the oaks that lined the east side and listened to the rush of the brown water over the rocks and the loopy liquid guitar that was still flowing through my head. Then Billy took my shoes off and put his—the denim stacks I had coveted throughout our friendship—on my feet. And he talked to me for at least two hours. By then the branches had melted into the flannel gray of the sky, and there was a small throb in my stomach, and I had begun to come down.

“THAT WAS A NIGHT,”
Billy said when I was finished. “After that we went down to some hippie bar, right next to the Brickskeller at Twenty-second and P, second floor, got sober on alcohol. Some band was playing, some cat blazing on lap steel, right?”

I nodded. “Danny Gatton.”

“How do you remember all that shit?”

“The funny thing is, I almost forgot. And the thing is, the thing you did for me that night,
those
kind of things are the only things worth remembering. Am I making any sense?”

“Yeah, pardner, you’re making sense. Hang on.” Billy eased off the gas and swung the Maxima into the turn lane. He pulled left across the highway onto Route 257. We passed a gas station and liquor store, then drove southeast, into a shroud of darkness.

W
E FOLLOWED 257
for a quarter-mile, blowing by a hardware-and-bait shop lit only by a John Deere sign in the window. Then Billy abruptly veered left off the interstate, onto a roughly paved, unlit road that swept up into a grove of high shrub and pine, then opened to acres of flat field.

“Where we goin’? I thought April’s property was off Two-fifty-seven.”

“It is. Mount Victoria road parallels Two-fifty-seven. We’ll come back out onto it at Tompkinsville.” Billy winked. “Watch this, Greek,” he said. Then he cut the headlights of the Maxima.

For a couple of seconds Billy and I were green, and everything outside the car was black. I grabbed the handle of the door and gripped it until the road ahead began to appear, slowly, in a bluish light. The moon was bright and almost directly overhead.

“You sure you want to do this, man?”

“Like we used to do, on that stretch of Oregon Avenue, down in the park.”

“We knew that road.”

“I know this one,” Billy said. “Roll your window down, man, it’s not too cold. Enjoy it.”

I did, as Billy maxxed out the heater fan, then rolled his own window down. Maybelle came forward and laid her head partly on my arm, partly on the door, leaving her face out, letting the wind blow back her ears. She closed her eyes.

The sound of the heater meshed with the wind. I had a slug of bourbon and passed it to Billy. Through the glass of Billy’s roof the moon shimmered above as if it were submerged in water. We passed a small gas station with an old Sunoco sign lit and suspended from two chains at the corner of a two-lane intersection, then moved on. No headlights approached from ahead or from behind.

Low trees began to appear on either side of the road, and the road grew darker. Billy saw something just ahead of his path, or maybe he didn’t, and he laughed piercingly and swerved, and we drove onto a shoulder of loose gravel. There was a sharp, screaming metallic scrape. Maybelle yelped, and there were sparks, and I drew back my face just as something shaved it like a quick, cold razor. I turned and looked through the rear window, and saw a roadside mailbox uprooted and tumbling back onto the shoulder in the fading rouge glow of our brake lights. I checked Maybelle and she was all right, though now she was lying bellyflat on the backseat, her head resting firmly between her two front paws.

Billy’s laughter was softly manic. I cackled with him and rubbed my right cheek, feeling raw skin but no blood. Then we were in a forest of pine, and there was almost total blackness, except for the light through the space between the tree line above, a light that snaked parallel with the road. Billy’s laughter ebbed and he shifted his sight from the road to the tree line and back again, navigating the course while negotiating the serpentine
curves. At the bottom of a steep incline the road seemed to end in a finality of shadow, but Billy turned the wheel sharp right just as we seemed on the edge of the chasm, and then we were suddenly out of the trees and on the flat blue road again, the vast, open, moonlit fields on either side.

After another mile Billy tapped on the headlights, and we merged back onto 257, turning left. I cracked two more beers, handed one to Billy, and lit a cigarette for myself. We passed a Methodist church and several bungalows with screened porches set back from the highway, Pontiacs and Buicks parked in the yards. A couple of markets that sold gas and liquor and lottery tickets slid by. Both the markets and the houses were closed and unlit.

Two miles later Billy turned right at 254 and accelerated down a straight stretch of highway toward the lights of Cobb Island. He slowed as we neared the water and drove by two crab houses and bars on opposite sides of the road. The bar on the right had lit Christmas lights strung around its low-rise white facade, with lights that ran along the dock as well, out into the channel beyond a gas pump and boat ramp. The road rose as we crossed a bridge with cement rails that arced over the channel and connected the mainland to the island. When we rolled onto the island, Billy pulled the car into a lot past an IGF grocery store and killed the engine in front of a small bar called the Pony Point.

“A nightcap?” Billy said.

“How’s my face?”

Billy grabbed my chin and turned my head into the light. “You’ll make it.”

“Let’s go.”

We chugged the rest of our beers and put the empties in the backseat, where Maybelle now slept. Out in the lot I tripped stepping up over a concrete divider and felt Billy grab my jacket and yank me back into balance.

“Keep your shit,” he said. “Let’s have some fun.”

We stepped into the Pony Point. The place consisted of one small room paneled in knotty pine with a U-shaped bar extending out from the wall that divided the front of the house from the back kitchen. The bar was nearly filled. “Tight Fittin’ Jeans” by Conway Twitty was shrieking out of the tinny jukebox. I felt heavy and slow as I moved toward the bar, but by now I had acquired that singular glow of imagined invincibility that is bestowed upon certain drunks during particularly blessed binges.