There had been rumors going around at school that Landry Collins had run off. Fled north to New York leaving behind his family. And his girlfriend Jules, who he had knocked-up a couple months prior. At least, that’s what people were saying.
Now, I don’t know if I believed it.
As far as I knew, Landry had no reason to leave town. He’d had a decent life for himself, and things were only going to get better.
But I don’t blame him for leaving.
Dundalk wasn’t his kind of place. There wasn’t anything here for an intellectual like him, a New York University bound teen. He managed to have a play win a prestigious award, along with $250 towards the tuition. That wasn’t much of a prize though from what he told me.
So, when the rumors started a few weeks before graduation, I ignored them.
It wasn’t any of my business.
It was too hot outside to care about much about anything aside from keeping cool.
Sweat dripped off my chin and into my mashed potatoes. They looked more like Play-Doh than anything eatable. Often I used my spork and plastic knife to recreate a potato Rushmore. Or shape them into tiny mounds meant to look like boobs or balls and a penis.
Erik spooned his into his mouth without taking a moment to consider what it is he might be eating. He could eat without thinking about what he was putting into his body. Or act without worrying how it may affect him in the long run. It seemed that the only thing he cared about was whether he could play this song or that song on the guitar. He had no other concerns. This kind of nonchalance about the world is something that I often admired in him.
“Do you believe all that about Landry?” Erik said, shoving another mound of potatoes into his mouth, a bit of gravy seeping from the corner. “I mean, you knew him better than I did.”
“Barely. We didn’t talk about much else aside from the lesson for the day.” I told Erik, which was both the truth, and not.
It wasn’t that Landry and I didn’t talk about other things during the tutor sessions we started. My ma told me I’d amount to nothing and would be out of the house if I didn’t try harder to do well. So, we started with the tutoring to ensure I graduated. I did know Landry. But I didn’t want Erik to know about all the details. Or anyone else for that matter.
Truth is, Landry wasn’t someone you’d want to be hanging with if you wanted some kind of social life. He was, well… different. But he was one of the smartest people that I’d ever met, and I respected him for that.
I mean, what kind of kid from Dundalk manages to land a spot at NYU, and for playwriting of all things? Not many, I can tell you that much.
Meanwhile, I was struggling to hold my D to graduate from this shit hole.
“Well,” Erik started, wiping his mouth on the bottom of his shirt. “You spent a lot of time with the guy.”
“I don’t know. I mean, you think Landry had it in him to get a girl prego then leave her behind? Let alone his family? It don’t seem like something he would do, you know?”
“Crazier things have happened. Remember Cecil?
“I think so, yeah. The kid who always wore gloves?”
“That’s the one. Did you ever hear about him?”
“Nah.”
“Get this.” Erik leaned across the table, “He has some kind of disease that makes his hands turn colors.”
“Seriously?”
“You better believe it.”
“How would anyone find out about something like that?”
“His sister told everyone about it.”
“Why would she do that?”
“Don’t know. But she spread it around like the herpes that Sara Allen had.”
“Well, supposedly had.”
“Yeah,” Erik said. “‘Supposedly’,” he said, air quoting the word as he allowed the word to be slowly drawn out.
“But what’s the big deal about his hands turning some different colors? That seems pretty harmless…”
“It’s fucking weird. That’s what the big deal is. The guy probably makes a rainbow when he whacks off.” Erik laughed.
My eye started to twitch. I tried to keep my cool. “That’s pretty crazy stuff.” But all I could think of was how my ex, Nellie, had recorded videos of me before we broke up. Videos of my soft body, jiggling. Walking around in that cold basement of hers, shrunken and shriveled. Videos of me finishing on her face, of her sitting on mine. Videos of her rubbing a dildo she’d stolen from a sex party her ma hosted over my lips, down my soft body.
Those videos could be shared at any time. That made my stomach sour.
The bell rang. Erik gathered up his tray and moved it to the trash. I followed, trying not to think about Landry, or Cecil, or the videos that Nellie had.
“You feel like skipping last period and hitting Bob’s Guitars?” I asked Erik, almost certain that he’d be willing to skip class with me.
“Sure,” Erik said after putting not more than a moment of thought into it. “Let’s go.”
I wish I could say that I didn’t know why I didn’t hangout with Landry. It’d be easier than knowing the truth, which was that I thought he was a loser. A social landmine that would go off if you got too close. It wasn’t that I was popular by any means. But I had it rough growing up. Bullies got the best of me in middle school. And any kind of acceptance, even passivity, was comfort enough for me.
Growing up in a town like Dundalk, walking down the street was something I couldn’t do without being harassed. If you were one of the sixth or seventh graders, and you wandered into eighth grader halls, watch out…
Worst of all were the Geeks. They were the ones who did most of the mugging, beatings, and occasional stabbings once we got older.
One in particular, Mikey, was especially cruel.
What set Mikey apart from the rest was his long, obsidian hair. It was never tied back or swept off of his face. Only one eye and half of his face ever showed.
He wasn’t the biggest of the Geeks. But he was the most brutal. The most unpredictable.
I’m not sure where he was from, or what school he attended then. He just showed up and started hanging around the place. Popping up here and there when you’d least expect him. Our interactions with each other were far and few, and with good reason. He didn’t give a shit about anyone’s well-being, not even his own.
In the winter, on my walk home, I decided to take a short cut through the woods. It took me over a small, wooden bridge that shaved about twenty minutes off. I was in seventh grade at the time.
Everyone always talked about avoiding that bridge at all cost. The Geeks ruled that bridge. Charging people to cross it, or beating them if they couldn’t pay the often too-lofty sum of money. At some point, someone had spotted a dead body in the water next to it.
This was something that many of us questioned whether it was true or not. Though the disbelief didn’t last long after we saw police officers carrying a large, black bag up the bank of the river.
None of us figured out what was in that bag.
Or who.
I’m not sure the police figured it out, either. Some things just go that way, I suppose. More often than I’d like to admit.
Anyway, call it stupidity or laziness, but I took the route.
When I’d reached the bridge, my chest tightened. It was hard to breathe. With the lower half of my face wrapped in a scarf, my glasses began to fog.
By the time I had cleaned the lenses and put them back on, four Geeks stood at the far side of the bridge. Mikey was near the middle. The Geek to his right, a girl with black makeup around her electric-blue eyes, flipped her pocket knife open to closed. Closed to open.
Mikey smiled, and took a couple of steps towards me.
I couldn’t swallow. My legs felt like pilings nailed to the bridge. I wanted to scream, but my throat wouldn’t allow passage.
“It’s twenty dollars,” Mikey said. “If you want to pass.”
I breathed in an unsteady way through the nerves that pulsated throughout my entire body.
“You hear me?”
I nodded.
“So,” Mikey said, pulling a cigarette out and lighting it. “You got it?”
His one eye glared at me. I nodded. I didn’t know what I was going to do. There were four of them and one of me. But I had to try something, anything, to get by, or else I was toast.
“Hand it over then.”
Trembling, I took one step towards Mikey. Another. Another. Another. Each step felt like my last. I couldn’t comprehend what could happen even one second into the future. All thought of predictability had fallen away.
When I was within arm’s length of Mikey, I reached into my back pocket, and pulled out my checkered Velcro wallet. I started to hand it over to him, knowing that I didn’t have even a single dollar in it.
Down in the shallow water next to the bridge where Mikey left me, I saw the silhouette of a girl lean over the railing. She looked down at me for a moment before Mikey called her away.
The price for tossing my empty wallet inside of trying to run the other way? A severe concussion, fractured wrist, cuts and bruises beyond counting, and a brief feeling of bravery.
Bright, white light reflected from the ruby-red surface of the Fender Erik held. Each of his fingers ran over each string, plucking them to produce a low hum. He held it out in front of himself, then repositioned it as he took a seat to play a few chords.
And I watched him. As much as I tried to learn the guitar, or any instrument for that matter, I could never seem to pick it up.
When I was in elementary school, I’d started playing the saxophone for the school band. But once middle school became a reality, I’d stopped. The band nerds were too easy a target for bullies, and I didn’t wish to be a part of that crowd. Which is the same reason that I had quit rec sports as well. Only the cool kids didn’t play sports or care about school. Or so I thought.
It goes to show how much of nothing I knew.
Erik played a few parts of different songs: “Smells Like Teen Spirit,” “Smoke on the Water,” “I Miss You,” and another that I hadn’t heard before. Though it didn’t seem like he knew it all that well, butchering chords here and there.
“Did I tell you about the time that Mikey cornered me in the bathroom?”
Erik paused his playing. “When he got you suspended?”
“Yup.”
“Oh, yeah,” Erik said, laughing. “I remember that. Your mom was pissed at you for weeks.”
I ran my finger over the wooden body of a Les Paul acoustic. Strummed the strings one by one, wishing to be good enough to play.
“What about it?”
“Well,” I started. “I wasn’t completely honest about what happened…”
Erik put down the Fender guitar and we walked back to his car. I told him what happened. How I walked into the bathroom that day and heard someone crying in the stall. How the person who emerged was Mikey. How he told me that his mom has passed from brain cancer. How he felt alone. How he’d beat the hell out of me if I told anyone about this. How he then thanked me for listening as he lit a cigarette. How I’d taken a drag when Mr. Wallcroft, the Econ teacher, came in. How I took the fall for it so he wouldn’t have to suffer.
The green of trees blurred past the window as Erik droves us down the highway, towards his house. We didn’t speak. There was nothing to say. Erik was one of my closest friends. There wasn’t much that the other didn’t know. For some reason, this seemed to bother him more than anything I’ve noticed before. Or I’ve never paid close attention to him when he’s been bothered in the past.
“You haven’t told anyone else about this then, have you?”
I shook my head.
“Do you think that Mikey had anything to do with Landry disappearing?”
“How would he? The guy’s mom died a few weeks back. He didn’t seem angry or crazy. Just, I don’t know… lost.”
“I mean, what if Landry saw him in a state like that? Think he’d try to keep him quiet? Maybe he beat him so bad that he ended up in the hospital? Or killed him…”
“I don’t think so… no.” Truth was, I had no idea what to think. Mikey wasn’t someone who I could peg for one kind of person. He seemed to me to be many different people crammed into one.
“There’s something I have to tell you”
I looked at Erik as he focused on the road. An eighteen-wheeler was driving under the speed limit in front of him. Erik pushed the pedal down, accelerating. The momentum applied pressure. I felt myself pressing back in the seat. He jumped into the oncoming traffic lane.
In the distance, another car approached. The car’s horn howled. Erik applied more pressure. I tried to speak, tried to tell him to slow down, tried to tell him how I felt, but my words were being held in my throat. I glanced over at the speedometer: 102 mph. The car in front laid on its horn. Erik jerked right, missing the car while bypassing the slow truck we were stuck behind.
The car slowed. My words came up.
“What the hell, Erik? Are you trying to kill me?”
“I can’t stand slow drivers.”
“Jesus…”
“Where was I?”
“I don’t know… I can’t think straight right now.” My hands trembled. I crossed my arms to hide it from Erik. “What the hell were you thinking?”
“About swimming. That’s all.”
I huffed and looked out the window, embarrassed by how terrified I felt. My nerves were rattled, and the shaking of my hands worsened.
Staring straight ahead, a smirk on his face, Erik didn’t seem phased in the slightest by his own actions. There was more to be said; something in me still wanted to speak out, to tell Erik to care, to try to care, at the least, but I couldn’t. Nothing would change. We’d get into his car, skip class, smoke another joint, drink another beer, follow through with whatever Erik felt the compulsion to do, and it would all end the same. I would be embarrassed about how I reacted, or handled it, or felt. Erik would be thrilled, alive, laughing, walking forward in life without the weight of any decision. And I would become a victim of the violence of insecurity as I covered up my naked body as he pulled up his swim trunks, proud of what he was, what he had, and walking out of the locker room, towards the pool.
As I watched the trees pass by the window, the ground fell away from me as the we drove over the bridge. The marshland below looked still. Water did not move. The cattails did not move. It was this stillness that reminded me of the time that Landry and his parents had given me a ride home after our tutoring session.
Landry had found out that he’d been accepted to NYU. He told his mom while I sat in the backseat, waiting for the inevitable explosion of excitement.
Instead, all he got from her was a question. How was he going to pay for a school like that? And a demand that he go to the local community college instead. There’s no money in writing plays. Those things aren’t how you make a life for yourself. Stop daydreaming and be real about this. Landry didn’t say anything back to her. He turned his and head mumbled something under his breath that neither me or Mrs. Collins could make out.
And I remember looking out the window. Rain began to fall. Yet as we drove down the road, it didn’t seem to move or ever touch down to the ground. Instead, the rain halted in its whirl, frozen in the midst of its movement.
We stood on Erik’s pier, observing the stillness of the creek.
Across the way, houses, most of them run down or abandoned, lined the waterfront. That’s what Erik referred to as “the wrong side of the river.” At first, I tried to correct him that it was a creek, not a river. But he didn’t care. It was for the sake of his saying, and that was that.
“What was it you were going to tell me in the car?”
Erik seemed distant. He stared across the creek as if he were waiting for something.
“Erik? What were you going to tell me?”
“It’s… it’s nothing.”
“Are you sure?”
Erik hocked a loogie and spit it into the creek. Ripples traveled out into the distance, across to the wrong side of the river, if there even was such a thing.
Erik started. “Well, it’s about Landry. A couple weeks back I saw him talking with Mikey.”
“Yeah?”
“I couldn’t hear what they were talking about. But I saw them get close and dap each other at the end of whatever conversation they were having.”
“You sure it was Landry?”
“I’m sure.” Erik spit again, sending out more ripples. Disturbance echoed throughout the water.
“I wonder what they were talking about?”
“Don’t know. But I’d heard another rumor that Mikey had started dealing drugs.”
My tongue felt swollen, dried out. It was hard to swallow. “But that’s just a rumor. I haven’t heard of anyone buying drugs off of him.”
“Maybe. But you know how these things work. There’s middlemen everywhere. Look at Harley or Taz.”
Harley was a fat linebacker for the school football team. He was our weed guy, but we’d never guessed it until Taz, one of his clients, ran out and couldn’t sell to us. So, he gave us Harley’s number, and that’s when we knew. Even Taz—whose real name was Tony Azaletti—was a bit of a shock. We’d known him since freshman year, but only when we were juniors did we learn that he sold weed on the side here and there. A computer science guy who took all AP classes. Who would’ve thought?
It’s hard to say the kind of person someone is. Mostly we only ever see the surface of each other.
I looked at Erik.
He looked away.
Across the creek, a man walked onto the pier of one of the rundown homes. Followed by another. And another. Erik had his shirt off, and stood on the piling, ready to jump into the brown water. Since the flood a few years back, the water never looked the same. Always brown, dirty, with pockets of oil that floated on the surface. Dead fish often drifted along the creek, becoming stuck on the bulkheads during high tide.
Today, there were no dead fish. At least, none that I could see. Death had seemed to rescind its hold on the creek.
And it was hot outside. Anything would be better than this heat.
I pulled off my shirt. Exposed my soft body to the sunlight, to Erik. Erik’s thin, tight frame, made me feel ashamed of my own. For a moment, I thought about putting my shirt back on.
One day this will end.
A strong wind carried with it the smell of rot. The sun held high in the cloudless sky. Summer would soon begin, and high school would end. All would change. At least, it was meant to change. Often it felt like it never would, and looking at Erik, his long limbs balanced on the piling, head held back as he breathed in deep, only served to reaffirm that feeling.
So long as he remained, things would never change.
But they had to.
I had to.
A police car parked in view between the two houses of the wrong side of the river. A congregation of people seemed to be gathering at the house of one of the Geeks, though I wasn’t sure of which ones it was. They were always together, grouped up. Like a pack of ravenous wolves. Or a flock of crows.
Those people, all of them were waiting for something to happen here, at this moment.
Men—police officers—flooded the yard. A woman, small and bent forward with gray hair, stood along the bulkhead. She cried into the palms of her hands as one of the officers held her back.
Erik bent at his knees, readied his jump.
I stood, watching the show across the creek.
A police officer walked to the end of the pier, knelt down, and looked into the water. Something emerged from the water. A man in scuba gear. He pointed down into the water, then went under again.
There was a splash when Erik hit the water. Small waves traveled outward from where he’d hit, forming whitecaps as they moved towards the spot where the man in scuba gear had went under.
I stood, still and calm.
A body was raised up by the man in the scuba gear. Hoisted by the officer on to the pier. He struggled with body that was smaller than a man’s, but larger than a boy’s. Three others came and helped pull the body onto the pier, letting it lay atop like a dead fish drying in the sun.
Coty Poynter is Baltimore-based writer and editor. He was the lead fiction editor for the 2016-2017 edition of Grub Street, Towson University’s literary and arts magazine, and is an managing editor at Charles Street Research. Currently, he focuses his creative endeavors to the exploration of memory, past and present, and the resilience of the human spirit through poetry and, more recently, short fiction. His second collection of poetry, Delirium, was published in October 2018 by Bowen Press.