Winger (28 page)

“Are there even any other gay guys at Pine Mountain?” I asked.

Joey laughed. “Oh my God, Ryan Dean, why do you care? You’re not
curious
, are you? Did Chas completely scare you off girls or something? ’Cause I wouldn’t believe that could ever happen.”

I shrugged. “No. I was just wondering. ’Cause I can’t tell. I mean, I would have never even thought you were gay except you told me. But I do know
exactly
how many fourteen-year-old juniors there are at Pine Mountain. One. And he’s a skinny-ass-loser. But he’s not gay.”

“Well, there are a lot of gay kids at Pine Mountain.”

“Hopefully, JP Tureau?” I said.

That would be awesome. Then I wouldn’t have to worry about anything.

Joey laughed out loud. “You know? You and Kevin are, like, the only straight guys who’ve ever talked to me about
me
, about this stuff, who weren’t trying to play some kind of fucked-up game, Ryan Dean.”

“Well, why not? You’re my friend. You’re probably the best guy friend I have. But I don’t think I could ever be gay.”

“Everyone knows you’re not gay,” Joey said, and I thought,
Phew! That’s a relief
, just in case Joey was wondering if I was gay and trying
to make, well, gay small talk, and then I thought, damn, that was a screwed-up thing to think about my best friend.

“But you want to know something crazy? And you can’t say anything to anyone about this, Ryan Dean. You know who’s been seriously trying to hit on me ever since school ended last year? Ever since I came out to everyone?” And then Joey paused to see if I would make a guess (which, I would have said Sean Russell Flaherty just because he’s so, well, not like other guys), but Joey said, “Casey Palmer. Can you believe it? Casey Fucking Palmer is gay. That’s why he begged Chas to get in the game with us tonight. He won’t leave me alone. He fucking scares me, he’s so hopped up about getting with me.”

Wow. That was a monumental secret, a career-builder for a guy like Seanie Flaherty. If Seanie kept such records, he would easily call that piece of info five out of five J. Edgar Hoovers in off the shoulder sundresses on the Sean Russell Flaherty Ruin Your Life Rating Scale.

“Casey Palmer is
gay
?”

“I’m pretty sure he wasn’t hitting on me because he thought I was a girl,” Joey said.

“Casey Palmer is
gay
?” I said again. Then I doubled over, laughing.

“Remember,” Joey said, “you are
not
going to say anything, okay? You know, football and everything. He’s a piece of shit, but leave him alone about it.”

“I pissed in his drink,” I said. “A lot. And the idiot thought it tasted good too.”

“Yeah. You’ve got balls, Ryan Dean. Except for when it comes to girls.”

“Well, he deserved it. He busted my nose.”

Then Joey stepped out of the car and said, “Come on. Let’s get some Halloween crap and get the fuck out of here.”

And as I followed Joey into the store, I kept asking him, “What do you mean, ‘except for when it comes to girls’?”

But he just said, “Never mind.”

IN LESS THAN THIRTY MINUTES,
we paid for five Halloween costumes, two tall cans of energy soda (I believed one of us was going to puke before we got back, and I hoped it would end up on Chas’s leather upholstery), and some cold medicine and throat lozenges for me.

I opened the box of cold pills before we were out of the store and popped three of them into my mouth. I washed them down with the energy drink.

So, yeah . . . between the whiskey, the cold pills, the energy drink, cherry-menthol (is there anything that tastes more unnaturally disgusting?) throat lozenges, and the pumped-up rushed feeling from completely ruining Chas Becker’s life, I was pretty much prepared to have some kind of seventies-Grateful-Dead-flashback-only-it-was-twenty-years-before-I-was-born experience.

We found some passable costumes for the five of us who played the game that night, too, even though I tried to convince Joey not to get one for Chas; and that way he could be the Invisible Man. But Joey said that wasn’t funny, because if we didn’t find Chas and he got into trouble or something, it would look like we’d stolen his car and ditched him.

Here’s what we ended up with (in alphabetical order):

Becker, Charles:
Well, we found Chas a Superman cape, but there was nothing to go with it. Fortunately, the supermarket sold kids’ underwear and we bought him a three-pack of boys’ size XL briefs with Pokémon characters on them. Then we also got him some red women’s pantyhose to go underneath the briefs. So, basically, Chas’s most horrible night in his life had just gotten worse. Oh, well, that’s what he gets for leaving me and Joey alone and trusting us to be in charge of his future.

Cantrell, Kevin:
Kevin would be the token pirate. We found him a hat, an eye patch, and a plastic hook we thought would look perfect sticking out from his black arm sling.

Cosentino, Joseph:
Joey got the cool costume: prison stripes from Alcatraz, a fitting outfit for someone who was spending his senior year in O-Hall.

Palmer, Casey:
Casey lucked out in a big way. We chose one of those plastic face masks of Wonder Woman and a golden lasso rope accessory for the guy with the serious case of the hots for Joey. We could have been much, much crueler, and even Joey admitted that he thought Casey would be jealous because Chas’s costume was so much gayer. Of course, I had to laugh about that.

West, Ryan Dean:
A discovery of true Zen-like perfection, I got a leopard-spotted caveman-loincloth kind of thing that had one suspender strap that tied in a knot over the shoulder. The Wild Boy of Bainbridge Island would be in full effect on Thursday night in O-Hall.

Score.

The O-Hall boys were not allowed to go to the dance with Pine Mountain’s good boys and girls, but that would not stop us from dressing up and having our own Halloween.

We left the store with our bags of goods, determined to seek out Chas’s hiding place and get back to Pine Mountain in time to scrounge at least three hours of sleep before class, but it wasn’t going to turn out to be that easy.

Just as Joey opened his door, a voice came from the darkness in the lot behind the car.

“Can I talk to you boys a minute?”

And my juvenile-delinquent-from-Boston self instantly thought, great, it’s a cop. A man cop, no less, to make things even worse. But when I turned around, I realized that unless the Bannock Police Department hired hundred-year-old officers who got around with walkers, we were pretty safe. And even if they did, I thought, I knew it would be easy enough to talk Joey into making a run for it.

Or a brisk walk for that matter.

The old man came out of the rain at the speed of a newborn glacier, taking two steps, then lifting the walker, then setting it down, then two steps, lift, set. I rubbed my chin to see how much that one whisker had grown in the time it took for him to get to Joey’s side of the car.

And why does Joey always have to be so goddamned nice and understanding?

Joey said, “Leave us alone and go to hell, fucking crusty old man.”

Well, um . . . to be honest, Joey didn’t actually
say
that. I think I was wishing it so hard, I actually imagined it, which was the girliest thing I’ve probably ever done in my life. He actually just said, “Sure.”

Two steps. Lift. Set.

I needed a shave.

And the poor guy looked terrible. He had a dirty white beard and just kept his eyes fixed ahead, staring at me and Joey as he two-stepped-lifted-set inch by inch, wearing what looked like rain-soaked and food-stained pajamas.

“Can you boys please give me a ride home? I’ll pay you,” he said.

Please, for once in your life, don’t be nice, Joey.

“What are you doing out here?” Joey said.

“I just went for a walk,” he said.

And I thought, he either lives about twelve feet away from here or he started his walk during the Reagan Administration.

“And then I got caught in this damned rain.”

“Where do you live?” Joey asked.

No!

But it was too late. I knew Joey and I were both helplessly being sucked into a black hole of Joey Cosentino’s niceness.

“I live in a residential group home for child molesters who kill teenage boys with hatchets,” he said.

Okay, I’ll be honest. I think the whiskey-cold-medicine-energy-soda-disgusting-cherry-menthol-throat-lozenge-lack-of-sleep effect was taking its toll on me. What he
really
said was something like, “I live in Bannock on Battle Point Lane. It’s about two miles from here.”

“We could call you a cab,” I said. I held the remainder of the poker bank out in my hand. “We’ll even pay for it.”

“Naw,” Joey said. “Come on. We’ll take you home.”

Good old perfect Joey.

Goddamnit.

“Thank you,” he said. “Thank you boys so much.”

I just hoped he killed Joey first.

We loaded the old man’s walker and our bags into the back of Chas’s SUV, then helped him up into the passenger seat beside Joey. I sat in the back and hunted around for something that could be used as a weapon.

“Joey?” I said from the backseat as he started the car.

“What?”

“Why are my pants ripped all the way down and my underwear hanging out?”

“Remember? Chas?”

“Um. No.”

That cold medicine was the shit.

“Maybe you should go to sleep, Ryan Dean.”

“Why are we driving Chas’s car without him?”

“I’ll tell you about it tomorrow.”

“You’re the best, Joey.”

Joey shook his head. When we came to the entrance to the parking lot, the old man pointed him to turn right. Then he patted Joey on the shoulder and said, “Thanks again. You’re going to take a right up here at Haley Street. By the way, my name is Ned.”

And then Ned dug around in his pocket and said, “How much do you want for the cab ride, boys?”

“You don’t need to pay us,” Joey said.

I closed my eyes and lay down across the seat. Then I felt the car turn right and begin lurching forward along a bumpy, unpaved road.

“This is Battle Point,” Joey said. “How far up here do you live?”

Then I knew we were completely hosed.

Ned said, “Where?”

It began pouring.

Joey said, “Is this your street?”

And Ned said, “I live in Waterloo, Iowa.”

Oh, yeah. Me and Joey. Both total losers.

So I said, “Ned? Will you please kill Joey first? He really, really deserves it.”

SO THERE WE WERE, IN
the middle of the fucking night, in the rain, on an unlighted dirt—make that “mud”—road somewhere between Oregon and Bolgia Nine in the Eighth Circle of Hell with an ax-wielding sodomist in a walker who thought he was in Waterloo goddamned Iowa.

Good times.

Ned stared blankly out the windshield. “I don’t remember any of this in Waterloo.”

“Oh,
that
Waterloo,” I said. “So, Ned, was Napoleon really as short as everyone says?”

“What?” Ned said. Then he pointed out the window in front of Joey. “I think you took a wrong turn, son. Where’s the Cedar River from here?”

“We’re in the middle of it, Ned,” I said.

Joey stopped the car, right there in the middle of the river of mud that used to be a road. Not that we were running the risk of blocking any traffic, that is, unless salmon used this fucking road to spawn on.

Spawning salmon . . .
awww
 . . . made me think of Annie. God! I’d never see her again! I felt like I would start crying, but I became determined that I had to live so I could stop JP from depositing his genetically inferior milt all over her.

“But you remembered this road and how to get here,” Joey said. “And how far it was. Are you sure you didn’t want to come to Battle Point Lane?”

“Is this Battle Point Lane?” Ned asked.

“Yes,” Joey said.

“Are we in Waterloo?” Ned asked. “My son lives there.”

“Catch and release, Joey,” I said. “Let’s put him back where we found him.”

“Maybe he’ll recognize his house if we find one up there.” Joey nodded his chin in the direction of the road-torrent.

I didn’t see any houses up there.

“Maybe he’ll remember the spot where he hid all the bodies of the other kids he tricked into taking him here,” I said.

“What?” Ned said.

“Ryan Dean”—Joey looked over his shoulder at me—“I really think you should try to go to sleep.”

He sounded a little stressed.

Joey started the car forward slowly.

I said, “Here, Joe. Do you want a cough drop?”

I dropped one of the paper-wrapped lozenges in his hand.

“Thanks,” he said.

“Don’t thank me. They taste like crap. But they keep you awake.”

“Then stop eating them.”

“I think it’s just up ahead,” Ned said.

That’s exactly when the driver’s side of the car lurched downward sharply and the axle struck against something hard, with a grating, metallic clang. We were in a hole up to the top of the car’s wheels. Joey tried backing the SUV out, but we were stuck.

Oh, yeah, and that’s when the water started coming in through the bottom of Joey’s door, too.

“Fuck!” Joey said.

“Don’t give him any ideas,” I warned.

“This isn’t the place,” Ned said. “I’m sure of it.”

And that’s probably about the time that Joey seriously considered throwing the old man out too. If it wasn’t precisely at that moment, I’m sure he felt like it when Ned started screaming insanely in wild terror.

You know, there is something especially frightening when you’re stuck in the darkest depths of hell, in the middle of a raging torrent of mud, and the insane old lost guy in the front seat starts screaming like he’s going to die. I mean, I figured Ned had probably stared Death in the face more than a few times in just the past four or five hours, let alone since the discovery of fire, so when you hear a guy who you know has gone through as much shit as Ned has—in a lifetime that was undoubtedly measured by geologic periods as opposed to calendars—screaming like that, well . . . you just know you’re going to die too.