You text McHenry, a dealer your childhood buddy Casey Wheeler put you in touch with before he fled to Coshocton on account of a dispute with his girlfriend’s father. McHenry meets you on West Third with a baggie of coke. He’s a mean-looking fucker with the eyes of a hound dog and three teeth missing from his upper row, but his shit is solid.
“Also got some of them X,” he says, eyes wandering over Claire Ann in the passenger seat.
You ask how much.
“Give y’all two for ten. Less you wanna buy in bulk.”
“Not tonight,” you say and hand over another ten bucks.
You drive to a part of town more suited for two people of the white race, stopping in a gas station bathroom where you and Claire Ann cut and snort two lines each using a compact mirror and a credit card. You pop the X. You ask what she wants to do.
“My friend Dee’s at a party down at UC. She texted me earlier.”
Cincinnati’s an hour’s drive, but with all the coke and X and the bottle of Maker’s you’re about to buy, it’ll feel like ten minutes.
You drive, and the headlights on I-75 glide over the ornate black cross tattooed on your forearm. You haven’t been to church since you were twelve, yet you know God has plans for you. You first started having this dream two or three years ago. It never comes on consecutive nights. Sometimes weeks will go by. It always comes back, though. Sooner or later, you will always return.
You thought the heat would dissipate as the night came on, but the air still sweats and you feel moisture run from your balls down your thigh. That’s the X kicking in. Claire Ann tried sucking you off on the drive down, but you were too keyed up to come. Stepping into this house party, you’re too hot and thirsty to talk, so you cling to the bottle of whiskey. You pull and pull. The names come so fast, you can’t remember which face belongs to which “Eric” or “Megan.” Claire Ann introduces you only as “Keeper.” Her friend Dee she knows from high school. Dee knows someone who goes to UC and lives in this sterile, bright apartment. You want to fuck Dee the moment you shake her hand. Not because she’s attractive. She isn’t. She’s overweight with a bad black dye job, black nail polish, and too many piercings. Yet she has a look to her, a sexiness that speaks of highly limited inhibitions. You keep thinking of the dream, always the same: Running through the woods behind your old house. Trying to get to the field. But no matter which way you go, the pink umbrella always finds you.
You are thinking of ways to fuck Dee when a joint travels into your hand, which gets everything swimming further. Someone flips a switch and the room is swathed in red light. Spilling like a puddle of hot blood. Claire Ann motions for you to follow her into the bathroom. You met her last fall at a Trotwood-Madison High football game. She was a junior and you went because you had nothing better to do that night. You had a flask in the inner pocket of your jean jacket and she kept looking at you from the student section of the stands, stealing glances across the aisle until you went up and started talking to her. You’d been meaning to leave Trotwood for a while, but then you met this cute little sun-soaked kid with haunting green eyes, filmy, gray-stained teeth that overlapped each other, and an ass the shape of a full moon. You want to take her with you wherever you go, but she has to graduate first.
In the bathroom you both snort another couple of lines, then you reach a hand up her skirt and pull her thong to the side. You lick her clit while she sits on the closed toilet. She stops you because she says she has to pee. Then she says she has to tell you something. The pink umbrella is never open when it comes floating through the trees looking for you. It only opens once its handle has hooked the back of your collar and hoisted you into the air. At that point, you’re helpless.
Claire Ann passes out on the couch, and you overhear Dee talking to some of her friends about going to a bar. You leave Claire Ann and end up in a car with five people, speeding over highway through vapor moonlight. Taking drags on a cigarette, window down for the smoke, crushed against the thigh of some guy in the back seat, everyone chirping. Birds in a hurricane. The air barely feels refreshing, the heat’s so intense. You’re coated in a film of sweat and grime that keeps replenishing itself. The guy next to you remarks, “Hundred-and-two’s the high tomorrow.”
“Not all that hot,” you hear yourself saying. “It’s the humidity that gets you.”
You feel the eyes and ears of the car attuned to you, uncomfortable, and you’re reminded of high school, the way you could say things and people would shut down their conversation. No one has ever liked you; no one has ever trusted you. You want to be out of the car and away from these preppy college faggots. In the dream, the pink umbrella takes you to the dot in the woods and leaves you. The yellow dot is vibrating in the dark, then darting back and forth with gathering speed, tracing lines of yellow in its path, printing a three-dimensional shape right there in the murk. The dot speeds and blurs, and a form begins to emerge—first the enormous body, then the mane, then the claws. The lion blinks, and it is alive. There’s nowhere to go. You scream as the lion devours you, flesh shredding from bone, the crunch and snap of cartilage, the gush and geyser of your life’s blood, until all that remains are your eyes. The powerful jaws descend and all goes dark. That’s when you wake up, never more relieved for the dampness of your sheets and the murmur of your mother’s television a room away.
Your hometown is a shoddy collection of breaking or broken families and people with too much time on their hands living off unemployment or disability. You hit the bars, you watch Little League and high school games and drink forties in paper bags. You sell plasma nearly every week, usually before Friday night to put twenty-five bucks in your pocket. You drive by the old house sometimes, the one your mom lost to Ameritrade, and you think of the field behind it. Beyond the backyard, through a tunnel of black oaks, there was the field littered with discarded farm equipment. You used to go there as a kid and sit among the rusted-out tractors and listen to the croaking of the frogs in the nearby pond. Now the field is gone. Replaced with a Kmart, a Verizon, a Dairy Queen, and a Payless. Some of your old high school frenemies are married, some have kids, a couple are dead. You’ve felt the urge to leave before, but never like this. After what Claire Ann has told you.
In the bar, you take a shot, and it puts you over the top. You hustle outside, to the alley, and puke up whatever you’ve eaten that day. A suctioning tube in your stomach, sharp fingernails in your throat. In a moment you feel better and try to go back inside. The bouncer, a large Indian guy—the dot, not the feather (one of your favorite jokes)—won’t let you back in. You argue with him, swear at him, call him a monkey.
The people huddled outside laugh in disbelief, and he steps to you and says, “You have two choices, man: Get the fuck out of my face right now or take a ride in a police cruiser with a broken nose.”
You feel sobriety lapping at you, which makes you embarrassed, which gets shame flooding your neck, heat on heat.
“Suck me, fag,” you mumble as you walk away. You have no way to call Dee or any of the others. You stumble down an unfamiliar street, cars hurtling by. Some jackass has put an enormous handmade TRUMP4PREZ!!! sign in the window of his duplex along with a picture of Hillary Clinton with a bull’s-eye over her face. You did like his show, though. You and your mom used to watch it. You remember Claire Ann back at that apartment with strangers. You vaguely understand that you need to get her, that she’s seventeen and passed out alone, but first you need to finish the coke. The dream never stops. You’d think after so many times, you’d be used to it, but it still terrifies you. You try different things in the dream. At the beginning you take different paths through the woods, you run from the pink umbrella, you try to hide from the dot that becomes the lion. But the lion blinks, and it always, always chases you down, ripping away pieces of you until nothing is left but your eyes.