RiverCraft
RiverCraft, one of the university’s student-run literary magazines, annually showcases poetry, short stories and novellas written by Susquehanna’s writing majors.
Excerpts:
If God Were a Spider
by Melissa Goodrich
she’d have let our eight planets parasail down
in some of her twine,
sperm gummed on the silk.
she’d have
designed the universe architecture
out of her abdomen,
fastened us between two bricks or
in silken domes on mountain tops.
she’d shuck the earth like an ear of corn,
yanking out the silk hair, her sun
striking the horizon like a flint, cooking,
her mouth baleen as she’d scrunch
her sacs together, liquefying us
for breakfast, her four front eyes
wet and wide as she’d toy with our antenna,
seeing right through us to our meat so that
even as we’d squirm, she’d like us,
curdling in her throat,
all our legs broken,
going weightless, going down like milk.
Cravings
by Joe Sherlock
You tell me you want a ham sandwich with ketchup and peanut butter. Our refrigerator is empty because I work late at the bar and you usually do the shopping, but you’ve been so tired lately. It’s two in the morning, but I know that the baby makes you crave things, and so I go. And that’s how it happens.
• • •
I grew up three miles east of Port Jervis, New York in the wooded mountains that shade the Delaware River. Those woods are dense and dark, especially in the pine groves where I lived, and back then they were filled with bored kids up to no good, kids always searching for something, God knows. Kids like us.
Me, Tommy Bennet, and Jake Reilly, we all drove around in my Buick—Tommy called it the Rip Roarin’ Shitbox—looking for girls at West End Beach, or tourists to curse at. Some nights we would bounce down the old dirt road outside of town and smoke pot, leaf springs creaking all the way. Tommy would pull a dime bag out of his pocket, and we’d pass his blue glass bowl around with a BIC. The flame lit our faces from underneath, and it looked the way it does when someone sticks a flashlight under their chin. That was our private campfire, what religious people would call a kind of bright piece of heaven in the dark woods.
“Hey Eric.” Tommy was staring at me.
“What?”
“Stop suckin’ and pass the goddamn bowl already. You look like your mom did when she gave me head last night.” His eyes were laughing. Then we were all laughing.
• • •
Port Jervis sits on the border where New York, New Jersey, and Pennsylvania meet, but if you forget about that, it only has three things going for it. One of them is West End Beach, with its trucked-in sand and crumbling asphalt parking lot, both of which recede a little bit every time the Delaware floods. The other two things are a Carnegie library and a Metro North train station. We weren’t the kind of kids to go to libraries, but Tommy went to the train station some weekends.
Port Jervis is the end of the line. It’s the last stop on a commuter track that runs through New York and New Jersey. If you ride it the whole way, two and a half hours or maybe more on a bad day, the forest starts to disappear, and it’ll take you through Otisville, Middletown, Ho Ho Kus, and Patterson, all the way to the City.
• • •
One day in late June, before our senior year in high school, we took the highway into Pennsylvania to see this local band called Seraph play a set at some firehouse. It was nine o’clock at night; the road was wide open, and the light was only just starting to fade as the sun set over our mountains. We had what was left of two twelve-packs in the trunk from earlier that day. It was Golden Anniversary, skunky stuff—good and cheap—that Tommy bought with his fake ID at the Beer Barn by the train station. He was the least drunk for once, so he was driving, probably too fast—that’s how Tommy was. I yelled the stuff I read on the billboards as they flashed by, and Jake added whatever came to him from the back seat:
“Pennsylvania Welcomes You!”
“. . . and your beer!”
“Now Buy Some Fireworks!”
“. . . and light them with your blunt!”
I don’t remember the concert.
• • •
The Delaware River cuts through the woods, and cuts through the mountains, making its own deep V in the landscape. From West End Beach, we would watch the canoers splash their way past in the bright red livery boats they rented for the day.
“Come up from New York and crowd our river,” Jake said. “Every damn summer. Remember when we were tubing and that idiot shot me with a squirt gun?”
Tommy laughed. He was pale white and freckled, and his thin face was surrounded by greasy red hair that reached his shoulders. Jake was tanned and toned, and had a fresh buzz cut cropped almost to the scalp.
I looked downstream to where the river curved around the tip of Pennsylvania.
“Do you ever just want to rent one yourself though?” I asked.
“With what money?” Tommy skipped a flat pebble over the rippling water with a flick of his wrist. “Steal one maybe.”
“I’m serious. We could go all the way downstream. Just let the water carry us.”
“My Mick ass would get toasted,” said Tommy.
“I’m Irish, too,” said Jake.
“Yeah, but your mom’s a Guinea.”
“Fuck you.” Jake walked off the sand and into the tree-line, and we could hear his piss spattering on the barberry leaves.
“Imagine if he caught his dick on a thorn?” Tommy grinned. “Meathead.”
“I heard that!” Jake yelled over his shoulder. “At least I’m doing something with my life.”
“Yeah, running up and down a field with a fucking football. Back and forth. Back and forth. Start, stop.”
“It’s getting me to college. Penn State, baby.”
“Are you guys even listening?” I asked. “I mean, I don’t want to work at Sunoco my whole life. Don’t you want to get out of here?”
“Yeah,” said Tommy. “I hear you, Eric. But I don’t need a canoe. I already get out.”
• • •
Jake was a good running back. He averaged 196 yards per game, which he was quick to tell anyone. His head coach had played for Penn State, and Jake was sure he was going there too. Jake’s dad was a mechanic at the Sunoco just over the Jersey border. I pumped gas there, and sometimes Jake would work with him in the shop on Saturdays because he had grown up with grease under his fingernails and a thin wallet. I stayed outside because I knew nothing about cars, except where the gas tank was. Jake worked on the Shitbox when it broke down too, but he wouldn’t take money for it. “For the good of the group,” he would say. “Besides, I can get some freebies from my dad if nobody’s looking.”
We had the hood up in Jake’s driveway, and I think he was checking the head gaskets.
“It’s a burning smell, right? I’m going to see if these are cracked.”
I kicked the gravel with my Converse. “So, are you going to work with your dad after we graduate?”
“Hell no. I’m not stickin’ around here any longer than I have to. I’m done with this hometown bullshit. Football scholarship . . . Wait, look. It’s not your head gaskets.”
He reached in and pulled out a singed pile of dry grass.
“Mouse nest.”
• • •
“Hey, let’s go to Middletown,” Tommy said. “I want to get some new CDs.” Jake and I had just left Sunoco and picked up Tommy at his dad’s apartment. We were heading toward West End Beach.
“What, the mall? I don’t have the gas to get back,” I said.
“Don’t you get an employee discount or something?”
“Yeah, sure. ‘Cause they’d give minimum wage employees a discount.”
“Nevermind. I’ll give you the money.”
I looked at him in the rearview mirror, and Jake laughed.
“Since when do you have money?” I asked.
“No, really. I’ve got it covered.”
I glanced at my gas gauge, then at the clock. It was only 4:00 p.m.
“All right, fuck it. It’s Saturday,” I said. I pulled a U-turn and headed for the on-ramp.
The highway stretched out ahead of us like the Delaware, cutting through the trees. I pushed the Shitbox up past 70, then 80, and we got to the Middletown exit in about twenty minutes. I drove down the strip, past the Toyota dealership and the porn shop with blacked-out windows, and turned into the Galleria parking lot by the Macy’s entrance.
The glass doors slid open, and we headed through the store and onto the main walkway. Lite jazz echoed around, blending with the footsteps on the tile floors and the people-noise wafting from the food court. Tommy told us to stay behind him and walked quickly toward a big clot of people coming out of the JC Penny’s entrance. He tried to wind his way through the group, but he bumped into a fat bald man with a corduroy sport coat.
“Sorry, dude.”
We followed him past the man and into the store.
“Got gas money now,” said Tommy.
“Shit.” Jake looked over his shoulder. “You just . . .”
“Yeah. I just learned how.”
We pretended to look at some t-shirts next to the entrance, then walked back out. After passing a few stores I said, “You know he’s gonna figure out it’s gone. What if he tries to buy something?”
“Chill out. Just let me go to the music store, and we’re out of here.”
“There’re cameras, man,” said Jake. But we followed Tommy on the escalator up to the second floor. We were almost at Media House when I looked over the rail, and saw the bald man talking with a gray-uniformed security guard.
“Guys, we gotta go.”
“What?” asked Jake.
“The fat guy’s talking to security.”
“Okay. Take it easy,” said Tommy. “Let’s walk back to the car. Don’t get weird or anything. We’re fine.”
We headed back toward the Macy’s. Everyone was watching us, I thought. It hurt to walk so slowly. We got into the store and wound our way through the men’s department before rounding the corner toward the exit, and freedom.
There was a tall security guard in front of the door.
We backed up behind a display of blue suits, the hangers screeching across their rack as we brushed by them. Jake’s eyes were as wide as mine must have been. Tommy still looked calm.
“The car’s right outside. We’ve got to do it,” he said. “Come on.”
“What if they radioed him?” asked Jake. But Tommy was already walking toward the door. We followed him, trying to keep our own faces calm. When he got near the guard, Tommy smiled with that grin of his and said, “Have a nice weekend.”
We got in the Shitbox, and when I put my hand on the steering wheel I realized my palms were soaking wet. Jake slammed his door.
“Holy fuck.”
We got onto the highway, and I didn’t speed at all.
• • •
That was all before, though. I found out Tommy started selling his weed, then harder stuff. Halfway through senior year, almost anything that came into Port Jervis High School went through Tommy boy.
The day I really noticed the change in him, we had spent the afternoon sitting at West End just watching the bikinis bounce by and were driving home in the Shitbox. Out of the corner of my eye, I saw Tommy messing with the shoulder belt.
“What the fuck are you doing?”
“It keeps cutting my neck, dude.”
“Then take it off.”
He wiped his nose on his sleeve, then unclipped the buckle and asked, “It’s just that fuckin’ easy, isn’t it?”
• • •
Tommy kept more to himself so Jake and I got a lot closer, talking about life the way boys do but won’t admit to—sitting in the Shitbox, or fishing by the river bank, or watching girls walk by like usual. We were driving along River Road one Saturday, heading for Tommy’s apartment, when we saw a couple walking on the gravel shoulder by the riverbank. As we got closer, I saw that it was Tommy and a girl I didn’t know.
“What the hell is this?” asked Jake. “He said he wanted to hang out when I saw him yesterday.”
I pulled off the road next to them, and Jake cranked down his squeaking window, letting the air conditioning escape.
“Hey, I thought we were going to come get you,” he said.
Tommy shrugged. “I’m busy.”
“I guess you are,” said Jake.
The girl had black hair and high cheekbones. She was pretty, and I wondered why I had never seen her before. I noticed the exhaust curling in through Jake’s window though, and I put the Shitbox back in gear.
“Leave them alone,” I whispered, then leaned over the center console. “See you later, Tommy.”
We drove off toward West End, past Tommy’s apartment.
“Who do you think she was?” I asked, glancing in the mirror.
“I was going to find out before you decided to get all nervous and drive away.”
“He’ll tell us if he wants to.”
“He doesn’t tell us much anymore. You know he’s using his own goods, right?”
“What? Where did you hear that?”
“C’mon. Haven’t you seen his eyes lately?” he asked, sitting back with his muddy once-white Nikes on the dashboard.
“He’s always been a little strange, man. And he smokes a lot more weed than we do.”
“You know I’m right. You see how thin he’s getting . . . and all twitchy and shit. That’s not from pot.” He kicked the radio, and a clump of mud fell out of his shoe tread.
“I’ve got to fix that damn antenna. We need some music in here.”
• • •
I didn’t want to believe any of it—these drugs Tommy was doing, the craving that he had, maybe the craving we all had. Everything was too much like one of those movies, but it didn’t matter because I still felt my stomach twisting around under my ribs.
We knew he went down to the City about every other weekend. We dropped him off at the train station every Friday, and he stayed until Sunday night. Then he came back up, and we brought him home. He looked like any other tourist, sitting with that old black backpack on his torn blue-jean knees.
I remember that backpack when it was brand new. We were in Mrs. Graber’s class, I think it was fifth grade, and Tommy came running in late because he had spent all morning packing his favorite toys in it. He didn’t get many new things, I guess, and he was really excited. At recess, he took all his G.I. Joes out of it, and we sat in a circle on the baseball field playing war games. The grass was cool and really soft under us, like the shag carpet in Tommy’s living room. I don’t remember exactly who else was there that day, but I know the sky was clear, and it was very bright out.
• • •
Then one Sunday, he didn’t come back from the City. Jake and I took the Buick down to the train station around 6 o’clock to pick him up. We sat in the car, and I remembered how the waiting room always smelled a bit like coffee, but a bit more like cigarettes. The paint on the outside of the building was cracked, and I kept thinking of a spider web running up and down the sandy-colored walls. He wasn’t on that train. We waited into the darkness, talking about everything, anything other than what we were thinking, until the parking lot was orange under the streetlights.
Tommy wasn’t on the 8 o’clock either. Then we drove around for a while, and came back to meet each train until the last one rolled into the station.
Jake was staring off through the windshield.
“I didn’t get it,” he said.
“Get what?”
“Penn State didn’t give me a football scholarship.” He stared at the rails behind the chain-link fence. They shone silver in the dusk and ran off into the distance until they curved and got lost in the dark forest. “I guess I’ll have to work at Sunoco for a while, to pay for community college or something. Maybe OCCC. What are you gonna do?”
“Same as you, I guess. I’ll probably try to go there or to Sussex County College,” I said, but it was then that I realized I really had no idea.
• • •
I took Jake home around one, the little green clock on my dashboard mocking me, reminding me that Tommy was supposed to have been in the car with us seven hours ago. He hadn’t called from jail or from a payphone. He didn’t have a cell phone, but he was never late either. He didn’t miss trains or appointments, except for that one day with the girl.
• • •
Jake called the next morning. He told me that Tommy had been jumped outside of a liquor store in Brooklyn on the Friday we dropped him off. He was stabbed twice in the chest. The killer took his wallet and his backpack filled with whatever it was he was buying down there. I don’t even know anymore. I never wanted to think about it. But he left him lying there on the sidewalk for some passerby to find. When Jake told me, the first thing I thought of was that backpack filled with action figures and us sitting there on the baseball field, and I felt a deep pang of longing twist in my stomach.
Jake’s voice was painfully calm over the phone.
“His dad just called me ten minutes ago.”
“Why didn’t he call me?”
“He said he didn’t have your phone number. Hey, do you think he’d want to talk about this any more than he had to?”
The realization hadn’t really hit us yet. I was only starting to feel it. We were speaking like nothing had happened. It was surreal and absurd.
“This is our fault,” I said. “We knew what he was doing. We took him to the train station.”
“Don’t say that. I don’t want to think about that. Not now.”
“We did this.”
“I can’t think about that now. I’m going to go.”
The receiver clicked in my ear, and I hung up the phone. I went out to the Shitbox and sat in the driver’s seat with my head resting on the steering wheel. I pictured Tommy lying there on the cold sidewalk, soaking in his own blood. He would have put up a fight. I knew that much. That’s probably why he got stabbed in the first place. He would have tried to fight his way out if it. That’s how he was. I could see the anger and the pain in his eyes, the way he must have looked when it happened, but I didn’t want to see it. Or maybe it didn’t happen that way at all. Maybe he hadn’t been jumped at all. Maybe he had tried to pickpocket the wrong guy. Some street-smart city kid who knew what the stuff in his backpack was worth, who knew a reversal of fortune when he saw it. I tried to push the thought of it out of my head, to make it leave. I started the car and tried to drive away from anything with a memory attached to it.
• • •
The clouds outside Donalson’s Funeral Home were smeared across the sky, but it had stopped raining. There were only a few of us inside the wide Victorian parlor: me, Jake, Tommy’s dad, and some other adults I didn’t know who must have been relatives. The casket was open to the cold air of the room, but when it was my turn to kneel, I couldn’t see Tommy inside of it. It wasn’t him. It was some taxadermied animal, some wax figure. They put too much makeup on him, I thought. Gave him too much color. He had always been pale, and I thought of West End Beach. People said he looked angelic, but I couldn’t listen to them. My friend was no angel.
As I walked back to my chair, I noticed that girl sitting in the back corner, curled up like she was trying to hide behind herself, and she shook when she breathed. She must have come in after me. I can’t picture what she was wearing. I can only see the mint green room that put a really sickly-looking color on her cheeks.
• • •
Jake and I drove in the Shitbox. The girl went with us because she didn’t have a ride to the cemetery. Do you remember that ride?
• • •
You met Tommy in a subway station on the Lower East Side. I could picture it when you told us, you sitting behind Jake. It was the December before, and there was Tommy with his backpack, coming down the stairs with snow sticking to his shoulders and his tangled red hair. You were sitting there on the graffitied wooden bench, leaning back and looking straight at him, legging legs crossed under a plaid skirt. He sees you, the girl with the knit hat, the high cheekbones and black hair, and he knows. He sits down next to you, self-assured voice saying: “Hey sweets. Where you headed?”
And you: “Back to Brooklyn.”
“Sounds good to me.”
And there you two go—back to Bensonhurst, Brooklyn, to your apartment—like you will every other weekend until the day he dies. You’re two years older than him, but he’s good to you, and you can’t feel the difference. He would stay out late on Friday night, then spend Saturday and Sunday morning with you. Then you would go out for a movie or stay home. It didn’t matter. But he always brought you flowers. Every time he came, he brought you flowers—carnations maybe, something bright that wouldn’t cost him much—a little sappy and sentimental, but he was trying. Except that Friday when he didn’t come back.
• • •
We followed the hearse past the school, past the beach, past our old dirt road and its dark woods, up to the cemetery where they buried Tommy’s mom when we were almost too young to remember. It’s in a clearing outside of town, and the middle rises up into a little hill. The grass is very thick there.
I was a pallbearer. Jake and I were both pallbearers. So was Tommy’s dad. He reeked of booze. I didn’t know the fourth man, but he must have been an uncle to be that close to the casket. None of us tripped either, even though it had drizzled earlier and the grass was slippery.
A few people said things. I just saw the reflection of the clouds on the black lacquered coffin lid, the way the breeze moved everyone’s clothes while the casket stayed still, the sound of the crows in the pine trees at the edge of the clearing.
The undertaker gave us carnations to put on him before we left. Red, pink and white. We held them while the priest talked, and I rolled the cold stem of mine between my fingers. I wondered if he could see us like people said. But I figured he couldn’t.
The priest finished his work, and people started laying the carnations on the casket lid. You stood up to add yours to the pile. I remember walking up to you and touching your arm, and I don’t know why I said, “He would’ve wanted you to keep it.”
• • •
We talked on the phone later, after you took the train back to Brooklyn. You had been crying when you picked up, but now your voice had cleared a little. It sounded smooth. I kept the headset pressed up to my ear.
“He liked you a lot,” you said. “He always had something to say about you.”
“Like what?” I asked, almost to myself.
“That you understood things.”
“What did he say about Jake?”
“You’re the only one he ever talked about.”
Neither of us said anything for a minute. Then I asked, “Am I the way he said I was?”
“I think so,” you said.
• • •
I talked to you almost every night for more than a month. Sometimes I wanted to talk about Tommy. But sometimes I just wanted to talk to you about the City, about your life, about the people on 29th and Benson Ave. Everything was wild and new there, and free, and it helped me to hear you laugh.
The night I went to you, it was too cloudy to see the stars. You were telling me about Jones Beach, how the whole city seemed to empty out onto that sand in the summer.
“I used to go with my mom,” you said. “We went every year, like all the other families on my block, at least the ones with little kids. When I was real little, I’d bring my green plastic shovel and this tiny McDonalds bucket and build sandcastles. I can’t remember a single cloudy day at that beach either. The sun was always really bright.”
“What’s the water like?” I asked. It was a stupid question. I liked to hear you talk.
“It’s usually pretty warm by the middle of summer, and the surf’s not too high. It’s just enough to body board in. You catch a wave and go with it.”
“We don’t have any big waves up here, unless a boat goes by,” I said, laughing a little. Then you were laughing too.
“I’d like to go there,” I said.
“I’d like to take you.”
I looked outside, at the darkness, at the trees right by my window and said, “How about now?”
• • •
It’s been four years since he died. That night I drove down here feels like it was so long ago. We were younger then, a lot younger. I got lost on the way around Manhattan, and I didn’t get to your apartment until midnight. But I brought you flowers because the CVS on your block was open all night. Somehow I thought it would be right. They were daisies, weren’t they? That’s all they had.
• • •
We wanted to live after we got married, to travel across the country, to go to Europe sometime in the future, you said, just to get out and see the world. Maybe, if we could save enough. I got a job working with that locksmith during the day, and at night I tended bar at Bennito’s, down 86th Street. I started bringing home pretty good money. We had a furnished apartment, a savings account even. It all seemed possible. But one morning you stayed in the bathroom for a long time, and even though I was late for a job way out in Queens, I saw the way you looked when you came out, and I didn’t want to ruin your moment.
“You’re going to be a father,” you said, throwing your arms around my neck and kissing my cheek. When you stepped back and looked up at me, I tried to smile.
• • •
So, tonight I find myself out late looking for an open store. Here in Bensonhurst there are no open supermarkets, no neoned bars. Bennito’s is closed. So is the CVS. I drive our green ‘98 Chevy Malibu down 86th and onto Sullivan, almost to Coney Island. Do you remember when the Shitbox finally died? It’s too bad Jake wasn’t here to fix it. We had to break that long-term CD to buy the Chevy.
Finally, I find Gino’s Deli on Bay 50th Street.
I pull into the parking lot and shiver as I get out of the car. The sea air is damp. Too cool for August. I can see the blackness where the ocean is, the only part of New York that isn’t lit at night. I think how maybe we should go to Jones Beach one more time before the season ends.
• • •
The inside of the deli looks like every other small store I’ve ever been in. It’s fluorescent and cold and bright in the unhappy way those places are during the night shift. I think back to when Tommy and Jake and I all used to smoke and drive down to the Price Chopper at midnight to get food, and I feel something like the old guilt twisting my stomach again. Jake’s still working with his dad up in Port Jervis. He’s probably doing okay for himself. You don’t know him real well, but I’d like to see him again. I haven’t seen him since our wedding. It’s been more than two years.
It was beautiful, though, wasn’t it? Our little group on the beach, just you and I, and the justice, and Jake, and those two friends of yours we haven’t seen in a while. The ocean was so open and wide.
There’s a flower cooler near the front door of the deli, and I want to get daisies for you again. The smile was supposed to be sincere. This is my child too. There are only red carnations, though, and as I slide the door open, the cold air rushes over me with the memories of you and him, of the funeral. I take the biggest one anyway. The leaves are a little brown at the tip, but it’s the best they have.
There are only five little aisles, and I grab a shopping basket before I make my way toward the back where I think the ketchup might be. I can’t find it, but peanut butter lives on aisle four, standing on a red wire-mesh shelf, and I pick up the Peter Pan. I find a bottle of Heinz on aisle three in front of the refrigerators for milk and eggs, and I can feel their chill on my back as I reach for the bottle. Then I go looking for a loaf of wheat bread and switch the carnation to my free hand.
There’s a sort of strobe effect on the linoleum because one of the lights needs to be replaced. Through the flickering, I see the cashier reading a magazine, the kind with photo-shopped celebrities dancing around on a cheap newspaper cover. He looks like he’s forty, maybe, and his hair is graying around his ears. Then I hear the chime of someone coming in after me.
A young kid wearing a wife-beater swaggers in like he owns the place, the bell ringing behind him. He’s about sixteen, and looks too thin to me, skinny even. There’s a layer of glass in front of his eyes—a look I know—a windshield against the world, but I can see through it. I saw it on Tommy a million times. I can see his need, and so I watch him out of the corner of my eye as he walks up to the counter. He stops to thumb through the magazines in a rack by the lighters, leaning in close to the register and the wary cashier.
He pulls the knife then. I catch the flick of the blade with my eyes. The tip rests against the shivering man’s throat.
It happens faster even than you might imagine: the guy behind the counter handing over the money, and me standing there helpless two aisles back, one arm dangling down with the weight of the basket, the other holding the bread and carnation close like a bundled baby in my arms.
The kid runs after he empties the register, but—of course—the cashier keeps a Smith & Wesson under the counter, so I guess he has been through all of this before. He shoots him in the back, right in front of the door, and the sound of the pistol cracks through the silent store, echoing around the aisles and freezers, off of the cold linoleum floor and up to the flickering lights. The kid’s back blooms red in a spray of blood. His body jerks mid-stride, his back arches, and he pitches forward into the door with a thud, falling back to the floor and lying perfectly still. His bone-thin arms and legs are splayed out like he’s still running, but his body is flat on the tiles. In one hand he still clutches the knife, in the other the fold of bills from the cash register. The only movement, though, is the red stain that’s slowly growing on the back of his shirt. Its deep color makes him seem suddenly very pale. My arms go limp, and the basket clatters to the floor. I half-expect the cashier to turn the pistol on me, but he just sets it on the counter and sits down on the cold flickering linoleum. I look at the groceries spilled across the floor and lying there next to them on the white tiles is your red carnation with the browning leaves.
I walk to the boy in slow shuffling steps and kneel down beside him, careful to avoid his pooling blood. I reach out my hand, trembling, and place two fingers on his neck just below the jaw. It’s smooth, like a girl’s. I pause, afraid to know the truth, but I press lightly and check for a pulse. There is none, and even though I can feel his body heat, I know that in a few minutes, he will be as cold as the floor.
The cashier stands up and walks to the phone behind the counter. Then we wait for a few minutes in silence, standing with the boy splayed out between us on the floor. When the police arrive, they take us both outside for questioning. The cashier says the kid took mostly ones—the cops count it out and the bills in his hand don’t amount to more than a hundred dollars—but I guess that might have been worth it to him. I have to tell you, Julie, it would have been worth it to me and Jake and Tommy, back when all of us were just kids. Back there in Port Jervis. Back there in the dark woods.
