It got dark and they fell in. The water was cold. They turned together under the surface, Janelle’s hair twisting like smoke, her eyes closed. Blaine could barely see her face in the dim moonglow through the high gym windows. He thought again about his own death, how easy it would be to drown, to let go. But then he inhaled, choked. It hurt and he panicked, pulling her up with him.
He coughed while Janelle vomited water. Then she rolled on her back, looked at him, and grinned.
“Your eyes are fucking crazy,” he said. He was flat on his back. Janelle was beside him, her pale shoulder glittering with droplets.
“Your eyes are fucking crazy. Along with the rest of you. Where’s my shirt?”
The water slapped against the tile. The pool filters gulped. Somewhere, far above in the dark, a wall clock thunked one minute forward. Blaine had a dim memory of boosting her up through one of the men’s room windows. They were in the Women’s Gymnasium, CSU Fresno. What the fuck.
“You put it on that kid’s head. The one who grabbed your ass.”
“He shouldn’t have done that.” Janelle sat up and raked her wet hair back. “Gimmie your shirt. Did I burn the place down this time?”
He could see her ribs in the moonlight, the bumps of her spine, the goat’s head pentagram on the back of her neck. Blaine sat up beside her and started unbuttoning his soaked short-sleeve. “You tried.”
“No shit? Well, that’s what happens when you smoke K.”
The kid hadn’t been smoking K. That had been Janelle. They took the elevator up to the second floor and climbed back out the bathroom window, slower this time. On that side of the building, it was only a short drop to a closed dumpster. Then they walked across campus toward the sirens.
The kid’s only crime had been being drunk and horny. He’d done what any loaded 19-year-old will do when a woman takes off her shirt in the middle of the frat party and grinds on him. He didn’t deserve a front kick to the sternum.
“Holy shit,” Janelle said.
Yes, thought Blaine, holy shit. Across Shaw Avenue, the Zeta Beta Tau house was on fire. Red-orange flames licked out of the windows. A crowd had formed. A wilted group of sorority girls in tiny shorts and sweatshirts sat on the curb, crying and holding hands. A few people still had plastic cups full of beer. The police had set up a perimeter and two water trucks were spraying the third floor. Then a deep thud came from within and a green fireball busted out towards the sky, raining hot glass on the firemen. They immediately turned away and dropped to one knee like synchronized swimmers or medieval soldiers when a volley of arrows comes down.
“I guess you succeeded,” Blaine said. The air smelled like smoke and melted plastic. The heat had already dried his T-shirt.
“Maybe it wasn’t me. I don’t remember a thing.”
“It was you. It’s always you.”
Five campuses this spring and three fires. Deaths? Blaine didn’t know. Why would he want to know something like that? And yet he felt he should know. He should find out. So when they got caught and someone threw them both in a dark hole, at least Blaine would know why. Someone was tracking them. Someone had to be.
“Shit,” Janelle said. “Look.”
Two sorority girls and a frat brother with a ball cap on sideways talking to a cop and pointing.
“Go,” Blaine said. They walked. They didn’t look back. When they got a block away, they started running—silently, simultaneously, the way the firefighters had knelt, perfectly synchronized, as if the two of them had also been trained. Some mad dance: arson, fire, and blame.
“You gonna hit it or what?” she said when the Dodge Monaco wouldn’t turn over. Blaine touched the screwdriver to the top of the solenoid inside the mangled steering column—nothing.
“It’s dead, babe. We have to go. Get something else.”
Janelle sighed. She’d found some black lipstick in her duffle bag, but she was still wearing his short-sleeved button-up. She was a beautiful woman, no doubt about it. Fair skin, long raven hair, blue eyes. She’d even look good when all she had to wear was a prison jumpsuit. The yellow-white streetlight made her jawline and cheekbones look extra severe. Her hair framed her face in graceful arcs. She looked well put together, as if she hadn’t just gotten high on horse tranquilizer, burned down a house, and almost drowned.
“Give it here.” Janelle slid over to him and planted a black kiss on his cheek. When she used the screwdriver to cross the terminals on the solenoid, the Monaco lurched and started up with a high keening deep in the engine. She kissed him on the lips, made the heavy metal horns with her right hand, and said, “Love me.”
“Listen to that. It won’t last.”
“Nothing does, Blaine.” She winked, then slouched against the passenger door and shut her eyes. It started to rain. They went down several tree-lined streets to the squeak of the wipers and the death cry of the engine. Blaine headed for what he thought might be the direction of the 5 North. He rolled down the window and lit a cigarette, listening to the sirens in the distance.
It was dangerous, life. He was falling. Always in his dreams, falling or burning or screaming. Not so different from when he was awake. He’d done too many drugs. That was one thing. Ketamine. Meth. Rock. Hash. Shit Janelle cooked up on the way. How did they both still have their original teeth? Blaine didn’t know. Cancer was probably locked in. Arthritis for sure. He creaked when he walked. He’d turned 37 four days ago and hadn’t said a thing about it. What would Janelle have done if he had? Bake him a cake?
Now she’d gotten the portable lab stuff, the hot plate, their tiny generator and some ingredients. She was over in the woods doing her thing. You could make meth from lots of substances. And you could make it anywhere. All it took were a few household products, a heat source, and patience. He’d taught her how, at first, but now it was all Janelle. Maybe it was bullshit, the patience part. But they were careful. They hadn’t had a cooking explosion in a long time. Still, what did he know? These days, he waited by the car. She never let him watch.
Maybe she was cooking down another batch of that liquid K they’d bought in Arizona. Or something else. They could make more in the long run selling meth to hillbillies in trailer parks, but that was dangerous. So they stuck to universities. And the college crowd liked K just fine. Dissociative. Hallucinogenic. Snort a bump of ketamine and you go outside your body. Tastes like oven cleaner if you smoke it. But it’s good for the nervous high-maintenance types. Blaine had seen it all. Rich kids with suitcases of dope. Wheezing trailer trash rednecks in wife beaters, no teeth and orange hair. Secretaries with death in their eyes. Fun-loving idiots who had no idea. Addicts. Future captains of industry. Future guests of the state. Kids on fire, feverish, drowning, disintegrating, disconnected, coming down, shot up, strung out, freezing in the heat, melting in the cold. Kids headed for the gutter, jail, the grave. Everything.
Pop the trunk. There it was. A shit-ton of meth in two lady’s handbags. Three more 12oz. cylinders of liquid ketamine. His usual bag of travelling hash. A cardboard box of lab equipment, solvents, a folded tent. A crate of cold pills in individual boxes. A box of powdered rat poison. All that special goodness.
Janelle came back grinning, armpit rings and a V of sweat on her T-shirt between her breasts. She smelled like cleaning supplies and burned hair.
“We’re good.” She took the cigarette from his lips.
“How good?”
Janelle sat on the bumper of the Monaco, smiled, smoked. “Just wait.”
Four hours later, after dumping the chemical remains in an orchard and getting a filthy dinner at Denny’s, they drove through downtown Chico, looking for the state college. She had directions written on a ripped piece of graph paper. 11:30 PM on a Friday. Packed sidewalks. All bars wide open. Drunk blondes in glittery dresses. Subwoofer thumps at the stoplights. A ten-year-old with a mohawk in front of a lit-up laundromat breakdancing on a piece of linoleum, black silhouettes around him in the bonelight.
“Go left,” she said. And there it was. Chico State. Dark as a crypt. The place looked like Atlantis sunk beneath the waves. Blaine imagined a shark snaking between the red-brick buildings. They went around a field to the other side of the campus, then went left again and rolled down another quiet tree-lined street. It looked just like the one in Fresno where they’d parked the car before selling the first batch of K to the ZBTs and then ruining everyone’s night. Every campus in the country had neighborhoods like that around it. Quiet old houses. Not too much money, but clean and neat. Window boxes with geraniums. Cats. It was the sort of area Blaine used to live in when he worked at Chemical Dynamics in San Diego. But that was more than five years ago—when he had a job, a wife, a life. Ancient history. Before he failed his drug test three times in a row. Before Janelle.
“Here,” she said. “Yeah. This.” Small two-bedroom house. Peach stucco. The rust-colored drapes everybody had in the 70s tied to the sides of the front window. Dark inside. He went by, did a three-point turn, and parked across the street from the house. Janelle opened the trunk and wrapped something in a plastic grocery bag. Then they were ready. They walked down the driveway past a minivan and a Subaru with a CSUC Faculty Parking sticker in the corner of the windshield. The backyard was a small rectangle of flat grass surrounded by trees and walled with fix-foot trellises. The neighbor’s floodlight shined around the spikes of a wrought iron spite fence, striping half the yard and house with fat bars of light. More bonelight. Pale. Spectral. Ghost city. Dead light.
Nothing on in the house, but they didn’t have to knock. He came out immediately and shut the door quietly behind himself. Fat guy. Round belly and a double chin. Early forties. Brown hair down to his shoulders, parted in the middle. Khakis. Lionel Richie concert shirt. Hello, it said across the bottom, is it me you’re looking for? He had a long face, small full lips, and the expression that people get at graveside funerals—mournful, a bit uncomfortable, a bit like he thought he should be somewhere else, like maybe he’d killed the person in the casket and was afraid people might catch on. He stood on the cement step just below his backdoor and frowned at them.
“What do you want?”
“Who else comes up to your backdoor at midnight?” Blaine said.
“That’s not what I asked you.”
“We’re here to sell you illegal drugs.” Janelle smirked and held up the bag.
He looked at her for a long moment. His frown got deeper, brows pushed together. Then he laughed. “Well good.” He looked Blaine up and down. “And what are you here for?”
“What the fuck does it look like?” There was something about this guy that seemed extra wrong. Not the usual wrong drug shit, but reptile wrong. The kind of guy who goes to AA meetings to find a date. That sick vibe. He was a college teacher? Of what?
“Wait here.” He went back inside, taking care not to make a sound. When he turned, they could see the handle of a gun in his pants pocket. Blaine looked at Janelle. She shrugged.
The fat man slipped back out with a yellow plastic bong in his hand. “Let’s see it. And keep your voice down. My wife’s asleep.”
Janelle unwrapped the plastic grocery bag and took out a large Ziploc full of white powder. The K. She held the bag in the light. It cast a gauzy spider web on the back of the house. Bonelight, boneweb, thought Blaine, everything dead or dying, falling apart, falling away.
The man’s mournful expression had returned. He offered the bong to Janelle. “Go ahead. Do the honors.”
She looked at it and shook her head. “Sorry, Nate, I don’t feel like it tonight.”
“You serious? How do I know it’s for real? How do I know it won’t tear a thousand little holes in my lungs on the first bowl?”
“Killing customers is bad for business,” Blaine said.
Nate turned his head slowly and raised his eyebrows. “Was I speaking to you?”
“I was speaking to you. If you want the shit, pay us. Otherwise, we’re out.”
Nate looked at Janelle. “I think he’s bad for business.”
“He’s my boyfriend.”
“Oh really. Well tell him to relax. And at least pack one for me.”
She put the bag on the ground. “Why don’t you do it?”
He sighed. “Because of this.” He took the gun out and pointed it at Blaine. It was a little gun, the kind women keep in their purses. Dull black metal. Not a movie gun. Not an ego gun. A gun people buy along with shooting lessons because they’re planning on using it and afraid of it at the same time. A gun you get shot with in a parking lot or in someone’s living room or in a dark backyard.
“What is this?” Blaine said. “You’re robbing us?”
“Lower your voice. My wife needs her sleep.”
“You’ll wake her up if you fire that thing,” Janelle said.
“Aw, shit,” he smiled and tossed the bong to her with his free hand. “You got me there. Then I guess I’ll have to shoot her, too.”
It’s not even his place, thought Blaine. He broke in and killed everybody. He’s a psychopath.
“Hurry it up,” Nate said. Then he looked at Blaine and winked.
Janelle carefully loaded and tamped the bowl with her thumb. Then she got out her lighter and offered it to him.
“No way,” he said. “You first.”
She gave him a look of pure hate but took a hit. The smoke was thick and unnaturally white when she exhaled. Cartoon dragon smoke. She made a face and blinked a few times. It smelled the way the house fire had—hot chemicals, melted plastic.
“That good, huh?”
“Always tastes like that.” She croaked the words out and spat on the grass.
Nate nodded and sighed. “Okay,” he said. “I’m satisfied.” Then he unzipped and took out his limp penis, a small pale tongue hanging out the mouth of his fly. “Now you can blow me.”
“Fuck you,” said Blaine.
“Right.” Nate shrugged and fired into the ground. The gun made a pop no louder than a balloon. Lines of gray smoke came out of the barrel and flowed up around his hand like tiny serpents. “I can do you and then pick up with her. It’s all the same to me.”
Blaine looked at Janelle. She had dead eyes. She put down the bong. “It’s cool,” she said. “Just be cool. Blaine, why don’t you go sit in the car.”
“He’s not going anywhere,” Nate said. “Now get with it.”
She wobbled as she walked over to him. She knelt down and took his penis in her mouth the way she sometimes did with Blaine, then started bobbing her head.
Blaine’s throat tightened up. He was breathing hard. He stared at the gun still pointed at him. He was maybe five, six feet away. He started to sweat.
But Nate was looking straight at him, grinning. Nate didn’t look away, even when he slapped the side of Janelle’s head. “Slower” he said. “Take your time.”
She slowed down.
The wind rose in the leaves above the backyard. Black branches waved in the starless sky. It took a long time for Nate to come. He made a little sound and told Janelle to swallow. And then Blaine thought they were both going to die. And he thought about falling in the pool; the time they were both shitfaced and Janelle drove them off the freeway into a canyon; the time he came home high and his wife Sarah started screaming because he’d gotten cut to the bone and was covered in blood and didn’t realize it; the time Janelle tried to burn a Hummer and it had a locking gas cap and wouldn’t burn and she kept pouring gas over it from a can and then, when she finally gave up, it exploded and they were both deaf for a week. A hundred other times. Waking up in the hospital. Waking up in a ditch with blood in his hair. Waking up on an enormous concrete pipe in a construction site. Waking up in people’s homes, in stolen cars, on roofs, in movie theaters, on shit-stained mattresses. Death was easy. It was right there all the time. It was drugs. It was that bullet in the ground. It was Janelle. It was Blaine himself, his own mind. Maybe it didn’t matter whether you tried to live or die. Sometimes you lived. Other times you died.
“That was real sweet,” Nate said. Then he gestured with the gun. “Now get lost before I change my mind.”
They backed away from Nate, the bong, the bag of K, his erect penis sticking up out of his fly, glistening in the light. They walked up the driveway in silence, past the Subaru with its faculty parking sticker, past the minivan with a plastic Goofy on the dash.
Janelle got halfway to the car before she started vomiting. Blaine tried to put his arm around her, but she staggered up, almost fell, and ran down the middle of the street. He watched her go. She went across the intersection at the end of the block and almost got hit by a truck. She didn’t even look.
He started searching for her about an hour later. The Monaco wouldn’t turn over. Blaine worked the screwdriver across the solenoid from ten or twelve different angles before the current connected in the steering column. Meanwhile, the house across the street stayed dark.
Blaine drove around the neighborhood, smoking cigarette after cigarette. He was thinking about guns. He was thinking about handcuffs and about injecting oven cleaner into Nate’s balls and letting him stay like that until he died. He was thinking maybe Janelle was going to kill herself—because she’d tried to before. But he was also thinking she’d want to burn one more house down first, that she wouldn’t go out so easy once she got angry. And he knew she was angry.
So he cruised the gas stations in the area. Janelle knew a hundred ways to start a fire, but gas was her favorite. It was her thing. She loved the smell of it. She loved the way it burned, the way it made a fire breathe. She said a gas fire was better than a poem or getting high. It got her high. Just the sight of it.
But he couldn’t find her. He went down the same streets twenty, thirty times. Not knowing where else to look, he drove back to Nate’s house. It was almost 2:00 AM. He parked in exactly the same place, got out, and leaned against the car.
There was Nate in the front room, sitting in a recliner, watching T.V. He had a beer resting on his belly. A woman came in. She was wearing a pink bathrobe and she had a baby on her shoulder. She was patting it on the back, doing a little rock-a-bye dance. Nate said something to her, then looked at the T.V. and started to laugh. Then she started to laugh. They laughed for a long time.
Something was real funny. But the baby was crying. It was wearing one of those animal pajama suits, all one piece with little rabbit ears on the hood. She held the baby at arm’s length and said something, then she started patting it more rapidly on the back, doing that rock-a-bye dance. She and Nate were still laughing. He got up and put his arms around them both and they started waltzing across the living room. Waltzing and laughing. The woman did a one-handed pirouette. And he bowed like an 18th century lord.
That’s when Blaine looked around and noticed Janelle sitting on the porch steps of the house behind him. She had two red metal gas cans beside her, the sort you see strapped to the backs of Jeeps. She’d been crying. Maybe she’d cried out all her tears. He walked up and sat next to her.
“There’s a baby over there,” she said. “He’s got a baby. They’re dancing.”
“He’s got a wife, too, from the look of it.”
Janelle nodded slowly. “I guess she woke up.”
Now Nate was back in the recliner, holding the baby on his belly where the bottle had been. He pointed at the television and said something to the kid. The wife had disappeared.
“I can’t do this.” Janelle looked down at the gas cans, rested her hand on them. “I want to, but I can’t.”
It started to rain. They stared through it at Nate until his wife came back and took the baby. Then it was just him. He turned off the lights. The blue-white flicker of the television flashed on his face like lightning.
“We could get him now,” Blaine said. “Get the crowbar from the trunk. Throw a rock through the window. Go straight in at him. Beat him in front of his wife and kid. He fucking deserves it.”
Janelle thought about it. But she shook her head. “He’s got a baby. The baby’s innocent.”
“So we don’t beat on the baby.”
“Come on,” she said. “Let’s see if the heater works in the car.”
Blaine drove to a 7-11 and they bought doughnuts and coffee. Then he got on the 5 going south this time. Neither of them felt like spending the night in Chico. They hadn’t talked about where they were going to go next. It didn’t matter. After an hour, she looked at him.
“You know,” she said, “some people lead their whole lives and never go dancing.”
Blaine remembered the kid with the mohawk breakdancing outside the laundromat in that dead bonelight. Maybe that kid was high. Maybe he was just a normal kid. Maybe he had no home. Maybe he was some kind of genius. Maybe he’d grow up to be a rapist like Nate. It made no difference. Blaine would never know him.
“But then maybe they do dance. Maybe they just decide to and they do it,” he said.
She coughed, nodded. “Yeah. I mean, it doesn’t cost anything. No one can stop you. You say, I’m going dancing. You just make the decision and you go.” Her voice wobbled a little. She looked very young to Blaine right then.
He smiled. “Anybody can.”
“Yeah.” She looked at the rain being pushed along the passenger’s side window. “Even us. We could go dancing.”
“We could. I like dancing.”
“I like it, too. It’s better than dying.”
The keening from the engine had gotten worse—like an animal caught in a cruel trap, screaming in pain. The wipers squeaked. The steering column made an electrical zap sound and smelled like hot metal.
“Blaine, can we go to San Francisco? I think my mom lives there.”
“We could go down there,” he said. “There’s nothing stopping us. San Francisco’s better than dying.”
“I think I need some help.” She slid over and put her head on his shoulder. “Can we stay there for a while?”
He said yes, okay, if that’s what she wanted.
“Yes,” she said. “And I want to go dancing someplace like normal people.”
Blaine thought about it. Normal might be good. They could try normal. So he said he might like that, too. The night was almost over. The bonelight had faded back to the drug world, the world of the dead, the lost, the dreaming. Ahead there was only sunrise and the mad dance of the sober, daylit world.
* Note: this story first appeared in Redline, Best of the Year Issue, 2014.
The Writing Expedition 