CHRISTIAN A WINN
THE LAST SUMMER I met Jack at the river near midday. He was holding, so we found a shadowed spot along the sandy bank, sat to smoke what he had left. It was pretty much dirt weed – stems and dried-out resin – but it helped the hot day ease away. The river was still running high – fast green whorls, whitecaps crashing against deadfall and the rocky island twenty yards offshore. It had been the wettest spring in fifty years, but now summer was full upon us. It hadn’t rained all June. A hush was on the afternoon, a breeze whispering in the cottonwoods, muting the young families shouting, laughing, wading the shallow inlet across the river. Jack was quiet, too, and we sat and smoked, trying to live in an invisible in-between. It’s what we wanted most right then, to disappear. It was the last summer. Jack would be driving south in August where Camp Pendleton waited. I’d be flying east to check into a dorm tower in Chapel Hill. It was our last summer together in that city, our last summer as boys, and in moments like this, we kept trying to figure out how to say goodbye. “Another Wednesday,” Jack said. “A good day to sit right here.” I took off my shoes, pulled my toes through the warm grey sand. In May, we’d caught his mom and my dad fucking on Jack’s living room floor. This was when they were both still married, and no one else knew yet – just Jack, me, and them. Though they didn’t know we’d been watching 35
