ROUNDABOUT

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

that afternoon, that we’d skipped midday classes to walk through that staid, tree-lined neighborhood where we’d lived our whole lives back to Jack’s and smoke, talk, thumb through his dad’s collection of Oui magazines. Our parents were career people, and we were only children. Skipping had been our Wednesday ritual since Christmas break when Jack started dealing weed and Quaaludes for this college kid named Curtis. Wednesdays brought the new supply.

That one Wednesday when his mom drove up and the garage door scrolled open, we slipped out the sliding-glass back door. For some reason, though, we didn’t head into the neighborhood, but stood within the juniper bushes to smoke another bowl. From there we had a clear view of the living room, and soon they appeared – his tall, redheaded mom; my shorter, broadshouldered dad – and went at each other on the beige carpet twenty feet from Jack and me. We stared, high enough not to be embarrassed. Shoes came off, buttons popped; Jack’s mother wasn’t wearing panties; my dad ducked his head beneath her yellow-flowered dress; her neck craned, her mouth made sounds that were almost words – primal, gorgeous.

Jack and I still hadn’t figured what to say to each other about all this, though we’d gone back to watch three more Wednesdays. School was done now, and so they must have assumed someone might be around because the last two weeks we’d waited, but there was no show.

“Think they’re in a motel?” Jack said, digging through his baggie. “Or do you think they stopped?”

“What motel?”

36

“Out by the airport.” Jack licked his fingers, stood, walked to the water. “Curtis takes girls out there.”

“I thought he had a house.”

“He says some girls are motel girls, some are house.”

“I guess that’s right,” I said, wondering how you’d figure the difference, or if my dad thought of women that way, or if he was thinking that way this afternoon with Jack’s mom.

“This bag’s dead,” Jack said. “I gotta meet Curtis at three.” He looked at his thin, freckled wrist, then up at the clear sky. “We’ve got a couple hours. He said the new stuff is wicked sticky.”

Curtis lived in a neighborhood of ranch houses near the university, not far from the river – an area where students crashed eight to a house, and where poor married couples or single old men lived. Not quite a slum, but nothing like the restored Victorians our families lived in across town.

When we knocked on Curtis’ door we didn’t get an answer, though people were moving around inside, shushing each other.

“We should give him a minute,” Jack said.

“He’s probably got a house lady over.” I thought about knocking harder, but I’d met Curtis once, and though he didn’t look super badass, I could tell he was someone whose good side you wanted to keep on.

“The supplier,” Jack nodded to a polished green mini-van. “The East LA Mexican chick who motors up twice a month with duffel bags full.”

We walked the bending streets past un-mowed lawns and cracked driveways, everything hollow, like no one

37

lived in these houses at all. College was out for summer, and everyone else must have been at work, or sitting in dim, air-conditioned rooms watching TV. We walked, saying little, watching the heat blur the asphalt and short trees and for-sale cars, all of it looking precisely how I felt. And it seemed Jack and I were turning over the same thing – how to deal with what we knew now of our parents; how to figure our watching; how to add up what our lives might become.

I wanted to put my hand on his shaggy head and say, “Years from now, we’ll know what all this means. We’ll be way gone from here. But, we’ll know.” But that wasn’t quite right, and it was not true, and each time I reached, my hand fell back to my side.

“Remember that woman who got murdered last year?” Jack said, stopping, pointing. “The decapitated ex-wife?”

“Dude threw her head on the roof?”

“This’s where it happened. In that living room. On that carpet. Curtis said there was gore everywhere, and that all afternoon the guy stood at that window covered in it, waiting.”

We stared at the small brick house. It was neatly cared for – roses and fresh bark lining the well-watered lawn. It was the nicest house on the block.

“Curtis told me she kept teasing him about his little dick,” Jack said, smiling sadly. “She had a new man she kept bragging about. Curtis heard ‘em fighting couple of times. Eventually the guy has enough, loses it. She comes home one day, dude knocks her out, stuffs something up inside her, cuts off her head. He did the worst thing for the best reason, that’s what Curtis says.”

I stared, trying to imagine the backside of that red

38

painted front door, or my breath against that window. Sweat raced down my spine.

As we rounded deeper into the neighborhood, the smell of dry straw and creosote all around, a little retarded girl ran up behind us, the only person we’d seen all afternoon. She was probably twelve, wearing a dirty, flower-print sundress and leather sandals. She grinned in that happy, vacant way, murmuring oblong words. A thin bruise smudged her neck below the right ear. Jack and I shrugged, kept on in silence, and she followed. I asked her name, and she shrugged, too. Jack asked where she lived, and she skipped in circles along the sidewalk.

“How hard is it to cut off a human head?” I reached across my neck. “There’s a lot of stuff in there.”

“With the right tools it can’t be hard.” Jack felt his neck, too.

Behind us the girl screamed happily, ran up to take our hands, and we walked with her between us. She mumbled an indecipherable diatribe explaining she was having the best day of her life. At first this seemed sad, but soon enough it became hopeful.

At a pause I said, “Did you know my dad likes his mom?”

The girl nodded, yes, as did Jack. “And they do it,” I said. “Know what do it means?”

She stuck out her tongue. Jack poked a finger into his nose. She shook her head, groaning.

“If you really watch,” Jack said. “When two people do it, they make faces and noises like you.”

“Maybe you were born to do it,” I said, though this sounded wrong, and a little sick, and made me wonder who this girl could ever end up with. She’d live her

39

whole life in this neighborhood, alone, in that happy head.

Jack blurted a throaty, retarded-sounding, “Fuck me, Dale! Put it in my dirty place!”

“You’re a filthy bird, Francis.”

“Go! Take this trash out, Dale!” Jack squinted, crooked his jaw, his face joyous.

I thrust my hips. “Give it, Francis! Take it, Francis!” We eased along in silence for fifteen or twenty paces, our sneakers crackling the asphalt gravel. I looked over the girl, to Jack, but he held his head low, only grinning into his chest. What more was there to say?

Then in a burst, “Give!” the girl yelled, her mouth a red, round O. “Take!”

Jack and I bent at the waist, laughing like we never would again, unable to catch our breath as the girl squeezed tighter, fingers slick with sweat, as the girl shut her eyes, groaning, pursing her lips, trying to speak.

But, she couldn’t figure this out, she couldn’t bring those words back, or any words at all, so she let us go and ran slowly into the bright, hot day, her arms spread like wings.

40