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  “Why’s that?” Chuck asks, lighting a cigarette.

  “Because she’s kind of a stuck-up bitch.”

  “So?”

  “Well, stuck-up bitches usually don’t hook up with guys like you.”

  “What kind of guy is that?”

  “You know, Chuck—losers. No offense.”

  “That’s all right.” He exhales a puff of smoke. “None taken.”

  Pretty soon we’re outside of town and heading down a familiar road. Again, I ask where we’re going, but he just tells me to wait and see. There are only two places I know of out this way—Captain Crazy’s and Tillman’s sister’s. We pass the spot where the captain’s winged giraffe sticks up over the trees, so that just leaves Dani’s place.

  “What’s Bobby doing out here?” I ask as we head up the gravel drive to the trailer.

  “Nothing,” Chuck says. “Just needed to pick up some product, that’s all.”

  Dani comes to the door, and when we go inside, there Bobby is, scrunched down in the big orange easy chair. Facing him, on the other side of the coffee table, Dani’s boyfriend, Jace, sits on the couch stuffing weed into the bowl of a wooden pipe. A gray-blue cloud of smoke hangs in the air above them.

  Dani sits next to Jace, and Chuck squeezes in next to her. Now, I figure surely Bobby will bounce up from his chair and grab me, but he doesn’t even say anything. He just points a finger like he’s shooting me a hello. Like we haven’t seen each other in about five minutes or something. Then he turns away and takes the pipe from Jace. He poises the lighter above the bowl, closes his eyes, and says, “God is great, God is good, thank you for this dope, amen.”

  It’s too weird. So many times I’ve imagined him coming back and me running into his arms, but now all I can do is take a seat on the floor next to his chair while he sucks on the stem of that pipe. I feel like I’ve done something wrong somehow, like I’m being punished. Maybe he’s mad because I took his room when he left. Or maybe he thinks I’m on the parents’ side just because I still live with them. It’s stupid to feel guilty when I haven’t done anything, but I can’t help it.

  Jace goes back to telling a story that he must have started before we came into the room, something about how pythons have been introduced into the wild in Florida and are making their way across the rest of the country, living off raccoons and squirrels and family pets along the way. He heard a story about a two-hundred-pound python swallowing a bulldog right in front of the kids who owned it. They were traumatized.

  He takes the pipe back from Bobby. “That’s why I told Dani not to let little Ian sleep on the floor anymore. A python like that would slurp him up whole in a second.”

  “Jesus, Jace,” Dani says, scowling. “Don’t talk like that. Ian might hear you.”

  Jace waves that away. “He can’t hear anything. He’s sound asleep in the back room.”

  “You know what?” Chuck says. “Those pythons have been known to slither into cribs too. I saw an interview with one. All he said was, ‘Mmm-mmm, that was some good baby.’ ”

  “Shut your face,” Dani tells him, firing him a nastier look than the one she shot Jace.

  Bobby smiles, but not much. He looks kind of out of it, which isn’t like him. Sure, in the old days, he smoked weed now and then but just enough to add to whatever fun he was already having. Now, the way he handles that pipe and the way he looks at it when the lighter flashes over the bowl, it’s like nothing else matters in the whole universe.

  The pipe keeps going around, and Dani keeps bringing out beers, but Bobby never talks much—no stories, no jokes, not a single one of those belly laughs of his that can make you feel like the whole world is funny. Even when Jace starts into this ridiculous BS about how he should be the star of his own TV reality show, Bobby just lets it go. I mean, how boring would that show be? Who wants to watch a part-time tow-truck driver sit around in his girlfriend’s trailer house, smoking weed and talking about pythons eating bulldogs?

  I’m like, “Hey, Bobby, why don’t we get out of here, go get a Coke somewhere.” But he just goes, “Coke’s not really my thing right now, Ceejay.”

  My stomach feels like it’s made of lead. I want to leave so bad, to get out of there and go someplace where we can talk—just us, nobody else—but he seems determined to melt into that orange chair while his eyelids droop farther and farther toward closing altogether. It’s like he’s ready to stay there all night, but finally Jace takes to the wrong subject.

  He wants to hear war stories. Bobby says he doesn’t want to talk about that, but Jace keeps after him, prodding with one question after the next. Is war like in the movies? (No.) Did Bobby have an assault rifle? (Yes.) What was it like to shoot one? (It’s not like anything.) Did he ever get shot at? (I don’t want to talk about it.) Did he shoot anyone? (I don’t want to talk about it.)

  Finally, when Jace asks if Bobby knew anyone who got killed, that’s the end of the line.

  “Look,” Bobby says, standing up. “Come here, I’ll tell you something about war.”

  Jace stands and walks over to Bobby. “Let’s hear it, dude,” he says.

  Very casually, Bobby reaches up and clamps his big right hand around Jace’s throat. “Here’s the deal about war, asshole. I don’t want to fucking talk about it. You got that?”

  Red-faced, Jace tries to spit out an answer but can’t.

  “All right,” Chuck says, slapping his knee. “Bobby! Awesome!”

  Jace tries to claw Bobby’s hand away, but Bobby grabs his throat with both hands, nearly lifting him off the ground. “Let’s hear it,” he says. “Answer me. Do you understand I don’t want to talk about that shit?”

  Jace sputters something but it’s not a real word.

  “Come on, Bobby,” I say. “I think he’s got the idea.” I glance at Dani, expecting her to jump up from the couch and defend her man, but she just sits there grinning a loopy stoner grin.

  I grab Bobby’s arm. “That’s enough,” I plead. “Let him go. He didn’t mean anything. He’s just an idiot.”

  Finally, Bobby relaxes his grip, and coughing and almost purple, Jace eases down to sit on the coffee table. “Shit,” he says, finding his voice. “What’s wrong with you, dude?”

  Bobby doesn’t answer. He just picks his beer up and takes a long drink.

  “I’ll tell you this,” Jace sputters. “I’m sure as hell not gonna get you that OxyContin tonight after this. You can just get the hell out of here. Christ, choking a dude in his own home.”

  “It’s not your home,” Chuck says, bright-eyed and happy over the whole situation. “It’s Dani’s.”

  “That’s all right,” Bobby says. “I’ve had enough of this company anyway.” He starts for the door without even asking me to come with him.

  Outside, he stops by the oak tree to take a pee. Right out in the open. From behind the fence, Dani’s Rottweiler barks at him like crazy. “Hey, look out for that dog,” Chuck calls from the porch. “You won’t have anything to pee with if he takes a bite out of you.”

  We all three get into the truck, with me in the middle, but before we can pull away, Dani comes out and walks up to Bobby’s window. He rolls it down and looks at her without asking what she wants.

  “Sorry about Jace,” she says, pulling her hair away from her face. She’s dark and pretty, a female version of Tillman. At least, she’s pretty when she’s not sitting around with a look on her face like a stoned moron.

  “It wasn’t your fault,” Bobby says.

  She smiles. “Hey, I was thinking, if you still want to score some of that OxyContin, I could sell it to you some afternoon when Jace is at work.”

  “Don’t you have to work?” Bobby asks.

  “Yeah.” Her smile takes on a flirty tilt. “But I’m off the day after tomorrow.”

  “Cool.”

  “I’ll probably just be hanging around the house.”

  “Then it’s a date.”

  “All right. It’s a date.”


  As she walks away, an exaggerated swing to her hips, Chuck reaches past me to punch Bobby in the arm. “Bobby, my man,” he says. “You still got it.”

  “Yeah,” Bobby says. “At least I can fool ’em into thinking I do.”

  Chuck laughs. But it’s not funny. Before today, Bobby hardly paid any attention to Dani, and now he’s asking her on a date while he hardly even looks at me. No, there’s nothing to laugh about at all.

  14

  Riding down the highway, Chuck’s all fired up and laughing about the deal with Jace, but Bobby’s quiet and cold. It’s like sitting between a lit match and an ice cube. Back at the trailer, I thought as soon as we got out of there, I’d pour out all my thoughts and feelings, ask a million questions, lay out my plan about the two of us moving in together, but nothing pours out. I feel like I have some broken part of myself stuck in my throat, choking the words back into my stomach.

  Chuck rambles off on the old days, stories about how he and Bobby used to tear this town up with their wild ways. Bobby barely pays attention, sitting there staring out the side window instead. Finally, Chuck pauses to take a pull on his beer and I jump in.

  “So.” I nudge Bobby with my shoulder. “When are you gonna call Mom and Dad and tell them you’re back?”

  “Sometime,” he says, still staring out the window.

  “He has to get his party on for a little while first,” Chuck says.

  But I’m like, “I don’t understand. I thought you were supposed to be coming back next month, and then all of a sudden I hear this gossip that you’re hanging out with Mona, and the next thing I know, you’re sneaking into the house like you’re on some kind of secret mission. What’s that all about?”

  “Look,” he says. “It’s not about anything. I’ll call Mom and Dad in a couple of days. Don’t worry.”

  Before I can say anything back, he twists in his seat to see out the window better and hollers, “Wow, what’s that over there? Slow down, dude. I want to look at this.”

  We’re passing Captain Crazy’s place, so I figure Bobby’s just now glimpsing the giraffe head—the captain wasn’t a town fixture before Bobby’s army days, and we sure never bothered to visit out here when he was home on leave—but now there’s something more than just the giraffe rising above the trees.

  “Damn,” Bobby says. “It looks like some kind of giant silver bird.”

  Sure enough, it is a silver bird, but it’s not flying. It’s waving around on the end of a tall metal pole.

  Chuck’s like, “It’s just some more Captain Craziness,” but Bobby’s all, “Pull over, pull over, I gotta see this!”

  I’m like, “You don’t want to mess around with Captain Crazy. He’s an idiot. One hundred percent.”

  He doesn’t care, though. As soon as Chuck pulls to the side of the road, Bobby flings the door open and takes off running toward the woods.

  “Bobby,” I call after him, “don’t go over there! We’re dealing with a maniac here!” But he just keeps going.

  I yell, “Stop him, Chuck,” but Chuck’s like, “Hey, this might be fun,” and then he’s out the door too.

  What am I supposed to do now? I don’t want to show up at the captain’s after our commando raid on his place, but at the same time, I can’t let Bobby slip away, so I bounce out of the truck and follow his trail through the trees and underbrush, heading for Casa Crazy.

  Where the woods give way to the captain’s front yard, I hang back while Chuck and Bobby forge ahead. The silver bird turns out to be part of a new sculpture the captain’s trying to erect with the aid of—guess who? Mr. White. Decked out in his stupid costume of hope—white painter’s overalls and cap, white T-shirt, and white sneakers.

  “You need some help with that thing?” Bobby calls out, and the captain looks up from his work, his face beaming. “Hey, man!” he says. “A soldier of the light has appeared before us. Far out! Yeah, come on, come on. We need all the help we can get, man!”

  Bobby hustles over and grabs a higher place on the pole while the captain and Mr. White work at fixing the bottom into the ground. Then Chuck joins in, and I swear they look like the dudes who raised that flag on Iwo Jima. Only instead of a flag, it’s some kind of wild totem pole.

  At the top there’s the silver bird, an eagle, from the looks of it, and then, fixed to the pole below that, there are about seven flat sheets of tin, each one with a symbol painted on it, mostly animals—a wolf head, a running horse, a rabbit, and a chipmunk, things like that. The sun has dropped down about even with the treetops, and its light glints on the metal, flashing in different directions as the boys work the pole back and forth.

  Mr. White says something about how they need to put braces on the thing, and Bobby hollers, “Hey, Ceejay, come here and help us out!”

  I’m not exactly eager to get over there—I mean, after all, remnants of my paintball marks are still all over the house—but if Bobby wants my help, I’m bound to give it. When I grab the pole, the captain looks straight at me and smiles. That’s all. He just smiles like he thinks this means I’m all of a sudden on his side. Of course, I do it because Bobby wants me to, but really, if it wasn’t for that, I wouldn’t care if the thing fell over and smashed to pieces.

  So there we are, making sure the totem pole is straight and fixing wooden braces to it so it’ll stay that way while the cement sets. At least that part feels good—working shoulder to shoulder with Bobby.

  When we get everything in place, we stand back and look at the finished product. The sun has dropped below the trees now, its fading light adding a warm pinkish glow to the sheets of tin and the metal eagle.

  “You see it now, don’t you?” Captain Crazy says. He’s looking straight at me, his eyes burning.

  “See what?”

  “You know.”

  I’m like, “Whatever.” But it’s kind of creepy. Like he thinks he knows what’s going on inside of me.

  He looks back at the totem pole and claps his hands. “Time to celebrate! Sacramental hot links! Hot links on a stick and blackberry wine!”

  I’m like, “We don’t need any wine. We have to be heading home.”

  But Bobby goes, “Are you kidding? Sure, we need wine. Bring it on.”

  “Hell yeah,” adds Chuck. “Just what the doctor ordered.”

  Great, I think. All I want to do is leave as soon as possible, but fat chance. Until I can think of a way to get Bobby out of here, I’m stuck.

  15

  I’m sure not about to trust any homemade wine of Captain Crazy’s, but I go ahead and try the hot links. We roast them over a little fire below the totem pole and eat them straight off the stick. Bobby and Chuck aren’t so particular about the wine and drink it from jars the captain provides. Even Mr. White partakes, but only in small sips.

  For some ungodly reason, Bobby takes to the captain right away and talks a lot more than he did at Dani’s. He goes into how he likes the sculptures and even the way the paint splotches on the house and the lime-green truck look. He seems to think they’re a part of the captain’s artistic plan, and the captain doesn’t tell him any different. Maybe I should appreciate the captain for that, but I’m not about to forget his fake Vietnam protest and how he basically called me a coward. I keep quiet about it, though. At least for the time being. But if he starts any more of that nonsense, I’ll show him who the coward really is.

  Chuck asks the captain if it’s true he used to make records, and the captain’s face lights up.

  “Sure did, man,” he says. “Way back in the way-back times.”

  Bobby asks what that was like, and the captain says it was a gas, whatever that means. He tells us how one day he was doing his usual deal with the guitar and the conga drum on Sunset Strip in Los Angeles, and some big, psychedelic rock-god dude from the sixties happens by. “He was blown away,” the captain says, real enthusiastic, like it’s happening to him all over again. “He says, ‘Man, we gotta get you in the studio,’ and that’s what happened. We went i
nto the studio like a month later and laid down some tracks. That’s when I did ‘Sliced Penguins.’ ”

  “That’s off Crash Landing on Pluto,” says Mr. White, and the captain’s like, “Yeah, man. Crash Landing on Pluto. That was a gas.”

  “You know what I heard about that,” says Chuck. “I heard you still got money coming in from that shit.”

  The captain grins at Mr. White. “Listen to this guy,” he says. “He’s all about the money, man. I don’t worry about that. I’m not a banker. I don’t work for the IRS, man. It’s all about getting the word out.”

  “The song is a metaphor,” Mr. White explains. “Penguins are like the world’s most innocent animals. And that’s what happens to innocence in this society. It gets all sliced up.”

  I’m thinking surely that will sound as ridiculous to Bobby as it does to me, but he nods like he understands perfectly.

  “What about these sculptures?” he says, waving his hot-link-on-a-stick in their direction. “What’s up with them? It’s like they have some kind of meaning I can’t quite put my finger on.”

  “Oh yeah, man, yeah,” says the captain, his words coming in quick bursts, like he has to hurry before somebody or something tries to stop him. “They have a meaning, all right. Yeah, they do. No doubt you’ve met the Nogo Gatu.”

  “Nogo Gatu?” says Bobby. “No, I don’t believe I have.”

  “Oh, sure you have,” says Chuck facetiously. “You’ve met the Nogo Gatu. He was a year behind us in high school.”

  “I hear you, man,” the captain says, looking at Chuck. “You don’t believe in anything. But that’s all right. That’s all right. You just haven’t opened up yet. Isn’t that right, Padgett?”

  Padgett is Mr. White. He nods.

  “But he’s young,” the captain goes on. “He’ll open up. He will. If you don’t open up, if you don’t see them and hear them and smell them, the Nogo Gatu will dance around you, man. They’ll dance around you with the dark fire in their hands.”