Summer Sons(85)

“You think I don’t know what that’s like, huh,” Andrew said.

Sam’s shinbone ground against his calf, boot still planted on his chair leg. Andrew grasped the table and leveraged himself to standing, nose to nose with Sam, invading his space in turn. From other nights, fire nights, he knew the taste of the fight about to unfurl between them. Swift and brutal, to assume the least.

“Yeah, I do. Everything’s been handed to you. You live in your own fucking world, and all you see is you and him,” Sam accused, breath reeking of liquor, his glare just as scouring.

Andrew said, “I see you, Sam. You don’t see me, though, if you think that’s true.”

“Ain’t it? Prove me wrong,” Sam demanded.

He splayed his hand on Andrew’s sternum. Andrew grabbed his wrist to pin him still, the fingertips digging into his pectoral muscle as if Sam could scoop out his beating heart. He squeezed the thick wrist in his grip until his healing forearm hurt from the strain. Sam took it, unimpressed, forcing him a step backward until the edge of the chair bumped the backs of his knees. Seconds dragged out as the room fell silent, each watching the other, skin to skin.

Andrew spilled over first: “When we were kids, I followed Ed into the woods. He was feeling something weird. He had to figure out what it was. When it started getting dark, I asked him to go back. He said no. We got a minute or two farther in and fell down a fucking sinkhole.” The confession scalded him from the inside out. “I broke my ankle, he concussed himself. We couldn’t climb out. I broke all my fingernails trying to get up the dirt. The sun went down. He was delirious, bleeding goddamn everywhere. I’d cut myself from ass to shoulder on a root. You want me to keep going?”

“You’re not dead,” Sam said.

“Yeah, fucking fancy that.”

Sam broke Andrew’s grip with a simple twist of his wrist, as if he’d only been waiting for the right moment. In the process he caught the start of the raw brown-red scab Andrew’s sleeve failed to cover. One additional step to the side broke their clinch. Sam gestured to his arm and Andrew realized his cover was blown.

“What’d you do?” Sam asked.

“I thought you didn’t want to get involved with my weird shit,” he said.

“I really don’t,” he said, “but you’re going to tell me anyway.”

One thing at a time, Andrew thought, rancor simmering at Sam for thinking he was soft and spoiled. “You want me to finish the other story first or not?”

Sam gulped the last of his bourbon in two huge swallows and bared his teeth in a sinus-clearing gasp of relief. Trees loomed outside the kitchen windows in the settling night. Andrew felt a desperate call to speak, maddened by the unstoppable fractures spreading from his past to his present; he was the sole living person who knew the tale he was about to tell from front to finish. After he told it, he wouldn’t be alone.

“Fine,” Sam said. “Porch. Let’s go.”





23


Andrew sat on the edge of the porch with his legs dangling behind the bushes and Sam settled down next to him, one big hand planted on the concrete between his spread thighs. The minutely grating seam of the concrete sank into Andrew’s hamstrings, a distracting line of pressure. Fireflies blinked through the gloom of later evening, brief lights there and gone. Starting again after the fight had stalled out felt wrong, so Andrew offered, “You want to see the scar?”

“Guess it’s fair, I know you saw mine,” Sam said.

Andrew skinned his shirt over his head, the mop of his hair collapsing around his face in disarray as the collar pulled it. Sam leaned back on his hands to have a long look and whistled through his teeth, then said, “Got you deep, huh?”

Andrew often forgot about the long weal of white, puckered skin that ran up the left-middle of his back, until he caught sight of it in an angled mirror; at a glance, it looked like someone had tried to pull his spine through his skin crooked.

“The paramedics were surprised I hadn’t bled out,” he said.

“Mine are shallow, but there’s more of ’em,” Sam said. “If we’re trading here.”

Andrew balled the shirt up in his fist and turned his arms to hide the scabs, his belly plumping to little rolls as he bent forward over his thighs. Sam stayed reclined, giving him the illusion of privacy as he began to speak.

“I passed out. When I came to, Eddie had wandered off. The sinkhole was attached to some big cave system under the forest. By then, it was nighttime, so once I got a foot inside I lost the moon and I couldn’t see a fucking thing. No light at all, that’s the part I still … dream about a lot.”

“Horror movie shit,” Sam said.

Andrew snorted, but he was right: crawling through the pooled, brackish water, pawing at slick stones, banging his sore knees and throbbing broken ankle and stinging bloodied hands, wound pulling on his shoulders and hips. Surrounded in his blindness by a whispering susurrus, the illusion of movement in the black. The wrongness of the cavern. His fingers bumping into the limp hot warmth of Eddie’s leg and grasping it, shaking it, to no response. Not being able to wake him. Horror movie shit, truly, and it had stuck to him for almost a decade.

“I had to crawl through the cave, felt like forever,” he continued. “And I found him, but in bad shape. There was something in there with us, man. It never felt like we’d had an accident, no matter what people said. The thing in the cave wanted us there, I think, and it especially wanted him.”