22
Saturday Night Raw Reuben calls it—the lucrative but frequently tiresome business of wrecker calls to bar parking lots. It means dealing with drunk owners, drunk passengers and drunk onlookers. Sometimes they are abusive, sometimes incoherent, sometimes sick and worse. At ten that evening, Sam is catching one of those, jump-starting a Subaru Justy at the Hair of the Dog.
“I can’t fucking believe you dinks got wiped by Dyer’s Fucking Mills!” the Justy’s owner berates him. “What the fuck happened? You all too worn out from screwing cheerleaders and getting blasted every weekend or what? Somebody slip you pricks some green to take a dive?”
“All three,” Sam answers.
“Huh?” The guy is too far gone into his own rant to register Sam wising off. “I lost fifty fucking bucks on that fucking game!”
It is 10:15 on the clock over the cash register as Sam punches up the sale. Reuben comes in from the pumps and Sam steps back to let him ring in a gasoline sale.
“Okay if I split?” he asks, jamming fingers into his pockets to keep them from twitching, but unable to keep his feet in one place.
Reuben looks at him. “Something up?”
“Thought I’d take a run to Rick’s and watch a video with him and Sarah.”
His father closes the cash register. “Go on,” he says. “I’ll close up.”
The Mill is a void, a black hole into which Sam steps with the sensation there will be no floor, just a long blind floating fall. But grit rolls on the cold headstone of the floor under the soles of his high-tops. He sniffs the air; it is dead with the cold and there is no scent of Mutant, not her cigarette or a whiff of burning bud. He peeks into the cubby but sees no sign she has been there since the previous night. It is eleven, an hour after he said he would be here.
He backs out of the cubby. Putting down his boombox, he finds her candle stash, and one by one, lights and arranges every stub in the box in a semicircle to illuminate the hoop. The multiple flames make a cave of dancing light. He slots in a Pigface tape. The hollow space reverberates the executioner’s beat, the hoarse agonized vocalization, the jangling guitar of music that is already half-echo. The first bop of the ball startles with its hollow beat, punctuating the musical grunge. An inhalation, a second beat and then on the exhalation the rhythm begins, like something being born into a chorus of grief. The second cut on the tape picks up tempo, drums running steady, driving, vocal now urgent.
His throat feels sandpapered. A few beers would help it. A lot of beer would cure it completely. He wishes he was puking passing-out drunk, as he has only been once in his life, but the only available oblivion is the rubber pumpkin in his hands. It has a beat he can dance to. Nor does he dance alone. The baker’s dozen of candle stubs paint the shadows of a whole team across the floor and up the wall under the hoop, rising and falling, stretching and shrinking, folding and twisting and burning up in tiny wisps of shadowed smoke. The phantoms dancing with Sam wipe phantom sweat from their eyes and feel a shadow of the pounding of phantom hearts. They have no existence apart from him as he draws his being down to this ghost dance with himself and the ball.
Rising like a sudden spurt of flame, he slams the ball through the hoop. His hands close over the rim and he drops, into the violent embrace of gravity, as if the trap is falling out from under him. He hangs from the bucket as it jerks against his palms. His twisting shadow, the stick man hanging from the gallows, catches his eye, a nursery rhyme filling his head: I have a little shadow who goes in and out with me and what can be the use of him is more than I can see.
The tape runs out with a whisper. He lets go. The stone floor rises to meet him and he keeps on falling, his legs gone rubber, until he is on his knees, crawling after the ball on all fours like his baby sister and then curled up around it on the floor. The floor is boneyard cold and he is overheated. Shivering, he makes himself roll up onto his feet. Inside, he’s as sour and empty as the Mill. Shanked. She shanked him but good. He might as well go home now. Hunched over the ball, he licks forefinger and thumb and begins to pinch off the flames, one by one.
“You think I’m weird,” she says.
He starts so violently, he loses his balance and falls on his ass. “Fuck! You scared the shit out of me!”
Stepping from the shadows near the door, she laughs at his slapstick reaction. Her brocade scarf falls loosely around her head so it is almost a hood and he cannot see her face. The light of the last candle flickers briefly, raising a flare in one obscured dark eye, like a very distant cold star, and a liquid shiver along the chains from her nose to her ear.
“I came in when you dunked. You were totally into it.”
He rises to his feet, shoving his fingers into his pockets, leaving the ball on the floor at his feet. “I’ve been here a good hour.” Then, angrily, “Where the hell were you?”
She drifts erratically along the wall toward the cubby.
“You wrecked?” he asks more softly. “Been partying?”
“Fuck you,” she whispers. Her ankle rolls on grit and she catches herself against the wall. “Fuck you,” she calls in high childish mock. Then the
