ShakedownI passed my cigarette, and he took it in trembling fingers. I didn't mind the blood around the filter when he handed it back. We lay there for a moment, both thrown to the floor by the shaking. "Earthquake," he said. "Yeah." Breathing deep, I stood up. I looked around. Somehow his fish tank was still standing on its rickety wooden slats. Amazing the things that can stand a great shaking. "Gin," he said. "Yeah." In the kitchen I found the bottle. It had fallen off the shelf, but landed on the 25-pound bag of rice. He always drank gin. That was the first thing I learned about him. He said it tasted like the air smelled back home. The junipers. But he never said where "back home" was. He usually drank straight from the bottle. I had never seen anyone do that before. "Drink like a lady," my mom always told me while she downed her fancy red wine spritzers. When we got to the old shack, we were nasty dirty from the three-mile hike through the forest brush. He looked like a mountain goat when he scurried up the crumbling slopes. There wasn't any trail that I could see. I wondered if he was part bloodhound, following some scent. He pointed to the line of junipers standing beside the building. "See those bushes. Even if the world blows up, we're cool. We can still make gin from those berries." My sister had tried to stop me. We had been lying down by the river on an August afternoon. This guy pulled up in a van. He had tickets to a Grateful Dead show. He had tickets to a lot of Grateful Dead shows. All I had to do was get in the van. The worst thing was his tarantula. It lived in the fish tank. I was scared of the creepy thing, but after that first show I was willing to live with it. I almost cried when I saw this wiry little guy lug this heavy tank all the way up the mountain, just for a stupid spider. When I brought him the bottle, he was still lying on the floor. His leg stuck out at the wrong angle. It reminded me of that time on Monday Night Football, seeing Joe Theisman's leg snap over and over and over again. I handed him the bottle and propped him up on some pillows. That's when I noticed the blood stain on the floor, where his head had been. He looked at me, so calm, his face twisted and bloody. Oh God, what do I do now? "You need help," I said. "You're right." He looked at his leg. "But I ain't going anywhere." "I'll go." He shook his head. "Don't bother. Even if you make it back to town, you'll never find this place again without me." He closed him eyes. "Besides, they've got enough trouble down there after that quake." I nodded. Do what I'm told. Just do what I'm told. That's what my mom always said. It hurt him too much to move, so I cleared away the chunks of ceiling and broken chairs. We held it together for the night by lighting chair pieces in the middle of the floor. We drank the gin slowly, straight from the bottle, and smoked joints. In the morning, he was dead. I went outside and grabbed a handful of dirt. I sprinkled that over him, and placed a cluster of purple larkspur over his face. Then I headed down to the van, saying good-bye to the juniper berries all big and blue and prickly. I still had tickets to the next show. |