The Summer I Died

CHAPTER 1

BOOM!

The gun jumped back in my hand like a startled cat. I winced at the shot, a screaming thunderclap that cut off my hearing as if someone had snuck up behind me and shoved cotton balls in my ears. The empty bullet shell bounced off my foot and rolled onto the ground. When I opened my eyes, I saw a puff of smoke breathing out of the tree trunk a few yards away from the trashcan I was aiming at.

Shit, I thought, not even close. If I’d been aiming at Kennedy I would have hit Oswald.

Next to me, Tooth let out a whoop and slammed his palm against my back. “Well wrap my nuts around a pole and call me Mary, looks like you just popped your cherry.”

It was the first time I’d ever fired a gun. A.44 magnum to be precise, a big mother of a cannon that Tooth swore would make my dick hard. And he was right. I felt bigger, brighter; hell, I felt invincible. Holding a.44 in your hand, well, it’s a bit like being deified.

“You missed the shit outta the can though,” Tooth said, taking the gun and aiming at the target. He squared his feet, looked down the barrel, took a breath and squeezed the trigger.

BOOM!

With my ears still clogged, the shot sounded like I was underwater. Tooth’s hands, wrapped around the grip, went flying up over his head with the recoil. He burst out laughing.

The metallic bong and firefly sparks that erupted from the metal can proved he was a much better shot than me, but then again, he’d had all winter to practice while I was down at the university.

“Did you see that? Dead on!” he shouted.

I could barely hear him through the humming in my head, but I flipped him off good-naturedly and motioned for the gun back. On the road out past the woods a car drove by. It seemed to slow a bit, like it was trying to spy on us, so I quickly hid the gun behind my leg. Tooth read my concern, shook his head in disappointment and said, “Will you relax? Ain’t nobody gonna care about some gunshots out here. Besides, we’re too far out to be heard.”

That wasn’t exactly true. The spot we were at-a dirt clearing in the woods that overlooked a small valley of evergreens-used to be a popular hangout area for teenagers, and most everyone in town knew about it. True, it was set back far enough off the road that passing motorists couldn’t really see through all the trees, but no amount of dense foliage would dampen the echoes of a.44’s gunshot.

We’d been here many times before, whether to get high, drink beer or just shoot the shit on a Friday night. Used to be you could come here and expect to find at least someone you knew hanging around. But its popularity had waned of late

Two summers ago Mark Trieger, the prodigy running back for Lakewood High, jumped to his death here, and now the place had become associated with ghost stories and bad vibes. Nobody came up here much anymore.

“Yeah, I know,” I said. “It’s just-”

“Just what?”

“I dunno, people drive by here now. . they tend to check up on things. I’m just being careful.”

“Fucking Mark Trieger.”

“Yeah, fucking Mark Trieger.”

It happened on a Sunday afternoon after church let out. Some kids had come here to get wasted and accidentally knocked their six pack of Bud over the side of the cliff. Realizing what a bitch it would be to find another adult to buy them more, they climbed down to retrieve it.

At the bottom they discovered the beer bottles shattered from the fall. They were about to go back up when one of the boys spotted something sparkling in the fallen leaves. It was a necklace. Rumor is he was gonna hock it for more beer, so he reached down and yanked on it and up popped a blue and purple head, the mouth wide open and dripping maggots, two glazed eyes looking into oblivion.

The boy fell down screaming, his fist still clenched around the necklace. He tried to run away but because he kept gripping the necklace, the body slid after him like a zombie in a George Romero film and knocked him over. He finally let go, but he was in such shock his friends had to carry him back up.

Turns out Mark’d been down there for about two weeks, nestled among the heaps of beer cans and porno mags people had hurled over the side.

Like any small town in the New England mountains, the body had drawn a crowd as if it was the second coming of Jesus. I remember standing with Tooth when the paramedics hauled Mark up. The police kept everyone back, but you could still kind of see what was going on through the trees. They had this sort of winch thingy bringing up the body, and when it got to the top, the head bounced over the rocks and made this thwacking sound you could hear all the way back on the road. People gasped. Tooth put his Red Sox hat over his heart and said something I didn’t hear. He didn’t know Mark, but he’d gone to enough Lakewood games to respect him. Personally, I couldn’t care less about sports, but I remember my sister Jamie being real upset. She was a freshman at Lakewood at the time, and like all freshman girls, she thought she was gonna marry the football captain someday, despite the fact that about twenty colleges were interested in recruiting Mark before he’d even graduate.

Looking back at the trashcan, I lifted the gun.

“It’s easier if you pull the hammer back first.” Tooth reached over and made like he was gonna do it for me. Beating him to it, I yanked it back with my thumb and found my target. I wanted to hit it this time, because if I didn’t, Tooth would go telling everyone what a bad shot I was and I’d spend the summer the butt of sissy jokes. So I took a breath, and held the gun a little looser than before, a little more relaxed. The first shot had given me some idea of the compensation required in aiming. Since it had gone high and wide to the left, I aimed a little lower and to the right.

“Steady,” Tooth whispered, “just relax. Once you feel it, then fire away.”

I felt the weight of the gun getting heavier, like when you hold a dumbbell out to the side of your body and see how long you can keep it level. I added a little backbone to it, took another breath, and pulled the trigger.

BOOM!

The bullet careened off the lip of the barrel, sent sparks flying, and struck the branches in the trees beyond. I stood for a moment, realizing that while I’d shot a bit wide, I’d still managed to hit the target. At fifty feet away, that was a glowing accomplishment. My dick was indeed hard. Tooth threw his Red Sox hat in the air and said, “I can’t believe it, you actually hit it.” He ran toward the barrel. “Not bad, not bad.” He poked at the indentation the bullet had made, somewhat tentatively, then turned back and yelled to me, “Hey, you gotta see this!”

I put the gun on the ground because I didn’t want Tooth doing anything stupid like jumping on my back and causing it to go off. He liked to jump on people when he was drunk, and he’d downed about four beers already since lunch.

At the can, Tooth pointed out what he found so fascinating. It was a bee.

“It musta been sitting on the lip and you winged it.”

The bee was still alive, but its abdomen was now fused to the barrel where the bullet struck. It was trying to crawl away but all it could manage was a feeble circular pattern.

“That’s the weirdest thing I ever seen,” he said. “Look at it, it’s like it don’t even know it’s been shot.” Then he got a funny look on his face and hit me in the shoulder. “You shot a bee and didn’t even kill it. You fucking pussy. Man, wait till I tell everyone.”

Great, that was all I needed, Tooth spreading stories. Don’t get me wrong, I loved Tooth. We’d been friends since kindergarten, when he stole my cookies and I socked him in the eye-the only time I’d ever beat him in a fight, and even then I probably would have gotten a good ass-kicking had the teachers not pulled us apart and made us apologize. Then they made us play together; I guess they fancied themselves diplomats. Anyway, the next week we figured out that by working together, we could distract the teacher long enough to steal the good toys away from the other kids during playtime. You might be thinking I was the brains and he was the brawn, but actually it was the other way around. Don’t get me wrong, he was definitely stronger, but he was much better at getting people’s attention, and I was adept at being invisible, which made swiping Matchbox cars all the more easy. If they’d only known what they’d created.

Tooth and I had been through everything together, which was weird, because our interests began to split in junior high school. I got hooked on science fiction and became an expert on comic books, and Tooth took an interest in beer. But I guess we realized we’d always stay friends, especially after the two nights we’d spent together in jail when we were sixteen.

See, we thought it would be funny to steal the lawn ornaments off everybody’s yards in town. You know, those obnoxious little ceramic gnomes and cardboard sheep that people think add flare and fun to a garden. Well, we must have stolen about a hundred of them, went over to the police station and started placing them all over the little lawn out front. I don’t remember how many cops we got in our town, I think five now that Bruce French is one, but anyway, usually they’re out driving around and only Mrs. Stefanko is in the office answering calls. But we apparently have the worst luck around, because they were having a meeting that night, and after Tooth and I finished putting the last gnome on the hood of one of the cop cars they all came waltzing out the door and caught us red-handed.

The incident made the local paper, complete with photos, and because my parents, who are both teachers at the high school, were in Boston for some teacher conference, I had to wait in the cell till they could come back and get me. Tooth’s father, tired of his shenanigans, actually told the officers to keep him locked up till he thought about what he’d done. So we spent two entire days as cellmates. It was the first time in a while that we’d really talked, not just got drunk together.

It was the first time I realized that Tooth was smarter than he let on, that his poor grades didn’t mean he was dumb. He was just interested in other things besides fractions and social studies. He said he was gonna learn how to build motorcycles, that he was gonna build one and take Route 66 out to California like in a book he read. Which also surprised me, because I didn’t know Tooth read. He was always making fun of me for picking up the latest Frank Miller or Todd McFarlane comic. I guess we just had different tastes in reading, but I felt maybe I had never given him credit beyond the growing alcoholic most people took him for.

He was still laughing at the bee. I punched him back. “Fuck off! I’d like to see you shoot a bee off the lip of a trash can.”

“I bet I could.”

“Yeah, right. It’s your turn. Go back and hit it.”

He gave me a shove and sprinted back to where I left the gun. Like some Hollywood detective, he rolled on the ground and came up with the gun in his hand. Standing next to the barrel, I yelled, “Wait a sec!” And threw my arms up and dove to the side. When I heard the report I nearly wet myself, went weak-kneed expecting my guts to explode out of my back. Thankfully, I heard the bong as the bullet struck its target and not me.

“Youmotherfucker!” I yelled. “Don’t mess around! It’s a gun!”

He just kept laughing like a toddler all hopped up on sugar. He went and picked up his hat, which had flipped away during his stunt, and put it on his head backwards. He aimed the gun again and said, “Move. I got one shot left.”

I jumped up and ran out to the tree line. This time when he fired, I plugged my ears. Again, he hit the barrel. I had to hand it to him, he had good aim, a regular Billy the Kid. Together, we walked over to check on the bee. Tooth’s two shots had struck about a foot below it each time. The bee was still buzzing, still fused to the trashcan.

“Yeah, all right,” he said. “So I can’t hit it. But it’s not like you aimed for it. You hit it by accident and that still makes you a pussy.”

“Bite me,” I said, bending down to look at the bee.

“I’m hungry. Let’s get outta here and get some fuel. Lucy Graves works over at the Wendy’s now, and they got these tight uniforms, and I swear her nipples are so big you can hang your hat on ’em.”

“What about the bee?”

“What do you mean ‘what about the bee’?” he asked, as if I’d spoken in Martian.

“We gotta kill it. I read once they can send out distress signals to other bees. It’s like a chemical scent they emit or something. Next time we come back there might be a whole swarm waiting for us.”

“God, you are such a geek. Just kill it.”

“With what?”

And out of nowhere, Tooth’s boot flashed by my face and smashed the bee into nonexistence. Maybe I was imagining it, but I swear a bit of bee goo hit me in the nose. Disgusted, I wiped it off with my arm. “Thanks.”

“What?” he said. “Better it dies quick than just stays there suffering in agony till it does. C’mon.”