The Camaro rumbled down the road like a metallic fart with a purpose. Heat wave rose off the baking blacktop as I searched for a radio station worth listening to. In the part of the county we were in, I knew we wouldn’t get much but country music-which explained all the goth kids and wannabe punks who infested the shops along main street, just begging for an alternative. Only way we’d get any good radio would be to head north toward Canada or a few hours south toward Boston.
I kept flipping stations, hoping something would come up I could hum along to, but the best I could find was some song about a man whose woman left him and took the dog when she did. I looked at the CD player and sighed. If it weren’t for online CD distributors I’d have gone Charlie Manson a long time ago. But we couldn’t use CDs in the Camaro because Tooth had fucked up the player trying to fix it.
I finally just turned it off and stuck my hand out the window instead, let it catch the wind and swim up and down like a dolphin. We took a lesser-traveled back route that ran under the trees and offered sporadic shade. Crooked limbs criss-crossed overhead like giant arthritic fingers. The blazing sun stabbed through them here and there creating a kind of flicker effect as we drove.
“Where to?” Tooth asked.
“I don’t know. Let’s go up toward Bobcat and see what we find. Should be pretty secluded and we can shoot all we want.”
He reached into his pocket and brought out the bag of weed and tossed it in my lap.
“I bought you a coming home present. Roll a nice fatty for us.”
Shaking the bag in front of my eyes, I thought, fuck yeah, this is the shit that makes coming home worth it. I opened the bag and took a whiff and holy shit was it bad. “This stinks like a hobo’s asshole. Is it even good?”
“Probably not, but it’s weed, ain’t it? Who cares what it smells like long as it gets us fucked up, right?”
I took a Bud out and crunched it up in my lap. The wind whipped some of it up and stuck it to my Silver Surfer T-shirt. The papers were in the bag as well and I took one out and rolled it as best I could despite the wind. It looked rather pathetic when I finished, but I agreed with Tooth’s philosophy.
“How’s that?” I asked, holding it up like a prize catfish.
“Looks like a piece of bird shit, but it’ll do.”
Bobcat Mountain was farther north than we liked to travel, about an hour and fifteen minutes, but it was as desolate as volunteer day at the old folks home. A few years ago there was an attempt to turn it into a ski resort, but a bunch of tree-hugging hippies rallied against it, arguing it would drive the mountain’s animals out of their natural habitat and into people’s bedrooms. I hate hippies.
I lit the joint and sucked in the rancid-smelling weed, then passed it to Tooth, who took a big toke. I hadn’t smoked pot in over a month because I was afraid it would affect my finals. I got okay grades, but they weren’t going to get me into Harvard Law or anything. The drug wasted no time climbing into the recesses of my mind and convincing my brain cells they could run the place with minimal staff. I slumped back in the seat and watched my dolphin-hand dive for food. When I got bored with that I took the dice out of my pocket and we played an imaginative game of craps.
“What odds you give me I roll a seven?” I asked, shaking the dice in my hand.
“I bet you an ass-kicking.”
“For you or for me?”
“For your mother, who do you think? Just roll ’em so I can get started. I been waiting to give you a good ass kicking for a while now.”
I rolled them on the floor and they came up seven. Scooping them up, I showed Tooth. He blew smoke in my face and punched me in the arm like a prize pugilist and I almost went through the door.
“Ow! Youfuckingbitchthathurt!”
He erupted in laughter and flicked the spent roach out the window. I rubbed my arm and felt it bubble up. My fist already balled, I went to hit him back, but he caught me with another blow in the other bicep. My arms went flaccid and hung down like a basset hound’s ears.
“Sonofabitch!” I yelled.
Tooth was high and just kept laughing. I was pissed at him, but pot giggles are a pox that spreads fast, and soon we were both cackling like a couple of idiots.
“That weed tastes like shit,” he said.
“I told you.”
“I think I know a good spot around the backside of the mountain. It has some trails that were supposed to be ski paths. They go up into a nice clearing on the side; you can see out over the whole forest.”
“We should have packed a lunch.” I was suddenly aware that our inevitable hunger would have to wait a considerable amount of time to be satiated. The nearest town from Bobcat Mountain was Bobtail, so named because it was at the back end of the mountain, and it was a good half hour away.
I put the dice back in my pocket. We drove in silence for a bit until we arrived, then sat a bit longer until we convinced ourselves to make the hike. Tooth took the 9mm out of the case, tucked it in his waistband and pulled his shirt over it.
“What are you doing that for?”
“Park police patrol here sometimes. They see some strange case they might get nosy and ask me to open it up. This way, I just tell ’em I got a gargantuan cock.”
Unlike most mountains in New Hampshire, this one didn’t have a little man in a booth asking for parking money, so we just drove up a dirt road that dead-ended about two hundred feet up, and parked off to the side. We took the six pack Tooth had grabbed from his house and started trudging up the nearest trail like two dwarves high on ore fumes. Tooth even whistled, the gap in his bridge making him sound like a hot teakettle. It wasn’t long before mosquitoes and gnats considered us fine dining. At one point, in the shadows of the trees, the bugs got so bad that I put my head in my shirt and jogged a bit. Through the fabric I could smell pine sap bubbling out of the surrounding tree trunks. The firecracker snapping of twigs behind me told me Tooth had followed my lead.
We came out into a clearing about a third of the way up the mountain. The sun was out in full force and I could feel it working its claws into my face. Tooth was smart to wear a hat; unfortunately, my head was small and I looked kind of ridiculous in them. Looking out you could see for a distance, though there wasn’t much to see but trees, the road we’d arrived on winding through them, and summer haze.
“Motherfucker those mosquitoes are hungry.” Tooth swatted at a few brave ones that followed us into the open air.
He stared at the mountains in the distance and narrowed his eyes. “You see that?”
“What?”
“That. That interesting thing over there.” He pointed out at the mountains and I tried to follow his trajectory. I squinted but all I saw was trees.
“I don’t see anything interesting,” I told him.
“Neither do I. I have to get out of this place. And soon.”
He was “California dreaming” again and I’d walked right into it. I’d kind of figured by now that Tooth’s summer mission was to get me to move to the west coast with him, and since I had no intention of going, it was going be a long summer. He popped the tab on one of the beers and handed it to me, took another himself and chugged it down in one gulp. When he was done he looked me in the eye and I could see he wanted to say something. I figured he was going to ask me to move again, but instead he punched me in the shoulder and yelled, “Let’s shoot something, you pantywaist!”
Any pain that had dissipated from my arm was now back in full force. I’d have returned the punch but quickly realized the futility of it. Tooth always got this way when he drank; I was used to it. Hitting him back would only encourage him and fuel his energy.
He walked to the tree line, put the empty beer can on a low tree limb and backed up to where I stood. “Bet you an ass-kicking I make this shot,” he said. Aiming the gun, he squared his feet and fired.
Bang!
The report wasn’t nearly as loud as the.44 had been, and the recoil was mild at best. The beer can flipped up in the air like a gold medal gymnast and landed on its side a little ways in the woods. He looked at me and smiled. I flinched.
“Here.” He handed me the gun. “I’ll have to owe you that ass-kicking. I hurt my hand last time I hit you. You’re a bony little fucker.”
I hefted the gun while he went and put the can back on the limb. When he was walking back he pretended to dodge bullets. And that was the first moment in my life I scared myself, because I felt how easy it would be to shoot someone in the head, dump the body in the woods, and walk away scot-free. The simplicity of it shook me.
Or maybe I’d just read too many comics and seen too many movies where the only time someone had a gun was when they were blowing another person’s head off. Because, somehow, despite knowing the feeling was wrong, it felt like that’s what I was supposed to do.
I handed the gun back to Tooth.
“I can’t shoot. My arm hurts from when you punched me,” I lied.
“You pussy. Suck it up and squeeze the trigger. This gun is so light a baby could shoot it.”
Forcefully, he pushed the gun back in my hand, placed his own hand over mine and made me grip it firmly. He didn’t back away until I faked an air of confidence, though what I really did was clear my mind of any thoughts that would land me in the loony bin. Across the field, the beer can reflected the sun so it appeared a train was coming out of the woods. I relaxed my grip, sighted down the barrel, and pulled the trigger.
Bang!
The noise was more like a firecracker than a cannon, and perhaps because of this I felt less nervous. My shot landed square and sent the can cartwheeling backwards to the ground. Tooth ran over and picked it up and brought it back.
“Damn, you’re a natural.” He fingered the bullet hole.
The bullet had gone through dead center, a bit below Tooth’s hole. I didn’t tell him I had pictured the can as a man’s head when I shot, though I doubt he would have given a shit. Then again, maybe I didn’t tell him because I didn’t want to hear myself admit it.