KEEP IT WITHIN

 

  When he thought back to those three weeks in the summer of 2008, the time before his life had changed so suddenly and so completely, the thing that struck Nick most was how smoothly everything had come together.  The three of them, ready to explode forth from under Washington's grey blanket and out to colleges across the country.  Alan's cousin selling off his old van for cheap, perhaps due to the strange smell of bananas that couldn’t be removed.  The near perfect fake IDs that Shaun's girlfriend had got them from her friend at work.  That sense, at once freeing and terrifying, of their entire lives ahead of them, cut loose from high school and its many tortures, the way ahead blurry and uncertain.  Their last true summer together, they all knew, before college and new friends, new places, spun them into different people who struggled to be at ease with each other.  From all this, the plan sprung, complete within that half hour in Shaun's garage as they realized what they were going to do.  Sat on the air hockey machine Shaun’s dad had salvaged from a construction job, they synchronized, a lifetime of high school comedies telling them exactly what they had to do. Tacoma to Tijuana, and back.  At their own pace, under their own steam.  Free.
  They were without commitment that summer - Alan had given his notice at Radio Shack, Nick had been let go from his dishwashing job when the owner’s daughter returned from college.  They were without guidance – Shaun’s parents were locked in the spiral pull of divorce, Nick’s were busy at work, and eager for him to be out from under their feet.  Alan, the only child, could emancipate himself with, he estimated, three conversations (two to Dad, one to Mom).  They talked around the plan, trimming the edges.  It started as the misty, summer-born desire for quiet country roads blasted open with stereo bass.  Within a week, it had crystallised into a schedule and a map.  Points of reference started to emerge.  Shaun’s sister, studying at Berkeley could put them up for two nights.  There was a gig in Eugene they all wanted to go to.  Alan had a friend from summer camp in San Diego who sent him an e-mail every four months, often offering a bed for the night.  MySpace and Facebook were stealthily trawled for two evenings, profiles pondered and rejected in the search for a coach or bedroom floor.
  Two weeks before the trip, they all took the hour and a half bus ride out to Eatonville to meet with Alan’s cousin, James Jr., who insisted on being called Jimmy.  He met them in the shadow of the concrete plant that kept the former mill town functioning, a thin, chemical smell in the air and up their nose.  Together they walked slowly back to his apartment, Jimmy squinting into the sun and talking about a Thanksgiving he and Alan had attended a few years ago, and how everything had tasted dynamite, especially the sweet potato mash.  Jimmy was something of the black sheep of the family, Alan had told them, a layabout and a loser, according to his father, and an embarrassment to Alan’s Uncle James.  To Alan, therefore, he carried a tangible atmosphere of danger and rebellion, even when it became clear that Jimmy was simply a sweet, naïve soul who was never not stoned, and just looking for someone to hang out with.  Stocky and tall, with dirty blonde hair just starting to thin, thick-framed glasses and incongruously upright posture, Jimmy looked more like a bookstore clerk than a criminal.
  As they climbed the stairs to Jimmy’s apartment, which squatted, damp and dark, above the bakery Jimmy had been fired from three days previously, he explained that selling the van was more urgent than it had been a fortnight ago.  Apparently, had come across a pristine video of Cannibal Grave Girls in the disabled bathroom of the local Dairy Queen while satisfying a drug-induced ice cream craving.  An avid collector of schlocky exploitation films, Jimmy had considered this some kind of divine intervention, but had arrived home too tired to watch it.  Waking for work the next day and discovering the tape, which by then he assumed he had imagined or dreamt, Jimmy had carefully considered his situation and decided his mind was too blown to even think about working, and had instead rolled a joint and enjoyed the film.  He fell asleep just as the end credits began to roll, and awoke again to find a note slipped under his door, firing him.
  They spent three hours sitting on Jimmy’s floor, listening to T-Rex live albums and The Who while Jimmy found all the paperwork for the van.  As he moved around the low-ceilinged apartment that made him seem even taller, he talked variously about the bands he had been in, his last girlfriend, his skill at making pancakes, his long running feud with Ted of Ted’s Arcade and the leg injury he sustained at an Iron Maiden concert five years ago.  He passed a joint around, and they found themselves warming to his shattered attention span, his high, lilting voice and his warm, doughy apartment.  When they finally left, Alan had not only gained a new van, but also a bag of weed to fuel their journey, a gift from Jimmy for not haggling him down on the price.  Jimmy had shaken their hands as they left, his grip surprisingly firm and dry, a military handshake, and told them that trips like this could change your future and your whole perception of your life.  They drove out of town slowly and stopped in a side road, barely more than a dirt track, unable to go any further for the moment.  Nick and Alan sat silently, minds slowly racing, while Shaun gurgled himself to sleep in the passenger seat.
  When the day came, Shaun kissed his girlfriend Virginia goodbye on his front lawn, promising he'd be back soon.  Nick knew before long he’d be offering to buy smooth skinned juniors beer and talking to them passionately about why their favourite bands were so good.  Alan left his mother in tears as he loaded up his bags.  He was leaving for college soon, and now he’d be away for the summer as well?  As they slipped away from his house, Nick wasn’t watching his mother standing in the doorway, face unreadable as always, but his brother Aaron, face peeking between bedroom curtains, nose pressed against the glass, swiftly growing a moustache of steam on the window in the early morning chill.  He was only five years younger, yet there was so much distance between them already, and they were accelerating all the time.
  They left the city in cloud-filtered morning light that grew brighter as they drove the steady climb to the foot of Mount Rainier, the snow-capped volcano that overlooked Tacoma.  They had picked this as their first stop, barely an hour from home, an ever-present colossus on the horizon.  For Nick it held that strange quality of childhood solitude, the spectres of a dozen daytrips, time spent scouting out secret caves and the keystone memory of the smell of dead leaves and warm earth.  They parked at the ranger station, and walked for two hours, climbing over fallen logs, scrambling up slopes, throwing Shaun’s football between them as they spread out along the path.  His oldest friends mixing with the backdrop of so many family outings, Nick was caught between nostalgia and déjà vu.  He felt like the present was already gone; like he was remembering now from many years down the line.  Shaun and Alan joked and laughed, wrestling with each other on bridges and quietly stalking a black-tailed deer that they spotted just off the path until it heard their footsteps, froze and then vanished amid the trees.  He hung back, worried he was being unsociable, but feeling a sleepy detachment from everything.
  The journey south continued.  They drove slowly, sticking to the back roads, and argued over whose music sucked more, sleeping in the windowless cradle of the van, which was no less uncomfortable for being lined with blankets and an old futon.  Their bodies formed an unwieldy puzzle; lanky Nick, broad, tall Alan and short, wiry Shaun, fighting tiny battles for inches of sleep space.  They blew a tire crossing the state border into Oregon, where they discovered none of them knew how to change one, and got into a fight outside a bar in Hayfork, California that sent them running to the van, panicked and laughing, pulling out of town as fast as they could.  They filled themselves with jerky and Mountain Dew, carefully rationed their weed and kicked Alan out of the van at one point when he filled it with a noxious fart, driving off and not returning for him for two hours.  When their schedule presented empty days, their route took them back and forth, inland and to the coast, chasing towns with names like Vader, Dunes City and Shafter.  The weather grew drier and hot, stagnant air became a constant companion in the back of the van.
  On the most perfect day of the year so far, with blazing sun and enough breeze to push the heat around and stop it becoming stale, they found themselves in a tiny, no-Starbucks town on the coast of southern California.  They parked behind a gas station on the very outskirts of town and walked in along deserted roads seething with heat.  A pair of battered sneakers, laces knotted together, bleached white with age, hung from a power cable like victims of a lynching.  The streets lounged close together along the coastline, and the whole town seemed to slumber in the Pacific breeze.  Shaun walked a few steps ahead, hands tapping at his side, head swaying from side to side, nodding in appreciation.  Alan and Nick wandered along behind him.  They had run out of water in the van, and were hungry.  Turning a corner, they were led to a well-maintained town square.  Shaun and Nick’s eyes swept the storefronts for a diner or even a drugstore, but were interrupted by Alan.
  “Guys, they’ve got a cinema.”
  Ahead of them, on the left, the entrance to a tiny cinema jutted out into the street, angular and pristine, light fixtures humming behind plastic letters, the painted wood well tended by careful hands.  They approached, curious.  The doorway was pushed back from the street, leaving a cool sanctuary underneath the awning, and casting the interior in inviting shade.  Even as a visitor, a stranger in the town, Nick could sense the affection for this building, the history that spoke from the polished steel rails and home-printed flyers.
  “They’re showing Pineapple Express in like, half an hour.”  Alan grinned at them both.
  “We can see films anywhere.  We’re doing this trip to get some experiences,” said Shaun.
  “This is an experience.  Tiny, private cinema, out in some nowhere town.  We went to your stupid book signing in Berkeley.”
  “What about lunch?  I’m starving, and you’ve been bitching about food for the past two hours.”
  “We’ll get hot dogs or something.  Fuck, popcorn will fill you up, and then we’ll eat after.  Come on man.  This’ll be cool.”
  Shaun’s head flopped towards Nick in a show of casual deference, eyes peering over aviator sunglasses, awaiting reply.  Nick looked past him, into the cinema.  He could almost feel the sticky floors and the gentle touch of the air conditioning.
  “I think we should do it.  We’ll get food afterwards.  Plus, we’re halfway between lunch and dinner already.  We might as well kill a few hours then really stuff ourselves.”
  “Okay, whatever.”  Shaun relented, and led the way into the cinema.

 

* * *

 

Three hours later, and with earnest smiles and fake ID, they made their way into a bar near the town’s marina.  They had left the cinema an hour ago, and walked down towards the sea to find food.  At Penny’s Diner, they had feasted on plates piled high with Buffalo wings and curly fries, trading quotes from the film while a chubby, red-headed waitress kept their Cokes topped up.  On leaving, they had spotted The Trophy Room, a neon fringed dive bar that stretched through four small rooms, connected by thin, sweaty corridors.  They settled down into a corner booth, each with a can of Pabst Blue Ribbon, the illicit thrill of their underage drinking still enough to make them nervous and excitable.  They were chatting about the next day’s travel, with San Diego approaching fast, and how they would soon be turning around, returning to steel-skied Tacoma, when a trio of girls entered.  Alan noticed them first, and with a low, conspiratorial whisper drew the attention of the other two.  Two of the girls were at the bar, ordering drinks, while the other stood over at the jukebox, one arm leant on it, head down in concentration.  Nick and the others watched them without watching, looking at their reflection in the mirror behind the bar, at the air over their heads, and, when they felt reckless, directly at them.  The girl from the jukebox joined them, and they walked through to one of the other rooms as Debaser by the Pixies came on.
  “Not bad,” said Shaun, smiling at the other two.  He was the only one of the trio who had had lost his virginity, and enjoyed his position as pioneer of all things sexual, while Nick and Alan stumbled around in the uncertain geography of Internet porn.
  “Should we go talk to them?”  Alan looked from Shaun to Nick and back again.
  “Why the hell are you asking my permission?  Or are you worried you’d be cheating on Felicity, even though you’ve never even asked her out?”
  “My love for Felicity Warren is chaste and pure, unlike the foul, disgusting things you get up to with your kinky little Catholic.”
  Shaun smiled, his tongue poking a little through his teeth, reptilian.  At that moment, the song on the jukebox changed.  Nick didn’t recognize it, but Shaun did, and stood up.
  “Okay, that settles it.  I’m going to talk to them.  You two can come with me, or sit here holding your dicks.”  He walked away from the table.  Alan looked at Nick for a second, his face a mix of resignation and anticipation, the face of someone at the top of a rollercoaster they didn’t want to get on, but are starting to enjoy.  Then he too got up and went after Shaun.  Nick finished off the last of his beer, and followed them through the corridor.  The three girls were sat around a table in the small, dimly lit room that had the smell of forty years of cigarettes driven deep into the walls.  Shaun made straight for the girl who’d been at the jukebox.
  “Hi girls.  We were just going to smoke a little weed in the car park, and were wondering if you wanted to join us?”

 

* * *

 

  Sarah, Keri and Wendy, all freshmen at UC Riverside, were travelling in the opposite direction to them, up from San Diego all the way to Vancouver, where Keri’s brother went to university.  Keri, the jukebox girl, a slim, pale brunette originally from Wisconsin, had immediately clicked with Shaun, and the two of them were sat together in one of the booths talking animatedly.  They had spent fifteen minutes in front of the jukebox once the group had returned from outside, and now Nick, Alan, Wendy and Sarah were dancing to their selections.  Alan and Wendy, tall and Asian, with a neat black bob streaked with blonde, danced close to each other, eye contact fizzling between the two of them, while Nick’s orbit was a little further from Sarah, who grinned and made Nick’s limbs feel weighty and cumbersome when compared to her own movements.  She leaned in closer, stretching up to his ear on her tiptoes and asked him if he was having a good time.  He could smell the light citrus of her perfume.  Nick smiled and nodded, trying to force some enthusiasm into his shoulders and hips.
  They continued drinking and talking and occasionally dancing until the bar closed and then, with the promise of a bottle of gin back in Wendy’s motel room, the girls led them across town.  When they got there, Nick accompanied Sarah back to her motel room, where she puked over his shoes, apologized profusely and then fell asleep in the shower.  He carried her light form across the room and onto the bed, let the others know what had happened, then made his excuses and headed back across the deserted town in the dark.  He slept in the harsh heat of the van, cocooned in dirty t-shirts and thin blankets, his shoes hanging from the wing mirror.
  The next day, he woke late, struck with a pull towards the sea that he figured was the keenly drilled echo of his swim team days.  He wandered down to the coast and found a mostly empty beach, so dominated by seagulls that only a few families braved the sand and cacophony.  He stood for a while, watching the birds kick up plumes of shining sand as they fell and chased along the softly formed dunes, trailing ribbons of salty dust as they took off towards the ocean, heading who knows where.  Nick remembered hearing somewhere that they only headed out to sea when it was time for them to die, and wondered exactly how they knew when their time was up, what ancestral tickle in the back of their minds sent them out into the open sky above the ocean.  He started swimming around midday, and didn't leave the water until late afternoon.  After so long spent crammed inside that van, or in booths in the corner of dive bars, it felt good to stretch his body out, to feel the muscles creaking and pushing against each other and the sun pounding Vitamin C into his pale skin.
  He walked back into town in the early evening looking for food, short hair dry already, back to the slowly descending sun.  Warmth pulsed down into his muscles, and he was already warning sign red, herald of sunburn and days of pain and discomfort. He regretted not bringing any aftersun, thinking back to when he was packing, throwing out all that useless stuff to make room for more CDs.  He ate in Jenny’s Diner again, squeezed narrow between a dry-cleaners and a closed down barbershop.  An SMS from Alan and Shaun arrived to let him know they were three towns over with Keri, Wendy and Sarah, looking for an In-N-Out Burger.  They'd move on tomorrow - they had plenty of time.
  Taking his time, he walked the quiet roads out of town towards the gas station where they’d left the van, the tightly packed scrum of shops stretching out into scattered houses and, gradually, the empty ocean roads and patches of forest that clung to rocky falls.  He knew he’d miss Alan and Shaun once he got to college, miss their nights spent huddled round the TV watching R rated videos Shaun’s dad would rent and their many ill-fated attempts at starting a band.  Their support had got him through high school, and he was sure they’d say the same. But lately they’d starting arguing more and, when there were only two of them, whining about the other.  Shaun was feeling the pressure of his parent’s divorce, was more irritable and stubborn than ever, and Alan was as cynical and distant as he’d always been.  There was no doubt their friendship was pulling itself apart, and Nick was glad that college would split them up before things turned nasty.  Maybe when they were back for the summer, things would be like they used to be.
  His skin was starting to itch now, deep down, and as he studied his hands, he saw he was beginning to peel around his knuckles and wrists, unused to the sun.  His shirt was uncomfortable, even in the cooling air of the evening, and as he wandered back to the van, he removed it, his skin baking, cracking underneath, the daylight seared deep into it.  He’d been so lost in his thoughts he’d not realized how much he had burnt; his entire chest was pinkish-red, flush with sunlight and radiating heat.  Even his legs ached with the burn – was that normal?  His feet were prickly inside his shoes, and as he focused on the pain, he felt dizzy, nauseous even.
  He stopped and caught his breath, holding onto a tree for support as his vision blurred for a second, like he was emerging from underwater.  He took his shoes and socks off, and began walking slowly, painfully, along a grass bank, his whole body singing with heat and pain.  The prickliness was spreading over his skin now, and he felt like the world was speeding up, like he could feel the blood pumping quickly through his chest and his head.  Was this heat stroke?  He’d never had it before.  He stopped again, leaning against a post and beginning to pick and rub at his wrists, a bad habit he knew, but that small piece of relief felt good, roasted old skin peeling back to reveal the new underneath.
  As he checked himself and stopped picking, light from a streetlamp caught on his wrist and dazzled him.  Under his peeling skin was something golden.  No, not quite gold - brass, like the polished sheen of trumpets and trombones.  He picked at it more, panic pulling at his spine and stomach as more brass revealed itself beneath his skin, warm and supple like flesh and beating with his blood.  He felt his feet give way, and he slipped and stumbled down the bank and ended up in the dirt beneath a tree, away from the road and the rest of the world.  The skin was coming away easier now, in patches and chunks, and he thought of grade school, when they would pour glue onto their hands, letting it dry and peel until they looked like ghouls and zombies, and chase each other around the playground.
  He was peeling without thinking now, his whole right hand free, the only reminder of his old skin the pink left beneath his fingernails.  The skin of his arm was loosening and breaking away in pale, translucent sheets, revealing more shining metal and copper coloured hairs like tiny little wires, sticking from his skin.  The pain in his arm had gone now, and he felt his new skin cool in the breeze blowing in from the sea.  He had to carry on.  He had to free himself.
  That night he slept soundly beneath the tree, in the dirt, his old skin strewn around him like the paper discarded from Christmas presents, new flesh luminous in the full moon.  If he dreamt, he certainly couldn’t remember.

 

 

 

 

Tim Maytom is a writer living in Norwich