Spotter

This does not end well, I must tell you. We had no way of knowing these things: luck is stupid; bodies break like nothing. The day was loud and sunny. White clouds banged up against the sky. We would soon be drunk on the beauty and a cocktail of pharmaceuticals and beer. But at the moment we were sober.

“Hit it!” I shouted. The motor, hooked up to an old car battery, barked. The rope spooled out to a T-bar in my hands, tightened, then yanked forward. I leaned back, blind in the wake spray. It took no less than ten seconds to get up with this boat, but you always did. You just had to wait. Each of us had sunk around $300 dollars of work money into resurrecting the boat. It had slumped in Andy’s backyard on a trailer, a ghost-ship collecting green and black mold, loaded with mice and other vermin. One day, after high school and my Whiz Quiz meeting–we’d memorize trivia; I’d pop an Adderall; we’d vanquish neighboring schools on local T.V.; it looked good on college apps–we fumigated the thing. The boat fixing was a one-time deal. A car battery used this way in a boat does not last. We knew that. No one said much about it. We didn’t know if there would be more summers like that. I planed up on the water. My skin broke the air and I thought of mermaids, krakens, leagues of water rumbling beneath my toes. Our day lodged in the stuff of myth. Andy and Drew cheered from the boat. White caps flared outside of the wake. I drifted out and rode the chop. My knees buckled, I cranked the T-bar into my waist. I cut in. After doing this three or so times, I felt stripped down and tenderized. It was time to call it quits. I took up the usual routine: a firm salute to the boat, and a give-no-shits toss of the rope, freeing myself into the lake. Waves benevolently dunked my head. I uncinched the ski and raised it like a beacon up into the air. I did not want to get run over. Drew was driving, and he was good, but sometimes he zoned out.

1 The bow rolled up in front of my nose. “Quick run, my guy.” Drew lifted the ski. He took pleasure in these small jabs, even though he was the only one around who enjoyed them. Really, this did not bother me. “It was rough,” I said. The wind gusted, spinning the boat around like a toy. “Hey, turn it off!” I shouted over the motor. The boat heaved and the prop nudged up against my chest. It was in neutral. I tumbled into the boat. Water streamed from my pockets out onto the deck. The boat was swamped. I leaned over and switched on the bilge pump. “Unreal, man,” Andy said. “Thanks,” I replied. I knew that my skiing was not good, but I came prepared with excuses: “Piss poor conditions. Sun was in my eyes. It was like the Bering Sea. But it was good.” The sun burnt off my wetness. Drew appeared with a barbecue lighter and Pringles can. He cracked open the lid, rattling the many joints inside. “Interested?” he said. This was a rhetorical question. Drew plucked a spear of weed and held it between his lips as it twitched in the breeze like a night crawler. “Here,” Andy said. He cupped his hands around the failing flame. Drew looked like he was composing a symphony. “I got some video of you out there. Good looks.” Andy drove the screen of his camera towards my face. We huddled above the footage, shielding it from the light. Andy was the only one with a camera. It was a nice one too. He saved up for it. All of our exploits got sucked into his lens. The end of the joint sparked and bloomed orange.

We fried in the sun for around fifteen minutes or a half hour, I really do not remember. “What’s the move?” Drew reanimated on the bow. He was stoned, pink all over, his nose swollen red like it had been shut in a door frame. “Want any sunscreen?” I asked, knowing this would inflame him. “I never get burnt! It’s the Indian blood. My gramma’s an Indian.” He said this with pride. “It’s what, 3 PM?” Andy asked.

2 “We’ve got until sunset.” The lake was all whitecaps. They licked up the edge of the gunwales. I said I was out for skiing, and peeled my back off the hot vinyl seating. “I know a back bay.” Andy stared into the distance. “It’s glass.” Glass, for the uninitiated, is when the trees along the shoreline mirror the water. Such visions made the Indians dream up totem poles. This is the best skiing. “Is it deep enough?” Drew asked. “I don’t want to crack the prop and have to paddle back through this shit. That’d really screw our trip plans.” “It’s good. I was there with my old man, the other day.” When Andy said old man, he really meant it. Andy’s father was just over sixty; he looked dried up, and ancient, as he smoked high tar cigarettes everyday, for many years. He was hooked up on chemo. I think the man was solar powered or something, as he still subsisted on nicotine, black coffee, and a spoonful of honey for his throat every few hours. He and Andy were up early most mornings, working. “It’s glass,” said Andy. We all agreed this was a good idea. Drew had purchased LSD from a guy in Akwesasne. We planned to eat the drug, wet and tired in the evening. One could always rely on Drew for this kind of thing. He was going to Fort Drum. Infantry. Drew never cared for school, but he was not stupid. Drew liked to hunt and fish and roll coal in the school parking lot. He had great business acumen: he bought cartons of cigarettes from the rez and made a profit selling to theater kids. He left for basic training the next week. Andy started the boat. The built in radio crackled DEVO: Crack that whip Give the past the slip We galloped through the waves. The boat bucked up and sprayed us in the rhythm of each new crest. Drew broke out the soft-shell cooler, packed with Genesee Cream Ale. He shouted and launched a beer through the air. I caught it with one hand. The cold aluminum bulged in my grip. I looked back and Andy had a beer, too. He grinned behind the steering wheel. “Thee...two...one.” Drew counted us down.

3 When Drew finished the countdown, I tore through the beer with my teeth and cracked the tab on its top. In unison, our cans exploded like depth charges. We sucked down the beer, fast. Drew plinked his beer’s carcass down to the deck. This time, he was the winner. The each of us leaned back, full and stupid as balloon animals. Andy gunned it. The lake and trees washed by like splatter paintings. Wind and sunshine beat up our skin and eyes. I felt tingly and just born.

We drifted into the back bay. It was a shard of lake with deadheads half-sunk around the shore. “We can’t ski here.” Drew complained. There’s not enough water.” I was tired, and I hoped, secretly, that Drew saying this would reroute our day. I was ready to be to be done–to zip back to Andy’s cabin and melt our brains. But, even it we did ski, I would be happy. This was shaping up to be a perfect day. “But wait, there’s more.” Andy captained us further into the cove. The prop buzzed as he raised it from the water. We coasted towards the trees. Just when it seemed we were out of runway, the back left funneled out into a creek. “We’re in god’s country now, boys.” When Andy said things like this, you believed him. He cracked open a beer. We slipped into the channel. Already, Andy had made more than Drew and I with our lifeguarding combined. The two of us worked the same beach. Drew and I hot-boxed my car on the ride to our afternoon shifts. Once we arrived, we’d lounge in the high chairs and scan the designated swimming zone, casually hoping that nothing went wrong. Andy’s job was different. He did things. Andy worked construction for his father’s company. He was smart; Andy scored a 98 on the Physics Regents. We only discovered this after lots of asking. He was humble like that. No matter how much Andy drank, he had this solidity–a reservoir of cool he could dip into at any time. We rumbled at a one click speed along the muddy creek bed. I was shocked we did not run aground. The forest towered in the backwoods light. Until Andy drove through with his father, I am sure this place had never heard a motor.

4 Deerflies and mosquitos swarmed around the boat. We slapped crazily at our exposed skin. Andy pulled out a green canister of bug spray. He began misting the air. “Watch this.” Drew grabbed the spray and gave it a few shakes. He took the lighter and bug dope and spouted flames. He had done this before, many times. It was still a great thing to see. Drew took a joint and shot fire out in front of his nose. He leaned into the can’s nozzle where it was hottest. Every one of his pores and blemishes lit up. He glowed. We drank some more and tossed around the flamethrower until the novelty wore off. Before Andy announced we had arrived, I saw it. The creek spilled out into a marshland. A boulevard of water sliced through cattails and long, prehistoric grasses. All of this spread out to the foot of the mountains. It was glass, and wide enough to turn the boat around without slowing. The clouds stacked up black and blue in the distance and the sun clung on them like light from a movie projector. Yes, this was the place. “How far does it go back?” I asked no one in particular. “What.” Andy started. “The water”– “Far enough.” “You’ve skied here before?” Drew leaned on the windshield. Normally, this would piss off Andy, but we were far too mystified to worry about such things. “Nah. But it’s deep enough,” said Andy. “Let’s trip let’s do the acid now,” Drew kind of blurted out. He buckled his lifejacket. “Look at the water and the frogs and everything. It’s perfect.” He did have a point. “How will we get back?” Andy questioned. “You have the addys right?” Drew turned to me. “Yeah.” I had brought my prescription at Drew’s request. Those pills are the reason I got into college–any college. I’d been taking them since elementary school, when teachers said I fidgeted too much, that I disrupted the learning. After my prescription, I burned through worksheets, but I found when I skipped the pills, I felt dumb and uneasy, so I just kept at it. Any concerned parent put their child on amphetamines. It was just one of those things.

5 “We won’t peak for a few hours,” Drew explained, “and Andy’s camp is close.” The idea was that Drew would drive the boat back. He had experience with this kind of thing. We did not. This seemed reasonable. Drew whipped out a dime bag of little paper squares. Each tab sported an image broken off from a larger, more coherent sheet. Mine had a branch of some twisted tree-thing–a kind of Dr. Seuss knockoff. I wanted to see the bigger picture. We ate them.

“Who’s going first?” said Drew. The sky had puffed up a bit more. The order was always spontaneous. We gauged the energy. These manners came out, no matter what. We were quiet for some time, then Drew said: “I’ll go–If no one else wants to.” Drew got it. “But first,” he looked at me, “the addys.” I reached into my backpack. Feeling slick and important, I flipped the pill bottle up into the air and brandished it between my palms, like a magician. “We need a flat surface.” Drew paced the length of the boat, scanning everything. The veins on my feet looked weird. “Ah!” Drew locked onto the dashboard behind the steering wheel. That was to be our spot. Drew shook out a capsule and dismantled it, spilling little white beads onto the dashboard. He grabbed his wallet and unsheathed a Spicy Iguana gift card–Spicy Iguana, once a Tex-Mex restaurant, then a thrift place, now another town building with the glass in the windows blown out. Drew corralled the beads together. He laid a dollar bill flat atop the beads, and, holding everything in place, he ground the pill bottle down through the money. Andy and I were fascinated by this procedure. Drew had clearly done this before. Every few seconds, he pulled off the bill to inspect his progress. With each peek, more beads became white powder. He continued this until everything was demolished. The powdered amphetamine was sliced and divided into small neat lines by Drew. He rolled up the bill. He jammed his head between the steering wheel and windshield and vacuumed it up through the bill and into his nose. “Your turn,” said Drew. Things in the acrylic glass seemed sharp, aggressive and profane. I inhaled a line and got out of there. The drug spiraled up into my brain. My cheeks went dry and feathery. My fingers sang. The bullfrogs and marsh bugs ate up the air. This reminded me of church.

6 “I’ll pass,” Andy said. “I draw the line at nose drugs.” “Well, shiiiit,” Drew said. His jaw slackened and warped. “Guess we’ll have to finish it ourselves.” He yanked me back to the steering wheel. We finished it. “Wanna spot?” Andy asked me, shimmering behind his Aviators. Dear god, yes. “Ok,” I said, severely compromised. If put in the driver’s seat, I’d probably get lost voyaging the AM frequency. I lounged on the back seat. “Here.” Andy gave me his camera to get shots of Drew. “Don’t drop it.” I wreathed my neck with the camera strap. Drew took the ski and flung it like a javelin out behind the motor. The ski glided, travelling further than what Drew had anticipated. “Oh fuck, wow, great.” Drew paced back and forth. He launched himself overboard. After some time, he arrived at the ski. He thrashed about, trying to adjust the boot. I was in no rush. “The rope. Get the rope.” Drew bobbed in the distance. The rope was already coiled together, which was good. Carefully, I rested Andy’s camera on the seat. I clutched the bundle of rope and whipped it out cowboy-style above my head. I let it fly. The T-bar splashed just beyond Drew’s face. Andy canceled the slack on the rope. “Hit it,” Drew screamed. Andy hit it, full speed. Drew popped up and skied. I pressed [rec] and watched everything through pixels and in the real world. Drew’s cuts left trails of motion bleeding over the wake. Usually, Drew had this jerky style with his skiing. Right there, he was smooth. The sun dumped on our whole show. The world and all its buildings and people fell off a cliff. I could see this in Drew’s face. Other things ceased to matter. We all knew of Drew’s home. His father worked the zinc mine (when it was open), logged the forest, and beat his family when unoccupied. At JV basketball games, Drew’s mother would materialize and dematerialize in the bleachers and by concessions. She had a whole spectrum of these brilliant purple bruises streaking her neck and jawline. Her face reminded one of high-res photos of space. I imagined worse marks in the places I could not see. Drew had a long jagged scar across his forearm. Once, he mentioned offhand, pointing at the wound, that he and his father had been pressure-washing.

7 During that time, Drew and I were an old married couple, as far as two straight teenage boys could be. Oftentimes, I wanted to punch him out. He seemed designed to be annoying and degenerate. But he was fun, and deeply honest in a way that demanded you keep him around. There, out on the water, drug-scrambled in the spray, was Drew’s glory–and our moment in the golden center of things. Drew leaned too hard into the cut and skidded out, a tangle of limbs and bright marine plastic. “Down,” I said. Andy cranked the wheel and we circled back. Drew held onto the ski like a plaything. He had this horrifying grin. “All good?” Andy asked. Of course he was good! But his face dripped in the water and mixed all around. This bothered me. “It’s good.” Drew shot the ski out in front of him. I grabbed it. He flopped up onto the deck. “Who’s next?” “I can go,” said Andy. He removed the glasses and his eyes rolled around like jet-black marbles. Drew was driving. There was no discussion. Andy stretched and flared out his broad shoulders. He cannon-balled and fractured the distance with a silver beam shot up to heaven. “Hit it,” Andy said. I snapped into focus. The in-between steps had occurred. The camera. I panicked for a bit and realized it was around my neck, still, recording my shirt-front and crotch. Andy cut in. His hip dipped down to the surface, like watching origami flatten out then come back to life. He’d been practicing. Andy and his old man got a jump on the skiing. His father’s lungs were failing. Soon, Andy would head the business. So Andy helped his father, I worked with Drew, and Drew smoked ditch weed and fucked around on his ATV when not with me. That had become the order of things. We were trying to stuff in the lost time. For that afternoon, it was working. Andy swept across the wake’s v in a great orange fluorescence. His life jacket left tracers burning through the air. In this hallucination, I truly believed such things would appear on camera. I wanted to get some action shots. I stopped recording. I flipped through the settings, tweaking the frame-rate, brightness and more.

8

The engine droned. Everything bent in towards that sound. I had been staring at the options menu for a long time. I looked up. The rope flapped crazily behind the boat. Andy was not there. “Down!” I shouted. Drew did not hear this. I tried to hold it together. “DOWN,” I said once more. Drew slowed and clicked into neutral. I think my voice was still noise to him, and the meaning–the association of these sounds to our blooming catastrophe– had yet to register. The marsh squirmed in my peripherals. We coasted for a long few seconds. The engine grumbled. Drew turned around. “Yeah.” He jounced his weight from foot to foot and stared at the T-bar sinking into the murk. “Wait–where is he?” Drew kind of shook. “I–I lost track.” “Jesus...you had one job! Ok, ok, ok. Get up, keep an eye out.” Drew started and spun the boat around. His turn was so sharp that, briefly, the prop left the water, which made an awful, grinding sound. “Don’t fuck up anything else.” The time we spent looking for Andy stretched out cruelly and endlessly. I believed it would never stop. I wanted to drown myself, shove my head into the prop blades. Then, there he was. Andy bobbed quietly against a wall of cattails. “Andy–I’m sorry. I couldn’t see you. ” I was ready to debase myself, to beg for forgiveness. We coasted up by his side. Drew reversed and clicked back and forth so as to park carefully beside Andy. Andy did not shift or react to the boat. He was white and still. “Yeah, yeah, yeah.” Andy talked at the air. The ski was not there. It must have shot off into the grasses. Andy did not approach the ladder. “Andy, Andy!? Come on and get in!” Drew said, angrily. “Yeah. Just a minute.” He paddled over, his eyes tilting down at the water. Andy attempted the ladder. He kept sliding back like the thing was greased. Drew and I hovered over him. We slipped our elbows under the crook of his armpits and lifted Andy into the boat.

9 There was no blood or anything on Andy. “Hey!” Drew shouted down into his face. “What’s happening!” I also wanted to know. I scanned Andy, confused, and then I saw it. His shin bulged out, unnaturally. I kept pointing there! there! But I said nothing. I just waited for Drew to catch up. “Oh.” Drew saw it–Andy’s bone, just tenting beneath the skin. “There was a log,” said Andy.

What can I say of the ride back? Of course, there was a storm. First, we crafted a splint for Andy: we used two locator flares on either side of his leg, and my Hawaiian shirt– shredded with Drew’s pocket knife–tied it all together. The thing looked like it’d been made by people on drugs. It did nothing to support Andy’s wound–we later discovered that his was a compound fracture. But I like to think it offered some level of comfort. We kept finishing the beers, both as psychological anesthetic for Drew and I, and as encouragement for Andy to drink off the pain. Then, he was in shock. But it would get worse. Back in the cabin, Andy really started up, cursing me, cursing Drew, and yacking all over his family cabin. It was not good to see him this way. Drew attempted to help with whisky, ice, and most creatively, Arnica Gel. He smeared the pain-relieving balm not just on Andy’s leg, but also on Andy’s thighs, chest, arms and face. We had reached our peak. Andy sparkled with an embryonic sheen. Curled up in an Adirondack chair, he reminded me of Christ in the manger. We took him to the hospital. It was a forty-five-minute ride from out in the sticks. The storm italicized the trees and the truck rattled dangerously. We were not sober. There is no use going over everything that happened in between: the hospital and the questions and the paperwork. I just remember our return as we exited the creek and lurched back onto the main lake. It was sunset, but one could not tell. A curtain of rain swept down from the mountains. Drew told us to hang on. He gunned the boat, full of dramatic purpose, like a scene straight out of a Mel Gibson revenge movie, where the hero’s family is battered, slain, immolated, yet this hero remains incorruptible–he saves the village, the nation, his own soul; the audience cheers, and everything falls in its right place.

10 As we tried to outrun the hard wet dusk, something from earlier in the day, from before, flashed through. Then the storm moved through us.

A week after, Drew shipped out, Andy had his operation, and I went to school downstate. I started practical, majoring in business studies. I hated it, but I was building a decent nest egg: I peddled my study drugs to so many prep-school grads. Though Drew floated somewhere out in the Middle East, I remembered–I was inspired–by his reservation cigarette scheme in high school. I used this extra cash to get stoned and pay off tuition. The three of us met up a handful of times out of some kind of obligation, almost like a council. I do not know if this was still friendship, but if it wasn’t, then I really don’t know what is. The last visit was at Drew’s apartment. He had returned from his first tour, but he was about fly into the desert, again. Back then the Army needed every body they could get. I picked up Andy on the ride over. Behind the frosty windshield of my dented Volvo 240, Andy limped. Andy had crashed into the passenger seat when I picked him up. He smelled bad. His cheekbones were sharp, a bit scabbed. He informed me that his father had passed, the business went under, and he was strapped for cash. I tossed him a twenty for groceries. I knew full well what it was going towards. At the door of Drew’s apartment, he asked us to remove our shoes. This was strange coming from the kid who once used his bedroom closet as an ashtray. We padded across his floor. Some road sand fell from the cuff of my jeans onto the floor. Drew swooped in. He opened the cupboard under the sink. There, stood pillars of cleaning supplies ranging from short, fast names like Shout and Grove to the more intimidating jug of Non-Acid Restroom Cleaner. He polished away my mess. Drew treated us as if we’d arrived from a nuclear blast zone. Initially, I was offended. But I came to realize that this was his new thing. Drew ran a tight ship; in everything he did, he went balls to the wall. Cleaning was simply the new focus. Drew fetched three tall-boys. We gathered in the living room. Once we crashed into Drew’s sofas, I could see. The service had completely gotten him. The little goatee thing he had was gone. He shaved. We learned that he was engaged to an Indian

11 (the country) nurse he met downstate. He showed us a picture. She was dark and very beautiful. They looked happy. Drew still had that spark, though he no longer rigged Molotov cocktails for fun or crashed his dirt bike over homemade jumps in the backyard. Drew’s evolution was funny. To my friends at school, he would appear as a lampoon–a walking recruitment ad. But they did not know Drew. They could not even imagine him. With Andy, there was no intervention. We never addressed his obvious collapse. Maybe this made us bad friends. But we would soon be gone and no one would be there to help him anyway. We decided not to taint the moment. That night, for a glance or two, Andy–the Andy we recognized–cut through the waterlogged man sat across from us. It was worth it. Andy sacrificed his body. But for what, I still do not know. It started with the pills, after the accident. Anyone could tell you that. They put him on hydrocodone. And Andy couldn’t afford physical therapy. He moved on to needle drugs, heroin mostly, though that wasn’t what got him. It was a bad batch, cut with fentanyl. The reason Andy lasted so long was the other addicts clumped around him. I learned this later, from one of Andy’s still living acquaintances. They’d have Narcan parties: fiends shot-up together and a sober person–by their standards–hung out to revive the overdoses. Andy was alone when he died. He quit breathing, folded up against the door of his apartment. I like to think he was trying to get out.

I stopped with the amphetamines. This was not because of Andy. I didn’t think I’d start smoking ice or anything like that. I wanted to feel like a person, and to see if I really was a fraud. The hardest part was losing the income from selling. That hurt. I became a teaching assistant, racking in sub-minimum wage. Eventually, I learned how to eat and sleep and live correctly. This took time. Drew got hit by a roadside bomb. This happened during my senior year. He exploded in an Afghani street market. Over spring break, Drew’s mother somehow found me in our hometown grocery store. The bruises were gone. We spoke like fugitives. The both of us staggered, dwarfed beneath a wall of soup cans and New-Age beverages. White light and soft muzak filtered down from above. She emptied out the news: They never salvaged the body. Drew smoked up the dessert. He was there, and then he wasn’t.

12 I am still here.

13