Eighteen and Life
Not Out Loud
The heat in Clermont County sat on you like a fat man with a grudge. It was 1989. The air tasted like lead paint and the scorched hair of a dozen local transformers that had given up the ghost by noon.
Tommy didn’t mind. He was seventeen, and for the last six months his body had been playing a radio station that didn’t exist. He felt it in his marrow.
“She tell you?” Ricky said.
Ricky stood by the rusted-out shell of an El Camino with the driver’s door hanging open. He was eighteen, wearing a cheap, starch-stiff button-down, collar a half-inch too small, the skin of his neck pinched into a red ridge. He’d been wearing it three days running.
“Why do you think I’m here, Rick?” Tommy asked.
“Don’t.” Ricky’s jaw worked. He looked at the tracks, not at Tommy. “I seen you two. Behind the SuperAmerica.”
“Rick…”
“I seen you.”
The tracks at the edge of town didn’t go anywhere. They looped back toward the textile mill, a shimmering circle of heat and rusted iron that went nowhere.
Tommy stepped onto the gravel. “You didn’t see what you think you saw.”
“Stop talking.” Ricky leaned in through the open door and popped the glove box. The .38 came out heavy and slow, like he was lifting something he hadn’t decided to lift yet. “I just want you to stop talking for once.”
“Put that down.”
“She was crying, Tom.” His voice cracked on it. “You want to tell me what that was?”
Tommy was quiet a beat too long.
“Rick, there’s something I’ve been trying to tell you. For a while now.” He took a step forward. “About me. Not Sarah. About me.”
Ricky’s hand tightened on the grip. “Don’t.”
“Just listen…”
“I said don’t.” The gun came up.
For a second the barrel wobbled. It dipped toward the gravel like his wrist got tired of lying. Then it steadied again, higher, back where it could do its job.
“I don’t want to hear it,” Ricky said. “I don’t want to hear whatever you’re about to say.”
His throat jumped hard. He swallowed like it hurt. He kept his eyes on the tracks because the tracks didn’t ask anything from him. Tommy did.
It was easier to be angry. Anger had a shape. You could hold it. The other thing made his hands feel empty.
Tommy took one more step and raised his hand and put it against Ricky’s face. Not grabbing. Just there.
Ricky jerked at first.
Then he didn’t.
His eyes shut for a beat. His jaw worked like he was trying to chew a word down to nothing.
“Don’t,” he said, and it came out small. “Not out loud.”
Tommy’s thumb moved once, gentle, like he was checking if Ricky was still in there.
Ricky’s hand went.
The shot sounded like a dry branch snapping in a winter forest.
Tommy didn’t fall right away. He looked down at his denim vest. A dark bloom spread across the fabric.
“Rick.”
Ricky dropped the gun. His legs went and he caught himself on the hood of the El Camino, hands flat on the hot metal.
Tommy sat down in the gravel. He didn’t say anything else.
The cell smelled of floor wax and old sweat. Six months in and Ricky had stopped counting the days, which was its own kind of counting.
He lay on his cot staring at the ceiling. Somewhere down the block a radio was playing, tinny and distant, and without meaning to he started humming along. Youth Gone Wild. The words didn’t come out. Just the melody, low in his throat, the way they used to do it in the back of somebody’s car with the windows down. Him and Tommy and Sarah, none of them able to carry a tune.
He stopped humming.
He’d been thinking about the SuperAmerica station. Turning it over the way you turn a stone over, not because you want to see what’s under it. Sarah had been crying. He’d had it right there, the whole thing, if he’d just let himself look at it straight. She wasn’t crying because of Tommy. She was crying for him. She already knew what Tommy had been trying to work up the nerve to say.
There’s something I’ve been trying to tell you.
Ricky put his arm over his eyes.
He’d kept the gun up and told Tommy to stop talking and Tommy, who never listened to anybody, had listened to him. One time. That one time.
He started humming again without noticing.
The radio down the cell block played on.