Clay Weights

“I delight, as I lie, in the wind’s rage” - Tibullus

“Can you keep a secret?”

“Yeah, but I don’t wanna hear one right now.”

I knew it was gonna be lame. Plus I was driving. He was laughing.

He giggled, then intoned, “I got it for Candy, like so bad,” and then squeakier, “and I .. um .. don’t have an I.D.” He snorted and turned his head. I backhanded his left shoulder hard.

“You told the whole party you did! Everyone believed you, you idiot.”

I took in a loud and long nose breath. Here we were, it’s almost midnight, and we were driving to the corner store with two pockets full of other people’s underage cash .. fifty, sixty bucks, in fives and ones.

“Well,” I whined, “we can’t go to the store now.”

“Yeah we can.” Bobby was smiling like an idiot.

“Um, we are seventeen and you’re sixteen. And you look like a baby.”

A baby with a touch of mustache. Bobby was dark, lanky, with straight brown hair. When he would sweat it wasn’t sweat, it was a sheen, like an even layer of spread butter on tan clay. His shiny temples bulged, blinding, over his calm black eyes. We met when he was nine. He lived up the road and we became friends.

We weren't always bad. We just kept getting caught. When his parents split, he moved in with his mom about an hour away. Soon I could drive and I’d go out there and we’d continue our dirty suburban white trash, stinky hoodrat ways. We’d shoplift (golf balls, pens, markers, eventually booze), then we’d duck into midnight garage parties, get drunk, drive back to his mom’s house and smoke cigarettes in the backyard until bed. We liked trouble, and thought we were good at it. But Bobby didn’t look twenty-one from any angle. I was hating him. I was serious, “I’m not sure about this, man.”

He shuffled his eyebrows around, thinking fast, and tried, “I’ll just go in. You wait in the car.”

“And what if that goes wrong?”

“I’ll dash out.”

“You’ll dash out .. Okay. I’m not doing this.” I was, after all, driving.

“Okay! Okay!” Both of his hands were on my arm. “How about you come in with me?”

“Oh, definitely not.”

He laughed, I fumed. I was ready to turn around, head back, tails in.

“And how are we gonna buy beer? I don’t have a fake I.D. .. Nor did I lie to thirty people back there about how I did! .. No way .. We can go to my mom’s apartment. She said she has some drinks in the fridge, we’ll just drink those and chill there. Screw the party .. And later you’ll give all of our friends their money back.”

“Naw, dude .. Come in with me.” He was kind of convincing.

“No way, man.”

“Look! It’s right there! We are right here!”

“Shit! Yeah, well … Nuts!” I pulled into the Quick’n’Stop, the kind of “stop” that was nowhere near a highway, a neighborhood spot, catering to the neighborhood’s needs. In the windows were cigarette ads and pictures of soda cans, fried chicken, ice.

I put my sweaty fingers around the keys. I turned to him and looked over my glasses, “I know you like Candy. Everyone knows.” He winked at me, opened the door and walked towards the entrance. I killed the engine, got out and followed him in.

We stood in the candy aisle. He grabbed a bag of taffy and dashed off to the wall cooler, quickly opened a door and slowly closed it. Like something he was good. He walked back down a different aisle. He looked at me, I closed my eyes hard for a few seconds and when I opened them he was still looking at me. Breath. I walked over to the cooler shuffling peanut butter cups, opened the cold door, grabbed a forty and tucked it in the waist of my jeans. We weaved towards the counter. Bobby first.

“Just this.”

The clerk smiled and rang up the taffy. Bobby paid in exact change then shuffled behind me. I smiled at the clerk and pointed the barcode at him. We left.

We headed south towards my mom’s apartment. Earlier that day when I’d talked to her she asked what I was doing this weekend. I said party tonight. I asked her. She said party tonight.

It was easier, that way anyway. We didn’t even have to go back to the party. We could just enjoy these forties and whatever mom has in the fridge. We could kick back, watch TV, get faded, drive home. After four or five lights, we hooked into the apartment parking lot. She lived in a large apartment complex. Countless room-sized boxes. She lived in the back of the property, on the first of three floors.

We were making our slim way through the overlit parking lot when, from out of nowhere to our right, a mangy dog appeared and walked in front of the car. I stopped. The dog walked into our headlights, full left side profile .. looking square, holding stare with Bobby and me. Like it was daring us to look away. Bobby laughed and leaned out the window, “Hey Stupid! Move!” I slapped his arm again. In a moment, the dog’s middle jerked, its neck pushing its head forward. Then it's spine took gulp. Out of the back of the dog, entering into the atmosphere, a long dark thing .. Bobby started dry chuckling. I was laughing through my nose. Once the canine fully produced his product, it fell into a slap onto the night-hot concrete. The dog gathered himself and clopped into his next mission, disappearing into the shadows, exit bathroom left. I could then ease off of the brake and swerved around the thing.

Inside we had the fridge, the TV, the couch, loveseat, wicker and glass tabletops. I was hoping Bobby’d wanna just hang here. In the fridge was cheese, meats, sodas, condiments, 3 beers, a plastic liter bottle of off-brand alcoholic grape soda. The pantry was teemed with bread, crackers, chips, cans, bag, boxes. We were set.

I had my head in the pantry when I heard little spurts of soft noise, sparse fluffy plops. I went into the living room. Bobby was standing, facing the entertainment center, and throwing little wooden figures on to the floor over his shoulder, quietly beat-boxing as he did it.

“Cut that the hell out!” I shouted.

“What’s this?” He looked at me, then at the little wooden figurine. Fling! Plop. It landed safely on the carpet. I leaned down to scoop them up. Bobby let another fly. It hit me on the back. I jutted up and stood nose-to-nose.

“My mom’s stuff. Stop!” Staring him dead on, like the dog.

Bobby shrugged and moved to the couch. I placed the figures back on the shelf. He says to me, “I gotta take a shit. After that, let’s go back.”

“Let’s hang here.” I offered.

“I gotta give everyone their money back.”

“Right.”

When Bobby sounded right or was convincing, that’s when you knew he is lying. I assumed he didn’t care about getting anyone their money back. Bobby never followed rules. When the plan made sense to him, he or we just did it. Once, when we were ten, he had convinced me that we could ride and glide the recycling bin down the stairs. I was first up, so I hopped in the dark blue rectangle, the footless plastic bathtub. At the top of the stairs I exhaled a desperate salute, and shifted my weight forward to nudge myself down and onto the sure track to fun. I leaned forward, getting the gravity reared up. In a second, the front bottom corner of the bin met the flat, carpeted steptop .. And sent me flying down the stairs .. bin rolling under, behind, then overhead as my little body underneath hurled down. Bell rung. My head, then at the bottom of the steps, my feet, above and behind me. My chest had came crashing down onto wrist, twisting it. The bin had landed on my back. I was sore for a few days.

I went back to fridge. I grabbed the half-a-six-pack and the purple thing and sat them on the couch beside me. I heard Bobby flush and he walked out with a lit cigarette and pranced about the living room, dragging his finger along the frames of the paintings of angels. Now I needed to go. I stepped in the bathroom and exhaled. Then I smelled burnt plastic. As I stood there, mouth-breathing, I could hear the kitchen drawers clatter on the other side of the wall. I finished, flipped off the lights, locked the door. We stashed the beers in the spare tire compartment of the trunk.

We drove back to the party, windows down, passing back through “The Strip”: A quad-corner of strip malls and grocery stores, lined with barber shops, drug stores, dollar stores, hobby stores, ice cream shops, chiropractors, discount cigarette shops, affordable tires, fast food, parking lot BBQ huts, paper plates and cigarette butts littering the lots and grass-lined sidewalks along the main roads. A real crossroads of suburban industries.

It was then a bit after midnight. I popped in a CD.

“I bet everyone has left by now,” went Bobby, in full recline, pumping his shoulders to the beat.

“Totally. I bet Parks is still there, it’s his house. Lange and James. Candy and Hannah and Kimmy. They’ll all be there. Everyone else, yeah, probably not.”

I signaled and turned left onto Chapman from Rufe Snow.

“The girls will be there no doubt I hope.”

“Yeah.” Bobby was leaning halfway out of the window now, both hands around the side-view mirror, gripping and twisting it, making airplane noise with his mouth. I slapped his rib cage a couple mean ones.

I looked in the rear view. A police car was following us. Okay, no big deal. I look again. He is, yes, following us, but he doesn't ... what? .. He doesn't have any lights on. Not one. A gliding dark grey shark’s head on a moonless sea. I tapped Bobby’s forearm and nodded my head backwards. He swung around and saw. He flipped the lever on the seat, it ribbitted and snapped into position. Seatbelts, check. 15ish miles an hour, check. I looked in the mirror again. Same squad car, still no lights. What the hell? We can’t go back to the party. Something was up, way up. I signaled and turned right onto a street two or three blocks before the party street. Brilliant. He turned in behind us. Damn. This guy, he wanted us.

They must’ve gotten tipped off by the sneaky-ass clerk at the Quick’n’Stop. Probably cameras too, definitely cameras. How could we be so stupid? What kind of charges were we facing? No doubt about it, it was all going to come to light unless we kept our cool .. Cops like clear speech, eye contact, hands visible .. Just two guys telling the same story ..

While we ferried the officer of peace, somehow getting away with pretending to not see him, Bobby and I had enough time to talk out our lie, our alibi. We agreed to a simple, semi-honest version of the last hour. 100% true without the mention of the party, the shoplifting, or theft of any kind. The beer would be, yes, my mom’s and only because she borrowed my car earlier in the day. World class bologna. She must have forgotten it, officer. Story was air-tight. Now we just had to surrender and calmly explain ourselves. The cops, they’ll laugh.

I looked at Bobby. He was shaking. I nodded at him. And why hasn’t this dumb cop flipped his lights on yet? What’s he waiting for? He has us. I was getting impatient. But I can’t land anywhere, not my house, not the party. I wasn’t going all the way out to Bobby’s house. I had forgotten where we were so I just pulled over. Silence. More silence.

Within moments, we were surrounded. Four squad cars in front of us, four squad cars behind us, each with there lights on full tilt, lighting the countless homes in the quiet neighborhood where we ended up. A real light job. Eight or nine patrolmen spill out in front. Guns out, pointed at us. I check the mirror, and more cops, guns out. That's at least eight guns. No chance of escape. We sat there. A bullhorn breaks the silence.

“Hands up!” Hands up, all four.

“Take your keys with your left hand and drop them on the ground, please.” Done.

“Open each of your doors from the outside, step out and both of you put your hands behind your head, and leave the doors open” Seatbelts off. Okay. Roger. Coming.

“Stay facing forward. Now kneel to the ground.” One, two, down.

Boots rushed in, four men pulled my arms behind. I looked over at Bobby. Same deal. I was walked backwards into the back seat of a squad car and Bobby taken to one of the cars in front.

They asked me what we were doing, where we were going, why we were out so late so young. I told them our little story. Then I looked ahead and saw six cops rifling through my car, pulling up the fabric, flashlights and fingers whizzing over dusty black faux leather. Eventually, they pulled up the hatch to the tire well. Out they yanked the beers and set them on the ground behind the vehicle. Just then, my pager started going off. It was clipped to my belt loop. Tied up, I managed to pop the little button. It was my dad. Shit shit shit. When I looked up I could then see that little crowds of neighbors were out on their lawns, watching. I recognized some of them. And how about this? I could then see that we landed three houses away from the party. Dorks.

The cops pulled me out, walked me and stood me in the street. I was in the field of a single light, brighter than God’s front teeth, pointed at my face. Through the bullhorn they asked me to spin around, slowly, then again, slowly. They ushered me back to the patrol car. Now it was Bobby’s turn to twirl. They pulled him out of the car, walked him and pointed him. Bobby did his two turns. Then he started talking, but not to the cops. What was he d..? He was kicking his feet. I yell out “NO!” from the backseat. Bobby was straight up wigging out. Flailing around like a decked tuna. Just then, his right shoulder exploded, pink, white, and black spray misted up and out from his corner. He collapsed. My turn to wig out, flopping around the backseat. The bystanders were frozen. One woman screamed, ran into her house, arms flapping, and slammed her door.

Bobby was in the hospital for a week. Winged, he said. No big deal, he said. I sat around one afternoon and clowned with him, watched some TV. He told me that he flipped out because not only was he trying to listen to the cops, but he was also, while being publicly detained, having a side-conversation with our buddy James, who walked down from the party. Bobby said he told him that Candy had left with Tim. That’s what set Bobby off. A week later, we found out she went home with Kim.

After the cops shot Bobby, they rushed to his aid. The ambulance came and down in young Robert’s shoe they found a little plastic bag full of something. But the police pursued no further, and pressed no charges. Lucky idiot. I asked him if he knew why they’d pulled us over to begin with, he blubbered, “Something about a robbery .. The car matched the description .. but we didn’t .. That’s what the ten cops who came by said .. I dunno.” We laughed. I asked him if anybody had contacted him about paying back the money. He went, “Why? Ya wanna split it?”