Cherry (27 page)

Once you’re home, Phil sends flowers—a box of peach-colored gladioli. The florist’s card with its calligraphy birthday wish contains a vow from him to love you forever. Your mother grinds up aspirin with a spoon back to mix in the water, to keep the blooms fresh. But the phone rings, so she forgets, and you just wipe the powder off the countertop with a sour sponge.

D
OONIE FIRST CRAWLS INTO YOUR LIFE
on his hands and knees like a reptile. You’re spending the night with his sister Elizabeth (aka Elizabeth Louise Deets), who lies in her own twin bed in a somnolent heap with her dark hair arrayed across the pale covers, just across the leaf-shadowed room from the identical bed in which you lie staring ceilingward, your insomniac skull crawling with words like a veritable anthill.

For hours each night, you lie awake this way composing letters to woo the far-flung, cherished college boys (the Adorees, as Lecia calls them) from the tidal wave of pot-sodden pussy that—if their letters are true—seems to be crashing down on them inside their various zip codes. These correspondences are your chief modes of expression and human contact. Without them, you barely exist, and never again will you bring such lapidary fervor to the manufacture of a single paragraph, nor will language ever hold more totemic power. The wooden English essay that won some prize this week took less time to conceive of than a single supposedly clever postcard. At school you’re laying low, angling for “good kid” status, part of a ploy to weasel your way sans high school
diploma into some hippie college far from here. With the new dress code, thay can’t even kick you out much this year.

Lying awake in Elizabeth’s white bedroom that night, you’re wholly absorbed in the skullwork of polishing some transition or other when the knob on the door starts to twist. First left, then right. Then the door cracks open to let an inch of hall light pour in, a knife blade’s width, then more than a yard of yellow hallway light spills in. You stare transfixed at the place a face should appear—expecting some quizzical parent come to loom a few seconds en route to the can. But there’s nothing. Unpunctured quiet.

Till the squeak of hands and knees on the linoleum announces someone crawling low around the end of the bed. You sit upright to watch Doonie in his pajama bottoms using his elbows to drag his skinny body forward to the side of your bed.

Then his giant sunburst of frazzled black hair pops up. He says in a whisper almost wholly starved of air, Wanna see something?

Like what? You say curious.

At which point, Elizabeth bolts up like some marionette jerked from full slumber into straight-backboned fury. (She studies ballet and has admirable posture.) She says, Get out of here, you little pervert.

Doonie says, Nobody’s talking to you.

You say, It’s okay. Really.

And it is okay. Though Doonie’s just a piddling-ass sophomore to your exalted junior status, you’re actually the same age. (You skipped a grade.) Plus his nervy entrance has piqued your interest, set you fumbling around for a sweatshirt to pull on. Whatever is he hoarding that would warrant such stealth?

Elizabeth says, He wants to show you his dick.

At which prospect you bust out laughing, and Doonie, outraged, says, That isn’t it. Get your mind outa the gutter.

I swear to God, Elizabeth says. Somebody told him he had a big dick—

I never showed anybody my dick! Doonie says.

—and he tries to show it to everybody.

’Cept people who asked. He says under his breath if you ask nice, he’ll show it to you.

I promise you, I don’t wanna look at your dick, you say. And you can see in the moonlit room Doonie’s eyes glint with the faith that someday whole herds of females will clamor to see his dick, so he can good-naturedly forgo showing it tonight because he can see that happy day approach. Besides that’s the kind of pedal-to-the-metal individual he is. (This facial expression of his is so inspirational, so able to infuse hope in its absence, that it will carry you and many others through acid trips and drug deals, across various state lines, through sagas that invariably end with the sentence, And the miracle is, the cops just let us go.)

It isn’t my dick I’m gonna show you, he says. I swear.

Elizabeth says, Get outa here before I call Daddy.

By then, you’re really wondering what exactly Doonie might have to unveil other than his johnson that would prompt him to steal in here like a jungle operative and risk Elizabeth’s hopping up and down in his ass. So you say to her, That’s okay. I couldn’t sleep anyway.

You get up while Elizabeth topples back down, saying, Just yell if he whips it out. Doonie, I’ll call Daddy if you whip it out. I swear to God. Don’t test me.

You’d barely noticed Doonie the summer before when you’d first met. It was one of those flattened-out Sundays when you’d been blowing joints with Elizabeth and the college-bound boys in a car, all of you winding up gathered per usual in the Deets’s yard in the aimless loitering of the stoned and willfully unemployed. The older boys were already shining like bronze icons you’d already cast them to be in memory—Phil and Raphael, Hobbit and the blond-haired Raj. (Hal was already in Mexico.) Each exuded a sly radiance that blinded you to anyone else in the vicinity in that early dusk amid the
whisk-whisk
of sprinklers. Distant refinery flames flapped against the fluorescent orange sky.

Those boys had the allure of transience. They’d already mentally checked out, like explorers before the anchor is hoisted, or astronauts during the countdown. They were setting off on quests and would come
back (question mark) to regale you with slain dragons. This charisma of departure so beguiled you that sentences were already assembling for the letters you’d write to each. So Doonie had been background noise: a scarecrow boy on a bike popping wheelies with his pal Hogan.

His greeting to you spoken while circling the whole crowd on the bike was, You gotta cute butt.

You were way too cool to respond to this acknowledgment of your ass before the Adorees. Still, you had to stifle a grin when he whizzed by on his bike close enough for Elizabeth to swat at him. Then he affected a quick stop that left a skid mark, a kind of exclamation point to the whole exchange.

Months later, you find yourself in Doonie’s room, a veritable graveyard for wadded up jeans and T-shirts and one Cheerio-encrusted bowl. Surf magazines scatter glossy blue oceans across every extant surface. He opens his closet door and hauls out a garbage bag that’s heavy enough to need dragging. He undoes the yellow twistie-tie with great drama, saying, You not gonna believe this. The bag yawns open, and it holds neither the Holy Grail nor pirate treasure nor bearer bonds you can cash in. No, it holds pills and capsules and powders and elixirs in every shape and size. Quite simply, it’s the largest stash of pharmaceuticals you’ll ever see excepting TV footage of government sting operations.

Where’d you get all this? you ask.

To which Doonie answers, with the grin of a kid who’s hit a home run, Hogan hit a drug store.

At the entrance to King’s Pharmacy there’d once been—for decorative purposes—this apothecary jar big around as a truck tire and aswill with pill samples. Hogan had stolen handfuls from there before, but this time he slithered down through an air vent with a garbage bag for the whole stash. Soon as his feet hit the floorboards, though, an alarm sounded, and shortly after that cops started in the back door. Since the front door was dead-bolted, Hogan had to toss a vacuum cleaner through the plate glass and dive out behind it while pedestrians gaped and screamed.

According to Hogan, he jumped and looked one way like a cartoon burglar, then jumped and looked the other before he took off, tennis shoes flapping.

He left the whole stash with Doonie for safekeeping, because Hogan knew the cops were after him. In Doonie’s psychedelic hyperbole, the arrest involved SWAT teams and a hovering helicopter. Hogan walked out with hands in the air and feeling the whisper-light touch of two dozen pairs of crossed hairs fixed on his big knobby head.

So he’s in jail? Your friend I met?

Aw he’s all right. It’s just Gatesville. He’s just sixteen. Be out before he’d have to hit the big time. Want me to get him to make you a belt from in there? They nice, those prison belts. I got one. Big old buckle’ll pick up your basic Cuban TV station. Get your name tooled on back.

You laugh more in Doonie’s company than in anybody’s since Clarice. He claims he does crappy in school (in contrast to his brilliant sisters) and wants you to tutor him in geometry. But his mind dodges around like a pinball bouncing, lighting up in places so odd you know it’s driven by the torque of great smarts.

For one thing, he’s isolated the tastier drugs into labeled sandwich bags. There’s valium by the packet and even birth control pills in round spaceship-like compacts, which you take in hopes of saving your Catholic pals from the early pregnancies they’re heading toward (two are knocked up within the year). Plus there are colored pills for any mood—methamphetamine (black mollies and white crosses), opiate derivatives like codeine, phenobarb in every dose level, nembutal (yellow jackets), seconal (red birds).

How’d you figure all this stuff out? you ask, scooping up a handful.

That’s the beauty of it, Doonie says. I made Hogan go back before his trial and steal this book. Told him, hell, you going to the joint anyway. In for a penny, in for a pound.

From under his bed, Doonie hefts a giant crimson volume, just smaller than the library dictionary and with gold-embossed lettering like some alchemist’s tome. It’s the first
Physicians’ Desk Reference
you’ve ever seen. He’s marked it with flat toothpicks at dozens of places.

Don’t they keep that thing chained to the counter? you ask.

Not like fence chain or anything. Just needed lightweight wire cutters like Mama totes in her glove box. Walked out the door with it tucked under his arm like that professor dog. What’s his name? Mr. Peabody.

Doonie sits in the room’s center cross-legged in pajama bottoms, the book open on his lap, holding up various baggies and describing their contents. It’s his hobby, pharmaceuticals. The way other kids glue model airplanes together, Doonie pores over the
PDR,
thus undertaking the study of chemicals with a vigor he’ll never bring to the geometry you wind up tutoring him in.

He says, Now here’s something meant to be what they call soporific. You gotta love the lingo, man. Soporific. Rhymes with
so terrific.
Don’t you write poetry or something? There’s a poem for you. (He grins up at the ceiling.) My soporific/ Is so terrific. You like that?

Not a whole lot, you say, and it’s dawning on you that you’re not gonna be able to tell when Doonie’s actually kidding. So when he says—Wanna eat some soporifics and get nekked?—you don’t want to insult him by laughing outright at his audacity. You just say no thanks.

Before long, you and Doonie strike up a friendship without which your life in Leechfield would prove duller than a rubber knife. He belongs to the underworld of surfers and beach bums you instantly meld into. That’s how you wind up traveling to the Gulf on weekends in all weathers. You pass the unspoken entrance exam to this fraternity (it was mostly guys) by displaying savvy about a wide array of chemicals, for every substance carries its own voodoo ritual or ceremony. In little over a year, you’d mastered most. You could clean bricks of pot or peyote buttons, roll a joint while driving, drive while tripping, and talk down the average acid-raging screamer. If a guy at the surf festival nodded off after smoking a tarry ball of opium, you’d walk him up and down the beach, all night if need be, pouring jugs of distilled water into his mouth and keeping him alert to stave off coma.

The exception was smack, which was both pricey and scarce in those days. (Junkies speak with nearly childlike glee about cooking stuff
up in a black-bottomed spoon, tying off, etc. But the one time you blammed heroin, you puked your way into nod-off, waking up astonished that guys would steal TVs for that stuff.) So aside from Doonie’s hilarity, the promise of narcotic anesthesia drew you to the shore, where it was all take a toke, sister, slap five. Plus there’s a powerful romance to surfing.

A surfer catches a wave for the same reason a rodeo cowboy throws his leg over a barbarous horse: to break the wild thing for personal use, to bend the brute will, or to be carried inside that rush of blind power for a fleet instant.

That’s partly why you’re enticed to the beach where few girls go. Not that anybody would hassle a girl (shouting as they will a few years from now in California,
Chick in the water,
when you dare to paddle out, thus exiling you to beach-bunnyhood). Girls just don’t come here unless brought by boyfriends. Eventually you’ll choose or be chosen by a sweet and sinewy blond boy in his twenties back from California, and you’ll go in his blue truck when the tidal charts and surf reports dictate, sleeping in the back or under the pier and waking soaked by fog for the first high tide.

Till you meet that boy, you come for a zillion reasons. Because the college Adorees have vanished. Because it’s the electrified Doonie who asks. Because Meredith’s ever-present new sweetheart captures all her attention with whispers and hand-holding on her mother’s sofa—all of which seems to spike in you a mean-spirited jealousy. The same holds true for Elizabeth Louise Deets whose beau likewise occupies most of her free hours. You go to do drugs and to flee the doldrums of Leechfield and the airless state that composing letters alone for days can leave you in.

Plus it’s about the only beauty spot within striking distance of the blighted Leechfield, and it’s easy to reach. You only need drive thirty minutes past refineries and along the intercoastal canal to hit the beach road.

Start at the Breeze Inn where you used to go as a kid. Stay on that road, and your right window will show slopey barbed wire marking off oil rigs and a sparse herd of blotchy Brahma cattle somebody’s trying to
make a go of. On the left, a low break of grass separates you from a shallow, flat beach and waves. An hour past that first stop is a burg called (no shit, check the map) High Island. On that beach there’s a bait shop (or was till summer 1998) called Meekham’s on a fishing pier, the narrow slats of which offer partial shelter from rain. There the water turns jade and smoothes out to offer the cleanest break east of Galveston.