A Field Guide To Murder & Fly Fishing Page 3

  So I jumped.

  The rest of that season plays out in my memory like a sunny cartoon, with Kimball as the daring hero, myself as the sidekick, and a badly recorded Grateful Dead bootleg as the soundtrack. Sometimes I wish I could rewind the cartoon and watch it from start to finish. I wonder if I would be able to stop laughing long enough to spot the heat blister in the corner of the frame, the small but unmistakable harbinger of the coming meltdown. Of course, time doesn’t have a rewind function, and there’s no slow motion either.

  Summer flew off the reel and fall was upon us, the fleeting swirl of red and yellow leaving the hillsides bare and battened down for winter. Kimball and I may have lacked motivation, but we were not wholly without discipline. Limiting ourselves to one dose per week, we were able to make the cartoon sheet last until mid-October. Around that time Kimball offered our services to help Temple after school in the wood shop. Temple was the assistant shop teacher and the high school’s unofficial handyman; the Nordic coach had asked him to build an indoor ski jump for pre-season training. We were paid hourly wages. We did need the money, but our underlying goal in taking the job was to get our hands on more acid. Another attractive aspect was that it was short-term employment: Temple estimated it would take two weeks of afternoons to finish the jump.

  Temple did all the actual carpentry. Kimball and I hauled lumber into the gym and held the boards in place while he cut them with a table saw, drilled pilot holes, and fastened it all together with a screw gun. We didn’t mention the cartoon sheet. Temple was a quiet man, not given to small talk, and he had a way of clenching his jaw when he worked that made you worry that he would lash out if you said the wrong thing. Not that he ever lost his cool with us—even when Kimball dropped a two-by-six on his foot—but you knew the potential was there. He was in his forties, a biker-type with a salt-and-pepper ponytail and a pockmarked face from what must have been a bad case of acne in his youth. There were rumors that he’d been a Hells Angel in the ’60s, that he’d been at the Altamont Speedway, that he’d done time in prison. He’d always taken a special interest in Kimball and me. As a long-term outsider, he probably saw something of himself in us.

  The jump took shape as a long, slanted ramp held up by what looked like a railroad trestle, with a rolling platform mounted on skateboard wheels. A ladder led up twenty feet to a starting box with handrails for the jumper to push off. The jumper would stand on the platform and assume the inrun position: knees and ankles bent, chest flat to thighs. When the platform reached the end of the ramp he would spring up and out, launching himself as far as he could onto two consecutive high-jumping mats. Kimball and I spray-painted white lines on the mats to mark distance: twelve feet equaled thirty meters, fifteen equaled forty, and so on. The afternoon we finished the project, Temple let us take half a dozen runs. It was fun clattering down the ramp and blasting off into the air, almost—but not quite—enough to get us to go out for the ski team again.

  Afterwards the three of us stood back to admire the jump. Temple looked happy. He wasn’t smiling or anything, but you could tell he was pleased with the way his invention had turned out by the fondness in his eye.

  “Phenomenal,,” Kimball said, shaking his head with a toothy, fawning smile. “Pure genius.”

  “Yeah, it’s really something else,” I said.

  Temple grunted distractedly. Then his face clouded over and he turned to Kimball. “What are you trying to do? Kiss my ass?”

  Kimball flushed pink. “No, no, no. Not at all. I was just pointing out how well it turned out. It works super, doesn’t it, Jeff?”

  I nodded vigorously.

  “The ski team is going to get a kick out of this,” Kimball blabbered on. “I wouldn’t be surprised if this season—”

  “Shut your goddamn trap,” Temple ordered, his face having gone a deep red under the pockmarks. “Stop trying to kiss my ass. It’s disgusting.”

  Kimball swallowed. “We weren’t trying to—”

  “I know very well what you were trying to do,” the older man said. “Let me guess. You want more acid, right?”

  Kimball glanced at me. I gave him a tiny, noncommittal nod.

  “So, you liked the cartoon sheet, did you, boys? I thought you would.” Temple grinned like a pirate. “Well, well. Any bad trips?”

  We shook our heads in unison. “We can handle it,” Kimball said.

  “What about you, Jeffrey?” Temple asked. “Can you handle it?”

  “Sure,” I replied. “Why not?”

  We followed Temple out to his car, a brown Mustang. When he opened the door a vodka bottle fell out and rolled a few feet on the pavement before spinning to a stop. Kimball picked it up and Temple took it from him and tossed it into the back of the car as he sat sideways in the passenger seat. He sprung the glove compartment and produced a zip-lock baggie full of what looked like sugar cubes. He counted out twenty of the cubes and dropped them into a second baggie, which he handed to Kimball.

  “This’ll cost you eighty bucks. You can pay me later if you don’t have the money on hand.”

  “Right on,” Kimball said happily.

  “Thanks a lot, man,” I said, glancing nervously around the parking lot. Temple stood up and closed the door of the Mustang.

  “We’ll help you clean up,” Kimball offered.

  “No need,” the older man replied magnanimously. “You boys go and have some fun. One thing, though. Sugar cubes can be stronger than cartoon tabs, so for Pete’s sake take it easy. This stuff can make you feel like God on a Harley, but you’re not God, and even a Harley can run out of gas in the middle of the desert. You got that?”

  “Got it,” Kimball said confidently. I nodded and gave Temple an insider’s smile, although I wasn’t really sure that I did get it.

  Meanwhile, socially speaking, things were looking up for me. Mike LaRochelle, the captain of the soccer team, was in my Geometry class. This was his second time taking the class, and although I was in a lower grade, I’d always had a knack for academics, especially math, so I was helping him out, and for this crucial service I was now recognized in the halls and cafeteria. Two of the prettiest senior girls had even come giggling up to my locker to tell me they thought I looked like a younger version of Gilligan from Gilligan’s Island.

  Well, it was something.

  One Saturday afternoon, LaRochelle and his buddy Steve Mann threw a keg party at the Shrubs. It was billed as a big event; the halls of the school buzzed with excitement for weeks in advance. Invitations were never mailed out, though: you either knew you were invited or were not. Due to recent events I was pretty sure I was invited, but Kimball was not. So I felt anxious when he suggested that we crash the party together.

  “They don’t own the Shrubs, dude,” he said, as we sat on the floor of his basement hunched over a game of Risk. He’d grown sideburns and a wispy white-blond goatee. It did nothing to improve his outlandish appearance, but at least he was beginning to look older. I was still shaving once a week, if that, so in that sense I envied him.

  “I just don’t feel like it,” I repeated.

  “Is there something you want to tell me, dude?” he asked coolly. “Do you have a date or something?”

  I shook my head. “Of course not.”

  “Good. Then why don’t you pick me up around three? We’ll have a little fun at their expense.”

  The Shrubs was a vast thicket of sumac and hardwood saplings in a field beside the railroad tracks at the south end of town. Viewed from outside, the thicket looked dense and impregnable—even with the leaves gone it was a visual barrier shutting out parents and town police—but there was a narrow trail leading into the middle of it, to a broad clearing of bare dirt and fire rings overflowing with charred beer cans and broken glass. I drove my father’s Beetle, an embarrassing forest-green car with rust ulcers on the fenders and floor, and a rear hatch plastered with the nonconformist aphorisms of the era: “Bread not Bombs,” “Think Globally/Act Locally,” “One Nuclear Bo
mb Can Ruin Your Whole Day.” I parked it next to the Buick town cars and Ford pickups beside the railroad tracks and, heart pounding in the slanting afternoon light, followed Kimball on the narrow path into the thicket. We could hear the hum of conversation, laughter, Led Zeppelin played low on a boom box.

  When we stepped into the clearing the chatter stopped, as if someone had thrown a switch. Mike LaRochelle and Steve Mann and four or five others stood by the keg, while the rest of the party clustered in a loose group around the clearing. No one looked at us; all eyes were fixed upon the hosts to see what their reaction would be. Mann leaned to LaRochelle and murmured something under his breath; LaRochelle nodded and smiled thinly. I saw that it had been a mistake to come.

  Gradually the hum of conversation resumed, lower-pitched and less carefree than before. Having succeeded technically in his goal of crashing the party, Kimball seemed to feel no need to attempt the keg; the two of us hovered awkwardly at the edge of the clearing for a few minutes and then slunk away. I heard a contemptuous voice utter the word “freaks”—it was plural—and there was no mistaking the derisiveness of the laughter that reached our ears as we emerged from the thicket. I could hear some of the girls laughing too. That hit me hard, like a blow to the solar plexus.

  Back at the Beetle I sat in the driver’s seat and fumbled around with the key. My hands were shaking. I stole a look at Kimball in the passenger seat; as usual, he seemed unfazed.

  “Don’t worry, dude,” he said, lighting a match on his tooth and holding it up to the twist at the end of a joint. “We don’t need those people. They think they’re some kind of elite, but really, they’re just leading these little . . . tiny . . . lives!” He exhaled a cloud of bitter smoke and passed the joint to me. “We, on the other hand, dude, know what it means to live large. Right?” He gave me a buck-toothed grin, one crazy eye dancing, the other staring kindly into mine.

  I took a drag from the joint and turned the key in the ignition. The VW chugged laboriously and then started up with a cheerful cough. Kimball had a way of putting things in perspective. Who needed their reality?

  The snow came early that year. It snowed so much that by the second week in December we had to post-hole uphill through thigh-deep drifts to get to Indian Head, a sheltered granite outcropping on the forested hillside above the high school. It looked nothing like an Indian’s head, and there was not much to recommend the place, other than a clear view of the school and the brick-and-shingle mill town beyond. But for various reasons our houses were by this time off-limits, so we frequently put on snowmobile boots and ski parkas and used the place to hang out, smoke dope, and, sometimes, drop acid.

  One Friday afternoon in early January, an hour or so after we’d each swallowed a sugar cube, we found ourselves standing beneath a horseshoe-shaped cliff hung with icicles: thick, fluted stalactites that gleamed like a row of giant teeth. A leeching mineral in the granite had stained the icicles with ugly yellow streaks, and Kimball got us started on the idea that we were toothbrush mercenaries, just like in the TV commercial, on a mission to rid the teeth of the deadly scourge of plaque. He broke off an icicle toothbrush and started waving it around, screaming at the top of his lungs in a garbled British accent. I broke off my own weapon and stepped into the fray.

  Eventually, things got weird. The teeth began to fight back. On the first swing of my fourth replacement icicle a molar the size of an anvil broke off and slammed into my skull, driving me to my knees in the deep snow and shattering my equilibrium in a psychedelic explosion of glittering shards. Kimball, a red-faced Viking going berserk on the teeth, hadn’t noticed my distress. I tried to call out his name, but no sound issued from my throat. I felt as though there weren’t enough oxygen in the air, as though my lungs were flooding. I closed my eyes and tried to suppress my rising panic.

  When I opened them he was standing above me, shaking his head wordlessly.

  “How bad is it?” I managed to whisper. “It doesn’t look good, dude.”

  The panic swept me up like water from a burst dam. My skull ached where the icicle had hit, and it felt cracked open, as if part of my brain were exposed to the air.

  “Here.” He handed me a crumpled red bandana. I wiped my eyes with it and hallucinated that his cheeks were pulled back and rippling with g-forces, like an astronaut in a rocket. He started giving me instructions, but his voice was weirdly slow and deep, like a tape player with low batteries, and my hearing kept cutting in and out like a distant radio signal: “. . . bandana to stop the bleeding . . . from doctors for now . . . to your house. And you . . . stay out of sight of your parents, okay, dude?”

  Staying out of sight of my parents was not a problem, luckily, as they were away for the weekend. But I had other hazards to avoid in the empty house. The most terrifying of these was the bathroom mirror, where I went to check the extent of the damage to my head. A vivid picture had formed in my mind of what the wound would look like: slivers of white skull-bone poking through the flesh; a strip of gray brain matter visible through the pulsating gash in my scalp. When I worked up the courage to peel away the bandana in front of the mirror, it turned out to be no big deal, just an egg-shaped welt and an insignificant scab of coagulated blood sticking to the hair follicles. I was so relieved I nearly cried, but then I made the mistake of staring at myself in the mirror. My face was perfectly normal: boyish, hairless, an underdeveloped face for a teenager to be sure, but normal. That is, until it started to morph.

  I stared in growing horror, unable to tear my eyes away, as my occipital crest bulged, receded, and bulged again. The tips of my chin and nose blurred, and there was a throbbing in my jaw and mandible as the lower half of my face fused together in a kind of blunt, atavistic snout. I let out an inhuman groan and held my head, staggering out of the bathroom. I slammed violently against one wall after another as I ricocheted down the hall to my bedroom. I sought refuge in a tiny closet, where I spent the rest of that horrible day and night in darkness, vowing that if God allowed me to wake up the next day as a normal human being, I would never do LSD again.

  It took me several weeks to recover. Kimball tried to get me to laugh it off, but the two visions of myself—first as mortally wounded, and then as a beast-like mutant—lingered in my mind. The knowledge that Kimball had been unable to protect me from these terrors was unsettling. From the beginning, his confidence had been a given; only now do I realize the extent to which I’d come to depend on it. I’d taken it for granted that nothing bad could happen as long as he was there, and when something bad did happen I felt like a tight-rope walker who completes his act only to discover that the circus grunts never bothered to string up the safety net. A part of me bore a grudge against him, I must admit, while another part was worried for both of us—justifiably so, as it turned out.

  Once a month the school offered a free Winter Sports Day. Some people went to the skating rink to play hockey, a few dedicated souls went to the country club to cross-country ski, and the rest of us took buses up to Mount Cratchett for a day on the slopes. Kimball and I boarded the second bus—the same vehicle, unfortunately, that carried most of the soccer clique. It was a noisy, unpleasant journey. By now we were complete pariahs, a painful state of affairs for me, but one that I was able to ignore as long as we were left alone. Today, however, we had no such luck. The sting of the first spitball on the back of my neck caused me to flinch visibly, and this set off a round of snickering. I knew better than to turn my head. The next one hit Kimball, who reddened and gritted his teeth, staring at his hands in his lap. The goatee had come in nicely, but contrary to his intentions for growing it, it hadn’t added any mass to his chin. We shrank down in the seat so our heads no longer offered targets from behind. This provoked a round of call-and-response derision:

  “Aw, isn’t that sweet. Kimby and Jeffy making out on the bus.”

  “Hey, lay off, guys, they need a little freak-to-freak time.”

  “Did we scare you? Why don’t you stand up for yoursel
ves, losers?”

  Kimball’s face was very red, and his whole body shook. I’d never seen him so angry. “Sometimes I wish I had an AK-47,” he said. “I’d love to just blow their brains out.”

  For a moment the idea made me smile—rat-tat-tattat, blood and brains sprayed all over the windows at the back of the bus—and then I started to worry. “You don’t really mean that, dude—do you? We’re better than them, right? I mean, our life is better.”

  His face was right next to mine, and the emotions I saw flickering there were far more terrifying than anything the soccer players could say or do. But slowly, the old smile came back, and the crazy eyes took on their familiar merry glint. “Don’t worry, Jeff. I was just kidding about the AK-47.” He fished around in the pocket of his ski parka. “But I’m not kidding about this.” He shook his fist as if he were rolling dice, and opened it to reveal four sugar cubes: little white bricks looking cheerful and frosty on the pink skin of his palm.

  “Four?” I asked.

  “Two each.”

  “Dude,” I whispered. “I’m not even sure I want to take acid again, much less increase my dose. Remember what happened last time? I’m not really that into it any more.”

  “Jeff.” The goofy, bucktoothed smile was disarming, irresistible. The back of the bus was noisy again: Led Zeppelin on the boom box, the hoarse voices of our tormentors singing along. Ourselves comfortably forgotten again, at least for the moment.

  “I’ll take half a cube,” I conceded, feeling a strange sense of removal, as if I were watching the two of us from a seat across the aisle.

  “Take a whole one, Grasshopper. I’ll take three and we’ll call it even.”

  I stared at him. “Okay,” I said finally. “I’ll take a whole cube, but only if you stick to one as well.” The idea of either of us trying to ski on two cubes scared the crap out of me.