It wasn’t like I’d never been high. But a weed high is different, and the stuff that Randy was putting in the pipe didn’t look like it had ever come from a plant. It looked like something that had been mined. It was just different stuff. “This is the shit, man,” said Randy. He put the pipe to his lips and torched the end with a Bic and sucked, his eyes turning into slits as the smoke went into his mouth.
It was late afternoon in August, a week before school started, and the Anaconda High School Copperheads were running football drills down on the field below the old Catholic cemetery where me and Randy were sitting near some high tombstones. It’s a good view from up there. You can see the whole wasted town. Trace the lines of where everything went wrong. The hills across the narrow valley like baked and cracked skin where the old smelting towers used to be. The broken water channels that once fed the smelting stacks. The big stack east of town like some forgotten tower of Babylon. The town itself just spillover from the graveyard on the hill.
Used to be a busy place. All first generation Europeans, mostly Irish, who had heard about the big mines in Butte, and all the work that was going on. They built houses, the schools, the churches, the bars. Settled the valley like an invasion of ants and busied themselves making a few men some of the richest people in the world.
My dad said the sky was always a yellowish haze when he was growing up. All the smoke from the smelters filled the sky and blotted out the sun. The trees died, and all the plant life that held the soil in place vanished. The hills would wash into town whenever it rained, and the water would sometimes carve out someone’s coffin and there would be bones there, spread out through the streets. Sometimes bodies with flesh hanging off like torn rags. Random meat for hungry dogs. That was when Anaconda was something on the map that people knew about. When there was a grip of good paying jobs that would kill a man. My father met my mother in high school and settled in down by the tracks and thought about building a family on the wealth from the mine in Butte. But that all left. The only jobs around killed men slowly. Picked at them for years until they finally crumbled. Dad took a job working produce at Safeway on the west end when Butte folded. Worked his way up to assistant manager. Mom did hair on Commercial street. Not much to do. Like scraping a meal out of a bowl that’s been licked clean. The house on the east end that we lived in still haunted by the ghosts of people from other countries. The trees on the hills eventually started to grow back. Grass returned. All types of plant life that had disappeared in the poison were coming back. The hills stayed out of the streets. The smelters crumbled and fell apart. Houses burned down or were closed up. The dead stayed buried.
Randy coughed out smoke and pointed down at the football players, at the sophomore running back who cut through the defense like the entire line was made of paper and he the sharpest scissors ever made. “That kid, that Collins kid? He’s fuckin’ awesome, man.”
I scoffed. “But our football teams sucks ass.”
Randy laughed out his nose. “Yeah. But he’s still good. He’s got something.”
I watched the Collins kid hit the corner of the line and slice between two defenders, Carmickle and Shaunessy, A couple of meat heads in my math class. Bonehead math. Math for people who’ll never go anywhere past managing the local Pump and Suck. I hated it. It was math that made you feel even more stupid because it was all the shit you were supposed to learn in middle school, but didn’t. Because middle school sucked, and made you feel even more stupid because it was all the shit you learned in elementary, which was okay. But kindergarten was the whole show. After that, it all went down hill.
The Collins kid ran down the sideline and scored. Touchdown. “See?” said Randy.
I nodded, hit the pipe. Felt the dry heat of the smoke singe my throat and burn down into my lungs. I held my breath. Counted to ten. Let the smoke out slowly and then started coughing, and then the buzz. My head floated up and out over the field, rolled up in the sky and I was no longer there. And then Randy said something about it all being good. Everything. And I came back and listened to him. He went on about how good everything was. How good the shit we were smoking was. How good the running back was. The football team. The wasteland of our hometown. The empty lots. The big black pile of slag that sat at the edge of town like the corpse of a giant animal that refused to rot finally into the ground. The town itself, a ghost town where the ghosts kept acting like they were alive. Having parades. Painting houses. Having funerals and weddings. Practicing football or getting high in the cemetery.
I handed him the pipe. I thought that I handed him the pipe. I thought that I thought it and then didn’t do it, but then the pipe was in his hand and he was sparking the lighter and everything was sharp and focused, and then fuzzy and I leaned back against a tombstone and thought I was dead. In the distance, the melancholy whine of an ambulance floated up in to the air.
“I’m hungry,” Randy said. “Let’s get some fried chicken.” We stopped at the Safeway, eyes thin and bleary, sniffling and rubbing our noses.
“Why do you do this to me?” I said.
“Do what?”
“My dad works here. You know that. We walk in and he sees us all fucked up, he’s gonna know somethin’ ain’t right.”
“You worry to fuckin’ much.”
Inside the store I looked around for my father, but I didn’t see him. I didn’t want to see him right then--still too high to figure anything out if he were to say anything to me. Give me orders to mow the lawn, clean my room, feed the dog, take the dog for a walk and clean up the shit if it crapped it out on the sidewalk. He’d say that people knew us and that he had to keep things controlled, keep things in their place. He didn’t want anyone thinking that his son would let the dog shit on the sidewalk, and he certainly didn’t want anyone to know that his son was a pot head, even though he didn’t know anything about it. I’m sure he wouldn’t hear it if I told him that I was high. That I was stoned and ground and felt like a baked tortilla as I walked toward the deli and the thick smell of fried chicken.
“Help you?” the old lady behind the counter said, her face a molten mask of make-up with eyes set deep in her flesh as if they’d been pressed into it. They sparkled black and strange.
“Fried chicken,” said Randy.
I coughed and looked around. I was sure everyone in the store knew me. Knew my father. They would tell him that they saw me acting strange in the store and then he’d sit me down with his glass of bourbon on the rocks and start telling me how a man should behave--the measure of things. “How many pieces?” the old lady said.
I looked over at her, at the name tag that read Barbie and tried not to laugh. Wondered what Ken was doing. Maybe he was the half melted man with the fucked-up lower lip who walked like a broken marionette and cleaned the toilets. Malibu Stacy locked up in a wheelchair at home and tube fed. Chain smoking in front of the black and white television that only could get one good channel, and all that was ever on was stuff about God. How He was going to come back and end all the suffering. All the suffering that people chose to endure. “Eight,” said Randy. “Dark meat.” Randy dug into his jeans and pulled out a wad of cash.
Barbie flapped open a bag like it was some kind of broken bird flopping in her hand and she started to fill it with fried legs and thighs. The metal tongs glistened in the heat lamp, tore away skin as she used them to snap up pieces of chicken and stuff them into the bag. Randy licked his lips. I kept looking. I kept thinking about my father coming around a corner, clipboard in hand, his expression going sour as soon as he laid eyes on me. “That’ll be four dollars, ninety-nine cents.” Barbie tossed the bag up on the counter. “Anything else?”
Randy looked at me and raised his shoulders in an inquiring shrug.
I shook my head.
“Nah,” said Randy. “That’s good. Maybe some napkins?”
I turned toward the door and one of the checkers, Natalie, walked by and looked at me and then stopped and came over and said, “Hey, how’s your dad?”
I must have looked stunned, maybe more than I did stoned, and I shook my head and said, “He’s fine.”
“Oh good,” she said. “Must’ve gotten him to the hospital in time. Tell him I hope he feels better.” She walked off toward the cereal aisle.
“Dude,” Randy said, already finishing a leg of chicken. “I’d so nail that ass.”
I stood there in the rain of fluorescent light pouring down from the ceiling. Everything went sharp and gleaming. There was a fragility there that I’d never considered. And I thought how stupid I was to be there, stoned, with Randy and the bag of fried chicken while my father was off in a hospital. I thought of my mother going frantic--the phone calls, my little sister blubbering in someone’s house across town because all she wanted to do was go home, but she couldn’t, because I wasn’t around. “Here,” Randy said and shoved the bag into my hands. “Let’s roll.”
I didn’t say anything about my dad. What could I say? What could I do about that? Show up at the hospital stoned with fried chicken breath and say, “Hey, dad. Natalie says hi.” Was that a way for a son to act?
But I was no longer a son. I wasn’t even a man. I was aimless and lost on a road without signs, without direction, and Randy was at the wheel.
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