Opioid, Indiana Read online

  She told me all about how she had lived a few years in Michigan and how back there her role was reversed. She was different than everyone else. And how she had been teased, and how she had a friend stick up for her.

  “Hannah,” Erika said, “that was her name. And she wouldn’t let anyone say anything rude to me, and I’ll never see her again but I’ll never forget her.”

  Erika kind of took care of me. She taught me how to not feel weird on the border. She took me to parties and teased me like I was just a person rather than a white person, and it got to where I don’t think we thought of each other as anything other than friends. I mean not really. We’d tease each other for being what we were—white/Mexican—but we might as well have teased each other for being too short or too tall or redheaded. I hope I see her again, but who knows.

  She asked me that first day, “You a smuggler or a struggler?”

  “What?” I said.

  “All the whites that come to the border are either drug smugglers or life strugglers.”

  I thought about that a minute. “I’ve never smuggled anything,” I said.

  “Struggler it is,” Erika said, and she stuck out her tongue and blew a raspberry at me.

  I’ve noticed that anyone who hangs out with me awhile picks up the word, and Bennet hangs out with me the most.

  My apartment door nearly opened on to the playground, so we stepped out and sat on the swings, but I was a bit wrong about the weather. It was nice out, but it wasn’t sunny. It was a harsh winter, my Indiana friends told me. We had gotten a few days off from school because of snow and a few other days school started late, and that morning was in the thirties, which just then felt like heaven. In Texas, that would’ve seemed cold as hell, but I guess I’d gotten used to things.

  “So much for sun,” said Bennet. The swing set chains winced and chirped.

  “More like a good day for a movie.”

  “Black Panther is out.”

  “Is it?”

  “Just this weekend. I gotta see it in the theater.”

  “Shit, let’s go.” I stood from the saddle of the swing.

  Bennet always seemed to have allowance and he was good about sharing. I guess that was our thing. He’d borrow my phone and I’d borrow his cash. “How?” Bennet said. “If we go to the theater, they’ll probably call the truancy officers.”

  “They will not. Just act like you belong there. We’ll tuck in our shirts and we won’t wear hats. That works every time.”

  “That might work for you, but they’re not letting a black teenager into the movies on a Monday during school.”

  Around that time I heard Peggy come out of the apartment with her keys in her hand. She spotted us and hollered over, “What you guys doing?”

  “Thinking about going to a movie,” I told her.

  “Movie?” said Peggy, and she walked toward us, her keys going clink, clink, clang.

  “You heard of ’em? Picture stories that they show in the dark.”

  “Like a date?” she said. “You gonna share popcorn?”

  I looked at Bennet.

  “See,” said Peggy. “I can be an asshole too. Look for your uncle.”

  “Instead of the movie?”

  “On the way to the movie,” said Peggy, “the way home. Text some of those numbnuts he tags with.”

  Then Bennet looked up. “Be honest,” he said. “If we go to a movie they’ll call the cops on me, huh?”

  Peggy regarded him. “Shave your head. We got clippers. Have Riggle take you down to a zero. You look white with no hair.”

  Bennet sort of scowled at her. “When you ever see me without hair?”

  “In my imagination.” She walked off to her car with her keys jangling on. “Look for your uncle,” she hollered back at us before hopping behind the wheel and driving away.

  Bennet looked at me. “You think I should make myself look as white as possible to go see Black Panther?”

  “You wanna see it?”

  He rubbed his head. “Yeah, motherfucker.”

  Shaving a boy’s head is getting close to a boy. You have to be gentle with their scalp and hold down their ears. We set up shop in my bathroom and I had Bennet take off his shirt. He didn’t have any hair on his chest, and when he leaned over for me to get the back of his head, I could see the bumps of his spine. He got cold and he got goose pimples. The clippers hummed and purred.

  “Tssss,” said Bennet, when I guess I nicked him once. “Watch it with those filthy things.”

  “They ain’t filthy.”

  “Man, look around.”

  I turned the clippers off, and Bennet had half a head of hair. I’d gotten the left side, but the right side was still fluffy, right down the middle of his scalp. Half sandpaper, half Brillo pad. We made eye contact in the mirror and the shaved side of him already looked white. My eyes went this way, that. A sort of dust-haze hung in the jittery fluorescent light. A veil of scag sweat clung to the mirror. Heaps of gunk and stray hairs were here and there on the surfaces. Water stains. Soap scum. Piles of lint.

  I flipped the clippers back on. “Be nice or I’ll leave you that way.”

  Bennet frowned at his half-haired reflection. “I’m nice,” he said. “I’m sweet as pie.”

  When I was done, I toweled him up, flipped on Peggy’s blow-dryer and blow-dried him clean.

  We both looked him over good after he threw on his shirt and tucked it in. He stiffened his posture, pursed his lips like a duck, looked at himself in the mirror. “I would like to purchase a single ticket for the next showing of the feature film Black Panther,” he said. He shrugged at his reflection.

  “White as fuck,” I told him.

  I don’t want to spoil the movie for you. Or Bennet. I mean, he watched most of it, but a lot of the time he played on my phone. I don’t get why people do that. We sat in the far back row so he could phone it up. We had started in the dead center of the theater, but during the previews I got the sense that he was gonna have the phone out the whole time, and I didn’t want to ruin the movie for everyone else, so I made him move with me. And he was like, “Oh, I gotta sit in the back, huh?”

  And I was like, “If you’re playing with my phone you do.”

  Some people don’t do movie theater etiquette. On the other hand, some people treat it like church. Erika would shush everyone in the theaters. She’d stand up and glare at people. I’m sort of in the middle. I mean, I love movies. And I love seeing them in theaters best of all. It’s the smell, really. Or the darkness. There’s a kind of carbonated taste to everything. A buttery gloss from the acres and acres of popcorn that have passed through. A sweet reek of syrup from the vast gallons of soda. Sticky floors. Springy seat cushions. The speakers thrumming your bones.

  I will say: the big screen is the only way to see Black Panther. It starts slow, and I would like to see Michael B. Jordan make it through a full movie alive. And Bennet thought it was weird that the bad guy was African American while the good guy was African African. But from the time when T’Challa was tossed over the waterfall until the end, it was one of the better action movies I’d seen.

  It wasn’t as good as people were saying—because people were saying it was the most perfect movie of all time—but it was solid, and I could see why people were getting bent out of shape over it.

  Black folks on the internet were acting like it was a religious event, and white folks on the internet were acting like it was a sign of the apocalypse, but the only way it could have been either of those things is if it was both of those things in equal measure and the noise of it being so important in opposite directions just made it average out to being just a movie.

  When the flick was over, we walked back into the day, and sun had broken open the clouds.

  That’s one of the things that Indiana had better than Texas: it has the mos
t dramatic skies. These sort of clogs of gray storm fronts, these sort of clumps of white pillow clouds. Every shade from black to white passing through purple, through blue. With these yellow stains, these glowing edges from the sun’s rays. That many colors in one spot is dizzying.

  In Texas, the sky is blue-menthol and white. Pale the way chalk is pale. Flatter than glass.

  “Shit,” said Bennet, as we made our way across the rain-slicked parking lot. “You’re out of data?”

  “What?”

  He handed me back my phone. “Out.”

  I thumbed some stuff closed, looked at my settings. I covered my eyes with my hair. “It’s only the nineteenth.”

  “Yeah but it’s a short month.”

  I was happy for that. I needed a new month. It was my second winter in Indiana, but it was my first bad one. I had moved up the January before, and back then everyone had warned me that winters got worse, and they all seemed to use “the blizzard of ’78” as the kind of measuring stick to rate all winters against. The winter I was in, the 2018 one, didn’t compare to that, I was told. But to my Texas-raised ass, it was the grayest and coldest I’d known.

  Everything seemed compressed by the cold, weighted by colorlessness. Sunlight appeared charcoal filtered. The ground was wet with winter. Ice melt glistened or snow patches grew dirt stained and muddled. Dead leaves clumped in frozen heaps. All the streets were salted.

  I once got high after about a foot of accumulation. I walked around in the sun-sparkling snow—one of the few days the sky was crystal clear—and in my highness, the snow seemed like beach sand. I was bundled and gloved. I was hooded and wool-socked. I traipsed in the virgin snow like I was plowing through dunes, like I was on the national seashore, like I was at South Padre Island.

  That was one of the only happy winter days I’d known that season. The grayness dampened my heart. The coldness made me pout and whine.

  So, on February 19th, with the magic, stormy sky above me, I felt a great burden shrug away. February was short. And I thought winter was ending. And I had just seen the most polarizing action movie ever made, and the next day I didn’t have to go to school.

  “What do you want to do now?” I asked Bennet.

  “I gotta get home. Before Mom does. Wanna walk with me back to the apartment?”

  “Nah, man. I’m gonna look for my uncle, I guess.”

  “Where?”

  “We go to a place sometimes.”

  “Alright then.”

  “Alright.” I watched Bennet walk away.

  My uncle was my mother’s brother. Is my mother’s brother? I’m not sure how to say it. He was, at a time, her little brother. Now . . .

  I don’t think he knew her well though. They were ten years apart, and my mom left Indiana for Texas when she was eighteen, but there was an old cemetery atop a hill in a park near downtown, and my uncle remembered my mother taking him there, and when I first got to Opioid, Indiana, we went there and sat on Ima Schort’s tombstone and we drank hot coffee from a thermos, and my uncle smoked a Swisher Sweet.

  “Funny name, huh?” He had a smoke-coarsened voice and an addict-thin frame. He looked like he’d kick a dog and give you the shirt off his back. He had an angular face that gave you the impression he was always paying attention even when he was fucked up and his mind was miles away. I’ve got a face like that too. So did Mom. But I don’t have Uncle Joe’s smile. “This town was almost called Schortville,” my uncle said, and nudged me. “On account of her family. We would’ve all been Schorties. Or something. How they name people from a city. Like New Yorkers.”

  “Or Houstonians,” I said.

  “Exactly,” he said. “We would’ve been Schorties.”

  I think we both kind of thought about that, because it got quiet.

  Then my uncle said, “Your mother was a good old girl. I’m sorry she’s gone. Hell, I was sorry when she left here.” He sort of waggled to shift his posture. “But I guess I always figured she’d be back.”

  I sipped coffee. “She’s been gone awhile,” I said. She died when I was nine and I was sixteen when we were at the cemetery.

  “Yeah, but we ain’t talked about it.”

  We had seen each other at her funeral, but he was very much a stranger to me then, and we’d only talked about race cars that day. I’ve never known anything about racing, and I never will know anything about racing, but he would talk to me about drivers as though they were A-list celebrities, and he would talk to me about racing events as though they were national holidays.

  “Thanks for taking me in,” I told my uncle as we sat there on the tombstones. My coffee breath hit the cold air as steam and dragged away like tissues caught in the wind.

  My uncle blew smoke rings. “Don’t fuck it up,” he said.

  I walked from the theater straight to the cemetery hoping to find—I’m not sure what. Maybe I thought my uncle would be curled in a stupor, his back against Ima’s ancient grave. The first time I’d gone there with him, he said that he’d spend time there on low days.

  “When I fuck up,” he said, “I come here. Have a smoke. Think about your grandfather. Think about your mom. It’s not that I remember her all that well, but I remember that I wish I knew her better, y’know? I wish I called more or that she called me. I’d heard she was struggling after your father died. I didn’t reach out, but I was young. Like, twenty. That probably seems like an adult age to you now, but it’s not. Hell, I’m nearly thirty and I don’t feel like an adult yet.”

  But that morning, the cemetery was empty. I sat on a tombstone that belonged to one of Opioid, Indiana’s founders for an hour or so watching the sun shred the clouds with its rays. All the tree limbs were stripped by weather and looked like insect antennae or cracks in glass. I didn’t have any data, so all my messages sent as SMS. Peggy still hadn’t heard anything. I kept tracing Ima’s name with my finger and thinking: Schorties. Schorties. Schorties. I wanted to google Ima but couldn’t. To see what she was all about. To see what had brought the Schorts here and from where. I can’t imagine traveling in old times. In wagons for months. To say goodbye forever to your loved ones and head west into mysterious terrain. Drinking river water. Cooking on campfires. Shitting in the bushes miles from anywhere. Building a house when you got where you were going with boards that you made. Out of trees that you felled. I could never do anything that berserk.

  When I got bored of pondering, I decided to go home.

  Peggy was dressed when I got back, but she wasn’t wearing shoes. Her hair was out of its pigtails and wet and she didn’t have on makeup and it looked like she’d been licking her lips for hours.

  “Still nothing?” I asked. Her eyes were surprised when I opened the door.

  “Nope.” She licked her lips.

  “Can I borrow your phone for like five minutes?”

  “Where’s yours?”

  “I’m out of data.”

  “’Cause of all the porn you watch.” Lick.

  “I don’t watch porn.”

  “The walls are paper-thin. I can hear everything.”

  “Fine I watch porn. But I won’t on your phone, I just wanna look someone up.”

  “Tough. I’m waiting to hear back from folks.”

  “Whatever,” I told her.

  I went to my bedroom and lay on my bed. I had a book about philosophy that I found on a discard cart the library put out. I read about this old philosopher called Diogenes. He was a cynic. He lived in a barrel. He pissed everyone off.

  One time he got caught masturbating in public but he said there was nothing wrong with it. He said masturbation was amazing. He said he wished he could stop his hunger by rubbing his belly, the way he could stop his lust by rubbing his cock.

  Tuesday

  On Tuesday morning, when I woke up, Peggy was gone and the apartment was dead silent. I like being alo
ne. I think some people need people and want to be around others at all times, but I think orphans get to the point where they prefer their own thoughts. Don’t get me wrong, if Mom walked through the front door, I’d do anything with her she wanted to do. Some people get mad at their parents when they off themselves, but me, I understood. My dad was her world, I guess. He died when I was six. He was a trucker and he crashed, and for three years Mom struggled along in life. She stared at the walls when we were eating dinner, and sometimes she’d cry for no reason and she couldn’t really hold a job at all, because she always had to call in sick. She’d lay in bed tossing and turning. But even when she was as bad as she got, we would always do Remote. We’d lay in bed, warm against each other. Sometimes her hair would fall on my face. And I’d watch across the room for Remote on the wall. His voice coming out of my mother’s mouth. The two of them separate but tied together.

  Here’s how Remote told me Tuesday got its name:

  When the Earthlings realized that every day was its own thing, they decided that different events should happen on different days, but they weren’t certain if that was practical. They came to Remote with their problem, and I thought about it. “What is the least predictable endeavor of man?” I asked, and they agreed that war was the least likely to operate on a fixed schedule.

  “Still,” they said, “it would be nice if war could take place one day a week.”

  “And it would be nice,” another suggested, “if that day was early in the week, but not the first day of the week. I’ve noticed,” he said, “that I’m pretty sluggish on Mondays. And fighting wars when you’re sluggish is the worst.”

  So, Remote sent for Tues, who was the greatest warrior amongst Earthlings, to seek his council on the matter.

  “Wage an entire war in a single day?” Tues said when the Earthlings expressed their plan.

  “Is it not feasible?” I asked.

  Tues had a pipe that he smoked, and he could blow the smoke into elaborate configurations. He took a deep puff of his pipe, and he exhaled a battlefield and on the field, smoke soldiers met and killed one another until the smoke dissipated and the room was once again still. “Perhaps,” Tues said. “It will require experimentation.”