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‘Turn that shit off!’ Someone in a blue and white jersey, standing on the other side of the lake, rolling up with a boombox of their own, clashing Billy Idol with Poison. They keep their distance, Raylan notes, there’s not much crossover in the baseball team and the football team, if they all follow this one fella suit then there might be a problem on their hands.
Last week Story Musgrave came to school and told them all about the Space Shuttle. Bob had liked the coincidence of his name, listening to him describing realistically what it was like to fly on one shuttle and then another, the dramatic story of his life. He wasn’t disappointed as it seemed like a movie in its own right. They were lucky to hear from him. Catching himself drifting into a daydream, Bob had looked around him at some rapt faces and some wan, figuring they weren’t having the same thoughts. Who among them would be lucky enough to be astronauts too? He’d asked Musgrave a question about the Pioneer and Musgrave had informed him they were losing track of it slowly, loyal little thing kept sending back data.
That was hopeful.
He was thinking of Pioneer now, lying on his back on a large rock that was still warm from daylight. Hoping for a shooting star, but it was still too early and the sky was hazy lilac, smoke rising up from the bonfire someone had started half an hour ago.
The sound and smell made him hungry even though he’d eaten to line his stomach before he’d climbed up the mountain. The moon is out like a slice of lime flung from a glass and stuck to the ceiling.
Maybe it’s a space station.
He’s still watching the football team having their own little party, looking downright sad with their oversize keg.
Everyone was getting on just fine without them, seeking a separation from high school, celebrating coming up to the end of senior year. They hadn’t expected to draw further attention, but it’s hard not to when everyone in the county will apparently know your business as soon as you speak it out loud and sometimes if you whisper.
Raylan picks himself up from where he was sitting, bare feet in the lake. He excuses himself from the little gang he was with, baseball players, puts on his sneakers and wanders off, keeping his back to the football players who haven’t seen him yet. One of them might be Bowman Crowder, unless he’s going to be fashionably late, but Bowman has never really been fashionable and for that reason might not show up at all. He doesn’t want to find out.
Bob isn’t hanging around either. Not if Raylan has decided to move. He always seemed to know things like he could sense them coming in the air, a moment or two before they happen. His skill on the field, with a bat. There was a book that mentioned Extra Sensory Perception in the library, bottom shelf. Bob would sometimes sit on the floor and flip through in an afternoon to see pictures of things on Earth speculated as alien. Although they were interesting and often beautiful, statues and mysterious happenings, they didn’t hold a candle to Ellison, Le Guin, Asimov. They knew what they were talking about. They taught him to pay attention. Catching up to Raylan, he throws a question to his retreating back, ‘hey. Hey, Raylan Givens! Leaving so soon?’
They’re forging a path through the woods that Raylan seems to know confidently, not misstepping over any rocks or tree roots, unlike Bob who has to watch his feet.
‘Not my scene,’ Raylan says, loud enough to be heard without turning his head.
‘Where’s this go? I don’t come up here too much.’
‘Sure, I’ve never seen you thisaways, not once by my estimation.’
Bob felt like he’d been caught in a lie, somehow, before he’d even really told one.
‘I come up here— now and again. I like the mountain air. Makes me feel alive.’
He heard Raylan let out a funny little laugh but couldn’t see his face, shadowed and turned away. There were trees tall enough around them now to block the moonlight occasionally, the forest full of night sounds that raised the hair on the back of Bob’s neck. In a brighter patch of desire path, the moon catches in Raylan’s eyes for a single second as he turns around and Bob halts his step.
‘You wanna lead the way?’
It’s a challenge. It has to be. Even so hushed. Bob doesn’t question it, he listens. He nods. He steps around Raylan, carefully and with some small apologies. He shouldn’t hesitate. Bob strides forward, holding up an arm to prevent branches from getting in his face. What he wouldn’t give for a machete. Maybe a bullwhip. A cool hat.
The unspeaking presence of Raylan behind him, quiet but not silent footsteps in leaf litter, makes Bob feel like he has to talk for them both. The excuse he would make if it wasn’t all a reflex, anyway. It’s a fear response without him really being aware of it.
‘Hey, this is kinda like— I mean, it’s kinda literally Midnight Run out here. You know, it’s dark. We’re kinda sorta in a hurry, it seems. You and me. Silence and rage. I must’ve seen that movie twelve times. I went every weekend until it was out of the theatre, and some days I skipped and saw it in second period. Did you see it? It’s real funny. Kinda serious. Maybe you’d like it. I dunno. What kinda movies do you like, Raylan? You seen Goonies?’
Bob glances up here and there as the light is dropping, the stars are coming out and they should be reassuring but every look to the trail ahead makes him feel more lost. He weaves this way and that where it looks like people have walked before him. Raylan follows. That assures him more; why would Raylan follow if he’d known where he was going?
Mid-sentence, Bob realises that the trees around them are getting more dense, the path seems less of a path and more of a coincidence. Gaps in the trees that made sense to walk through but now he’s not so sure. He doesn’t want them to double back. The party sounds are barely audible and there’s no way to see the bonfire smoke. Raylan is unreadable, meeting Bob’s eyes. He looks— patient.
‘Just a breather, one second.’ Bob holds onto a tree and tries to be furtive about scanning around. Would it make more sense to go forward, as much as possible? Or would it make sense to follow the weaving trail as much as he had been, further up and down the mountainside? Both of these considerations are the same, he figures. All roads lead to Rome, or the other side of the mountain, as it were. It’s not as if they’re high up and going to lose oxygen, or encounter snow and have to eat each other, or something like that.
Bob’s choice, his path, that he works out mostly by sticking to the left as in a maze, leads them eventually to a creek. He’s ecstatic and grinning, knowing that it’ll lead them to somewhere built up if they stick by it. The flow heads down the mountain, water twinkling in the moonlight. It feels brighter, although Bob’s eyes have gotten used to the evening darkness by now. ‘Far enough, right?’
Raylan perches on a rock, no longer rushing, picks up a pebble and wings it over the creek to hit the opposite bank.
‘Why’d you wanna come out here?’ Bob says, standing and getting his breath back, ‘those jerks? They’d get bored and leave if nobody started anything with ‘em. Which I don’t think anyone would, big party and all.’
‘Could go one way or another.’
‘You were gonna go home?’
‘No.’ Quicker than Raylan has answered anything else, decisive. Bob catches a muscle jumping in his jaw.
‘Sorry. This a special place to you?’
‘Not at all.’
Bob starts to put two and two together, ‘oh— I get it. I heard about you and Crowder.’
Raylan clears his throat and levels a look at Bob, ‘you hear that from Bowman?’
‘Bowman— no, it’s Bowman I heard about. I mean, I didn’t see you fighting. I just heard it. I was in the library.’
A short exhale, like a sigh of relief. Raylan hangs his head and shakes it, ‘well, all that’s not gonna end real soon.’
‘Why’s Bowman have it in for you?’
Sliding off the rock to stand, Raylan’s frown looks deeper in the shadowed dark. He says, ‘history.’
A question or two hundred fold up on the tip of Bob’s tongue and he nods, gravely, like he knows the extent of that word. It looks like Raylan is ready to go, so they head upriver.
They should have gone downriver, the path Bob was hoping for only takes them further up the mountainside. He doesn’t know why he’s still leading, why they’re even leaving the lake behind them when it seems like Raylan doesn’t care where they end up. He could have had another beer or two by now. Maybe the football players wouldn’t be so bad and would share beyond their group. Doubtful, but logic was losing its reliability at this point of the night. Just as he’s about to give up, Raylan says, ‘okay, Bob, I’ll lead.’
Bob isn’t subtle about the massive weight off his shoulders, ‘thank god. I’ve never been this far up the mountain before. Not this mountain.’ Reaching out a hand in the dark, he finds Raylan’s elbow and shuffles around him so he’s following again. No room to walk beside each other on such an uneven path.
‘I’ll tell you what, Bob, I’ve come up right here to this part of the mountain, when it’s this dark, less times than I could count on one hand. Most other times, we’d just stay by the lake. That’s the attraction, hm. I come up one time, another party, tenth grade. Bowman was here then, too. Late, too. Young leader of men, that one. Whatever he didn’t like, he saw to it that one of his boys would deal with it, whether that was a couple slowdancing or the type of beer someone managed to get someone’s uncle to buy. Kill two birds, pour the beer over the couple. Smart thing to do. Then nobody’s having a good time except Bowman, I reckon, ‘cause his boys all say sorry when they follow what he says. Private-like. Bowman and me’ve never seen eye to eye. He doesn’t like me and his brother. But like you, I got my ear to the grapevine in the week before the party, I know he’s comin’, I think I got a foolproof solution to managing to have me a good time either way. I find myself somewhere to go when things turn sour, lay low and sit it out until he gets bored, as you say.’
As Raylan speaks, evenly and clearly, Bob finds himself willing him to turn around.
‘Second one of his boys comes up to me, not Bowman himself, I lay him out and hightail it. I think I know where I’m going. Walked up here in the daylight a lot more, if I go West I can about reach my house but it ain’t a shortcut. Evening’s okay, still got some visibility. This time of night, and it was about the same then, I can’t see a hand in front of my face. Running blind. Face, hands, all getting cut as the trees grab me. Trees I can handle, I don’t wanna be caught by noone else. I hear ‘em, Bowman too, he has to lead the chase. I’m going up the mountain ‘cause it makes sense to me that I’d cut ‘em off if it was harder for them to follow me. Slows me down, but doesn’t slow my decisions, and the next thing I know, I’ve gone every which way until I smell something real bad. Smells like a dead thing.’
He has to be imagining it, but Bob thinks for a second that his nostrils prickle with the same smell. They’re still walking, Raylan carries on.
‘Makes me stop. When I stop, I find I’m face to face nearly with a pathway that goes into the mountain, a gap between rocks bigger than my house. Smell’s coming from inside it. Darker in there than it is out here, even now, and I’m desperate enough that I think about going in. I hear Bowman stop, too, coughing with the smell. Scares him more than it scares me, proximity being to the source. I step inside the mountain and I fall right over it.’
Bob’s stomach flips as he watches Raylan look either side of the path, maybe it’s still here.
‘Dynamite. Bag of dynamite left over from when they blew the top of the mountain.’
‘Holy shit. Did you—?’
‘Nah, I didn’t have a lighter or nothin’ and I didn’t wanna call his bluff. They’re scared enough on their own and they gotta find their way back, so I let ‘em go. Wait a little longer. Smell of the stuff soaked into my clothes, though. Told my momma I met a skunk.’
‘Damn. Wish we had some dynamite right now. Blow the bloody doors off.’ The impression is a nervous tic, as well.
Raylan doesn’t really laugh but the path has widened out a bit and they can walk together. A flicker of bonfire flashes into view behind the trees and most of Bob’s nerves fizzle out.
‘Didn’t see you at that one, Bob. I know you don’t like Bowman, neither.’
‘Man’s an asshole,’ Bob says, rounding his shoulders. He doesn’t want to retread old ground, hadn’t been expecting to even though he had been very aware of the chance of party disruption as well, this time. ‘Least the likelihood that we’ll see each other in college is way, way low.’
‘True for us all.’
Maybe it’s an oversight on Bob’s part, but with as much as he knows about Raylan, he realises he really doesn’t know much about him at all. He knows the high school Raylan. He doesn’t really know the past Raylan and it seems like he won’t know the future Raylan. The disappointment on his face is unfortunately highly visible, seemingly enough to make Raylan sympathetic.
‘World’s real small, though. I won’t be going nowhere for a while. Just need to make some money.’
‘You couldn’t get a scholarship?’
‘Nope. Don’t worry about me, Bob. I get by just fine on my own.’
It’s the relief of being back on the path, back in the realm of logic, that has Bob asking, ‘well, why’d you let me follow you just now?’
A shrug. ‘Company makes a change,’ Raylan takes his hands out of his pockets and halts Bob, cold fingers on his arm. At the treeline, he ducks down and plants a kiss on Bob’s lips before stepping out towards the lake.
The golden line of a shooting star arcs like a smile across the night sky.