He drove Hank’s ’60 Chevy to the quarry. They were going skinny dipping. Hank was too messed up to drive. He and his wife-to-be were in the back. They’d already stripped and were just basking in what was a hot, hot summer day, dry and not at all humid. All the car windows were open wide and some sun found its way into the car and onto them. It was near a hundred maybe.
The road was moving up and down like a carnival ride, a soft, gentle roller-coaster thing for little kids. Up and down and up and down. This was because Bill had taken acid. They’d all taken acid and they were all tripping. They were laughing and smoking and drinking wine.
Only by the grace of God. No cops. No cars.
Bill was doing about fifteen as they got close to the quarry and he opened his door so he could see down to the road. Annabelle asked him what the hell he was doing but he didn’t answer. He drove not so much looking ahead of him but looking down at the road which was softly curving up and down like that carnival ride.
Other of their friends met them there. They were all swimming naked and some of them, couples, had gone off to the woods surrounding the quarry’s swimming hole.
He and Annabelle didn’t bother to go off anywhere. After they’d jumped off the rocks and were in the water she’d come to him and swayed on him, swooned on him.
They weren’t the only ones. Others did it in the water too, and it was all a good time, a fun time, another acid time etched in his memory.
Look at the green. Look at the road. Look in the egg wash.
He waited for Mary to get schmutz on both her hands. One hand was wet with the egg wash and the other had bread crumbs on it but was mostly dry. That’s when he stood behind her and started to grind on her.
“Boy,” she barked at him.
Bea was watching. She was laughing. “Wish he’d do that to me,” she said to Mary. “I do him right here.”
“You would too,” Mary said.
“Well, I’d dare him anyway.”
“Boy,” Mary said again. She smacked him with her bread crumb hand.
“If we do this quick, can we go downstairs?”
“Get real,” Mary said. But then she thought about it, softened some and said “Maybe.”
So Bill concentrated, except all he could see was that mouse sliding back and forth on the linoleum being batted from one cat to the other.
“Great fun,” one cat said. That cat was wearing a baseball cap and a OSU t-shirt.
“You bet,” said the other cat. It was wearing sunglasses and laying on its side, a lazy cat, just batting that mouse with the slightest movement of one front paw.
Annabelle was wearing panties now and making tuna fish. Bill could hear the slap, slap, slap of the fork against the porcelain bowl as she mixed in the mayonnaise.
“How could you let them do this to me?” the mouse asked. “I’m gonna die.”
“We’re all gonna die,” Bill said.
He must have said it out loud because Mary, standing next to him, asked him what he said.
“What I say?” he asked.
She said, “You said we’re all gonna die.”
“Well, we are all gonna die.”
“I hope not too soon,” Mary said. “I hope not before you take me to the Upper Room.” She stepped away from him and off into the back to her station where she stirred some things on the stove and checked the prime rib inside the oven.
Bill walked over to Bea’s station and helped himself to a cocktail shrimp which he fully dipped into the cocktail sauce.
Coming in a few weeks
and
