* * *
Opening the doors to the truck was like opening the doors to a blast furnace that had been firing for five days straight. Dual paws of heat slapped Russell’s and Mike’s faces as they climbed inside the cab, causing them to sway dizzily until their bodies adjusted to the hellish new clime.
Should’ve left the windows down, Russell thought for the millionth time that summer.
Then, turning the engine: "Hold on. AC’s coming."
But O’Brien was already cranking his window down. "Can’t we just open them? It’s funner that way."
Russell swallowed. "Sure." He backed out of the driveway, stopped, and waited for Pete’s brake lights to blink on. When they did, he shifted to drive, rolled his own window down, glanced at Hector’s house, and headed up Pritchard Street.
Hector.
Something welled up inside of him, a combination of guilt and remorse that made him not only queasy but also tired. He often experienced the queasy part during the summer—a low-grade, persistent nausea as ubiquitous and annoying as the squealing cicadas—but the tired part was something new. And he couldn’t entirely blame it on the heat, which was surely contributing to it, or the long day at work. It was those thoughts he’d had under the tree. They’d meant something. What, he didn’t know. But they had drained him of something vital. That much he was sure of. The truth was he felt like he had sold his friends out, if by thought alone—especially Hector. Sure Hector was an asshole, but at times he could be a good asshole. Like the time he beat the shit out of that hulking senior, Jamie Kirk, after he shoved Pete’s head into the water fountain at school. That was how he and Pete had become friends with Mike and Hector, after all: two duets becoming a quartet through a random act of violence. And to see them at each other’s throats today—worse than usual—was physically sickening. Friends (and that’s what they were) weren’t supposed to punch each other. But Pete was asking for it, his mind retaliated. He knows how short Hector’s fuse is, yet he lit it anyway.
Thinking further—and in consequence, deeper—Russell came to realize what the worst part of the whole afternoon had been, even worse than that horrific, swift, humiliating punch to his friend’s gut. It was Pete running out to Hector with that big, stupid plate in his arms and stepping in one of Lola’s shit piles and being totally oblivious of it. That, Russell knew, was the primary ingredient comprising his current malaise: recalling that white turd exploding around Pete’s shoe as he ran out to Hector like a…like a.…What was the word he was looking for? He racked his brain for an association but none came. It was the heat. Had to be.
"I never got that ice cream," Mike said, staring at the green blur beyond the place where a panel of glass should have been.
"Huh?" Russell said over the incoming rush of air.
"I said I never got that ice cream. Hector asked if we wanted some, and I never got any."
Russell inhaled sharply. "Listen, Mike. I’m not really in the mood right now. To be honest with you, I’m not feeling too great." He paused, then added, "Do you even care that Pete was hurt back there?"
O’Brien turned away from the window. He fiddled with the radio dials and said, "Sure, I care, but Pete—he tries so hard to piss Hector off sometimes. I don’t get it. He’s so small compared to him, but he does it anyway. He gets all brave one minute then turns chicken the next."
Mike had dropped the monkey business as Russell knew he would. One-on-one, Mike O’Brien was a normal—or close to normal—guy. It was only in crowds that he turned his dementia on. Why he did it, no one knew. Speculations abounded around town, ranging from abuse as a child (a completely unsubstantiated rumor that Hector, Pete, and Russell did not buy) to physical trauma, like hitting his head on the curb after falling from the school bus steps in second grade (a verified fact). Still, these excuses failed to explain how he could be a model citizen and student when alone or with one other person. Russell (and others with a more psychoanalytical bent) believed O’Brien suffered from an undiagnosed anxiety disorder that compelled him to act out in social situations in order to alleviate an inner tension. So what if he danced a little too wildly or walked around like a crab? It wasn’t that big of a deal. After putting in enough hours around the kid, you learned to ignore it.
At times, though, his idiosyncrasies bordered on the bizarre. Pete personally witnessed Mike running down Cuthbert Road, which is more backwoods path than actual road, wearing nothing more than a pair of old Nikes. This occurred the summer before last, when Mike was fifteen and Russell and Pete knew him by reputation only. Pete had been in the woods searching for beetles for his insect collection when he’d heard the scrape of a jogger coming around the bend. He didn’t think anything of it at first and kept his eyes glued to the forest floor. By chance, he happened to glance up to see Mike’s rail-thin, nude body sprinting away from him, kicking up a plume of dust like the coyote in the Roadrunner cartoons. Later that afternoon, Pete had bumped into Russell at Hardaway’s grocery store and told Russell what he had seen. It had taken a week’s worth of convincing for Russell to accept that his normally no-nonsense friend wasn’t pulling his leg.
There were other oddities—ticks and spasms—that ultimately led O’Brien to pay a visit to the school counselor’s office, where the taciturn Mr. Brewer nervously asked him vague questions straight out of a teacher’s edition psychology textbook. A week later, at the counselor’s behest, Mike and his parents made the trip to Montgomery to meet with a group of special doctors who worked with special (or as they put it, "exceptional") people. Mike was tested for Tourette’s, along with a slew of other neurological disorders, but as far as the doctors could discern, there was nothing too abnormal about him. With all professional confidence, they had assured Mr. and Mrs. O’Brien that their son was "unique" but quite mentally healthy.
Of course, Hector, Russell, and Pete knew bullshit when they smelled it.
Along a gently curving two lane road, Russell and Mike headed south. The tall pines to their right carved shadows out of the setting sun, and in the alternating dance of shade and light, the truck crept its way back to civilization (or to what passed as it), namely to the town of Riley, Alabama.
Casually, Russell breached the silence. "Yo, Mike, tell me more about that raccoon you saw."
Mike jerked a spastic twinge of surprise. "Oh, that thing? Whatcha wanna know ‘bout it?"
"Well, for starters, was it foaming at the mouth?"
"Pete already asked me that," he said, before stating, "Hector didn’t think it had rabies. What do you figure?"
Russell stuck his hand out of the window and caught the wind with his palm. "Okay, first of all, Hector is an idiot. And second, we’ve had rabies scares before. So if we think it’s happening again, we’re going to need to tell someone. The thing is, usually an animal with rabies—full blown rabies—foams at the mouth, or stumbles around, or something. Are you sure you didn’t see it roll around on the ground or anything like that?
"No—jeez, why don’t you leave me alone ‘bout it?"
Russell turned down the radio. "Because it’s pretty fucking important, Mike. There’s a lot of livestock around here—not to mention my dog, who I happen to care a lot about. You have a dog, too. How would you feel if Huey got sick?"
O’Brien twisted in his seat. "Huey’s fine," he said shakily
"Yeah, sure, he’s fine now, but if you see another raccoon in the middle of the day—or any other kind of weirdness—you let me know." Russell pointed his finger at Mike’s chest to underscore his seriousness.
Unevenly, O’Brien replied, "You can count on me. I know all about that."