AFTERMATH
By Elizabeth Stamford

"You!" Lloyd said, lighting a joint. "I forget your name."

"You always do." The boy’s tone was mild. He looked down at his silver bracelet, spinning it on his wrist. They were in a vacant lot behind a tiny strip mall. It was night, and a single streetlamp cast its grim light over a mosaic of crushed brick and broken liquor bottles. Kevin’ s Pontiac was parked on the other side of the street. Its windshield cracked, the fender bent in a crazy jag.

"Guess I got more important things to remember now, don’t I?" Lloyd was two years older than the boy, and he had a Setter red beard and thick braces on his teeth. His mind moved too quickly, he said, leaping from one thought to another, so he smoked dope to quiet it down.

"Guess so." The boy’s stomach turned to water when he saw that Lloyd had actually brought a gun – not a hunting rifle, but a real gun. The kind you could kill people with. Lloyd had stolen it from his old man.

"Are you sure about this?" the boy blurted. He was here because of Kevin who had promised him some money if he stole the gasoline, but he did not yet know what the gasoline was for, or how much dough he would get for his trouble.

"Of course," Lloyd said, taking a pull on the joint. "What are you, some kind of pussy?"

"No way!" The boy spat on a dry crack in the earth, to show how tough he was, but already he felt the hopelessness of it. They were too raw, too green, too driven by simple prairie boredom.

"Then what the hell are we waiting for?" Kevin said, smoothing his scraggly sideburns. "Don’t tell me I stole my mom’s pantyhose for nothing."

Reluctantly, they yanked the thin nylon over their heads, and from then on, everything seemed to happen in slow motion. Lloyd went first, and the others followed.

The store was packed with good things for the taking: Twinkies, Thunderbird, beef jerky, six packs of Budweiser stacked in shiny silver-blue towers. There were no customers, just a striped cat intent upon eviscerating a field mouse, and a sweaty clerk named Johnson. He was a chubby man with three chins, and a mole on each one. He blubbered like a baby when Lloyd held the gun up to one of his fat tits. "Don’t hurt me!" he said, "Please don’t hurt me!"

The boy watched, clutching a bottle of Night Train, his pockets stuffed with cinnamon balls. The nylon prickled at the back of his neck and exaggerated the sound of his breathing, as if he were underwater. Moisture collected around his mouth and under his flattened hair, and he saw the world through a fine tan mesh that confused and overwhelmed him. Johnson’s crying made him want to dash for the door. For as long as he could remember, he’ d dreamed of jumping a train, riding a westbound freight as far as it would go. If only I could, he thought, I’d just walk out of my whole rotten life.

He’d tried to run away before. Once he’ d hid out in a barn for almost a week before the cops found him. Another time, he hitched a ride to Emporia, but the man that picked him up tried to touch him, so he slipped away at the next gas station.

"Hey!" he heard Lloyd yell. "Move it kid!"

And so he did, chasing Kevin out onto the street and across the asphalt. He was only half inside the Pontiac when it began to move, and he kicked his feet, clawing his way across the seat as the car leapt from first gear into third. He ripped off the moist nylon and reached out, slamming the door. The tires screeched as Lloyd rounded a corner, and the boy was thrown back, hitting his head hard against the window. When he had collected himself, he leaned over and seized a can of beer.

Lloyd headed out of town on an old dirt road that led out to Federal Highway, where the high school was. As they bumped and revved their way through the night, the lights slowly faded away and the boy saw the whiteness of the stars sprinkled over the midnight sky. He tried to drink his beer but kept spilling it down his shirt because the road was bad and Lloyd drove so quickly. Kevin stuck his head out of the window, whooping at the sky, while behind him, the boy chugged the rest of his beer and cracked open another. He could not share Kevin’s jubilation. He was trying to imagine what might happen if the Buzzard found out.

The boy’s mother always had men around: big ones, skinny ones, loud ones that hollered and cursed, and quick, quiet ones with bitter smiles. A month before the boy’ s twelfth birthday, Buzz Majors had moved in. He was a barrel-chested man with red-rimmed eyes and tattooed knuckles. The first time they were alone together, the Buzzard caught the boy by the scruff of the neck and gave him a winding punch in the stomach to show him who was boss.

Once, when the boy tried to run away, the Buzzard caught him and wrapped him in barbed wire. Another time, the Buzzard tied him to a tree where he spent the entire day in the blazing summer sun, without food or water. His little sister tried to untie him, but the Buzzard smacked her out of the way and told her it was time they all learned a lesson. Later, he did a terrible thing to her. She was sick for days, crying and bleeding, unable to eat or even sit down properly. The boy’s mother pretended it had never happened, but the boy knew that the Buzzard had stolen his sister’ s soul. All he could do was to promise himself that someday he would be so big that no one would ever mess with him again - and then he would take his revenge.

Thinking about the Buzzard excited the anger in him, so he finished off his beer and crushed the can as hard as he could. They were at school now. Lloyd parked behind the gym and swigged from a bottle of Wild Turkey. Kevin and the boy opened the Night Train. It tasted good, but was too warm.

"All right," Lloyd said. "This is where the fun begins."

The boy was drunk now and he didn’t want to move. The school was so peaceful without light or noise – without the jerks on the football team, the chicken-thighed cheerleaders, and the frazzled teachers. For the first time that night, he heard the sound of summer insects thrumming in the long dry grass, and smelled the sun-baked earth. Kevin reached back, rumpling his hair.

"Hey buddy," he said. "Let’s get out the gasoline."

The boy helped Kevin pull gallon after gallon from the trunk. Stumbling, their stomachs and bladders full of beer, they slopped gasoline around the building until the petroleum smell made them gag. The boy unzipped his jeans, peeing in a thin, frothy arc on the cafeteria steps while Lloyd and Kevin smashed windows.

"Hey!" Lloyd yelled. "Get over here!"

The boy zipped up and started toward the voices, the shards of glass.

"What’s your name again?"

"You always forget," the boy slurred. Lloyd reminded him of the Buzzard, drinking Wild Turkey straight from the bottle.

"Aw, shut up. Let’s get the hell out of dodge."

A flame sprang up in the darkness and the boy saw Lloyd’s fingers trembling at the end of a match. He looked up at the wild eyes, the slack, inebriated jaw.

"Do it!" Kevin cried. He knocked the match out of Lloyd’s hand – and at once the flame caught, ripping across the grass in a trail of Halloween orange.

Again came the rush of adrenaline, a terrified exhilaration as they dove into the Pontiac and Lloyd gunned the engine. Soon they were steaming though the football fields, racing across the prairie, and flying into the shadowy hills, where they stopped at last to watch. And the gun went off again and again in the darkness. In celebration, in jubilation - and with each shot that Lloyd fired, the boy felt some small part of himself fade away. He vomited a mess of beer and Twinkies into the grass, and then raising his head, he saw the school flash, in sharp relief, as if it had been struck by lightning, and then the fire crept inward and upward, swarming like a plague of glowing locusts. Soon the building became a beacon of light, bursting scarlet and streaks of pale gold. It was undeniably beautiful, an oasis of flaming glory in a plodding lifetime of sameness. The firestarters cheered, their faces blooming with awe. They had created a masterpiece – a kiss of warmth and color in a landscape of infinite darkness.

Kevin and Lloyd were gone for nearly four days before they got arrested. They skipped town; hid out in an old railway station fifteen miles away. They dumped the boy, hung over and bleary eyed by the side of the road. They left him to fend for himself, warned him not to rat on them. The boy, discarded on dawn’s highway, took a chance and stuck out his thumb. Who would care if he just moved on? Who would know if he washed up on different streets, or if he learned to live without them? And when a truck stopped for him, he climbed in and rode until Kansas was but a dirty smudge on the horizon.

Night is falling, and the boy knows that the thundering world lies close outside this transient cradle. Everything in his life seems to have led him here underground – to where his heart can never be fed. He hunches down biting into another cracker. It’s dry as cardboard and covered with thick grainy salt. And now, in this dingy cab he finds himself crying, sobbing like a child. The truck driver tries to comfort the boy – gives him a can of flat pop. "It’s gonna be alright kid," he says. "It’s gonna be alright." He thumps the boy quickly on the back and passes him a rag to wipe away the tears, but the boy stubbornly keeps his head lowered - his cheeks are hot with shame. Embarrassed, the trucker straightens his hat and packs his lower lip with tobacco. After all, there is nothing more he can do.