Authors: Joyce Carol Oates
In Cherry Hill it was all guesswork, all these little tests they gave you on the stupidest things. Ernie figured it out pretty quickly that if he could guess what they were thinking he would get past the bullshit and assimilate.
Kevin Klausen, the jock with the hottest girlfriend, invited him over to his house after school and they sat on a leather sectional in a big family room and played Atari. Ernie liked Kevin and wanted to be his friend. Kevin’s mom offered snacks. “Want an apple or a peach?”
Which one sounded less tropical? “An apple.” Mrs. Klausen smiled.
For lunch she made sandwiches. “Want cheese or peanut butter?”
“Peanut butter.” Definitely peanut butter.
She was actually a bit nervous, giving him all these little
pruebitas,
nervous he was a crazy Scarface, maybe, but also nervous
for
him. He was her token something-or-other. She wanted Ernie to succeed. To assimilate. When Kevin’s mom brought them Nutter Butter sandwiches with the crusts cut off, Ernie smelled her perfume and looked at her hips in red corduroy and thought she was too pretty for this planet. Cherry Hill, he thought to himself, is heaven.
Then one day he was hanging out after school with a bunch of the popular boys, jocks and cools, on the brick wall outside the equipment shed, flicking matches and talking about getting some firecrackers. Somebody’s big brother was taking the train to Chinatown at the end of the month, and Ernie put in a dollar for some bottle rockets.
Talk turned to fucking. A couple of the boys agreed that Mrs. Klausen was a woman anyone would willingly fuck. For a mother she was downright fuckable. One kid put the question to Ernie. “I’d fuck her. Wouldn’t you?”
He didn’t have much concept of what would really be involved in a fuck, but Ernie knew that this woman, unrivaled among the mothers of Cherry Hill for the sweetness of her perfume and for her shapeliness in bell-bottoms, was someone he would like to hug, and hug was near enough phonetically to fuck that, given the opportunity, he would give it a try. Ernie said, “Yes.”
Kevin walked up. “Hey, Kevin, Ernie wants to fuck your mom.”
“Boat person, you suck! Why don’t you go back to Cuba?”
Ernie flushed. “My parents came over on plane” was all he could say. He could have added that it had been more than twenty years ago and he was born in Florida, but that wasn’t the point. It’s 1984, and everyone, even kids, knows what kind of trouble Ernie’s people have been causing for the past four years since that hillbilly Carter invited them all to come over on their inner tubes.
There was that predatory gleam in Kevin’s eye. “Hey, Fidel, why don’t you go smoke a cigar?” All the boys laughed. It could have been Speedy Gonzalez, Ricky Ricardo, Pepé Le Pew, or any other caricature of alien origin, but it happened to be Fidel. “Feedel! Fee-del!” The other boys joined in the rhyme. “Fee-del! You smell!” At that moment, Ernie knew he was never going to play with these kids again. He wanted that dollar for his bottle rockets back.
The next day Kevin started picking on Ernie in gym and making him do his homework. Now Ernie’s only friend is somebody everyone calls Pervert.
Pervert comes back to where Ernie is sitting. “You look like a Indian.” He rinses his hands in the river, cupping them and slurping some water.
“Cows shit in that water.”
“I don’t see no cow shit.”
“You don’t see it, that’s the point, but upriver there’s big cow patties getting dissolved.”
“I don’t taste it.” Pervert shrugs, slurps some more. “Let’s blaze this last one before we go to school.”
“Then we won’t have one for after.”
“We’ll pick up a soda can at lunch and I’ll make a pipe for the roaches. I can’t take fuckin’ English class without being majorly baked.”
Suddenly, out of nowhere comes a big pickup truck, a black F-250 roaring up the dirt road with blackout tinting on the side windows. Ernie sees through the windshield who’s in the passenger seat. “Tull—what the fuck is he doing out here?”
Pervert groans.
“
Are you sure it’s him?”
“Oh shit! And Keith’s driving.” Keith, a mean fucking twenty-year-old.
Pervert sinks in his seat. “Shit.”
The F-250 stops, blocking the Buick, and Tull gets out. Tull in filthy, fuzzy slippers, bright orange gym shorts, and sleeveless sweatshirt, dingy gray like a river, his doughy upper arms seeded with blackheads. Count these to avoid looking at his bloodshot blue eyes, his candle-stub nose, odd plugs of hair not definable as a beard. “Not you fuckin’ homos.”
Ernie does the talking. “We’re not homos.”
Tull bellies up to where they’re sitting. An oily matt of hair bursts from each armpit, tucked up in there like two cheeseburgers. “Then what’s the fuckin’ problem?”
“No problem.” Offer them a hit. Or don’t offer them a hit. They’ve got the best shit. “Just smokin’ weed.”
“Whose weed you smokin’?”
“What do you mean
whose weed
?”
“Someone’s been topping our plants.” Ernie wants to say,
What plants?
but it makes too much sense: them being out here in the Pine Barrens, their aggressive roll-up. This is where they grow. Ernie shoots Pervert a look, sees him shaking, and knows he stole some pot. It
is
a fuckin’ problem.
Keith gets out of the truck. Handsome, sleepy-eyed Keith. “Give me your keys.” Shit. Give them your keys and they got your car. And then you’re stuck. Here. The lonely quiet of wind blowing high in the pines. The far whoosh of cars out on Kettle Run.
Ernie gives him the keys. Keith goes back and checks the Buick, looking in the glove compartment, under all the seats, popping the trunk, even looking under the spare in the wheel well. Tull shakes Ernie down, checking all the pants pockets. He finds the little bag of weed in Ernie’s jacket. It’s just the Marlboro rattail and a couple of cured buds, what’s left of a nickel bag Ernie got from Keith. Tull keeps it.
Pervert is next. Tull works him over roughly and Pervert squirms like he’s getting tickled. None of this makes sense. Tull is their loser friend, but he goes at Pervert savagely—front pockets, back pockets, jacket. He finally plunges his hand down Pervert’s underwear and Pervert squeals. Ernie watches as Tull pulls out a wadded-up piece of paper—Kevin Klausen’s homework. Tull unfolds it, holds it up for Keith to see. Ten or twelve big buds, freshly cut. “You little shits.”
* * *
Yesterday they stopped by Tull’s trailer before school. A homemade sign on the gate features a cameo of a handgun:
Tresspassers shall be greeted by Smith n Wessin.
Pervert got out, the cold odor of exhaust in the air. He swung open the gate and Ernie pulled the Buick up the drive. Pervert shut the gate and got back in. They drove up to the trailer and Ernie cut the engine. Vicious dogs barked and growled from a ruined cage choked by wisteria vines.
They had met him at Luigi’s playing pinball, another loser from another generation. Tull had largely given up socializing with people his own age and concentrated on a world of never-ending adolescent pleasures: marijuana, video games, and BB guns.
Tull’s trailer door had
No Soliciting, NRA
, and
FOP
stickers. Pervert punched out the secret knock, five steady taps and one more delayed—the “Aqualung” riff. Closed curtains quivered at the far end of the trailer. Tull would look out all four sides before throwing two padlocks and lifting the four-by. Pervert snorted. “You could break through these walls with a rusty can opener.”
Tull opened the door and they were hit with the smell: onions, rotten bananas, and marijuana. “You leeches. You mooches.” They came in. “You wanna smoke?”
“Only if you are.”
“Fuckin’ couple of kiss-ass bloodsuckers, you know I smoke all day. Here, clear this bowl.” Tull didn’t pack them greens, but his pipe, passed without ceremony or comment, was amply resinous. With Tull this guaranteed a dark, funky mind-blow. “Wanna shoot?”
They hiked into the pines behind the trailer, Pervert wheezing from the walk. They shot at rats and empty cans of Tab and Pabst.
Tull said, “You know, you could kill someone with a pellet gun.”
Pervert snickered. “Yeah, if you hit him over the head with it enough times.”
“You want to try something really hard?” Tull reached into his shorts and pulled out a handgun.
Pervert shrieked. “Sweet!”
“Forty-four caliber. You ever hold such a thing?”
“I want to try it.”
“Fifty cents a bullet. You can shoot two for a dollar.”
“You want to try, Ernie?”
“I don’t know. I’m pretty fucked up.” He was thinking,
I don’t like this
.
Ernie plugged his ears and Tull took the first shot, knocking over a big rock. Even with fingers pressed tight against his skull, the concussion punched Ernie in the chest and left his heart pounding to get out. It was louder than an M-80, maybe as loud as an M-160—a half-stick of dynamite. Ernie’s buzz turned black. He wanted to be out of there.
Pervert took the second shot, blowing a huge chunk off a pine trunk and knocking himself on his ass in the deadfall and rotting leaves. “Holy fuck! Fuckin’ awesome!”
Tull grinned. “You ever hold anything like that?”
Let’s get out of here,
thought Ernie.
Let’s go back and say we never saw this.
Back in the Buick and out the gate, Pervert showed Ernie a handful of roaches and pot crumbs he had picked from the carpet in Tull’s trailer.
“I don’t know why you do that, Pervert.”
“He doesn’t even notice.”
“He puts his naked ass on that rug, you know.”
“Roll up your window.”
“Check the glove compartment. My pops should have a cig in there.”
Pervert came out with a loose Marlboro and pulled a piece of paper from Ernie’s notebook: Kevin Klausen’s homework. “That kid’s an asshole, Ernie. Why do you do his shit?”
“You have no idea what it’s like to get sat on in front of all the girls in gym.”
“Weren’t you guys friends for a while?”
“Supposedly, for about a week, until I became a loser.”
“Like me.” Pervert pinched the tobacco out of the cigarette and started tearing open roaches onto the back of Kevin’s homework. “Go down Kettle Run. There’s a place used to be a Girl Scout camp.”
“We got time?”
“You got study hall first period and I got gym, and I’m excused.” Pervert refilled the empty paper tube with shake and pushed in the lighter knob. They saw the decaying wooden sign for the Girl Scout camp and Ernie pulled the Buick behind an old bunkhouse by the river.
“Roll down your window so our clothes don’t smell.”
“Your clothes always smell, Ernie.”
“Oh yeah?”
“Yeah, like Fidel Castro’s crotch.”
They blazed, Pervert alternating hits with the inhaler. The sun and the weed made the maple burn redder. Pervert climbed out of the Buick. “We still got some time, right?”
“Took us twenty minutes to come out here and now it’s quarter to ten.”
“Don’t turn this into fuckin’ algebra homework, Ernie, just tell me whether I’ve got time to take a shit.”
“What! Where?”
“Over there in those trees.”
“How you going to wipe?”
“Whatever ain’t poison ivy.”
“You sure you know the difference?”
Pervert went singing around the back of the bunkhouse. “
Leaves of three, let’m beeeee …
”
At the time Ernie didn’t think twice about it, but Pervert took so long they would end up late for second period. “Jesus, Pervert, took you for fuckin’ ever.”
“Rome wasn’t built in a day.”
“What’d you use to wipe?”
“Kevin Klausen’s algebra.”
“What!” Ernie punched his arm. “You asshole!”
Pervert wrapped his arms around his head and curled up squirming in the passenger seat. “Peace! Peace! Peace!”
A day later they’re back at Girl Scout camp and Ernie watches Pervert. He wants to look Pervert in the eye, but Tull is holding him tight by his jacket collar shaking him and shouting in his face, “Little shit! Where’s the rest?”
Pervert is shivering, crying. “There ain’t no rest.” A wet spot spreads down the leg of his jeans and Ernie looks away.
Keith gives Ernie a drowsy look. “You follow us out here yesterday?”
“No.”
“You sayin’ your friend did it alone?” No. That isn’t it, either. But Ernie isn’t in a position to contradict. Keith speaks up to the sky. “The way I see it, one of ’em or both of ’em is lyin’. And they ain’t been sellin’ it yet cuz the shit ain’t cured. So somewhere there’s about six pounds of pot we can still get back into the rightful hands.” Tull, with his gaze fixed on piss-pants Pervert, is intent on Keith as if listening to his own inner voice. “Why don’t you have a talk with that one and I have a talk with this one and the first one to tell us the truth gets to see his mommy again? I’m sure when these kids see what a bad choice they made, we’ll get back whatever they haven’t already smoked. And then they can tell us about how they found it.”
They break off like pairs of dance partners, Pervert with Tull and Ernie with Keith. Keith pulls Ernie by the wrist and leads him around the back of the bunkhouse, another twenty steps to a thick hedgerow that seems impenetrable, but Keith pushes aside a heap of vines and they duck into a small clearing in the trees.
Here they are, the gigantic cannabis plants, about twenty of them, all taller than Ernie and bearing big, beautiful buds with dark-purple hairs, getting irrigated from the river through siphons. Ernie can see three stunted plants. The stalks have been cut cleanly with a pocket knife near the top. Nobody could expect this to go unnoticed, but it seems to have been done deliberately, with care: not brute vandalism, more like a tithe.
Keith sits Ernie gently on a stump and stands over him with one foot up like a cop confiscating firecrackers. “It’s not a ton of money, when you consider all the work and worry, and I don’t feel like harvesting today. Forecast puts first frost two weeks away. Let those plants bud another ten days and it doubles the take.” He’s not trying to be intimidating; Keith is just thinking out loud when he says, “It might end up better to keep you missing awhile.”