Ephemeral creatures, p.2
Ephemeral Creatures, page 2
I’m going to need a whole new wardrobe of stuff that actually fits.
He sat down in his desk chair. The surface of his small student desk was clean and uncluttered, save for a stack of books, a lamp, and a Dell laptop with a Windows XP sticker on it, likely as obsolete as his flip phone. Four college textbooks that had been waiting to be traded in at the bookstore before the next semester were stacked neatly to one side. They would be waiting a whole lot longer as the bookstore undoubtedly wouldn’t accept the out-of-print editions.
As he surveyed his room, his gaze landed on a cardboard box that seemed out of place in one corner. A surge of anxiety flooded him at the sight of the plain box, about twice the size of a shoebox, with Kevin’s Car written in black marker on the lid, his mother’s neat handwriting from the look of it.
Cautiously, he eased one flap open as if a coiled rattlesnake might be inside. Instead, he found mostly odds and ends. The box contained a Hard Rock Cafe ball cap, a mini Maglite, a Zippo lighter with a Metallica logo, several empty CD cases, loose pens, and a pocket notebook, as well as a paperback copy of A Game of Thrones that he recalled liking a lot.
Maybe I’ll be able to pick up the rest of the series now and find out how it ends.
The treasure trove also contained a battered pair of Ray-Ban Wayfarer sunglasses he didn’t recall owning, along with a Chevrolet keychain with house and car keys.
Last was a pink iPod with an aux cable still attached.
His throat grew tight as he gingerly picked up the iPod. The device brought memories of that fateful night from all those years ago rushing back in a torrent.
***
He was back at the eighties-themed house party again, that Friday night in July 2006. The booming thunder and pouring rain from the earlier monsoon storm had ended, leaving the night unusually crisp and cool for summertime. Inside the large Catalina Foothills house, music thumped, and alcohol flowed freely.
Kevin barely knew anybody there, just a couple of acquaintances from one of his freshman business classes. Most of the partiers were University of Arizona students, though he imagined plenty of others were present, too, such as Kevin’s two best friends, Chad and Lidia, along with his crush, Tara, all of whom he’d invited.
Chad was back home on some much-needed leave after having served in the Iraq War for the past year. He’d evidently seen some heavy shit over in the Sandbox, as he called it, and was being even more taciturn than usual. Kevin wasn’t too concerned, figuring his old buddy just needed time to blow off some steam and get his head straight again.
Lidia was the only one he’d seen recently, although they didn’t hang out as often as they used to. She’d taken a gap year after graduation to work full time and help her mom out with the bills. She planned to enroll eventually at the community college to pursue an associate’s in fine arts, though she’d said she might change her mind and take creative writing instead.
Most importantly, Tara had come along as well. She was home on summer break from USC, where she was pursuing her broadcast journalism degree. He’d been ecstatic when his high school crush had accepted his invitation, with encouragement from Lidia. Apparently, Tara had parted ways with her college boyfriend, at least for the summertime.
As Kevin and Tara danced on the patio, her intoxicating perfume filled his nostrils. Her soft lips met his, hot tongue slipping into his mouth after a moment. His arms enfolded her, and she pressed into him willingly. As they kissed, the softness of her breasts pressing against his chest nearly drove him wild. One of his hands slid down to her bottom as the other caressed the back of her graceful neck. Tara had one hand on his shoulder, and the other had slipped into one of his back pockets.
He’d already put down five or six beers—he’d lost count—but slowed his pace once Tara pulled him onto the makeshift dance floor on the immense back patio. The stars sparkled in the clear night sky, and Def Leppard’s “Pour Some Sugar on Me” blared from a stereo. A string of white Christmas lights strung up around the patio provided mood lighting.
Tara broke off the kiss, and Kevin gulped a long breath of fresh air. Her cheeks were flushed, and her lovely blue eyes bright with promise.
“Be back in a minute.” Tara turned away but then must have reconsidered. She gave him an aggressive kiss then went back inside, giving him some serious side-eye and that sultry smile.
Kevin fanned the front of his button-up shirt to try to get some air, a stupid grin plastered on his face. Man, this is going great. Tara said her folks are out of town, so I’ll just have Liddy drop us off at Tara’s place. I’ll get my car back from her in the morning. He realized his jeans needed adjusting in the front, so he did so as surreptitiously as possible.
“Kevin.”
He turned with a start to see Chad approaching him a bit unsteadily.
“Hey, man. Having a good time?”
Chad nodded. “Yeah, all good.”
Suddenly thirsty as hell, Kevin reached for Chad’s cup of beer since he’d set his own down someplace and forgotten where.
Chad held his cup away with an apologetic look. “Dude, that’s what I was coming to tell you—think you’ll be good to drive?”
“What? I thought Liddy—”
“Nah, she’s kinda lit already. And I’m pretty shit-faced myself.”
Kevin had already surmised the latter part. “Shit.” He started to run a hand through his overly moussed hair and thought better of it. “Liddy was gonna be DD.”
“Yeah, but she’s got some crap going on at home. Had a fight with her mom earlier… and other stuff.” Chad looked like he wanted to say more but just shrugged.
Kevin remembered Lidia mentioning the fight earlier when she helped him get ready. If anyone deserved the opportunity to let loose, she did.
“Oh… all right, that’s cool,” he said. “I should be good to go.”
“How many you had so far?”
“Fourish. I’m good—haven’t had any since we’ve been dancing. Kinda sobering up, in fact,” he lied.
“Right on.” Chad punched his shoulder. “If you’re good, then I think we’re ready to bounce whenever you are.”
Kevin checked his watch, which showed quarter after midnight already. “Damn, it’s getting late. I’ll see if Tara wants to roll.”
“Let us know. We’re chillin’ over there.” Chad pointed with his cup and sloshed beer onto his shoe but seemed not to notice.
Lidia did look drunk—also unhappy, sitting by herself and staring off into the dark desert beyond the neatly landscaped strip of yard. Kevin took a step to go check on her but was halted by Tara’s arm slipping through his.
“What’re you guys talking about?” she asked.
“We were thinking about getting out of here, if that’s cool with you.” He smiled, thinking that he was more than ready to spend some alone time with her back at her place.
“Sure, let’s go.” Her seductive smile and hip pressing against his foretold a very good chance of getting laid.
“I’ll get Liddy.” Chad was already walking away, slamming the last of his beer.
“He’s pretty trashed,” Tara observed.
“Yeah, I don’t blame him. He’s been through some serious shit in Iraq.”
“I don’t doubt that.”
Five minutes later, Kevin found himself behind the wheel of his 1990 Camaro. Lidia, as the smallest, sat behind him since the legroom behind the driver’s seat was fairly nonexistent. Chad was crammed into the back behind Tara, who’d moved her seat up nearly all the way to try to accommodate him.
All good, Kevin told himself, though he was in reality still buzzing pretty hard. He did seem better off than Chad and Lidia, however. Tara, he wasn’t sure about—she’d had a few drinks early on, but he hadn’t seen her drink much later. Maybe she was one of those composed drinkers who never showed how drunk they were until they passed out abruptly. I got this.
His Camaro rumbled to life when he turned the key, and he pulled out onto the dark residential street, much less crowded with vehicles than earlier. Bon Jovi’s “It’s My Life” started playing from Lidia’s pink iPod, hooked up to his new Alpine stereo deck. As they drove, he considered the likeliest route to take. Chad’s parents’ place was only a short detour en route to Tara’s. Lidia’s house, on the other hand, was miles out of the way, and he wondered how he could swing it so he could end up at Tara’s without annoying her with the long drive. She was in a good mood tonight, but honestly, she could be a bit of an entitled princess. Making a round-trip drive of nearly an hour before ending up at her place risked a good chance of her going from “in the mood” to not. And more than anything, he didn’t want to risk that happening.
A couple minutes later, Lidia solved his dilemma for him when she leaned between the seats. “Hey, Kev, if it’s cool with you, I’ll just crash in the car.” While you and Tara are hooking up was the part she didn’t say but implied.
That was just how Lidia was—completely selfless and the awesomest friend Kevin could ask for. She was doing her best to help him get what he wanted.
When he opened his mouth to reply, Tara said, “No way, Liddy. You should crash out on our couch, girlfriend.”
Lidia smiled drunkenly, though it looked a bit forced. “Oh, cool. Thanks, Tara.”
Tara flicked one of Lidia’s earrings affectionately. “No problem.”
“You guys want to take Roller Coaster?” Kevin asked, knowing that was a shortcut to Chad’s place.
“Go for it, bro,” Chad said. “Just don’t drive it like a little bitch.”
Kevin grinned. No chance of that.
After a few minutes, he made the turn onto Roller Coaster Road. Right on cue, Whitesnake’s “Still of the Night” started playing, an old-school hair-metal song he liked. He punched the gas. The Camaro roared and shot down the narrow, winding two-lane road. Tara grabbed his knee as he took the first curve well over the posted speed limit of twenty-five miles per hour. The car’s rear end slewed a little, and the tires chirped until he punched the throttle and the car surged forward. He cranked the stereo a little louder. His passengers whooped as they hurtled up and down dips and through a couple more curves.
Then they were racing up a steep incline, which heralded the funnest section of the road. The street abruptly disappeared from view, leaving nothing other than a large expanse of hood visible. Tara shrieked, and her hand slipped higher up Kevin’s thigh. The road reappeared again as they nosed downward into a shallow valley.
Kevin hugged the centerline at first, then straddled it, knowing the next curve was the best one, a blind left-hand turn cresting another hill. Whitesnake blared from the stereo as he accelerated, very much liking Tara’s smile and the feel of her hand on his thigh. In the rearview mirror, Lidia and Chad had big grins.
They roared up the hill and into the turn. The long hood again blotted out Kevin’s sight of the street, but he knew the road well. Just as they crested the hill, the road reappeared.
When it did, a single oncoming headlight appeared with it, approaching rapidly from maybe only fifty feet away. Tara screamed, louder this time. Kevin cursed and hauled on the wheel. The Camaro swerved back into their lane with a mere foot or two to spare from the oncoming car’s front bumper. The Camaro’s right tires went off the shoulder onto loose gravel. He fought to keep the car on the road, but their inertia was too great and his reflexes too slow.
Everyone cried out then.
A terrifying moment of weightlessness followed as the car went airborne off the road altogether and plunged down an embankment into a ravine. Metal crunched from the violent impact, and the world turned upside down. Kevin’s head smacked the ceiling, and he knew no more.
***
Kevin jolted out of the memory, having been helpless in the thrall of the worst sort of nightmare—or daymare, more accurately. He dropped the pink iPod on his bed as if it were a hot pan. He realized he’d been sitting there spacing out for some time, pulse racing and gasping ragged breaths. I’m having a fucking panic attack or something. A tight band seemed to constrict his chest, and he felt sweaty and jittery. With some difficulty, he was able to calm himself after long moments of taking slow, deep breaths.
The foolish decisions made that tragic night had ruined the lives of Kevin and his friends. Presumably, Tara’s life hadn’t been totally upended since she’d been the only one buckled up and was largely spared from harm. Chad sustained a grievous injury that destroyed his life and military career.
Worst of all, Kevin had killed Lidia.
His childhood friend had been ejected when the Camaro crashed. Over the years, Lidia had been Kevin’s closest friend, the little girl with her nose always in a book while riding the school bus. After noticing the two of them got off at the same bus stop every day, he’d decided to ask her what she was reading. They struck up a conversation about The Hobbit and clicked immediately. His life had been immeasurably fuller from that moment until the night of the crash.
He’d once heard a quote about God looking out for children, drunks, and fools. Well, if God even existed, He had looked out for Kevin, who though not a child any longer, certainly fell squarely in the latter two categories. Why God had seen fit to spare a worthless shit like Kevin when He’d allowed a sweet, kindhearted person like Lidia to die, he couldn’t begin to fathom.
Lidia Knight had been a free spirit and a bit of a nerd who adored all things fantasy, The Lord of the Rings in particular. Her favorite bands included Radiohead, Dave Matthews Band, and pretty much all eighties music. Kevin had held and comforted her when she was inconsolable after her cat died. But she hadn’t required any comforting a few years later when her estranged deadbeat father blew his brains out in a shitty motel room in South Tucson. She seemed to react to that with cool detachment, but the hurt had run deep, unbeknownst to Kevin at the time.
After her parents’ divorce, Lidia kept her old man’s name, Knight, rather than her mother’s surname, Flores. That hadn’t come as a big surprise as that was quintessential Lidia. She favored the name because she thought it was cooler, not to mention it also fit well with her love of fantasy.
As for Chad, he’d also been ejected from the vehicle but was tossed only a short distance, where his right leg ended up pinned beneath the overturned car’s roof. Surgeons needed to amputate his limb at the hospital. Shortly thereafter, Chad was medically discharged from the army, his career gone down the toilet thanks to Kevin.
Kevin hadn’t spoken to his old friend since the accident but felt sure Chad despised him over what had happened. Still, he couldn’t help but wonder what had become of Chad.
-3-
Chad Coates stared at the nickel-plated Ruger on the end table beside his recliner. The revolver sat there with the gravity of a hand grenade with its pin pulled. It seemed to be the only thing in the room that mattered, the power of life and death contained in 125 grains of lead. He swallowed a lump in his throat as he sought to muster the courage to try his luck one more time.
The truth was that the last time had freaked him out, and badly. He’d become used to his weekly games of Russian roulette, usually playing it while drunk off his ass, when bad decisions came easy. For ten straight Friday nights, he’d spun the cylinder and pulled the trigger without hesitation. According to his inexpert calculation, the chance of having survived that long was roughly sixteen percent. He’d been riding a winning streak that might have made him rich if he’d gone to Vegas to capitalize on it.
But his luck had run out the prior Friday.
On the eleventh time he played, the gun fired. At least, it should have. Instead of the metallic click he was used to, it made a fizzing pop like a child’s cap gun rather than a lethal firearm. The bullet actually left the barrel and bounced off his temple with as much force as a spitwad in a high school classroom. Against all odds, the bullet was a dud.
During the past week, Chad had felt unmoored from reality, unable to get over the freaky incident. I should be fucking dead right now. My brains should be painting the wall. He glanced over his shoulder at the trailer’s wall with its dingy yellowing wallpaper and curling Pantera poster. This was exactly the type of sad setting where one might expect to find the remains of someone who’d hit rock bottom and never bounced back.
Unbidden, his old man’s stern face appeared in his mind. Command Sergeant Major William Coates had been a decorated war veteran of both Vietnam and the first Desert Storm. The only times Chad had seen approval on the taciturn bastard’s face had been when Chad announced his enlistment in the army and later, at his basic training graduation ceremony, when Chad marched on stage, looking squared away in his Class A uniform. His father, dressed in impeccable Class As himself for the ceremony despite being six years retired, shook Chad’s hand afterward and even gave him a brief man-hug and clap on the back, eyes full of pride. His mom was bawling, but that wasn’t unexpected—she was an emotional woman, the polar opposite of her husband. Chad had never felt so proud as in that moment. Even his moderate success on the high school wrestling team hadn’t truly seemed to impress the old man much.
Chad’s burgeoning army career had been the silver bullet. As an only child, for a brief time, he actually dared to believe that maybe, just maybe, he might be able to carry on the Coates name with pride.
But then he’d let his father—and himself—down by getting himself crippled and booted from the army in one awful shot. His father’s disappointment, along with his lack of surprise, had given Chad a distinct “I knew you’d end up a failure sooner or later” vibe.
He doesn’t rule my life anymore. Hasn’t for a long time now. Yet he still couldn’t get rid of the annoying thoughts of CSM William Coates after all these years.
