Jared Dean
by Matthew Wood
Jared Dean was completely fucked. It was way past curfew, and he was high out of his mind. He was more stoned than he’d ever been in his life. Every time he looked up at a streetlight, or a car drove by, there were smeary trails behind them, and he could not stop giggling. He was alone.
His grandfather would be waiting for him. Which was a major fucking problem. He would look at him and know immediately that he was high. He’d drag a hand over that 40-year-old, army-issue buzzcut, and there would be rummaging in the drawer, and he’d produce a drug test, and poor Jared would have to go piss on this thing in the bathroom while he waited. Then there would be this kerfuffle over the results, and Jared would maybe get sent to military school, which had been an idle, standing threat since he moved in.
But naturally, Jared would look at him and say something like Grandpa, please, and then try to make his super-red eyes as doleful as he possibly could. Then maybe they’d stay up until the early hours of the morning, and maybe Jared could make himself cry right there at the kitchen table. He’d be slobbering and snotting and talking about when his mom died and that he just hadn’t been the same, but he’d been trying, goddamnit, he was trying. And maybe his grandfather would believe it, and he could avoid the whole military school thing for a while longer.
Did he pass his street? Fuck. He’s double-fucked.
This is all Nick’s fault. Nick came to him in the middle of the schoolyard and said some shit like I got dope that’ll skullfuck you and nudged Jared in the ribs. How was he going to say no to that? Christ, what would he have to be made of to be like ah, no thanks, I’m trying not to get sent to military school, so thanks, no thanks? Who the hell would want to hang out with a guy like that? Even waiting until the end of the school day had been difficult. He was sitting in geometry bored out of his goddamn mind after lunch. Whatever, look at these triangles. Now look at these pointier ones. This would drive anyone to drugs.
He had passed this side of the park already. Jesus, what a shitshow.
And he still had, like, half a mile to walk. What if he just slept in the park? He could avoid the whole pissing on command thing, maybe. He felt like he was pissing on himself now. He always felt like he was pissing himself when he was high. He had this feeling when he did mushrooms last summer. With Britney Durber. Fucking Britney Durber. She was a trip. She was one of those girls that seemed to have never had the faintest suggestion of supervision. She was kind of pudgy, but not unattractive. And she had a laugh that seemed to take her whole throat. What’s the word? Husky? They made out in a sloppy way that day, all open-mouthed and hot-breathed. They never talked about it.
It’d be much worse if the police came and picked him up, was what he was thinking. He couldn’t sleep in the park, what was he thinking. Can you imagine what his grandfather would do then? He’d shit a full-sized, kiln-fired brick. God, this was a mess.
The bummer of it was he really liked his grandfather. He was what old-timers would refer to as a decent man. He wanted the best for Jared, however clumsily he went about it. Jared knew this to be true. Through all the piss tests and soliloquies on the nature of hard work, the harping on the sweet relief of a job well done, he really cared. He caught the look in his eyes sometimes. But there was some divide between them. The textures of their lives were wildly different. It was a generational thing. Like hard work had meant something in his era. They were farmers or bankers or police officers.
A cut of light came from the far side of the park. He was running now. Toward the baseball diamond. He wanted to hide in the dugout. His body felt strange, and he tried to make himself small. Like he could hide, flatten his body to the ground, like in cartoons.
Once, he had been so stoned that he literally could not even look his grandfather in the eye. He hid his face in a pillow. His grandfather hadn’t said anything. Jared didn’t need to look at him to feel his immeasurable disappointment. That incredulous look in his eye. Like Jesus, pull yourself together. They were supposed to go somewhere together that day, but Jared couldn’t remember where. On account of his highness. He was laughing himself into tears, wiping his face on the pillowcase on the couch. Then he excused himself to lay down in his room and watch TV.
He came around the dugout, trotting alongside the fence. There was nothing on the other side of the park now. He hadn’t even seen where the light had come from. Still, he knelt down to the cement and got down on his hands and knees, wading through spent sunflower seeds that stuck to his palms. He listened intently. He waited for light to reappear in the smeary dark.
It had been hard on him. His mother’s death. They had had a strained relationship that was worsened by his pot-smoking and her drinking. They yelled at each other and, on a few occasions, got into fist fights. Once she sat on him. She was a big woman, and he was a small boy and she completely incapacitated him. She stayed on him for maybe an hour. Just until he calmed down and wiped the tears from his face. Later, he smashed his cell phone and ran out into the night and returned later, high out of his mind. She bought him a new phone the next day.
He still had that phone. He thought about calling Nick and asking for a ride, but Nick was also supernaturally stoned and more or less useless. Plus, Nick wouldn’t piss on you if you were on fire. Nick wouldn’t cross the street to talk to you. The sole reason he hung out with Nick was Nick’s access to potent pot. Also, Nick bagged, which put him in the position of getting residuals.
The park was silent in a way that was eerie. It was the kind of silent where people stumbled out of doorways or otherwise darkened areas that you didn’t initially see. If this were a movie—which it wasn’t—this would be the point where the camera came in hard on a hand bursting through the soil. The very thought kind of wigged Jared out, and he looked around again, peering through the fences that enclosed the dugout to see if there was anyone around.
Had he seen the light at all?
What he knew now was this was a bad situation to be in. Not only the curfew situation and the problems that presented, but also the being stoned, which he was now starting to think was the root of all his problems. In his mind, he was assigning blame for every adverse circumstance that had presented itself since he had first chiefed hard on a joint in Ezra Greenbaum’s basement in seventh grade. It seemed increasingly logical that all of the problems that he had encountered were worsened by his use of pot. Like a ray of blame-lifting sun it washed over him and for a brief moment he resolved to quit smoking pot and fly straight. He’d give a shit about geometry, and his persistent acne would clear up, and he would be a well-adjusted boy in the eleventh grade who did his homework and was college-bound, and maybe he’d work on Wall Street one day selling penny stocks. He’d have a late-night television interview in which he would be witty and whimsical, and his grandfather would tell his friends that it was rough in the beginning but, goddammit, the kid pulled through. Did his grandfather have friends?
He stood now, halfway crouched, looking around the perimeter of the park. He saw no lights beside the streetlamps, which gave off a dull, sepia glow. He started to duck-walk out of the dugout.
Then it occurred to him that his resolution was entirely false. This was a last hurrah resolution. He had had major emotional problems before he started smoking pot. He wrote shit on the walls like I hate everyone and everything when he was, like, nine, and it wasn’t until he started smoking truly egregious amounts of pot that he felt anything akin to emotional stability. There were talks of medication with his dearly departed mother. School counselors looked over their glasses at her and spoke in tired, measured tones. And Jared didn’t really know his father, who had left when he was, like, seven, in part due to the emotional disturbances of his young boy, but not helped a single fucking bit by his mother’s drinking. He moved to Nebraska and there wasn’t a single fucking peep out of him, though child support came regularly, however meager. And as soon as his father left, his mother’s drinking had gotten much, much worse, which often crossed his mind as another convenient scapegoat for his shitty behavior.
He was walking cautiously out of the dugout, as if moving slower made him invisible. He moved from structure to structure, trying to stay in the shadows, like spies he had seen in the movies. Where inevitably one spy would make some kind of hand gesture to another spy, whether a point at their eyes and then in another direction, or a flick of their wrists like follow behind. Did this really work? Were spies like this in real life? Like pitchers and catchers with this shorthand and those steely looks?
His mother died of cirrhosis of the liver. It was not a dignified death. She wept often and vigorously and clutched his biceps and asked for forgiveness. She grew spindly in a hospital bed and had tubes for various bodily functions strewn throughout her body. She looked red-eyed at him and winced in pain. She asked him to stay with her but could never stay awake. His grandfather, her father, looked on. Outside the hospital window, birds had made a nest in a sycamore tree and his mother repeated that she knew how the birds felt and did not explain what the hell this meant exactly. And shamefully, he was always stoned then, too, and this worsened the disconnect because he could not parse why she was talking about the fucking birds or how she felt like them or what he was supposed to forgive her for. He looked into her glassy eyes and felt fraudulent and unreal and like time was slipping away from him in not so much of a stream but more of a white-foaming river. He was at school when she finally died, and his grandfather had signed him out for the day and told him that she died, while they sat in his Toyota Tundra in the parking lot. He was stone-faced, but not unkind. He gave Jared a pat on the back that felt foreign and quickly retracted his hand. They got pizza that night, which felt weird. Like, was this celebrating? What was an appropriately mournful dinner?
He felt like he was pissing himself again. He was behind a twisted plastic slide. Which was stupid because if anyone looked, they’d see his legs, like a child hiding behind a curtain when you can see their shoes. Like poor, dumb Polonius. They had just covered Shakespeare in English, and he was so stoned he could not stop laughing when Polonius got stabbed. This son of a bitch thought it’d be a good idea to spy on a guy who is clearly coming unhinged. His teacher, Ms. Enriquez, made him leave the room, and he never went back.
There was another cut of light. He got down on the ground, and started to army-crawl across the dense rubber foam of the playground. Which he’d likely be doing a lot more of in the not-too-distant future. He needed to get out of the park, but he felt like maybe they were circling, looking for him. And he couldn’t see where the light was coming from.
He sent a text that said “help” to Nick.
Then it was all dark again, and he couldn’t do anything but wait. It was 12:43 am. His grandfather would be absolutely pissed. He had come home once at 11:32—he knew this was the time because his grandfather said it over and over again—and his grandfather had almost had a stroke. He used words like respect and dignity and consideration. He told Jared that he was a reasonable man a number of times, and always followed it with comments that suggested otherwise. He said things like I’m a reasonable man, but I had no problem shooting Viet Cong from the trees. Or I’m a reasonable man, but I once chased a boy down in the street who threw a smoothie at my truck. Or I’m a reasonable man, but I am negative in the way of shit-taking.
Sometimes Jared felt like a disappointment.
When the light didn’t come up again, he made a break for it. He was fully sprinting. He had acid in his throat and his legs burned. He was nearing Stoner Circle when the light cut again. This time from the opposite side of the park. But he couldn’t stop now. He was running across the park at the absolute median of night, and he could not stop. If they caught him, it was over. The military school would shave his head and make an example of him and tell him to drop and give them varying amounts.
The light flooded over him and heard the thrum of acceleration coming around the far corner of the park. He knew exactly where he was now, and he was just sober enough to see.
“Stop running,” a voice said, harshly amplified.
But he couldn’t stop, and he had to keep pushing through the throw-up in the back of his throat and the dumb throb of his body. He got to the corner and looked both ways like a fucking boy scout and pushed on up one of those winding streets that sprawled off from the park. And for a moment, it was only the flat slapping sound of his shoes on the concrete, the whistle of wind in his ears. But soon enough, the crawl of tires behind him, coming around the corner. As they neared, he cut down a driveway that was not his and pulled himself over a fence.
His mother had gotten a DUI when he was eleven. He remembered this. She had spent the night in jail and had come back the next morning in the harsh early light with a sullen expression on her face and her father fuming behind her. She had said nothing to him and his grandfather had said nothing to him and they had both just let it fall away until it was something ominously hinted at in passing. Someone on television would say something about going to jail and she would leave the room and get a beer like it was Pavlovian conditioning. Jared’s grandfather, for his part, never said anything about it. At least, not until after her death. It had been maybe a couple of weeks and they were sitting at the dinner table eating meatloaf or something else that was nondescript and easy to make or reheat and his grandfather had simply told him that his mother had drunk herself to death. He said, “She killed herself, you know” and took a bite and chewed for an inappropriately long amount of time. He had looked at his grandfather expecting more, but the old man just sat there chewing and then swallowed hard. It wasn’t until Jared probed that he had told him the story of her DUI and how she had run from the police and smashed four parked cars and hid behind trash cans and would not stop crying over the phone that had warned him that he was receiving a call from an inmate and that charges may apply. The old man’s lip trembled briefly as he told him this. Then he said that that was when he should’ve known that he had to do something, but he didn’t. Then the old man stood and rinsed his plate in the sink and left the room.
Another streak of light came across the garage that he was leaning against. Then a light switched on in the house and he had to scale a cement wall into another backyard, where he found a dog barking. He sidestepped to the edge of the yard and the dog yanked itself back on a chain secured to a post in the ground, whimpering a little. This set off a series of lights in the houses all around and he was off into the street on the opposite side that he had come from. His heart was beating hard in his chest and he thought he was going to have a cardiac episode right there in the street but he kept running. He was maybe a block from his house when the sirens started squealing, which felt entirely unnecessary.
Faces came to the windows, the shades pulled back. They were neatly framed and innocent looking. All these little faces like when Santa came down their street in early December for all the children to make their Christmas wishes to. They’d point to the sleigh and say there he is. There’s Santa. But now, all he saw was phones drawn up to their faces, saying yes, I’d like to report a disturbance.
He thought about what his grandfather might say when he showed up. How he might look at him under his bushy eyebrows. He was almost home. He was clapping the sidewalk hard. A streak of light came up the street and he ducked down the side of his own house. Then he pushed up the window to his room and fell in.
A moment later, his grandfather kicked in the door, wielding a baseball bat.
“Christ, Jared,” he said.
But Jared still couldn’t breathe, and his chest pumped and he was totally fucking dazed.
“Do you have any idea what time it is?”
But before he could answer, there was a series of dull thuds against the door. His grandfather left the room and went off. Then it was his gravelly, low voice and another’s wrapped in conversation. He moved toward the hallway, trying to listen.
“There’s no one here but me and my grandson,” his grandfather said.
“We got a report,” said the winded man.
Jared couldn’t make out the rest. There was white noise humming in his ear, a great wash of it, like TV static in the early hours in the morning. He remembered that. His grandfather’s old TV set and the way it broke into that fiery crackling sound when the stations went off the air.
“He’s been here,” his grandfather said.
ABOUT THE CREATOR
Matthew Wood is a writer of fiction and poetry working in Los Angeles. He is a cum laude graduate of California State University, Long Beach’s Creative Writing program. He has had fiction published in Heartwood Literary Magazine, Chapter House, Washington Square Review LCC, and El Camino College’s Myriad, where he was awarded the Tom Lew Prize for Fiction. He is working on a novel and a collection of short stories.