Electric Blue

Big John stood near me with the electric blue above us, screaming out with its shine for everyone to drink it. Lines of neon stretched and twisted into a beauty of advertising brilliance. We were drinking it and the bottles were sweating and it made me feel good for the first time all day.

So it was good to be drinking the cold fizz in our hands like we were, Big John and me.

Hector was also drinking what the sign told us to. He was in the corner, more of the electric sheen rubbing off on him, talking to some girls. They were older but that was okay, he told us.

“Ya’ll need guidance,” he said before he left us to go to their table.

I kept staring at Hector as he talked to the girls and wondered where he got his guidance from; who he listened to when he wasn’t talking at us.

He pointed to us and the girls laughed. He laughed with them. I took another swig from my glass and let the cool metal taste glide down my throat, wondering whether tonight would go the way we were told we had wanted it to go.

“These are my friends,” Hector said to the women after they followed him across the open space, which some of the couples in the place turned into a dancefloor, to where Big John and I were standing, around the rounded high top sticky with spilled beer. The brilliant blue above us wouldn’t leave us alone, made it obvious that we were drinking it, made it so I felt I needed to keep drinking it, and made the whites of the ladies’ eyes glow—their teeth pulsing out of their faces whenever they talked. It scared me to notice it in them, and it worried me to think that I might look the same.

But I played cool, like Hector taught me to. I kept one hand in my pocket and held my beer with the other, like Hector told me, and I used my thumb to touch the tips of each of my fingers, like I learned to do as a kid—whenever the teacher would start calling out names to do out problems on the board—index, middle, ring, pinky, pinky, ring, middle, index—performance anxiety, Hector told me—problematic behavior, my teachers had said, until I stopped showing up to class, stopped letting the fear of them asking on me to answer a question invade my thoughts, and left town with Hector after he graduated. Somewhere along the way we found Big John.

“Hiya,” Big John said dismissively to the women, and once he said it Hector rolled his eyes, and his eyes were wider and brighter and whiter than I remembered them ever looking, and his teeth popped out of his head too, and I thought for a moment I could almost hear the hum of light coming from his teeth. I thought about how people’s eyes and teeth sounded. Not the way they make a sound, when the teeth gnash or chatter, or when the eyes are wet and blink, but about the way the look of them sounds. By the time I started thinking this I figured I shouldn’t drink anymore, but my nerves were unsettled with the women there in front of us, with everyone’s teeth and eyes pulsing and humming and vibrating with the music under the lights, and so I kept drinking—index, middle, ring, pinky, pinky, ring, middle, index, and on and on.

I tried dancing with them, first the one in the pink dress, then the one in the dark dress, and then finally the one in the jeans and flannel that Big John seemed either repulsed by or deeply attracted to. I couldn’t determine which it was since every time she had said anything he made a low grunting noise. None of them seemed to want anything to do with me, which I felt I was fine with.

I tried to look at Big John, to see if his teeth, his eyes, were doing what everyone else’s were doing. I’d have liked to ask him if I looked the same. But looking straight at him had always been something I was afraid to do. Asking him to look straight at me, never in the question.

“Don’t fuck me on this,” Hector had said to me while we were pissing in the toilet together. It was how everyone used the bathroom here, with only two toilets, one for men and the other for women, and there wasn’t ever a lock on the doors because the owner said he didn’t want anyone feeling comfortable enough to be doing drugs in them, and so after a while all the regulars got used to seeing each other’s dicks. It was a small town, and when we first showed up we weren’t well known to any of them. But drinking with the townies—the professors from the small college in the woods, and the guys who spent their weeks driving hours away for construction jobs that were killing them as quickly as they could, had, as Hector told us—had ingratiated us into the community.

“Seeing a man undressed is the only way to know him,” Big John had told me.

Hector’s uncle—the one whose hunting camp we had been staying at since arriving—was some provost or money guy behind a lot of the recent additions to the college. That, Big John told me, was also why we fit in so quickly.

“Watch yourself,” Hector said to me as I swayed forward a bit too much, unsteady in myself. “We’re trying to go to the manly one’s apartment, but she don’t want nothing to do with us unless Big John is coming.”

“I’m not sure he likes her or not,” I responded.

“Don’t matter,” Hector replied, “we’ve gotta find him. That one in the pink dress is only visiting town and she don’t want to come back to my place.”

“Where would I stay if she did?”

“Well, she’s not, so it’s no matter.”

That morning prior, we had waited in the shack for Hector to go grab some fishing rods for us, and though mornings this time of year were my favorite—a dew wet with memory and the quiet reprieve from the bright afternoons and cool forgotten nights—Hector hadn’t kept the woodstove going and the place was dank, but I couldn’t leave for the flies and mosquitoes in those woods were dense. Swatting them was like putting a hand through mesh.

When Hector showed back up he only had one pole, but told us it was all we’d need, that none of the others of us, Big John and I that is, would know what we were doing with something so big, and he laughed to himself at this, and I laughed with him, but Big John didn’t laugh and told him why.

“Ain’t no fun watching another man do the thing.”

“It is if you’re drunk,” Hector had said, before mentioning that he didn’t get two other poles in order to buy us beer. I thanked him. Big John stayed silent.

He’d been more silent since we arrived to the town, before Hector told us to get readied for drinking and flirting with college girls. I always felt uncomfortable when Hector made us do things we didn’t want to do, but I went along with it because Big John always went along with it. No matter how badly he hated it, or seemed to hate it. Big John never seemed to want to do anything, but he’d always end up there with us, Hector and me, doing it.

I was still shy from my youth. I didn’t know why. Plenty of people asked me enough times that I should’ve had something better than “I don’t know” to tell them, but that was the way it was with me. Hector liked me because he said my shyness made me funny.

“Funny how,” I asked him one time, when Big John wasn’t around.

“Just funny,” he said. I didn’t know what he meant but I made like I did and we hadn’t talked about my shyness since.

After we’d arrived to the lake in the morning, Big John wasn’t drinking much, and I asked him why.

“Don’t feel well,” was he said.

Hector wasn’t paying attention to us. He was focused on his bait, which he bought from the miserable old man at the general store on the edge of the town.

“Might be a lousy asshole,” Hector said, “but he sells the best bait I’ve ever used. Been buying from him since me and my dad would do this.”

Hector did a lot of things with me and Big John that he said him and his dad had done when he was younger, meaning that Hector dragged me and Big John around to do things we didn’t really want to do just like he had been dragged to do when he was a kid.

The town meant something to Hector, Big John had told me. He didn’t say anymore than that, and since looking at Big John was hard to do, I never tried to ask him more.

I told Hector and Big John that I didn’t know what made good bait and what made bad bait and this seemed to set off a crack between them that I couldn’t have detected before.

I tried focusing on my fingers. Starting with the index.

“For starters, you’ve gotta use real bait.” Big John spit after saying this, wiped his mouth, and glared across the water, avoiding Hector’s eyes. “Not some rancid worms sold by an old man who’s lost most of his sense.”

Middle.

“My bait’s fine,” Hector said.

Ring.

Hector wasn’t ever usually content with such short statements, and it was as though my question pushed them off an edge that they were both straddling. My words made both their worlds quake and I didn’t even know what I did, but I could sense it.

Pinky.

“That bait’s not worth the skunk piss you’ve got us drinking,” Big John continued.

Pinky.

“You don’t have to drink it,” Hector said, staring off at the same shore across from us.

Ring.

“I will if I want,” Big John went back to his silent self after this, planting himself in the shade and cracking open the beer.

Middle.

“I like the old man,” Hector took over the space between us. “He’s who we bought from when I was a kid. He sells all the same stuff—the candies, the sodas, the chips, the dips, the smokes—it’s all the same as it was when I was a kid. I don’t like how much things always change and goddammit, the old bastard’s store hasn’t changed one bit. I like that.”

Index. And on and on and on.

Hector didn’t catch anything for the first part of the day, only waves of anger at the lousy asshole from the general store for selling him the bad bait that he kept silent about. It was obvious he was mad though, spitting and sighing heavily whenever he brought in the line and the bait was gone, the slamming of the little tin of bait when he rehooked some more, and the loud whistling he was doing. Hector only ever whistled when things were tense, like my father used to do.

When the sun climbed to its hottest height I nearly fell off the cool rock I had been laying against. That was when Hector started humming in the way he hums when something good’s about to come his way. He said he liked to hum more than he liked to whistle. It was about the vibration in his chest. The way it made him feel his heart. He’d start off real low, where I could never be sure it’s him or not, then growing more confident. He did it then, until the line ran taut and the humming became a buzzing that I could feel in my chest.

Usually he’d lose whatever good was coming his way. Whether by his own drunkenness or the tragedy of being Hector, as he’d say.

The line held and the fish came up. Big John laughed before the thing could even break water.

“You caught a baby,” Big John chuckled, the first thing he’d said since earlier.

“Well he put up a helluva fight,” Hector replied.

The tragedy of Hector.

I expected his usual anger, but something about the breakage of the moment earlier did something to him. It unsettled him into a cowering figure. His shoulders and his back were as straight as they’d ever been, but his demeanor had changed. I kept thinking about what it was that I said, or how I said it, that could’ve made this moment. I never know what I’m saying or what effect it has on people. I couldn’t tell if the thumping in my chest, the numbness accompanying it, was from the moment or from Hector’s humming.

“Wait,” Big John says. “You got a bucket or anything to hold on to the fish with?”

“Don’t have anything,” Hector says quickly, tugging the hook out of the fish’s mouth and tossing it back into the water. “Just catching ‘em, and drinking.”

Big John swore and picked himself up off the ground and swallowed the rest of his beer in two gulps. The fracture of the morning fed a fire in Big John that I hadn’t seen before. He grew more animated. His lumbering body shaded me enough that I learned how hot I was, how tired I was, how much I wanted to be deep inside something, to have it protect me. He walked over to the treeline and I heard the grinding of his zipper and the sound of what I had learned to call nature’s way.

Hector tried humming, tried to bring some good luck and to block out the sound, and I hated him for it. I was happy when the violence of piss came streaming out of Big John and it was enough to overpower Hector, filling the air so thick with its sound that Hector tried to whistle but, stilted in his throat, he let it die and he began reeling in his line.

I wanted to laugh at everything in that moment. I wanted to laugh because laying under the sun reminded me of being a kid and feeling in charge of myself. But I held it all back and finished the warm beer in my hand. I let Big John take control of the moment. Let Hector burn himself under the sun. Let the cool rock warm itself without the weight of myself on it.

“Let’s head back,” Hector finally said when the hook, still fitted with bait, came into his hand.

“Good idea,” Big John said as he hoisted me off the ground.

The mosquitoes were dissipating in the sun’s growing heat and I could start to feel the sweat running down the back of my knees and into my socks.

“Guess that makes me my father now,” Hector said. Not to us, it seemed, instead staring at the edge of the lake across from us where the water seemed, at this distance, to go straight into the forest. No shore in sight.

I couldn’t ever seem quite to talk to any of the women that Hector introduced us to at the bar. I’d keep drinking beers and keep pissing in the only toilet in the men’s room. Most of my life I’d felt like a little kid, in the backseat, being driven to wherever my parents were going to take me, not knowing where I was being taken to. None of it mattering. It was what I was going to have to do. It’s why I drink, because at least then I know where I’m going.

That’s why I didn’t know where Big John went when Hector asked me. I gripped the edge of the table, feeling unsteady with myself, with the ground, with the table I was holding onto, with the pulsing humming coming off of Hector’s face under the electric blue. I used my other hand to settle myself, or try to—index, middle, ring, pinky, pinky, ring, middle, index, and on and on.

He finished his beer, wiped the wet from his lip, the whites vibrating out of his face as he looked at me before disappearing into the open door towards the back patio of the bar. As I lost him in the crowd and my eyes struggled to keep only one of everything in my focus, Big John tapped me on the shoulder.

“I’m going home,” he said to me.

“Can’t,” is all I got out.

“I’m not going with you all,” Big John said, almost sad.

As he talked to me, I finally saw him. Looked at him, that is. The way his brow already creased whenever he focused on what he was looking at—how easy it was, I felt, to be looked at by him, how naturally it came to be under his gaze and how little I felt in it, how I wondered if this was what it was to know it, straight on, if only I had been willing to look. The way his eyes and teeth hummed like the others, vibrated out of his face while we stood under the electric blue shining above us. The way his hulking mass no longer frightened me. Something about everything we were all under, the unifying nature of it all. We looked the same. We all looked different. Even me, I figured.

“C’mon man,” Hector pleaded. He had returned to the table, was more drunk than I had realized. “Even if it’s just for an hour, come with us. I’ll owe you.”

Hector owed us a lot. It was part of what kept him around, or kept us around him. Some people had called it magnetism—that’s what they’d say about Hector whenever he’d bombast his way into a room and make everyone in it feel like they were the only people on Earth who deserved anything in this life—it was the thing that drew us to him, Big John and I. All the others would say it about us, and we’d be unable to say otherwise. It was like my shyness: I had nothing else to offer up. I started to think I understood what was funny about me.

“You owe us a lot. Some might say,” Big John started and then let the words trail off, as the music got turned up, the DJ telling everyone in the bar that it was eleven o’clock and that meant dancing. The booming bass brought even more of the boozehounds out onto what had then become a true dancefloor.

“What,” Hector asked with anger bubbling in his throat, and a tinge of the pleading he did earlier rattling around in his teeth. Those pulsing teeth that wanted to jump out of him every time he opened his mouth.

My teeth started to hurt, or I noticed they were hurting, and I thought maybe it was the hit that Big John gave me the day before, when I told him we were out of beer and Hector wasn’t yet back from work and I didn’t feel like leaving the house, that the dry heat of the woodstove felt good to me in those late afternoons of early spring, where the heat couldn’t fully hold itself in the world, and then Big John took his big hand and slapped it across my mouth, and it didn’t leave a mark so I didn’t tell Hector, though knowing if I had he would’ve hit me too for letting myself be hit without hitting back.

“It’s almost like we own you,” Big John said before the women came back from the bar and the one in the pink dress put her arm around Hector’s waist and I looked at the one in the dark dress, the only one available to me, and I thought she might look pretty if it weren’t for the neon shine of the place that made us all look so unnatural, and made me feel so immoral.

Turns out she was. Pretty that is, at least that’s what Hector kept telling me, prettier than he thought she was when we were in the bar and he tells me he worries he picked the wrong one by picking the one in pink. As the women walk in front of us down the street that’s only just waking up to the night, Hector’s working on Big John and I—telling me mine is pretty and telling Big John he only has to stay an hour and then he should be good.

“Thanks,” I hear him whisper to Big John. Quiet enough I know I’m not supposed to hear it.

The apartment was nice. Too nice for us. How was Hector able to always get women who were too good for him, I thought? What did he have that Big John and me didn’t have, I thought? Did I want what he had? If it hadn’t been for the queasy way the light in the bar made them all look—made Hector’s mouth into the white-ringed void that only ever seemed to exist to bend us to his will—I might have never asked myself. It wasn’t a question I had grown up believing I needed to ask myself. I was just supposed to go along for the ride, with the plan. I was just meant to go along.

I had to piss from the walk and I was happy for the walk because it sobered me up, but sitting down to piss on her toilet made me aware of how drunk I was. They seemed like the group to have drugs that could help, but I didn’t find anything in the cabinet, and so I took another sip of the beer I took in with me and came into the hallway hearing Big John and Hector’s voices booming out from the front room. I was either too drunk or they were too loud or not quite loud enough for my ears to fully detect what they were saying or even the tone they were using.

The one in the dark dress had changed out of the dress and into sweatpants and was sitting at a small computer desk, the monitor lighting her face up in a blue glow. Still unable to determine whether Big John and Hector were having a good time or making a bad time, I decided to go into the room with her. She played nice with me, and didn’t try to push me away as soon as I crossed the doorway, but she made it clear she didn’t want me in there with her for long and I respected that, telling her I just wanted to be away from my friends.

“Then why are you friends with them,” she asked, going back to the screen, the black lines of an essay piled up before her.

Index.

“Is it too sad if I say it’s because they make me feel good about myself?”

Middle.

She spun herself towards me, looked at me, and I looked at her. She was pretty, I thought. Not because Hector said, like I had always gone along with. I liked the way her cheeks sat, high up and plump on her face, the slightly-crooked nose—a flaw that wasn’t a flaw, that heightened all of the other qualities about a face, that made her really beautiful.

Ring.

“Is that even the truth,” she asked.

Pinky.

I shrugged, not knowing how to speak to that thought.

And on and on.

She sighed and turned the computer off.

Hector and Big John’s voices quieted down a bit around that time and I figured it was them having a good time with the other two women that caused the volume earlier.

When I woke up on the floor, I couldn’t hear anything, though all of the lights were still on from the hallway. I tried to pull myself up off the ground but my arms were both dead and so I laid on my back, counting my fingertips with my thumbs until the tingling went from painful to annoying and tried again. I accidently touched the foot of the one in sweatpants as I reach at the bed for something to hold onto and she squirmed away and went back to snoring. I whispered an apology to her that she wouldn’t hear and said goodbye to her, knowing I’d never see any of them again after this.

Each step in the hallway produced a squawk that burrowed into my head and split me in half, and I was reminded of my aching teeth. I had the same pit in my stomach thinking about my own self split in half as I did when I felt the quake of uneven ground between Hector and Big John from the day before. And as I tried making my way through this foreign place and its architecture that made me feel unwanted, like I didn’t belong, and I longed to be back on my rock, next to the water, with the sun overheating my body, and the sound of Big John’s piss knocking against the tree, I thought that the apartment felt familiar in a strange way.

The other four weren’t anywhere that I could see, the living room a graveyard of the previous night. I couldn’t tell who these women were, based on what was in here, other than some college girls whose night was interrupted by the three of us. I sat on the couch and looked for any signs of them, of the one in the pink dress, of the one in flannel, of Big John, or of Hector.

“They’re gone,” the one in flannel said from the kitchen doorway behind me. I tried not to jump but I couldn’t stop my body from jolting at her voice, her tone almost sad. Pinky, ring, middle, index.

I tried to speak but my throat was nothing but dust and debris from the night.

“The annoying one,” she said in reference to Hector, I knew, “he was being an asshole to Denise because she said she was tired and wanted to sleep. I had tried to tell her what all that he wanted from her but she was having fun, she said.”

I felt a chill run up my arm as a breeze blew through the open window next to me.

“The big guy hit him and then stormed out. The annoying one chasing after him.”

I mustered all the saliva in my mouth to coat my throat and finally managed, “I’m sorry,” then coughed. “My friends can be,” I started.

“I didn’t realize you were here,” she said. I tried for something else to say. “I thought you had left when they started arguing.”

I thanked her and apologized to her for sleeping on her floor. She brushed me off as she opened the door and I left, touching the tips of each of my index, middle, ring, and pinky fingers.

It was cold. Too cold to be walking in only a sweatshirt, like I was, and the cars on the overpass didn’t try at all to move over and give me space, and so I thought that this was going to be the end of me. It was spitting snow and I wished I had Hector or Big John or both with me to talk about it. How crazy it felt that after such a warm day it would be snowing. That maybe all those people at the college in the woods were right about it being the end of the world.

But it wasn’t the end of me, and it wasn’t the end of the world yet, and I made it back to Hector’s place by the time the sun came back out and melted everything on the ground.

Hector was on the porch and when I asked where Big John was he burped from the beer in his hand and in his other hand he handed me a beer and I drank it and it was the best I’d felt since the night before.

“Clearing his head,” Hector finally said.

“Didn’t realize he had enough it needed clearing.”

He didn’t say anything. It wasn’t unusual for him to ignore my jokes and then to tell me, a few minutes later, that I wasn’t funny when I tried to be. But he always laughed at anything at the expense of Big John.

“D’you hear?” I asked.

“I heard,” he answered. “Wasn’t funny right now.”

“But it is funny,” I pushed.

“Sure.”

“It is,” I said. Staring at him, seeing the way his hair was thinning, his eyes looked tired and empty, and nothing about him was humming anymore, outside in the natural light, away from the electric blue.

“It is funny,” I repeated, sitting up in my seat so that I was looking down on him, and I rested my hand on my thigh. Calm.

And he laughed.

And I laughed.

And we waited for Big John to return.