Ali’s parents did indeed get divorced. Ali lived with her father in Kamensic, and spent alternate weekends in the city with her mother, a one-time principal dancer with the New York City Ballet and former Balanchine muse. Ali’s father, Constantine, was a set designer. Ali had inherited his gifts—she would have made a wonderful illustrator, with her eye for the grotesque combined with her skills as a draftsman—but Ali wanted to be a dancer. She had studied since childhood at Madame Laslansky’s famed Manhattan studio, but despite the years of training she moved with an oddly stilted grace. Not like a dancer at all; more like a fox stalking, stopping to listen, and then flowing forward, always on the balls of her feet so she looked slightly tippy-toed, as though she were about to pounce. In our freshman year she auditioned for both the Joffrey and the School of American Ballet, but was turned down for both.
She was different after that. Wilder—she’d always been wild, but now there was a hysterical edge to everything she did, from dancing at parties to streaking during away football games at Carmel and Goldens Bridge. When I think of Ali I think of her naked: she shed her clothes like a toddler, unthinkingly, stripping to slide into the lake or to join some boy in the mossy woods behind school. Or else she wore leotards, black Danskins and black Capezios on her tiny feet; a ragged flannel shirt tied around her waist so the sleeves flopped against her thighs, her glossy black hair slick against her skull.
That was how she was dressed the day we met Jamie Casson. It was a damp afternoon in our senior year, the week before Halloween. The end of high school seemed like a formality to be dispensed with as quickly as possible. We’d both recently applied to the college of our choice—Hampshire College for Ali, NYU for me. Half the time we’d hardly bother showing up for class at all, save to find our friends in the parking lot and check out whose parents were out of town scoping locations for a new film or rehearsing. That was how we knew where the parties were, and that’s how we spent most of our time.
It was a strange autumn; not just that one October night, but all the weeks leading up to it. Though I never spoke of it, I felt a real foreboding at the idea of leaving. Not leaving school, but leaving Kamensic—and leaving Hillary, who had aced us all and already been accepted by the Yale School of Drama. Yet in some weird way the thought of going away from the village disturbed me more than anything else. I wondered if Ali felt it, too. Sometimes she would grow silent and oddly alert, as though focused on a faint sound, thunder or the rustle of footsteps in dead leaves. But she never told me what she was thinking.
That rainy Thursday afternoon I felt fiercely restless. By the end of the day I thought I’d start screaming if I couldn’t escape: from school, from the rain, from my own too-tight skin. I met Ali in the parking lot by Hillary’s old Dodge Dart. Behind us the dismissal bell shrieked. The rain had slacked off, though a cold breeze shook the trees and sent water arcing onto our heads. Ali lit the butt-end of a joint; as usual, the pot made me feel worse, paranoid and fuzzy-headed. But Ali grew loopy, laughing and walking backward through the woods.
“Something’s gonna happen now. Don’t you feel it, Lit?” Her golden eyes narrowed as she took out a cigarette. “Don’t you
feel
it?”
We cut through the trees, heading out along the railroad tracks. I shrugged and kicked at the gravel underfoot. “I guess.”
The truth was I felt a vague foreboding, a sense of malevolent purpose in the way the tree-limbs moved and the pattern of raindrops beaded on the railway ties. But Ali walked alongside me happily, smoking and singing.
“I don’t want no diamond ring
Don’t want no Cadillac car
Just want to think my Ripple wine
Down at the Deer Park bar…”
She tossed her head back. “Isn’t it fucking great to be alive?”
“I dunno.” I shivered. I had on one of Hillary’s old corduroy jackets, too big for me but worn and comforting. “I do feel sort of weird. Maybe something
is
going to happen…”
Ali laughed. “I
always
feel like something’s gonna happen. And nothing ever does.”
She dropped her spent cigarette, veering from the tracks onto the overgrown path that would bring us to Mount Muscanth.
It wasn’t a real mountain, of course, just one of those outriders of the Catskills that straggle down from the northwestern part of New York State. But on its north face there was a bare stone outcropping where you could sit and look down upon the village, and it was as though you were in another world. The air smelled of dying leaves and earth, and as we walked there were birds everywhere, and tiny things moving underfoot.
“I’m beat,” Ali exclaimed. “Hang on a minute—”
We stopped before a stand of forsythia that had run wild. I was stooping to settle beneath it when the earth at its roots seemed suddenly to shiver.
“Fuckin’ A—” Ali gasped. “Look out!”
At her feet the ground was fuming with a gray cloud of shrews no bigger than my thumb, dozens of them scurrying about, utterly heedless of us. At first I thought something must have disturbed them. But as we watched I saw that no, they were all
hunting
—feverishly, lunging at black beetles and ants pouring up from beneath the rotting leaves, teeth slicing through shiny carapaces and the dull gray coils of millipedes, their white claws delicate as fronds of club moss. They tore at the leaf-mold in a fury, scrabbling over puffballs that sent up clouds of spores like minute bomb-bursts. I held my breath and lowered myself to within a foot of this seething world, watching as two shrews had a tug-of-war with an earthworm. After a minute they separated and ferociously attacked each other. I was so close I could see tiny droplets of blood spatter onto the forsythia and smell their faint foul musk.
And still the shrews raced on, fighting and hunting and eating. To them, I had no more being than a tree or stone. I was entranced, and would have remained there for the entire afternoon, maybe, if Ali hadn’t pulled me away.
“Enough with the fucking
Wild Kingdom,
Lit; it’s gonna rain. Come on, let’s go to Deer Park.”
About halfway down we emerged onto a narrow ridge of stone, slick with moss. A scant yard in front of us the ridge sheared away, so that we gazed down upon the tops of red oaks and huge lichen-stained boulders. If you knew where to look, this was where you could catch your first glimpse of the ruinous beauty that was Bolerium. I edged back until I could wrap my arm around a tree—I was wearing knee-high lace-up Frye boots, well broken in but a bad choice for climbing. Ali walked fearlessly to the lip of rock and looked out.
“I can’t see it,” she said, frowning.
I squinted, trying to distinguish between the mansion’s granite walls and the gray trees that stood between us. “It’s too rainy,” I said at last, feeling a vague disappointment.
Ali shook her head. “Uh-uh. It’s
hiding.
”
We turned and scrambled on down the path. When we finally burst out of the woods onto Kinnicutt Road, it was into a world gone gold and white, yellow leaves covering the tarmac and birches ghostly in the mist. Ali shivered in her leotard and pulled her flannel shirt over her head like a hood. I pulled Hillary’s jacket tight around me, wincing as a black BMW raced past and sent water splashing over us.
“Asshole,” I shouted.
If there was a wrong side to Kamensic, that’s where we were now: Kinnicutt Road, a chopped-up remnant of the Old Post Road that a hundred years earlier had linked Boston to the fractured villages strung across New England. Ten miles or so along, Kinnicutt fed into Route 684, the new interstate that connected the city with the north. But here it was a scumble of cracked asphalt, broken glass winking from a shoulder overgrown with nightshade and fox grapes and jewelweed. There were no houses along this stretch of Kinnicutt, no other roads; only a defiant tributary of the Muscanth River threading alongside the tarmac.
Now it felt almost inutterably desolate. The air smelled faintly of diesel fuel. Ahead of us the road narrowed, unyielding to the woods that crowded to either side, and finally faded from sight. My dread intensified until I considered making up some excuse to head home—stomachache, homework, fever.
But then the trees fell back, revealing a drab patch of sky. In another minute I could make out the parking lot and dull mass of cinder block that was the Deer Park Inn.
“Hillary’s here,” remarked Ali. And yes, there was his Dodge Dart by the front door. That made me feel better, and the sight of Deer Park’s venerable sign: a huge Sweetheart of the Rodeo, suspended between two worm-riddled telephone poles. Years ago during a storm the sign had been cloven right down the middle. Now only half of the cowgirl remained, one eye, one arm holding a lariat, one foot in one frilled cowboy boot; and beneath her what remained of the bar’s legend:
RK INN
NTRY
TERN
NCING
LBILLY
USIC
We crossed a parking lot awash with cigarette butts and beer bottles. Once behind the squat building you found more ominous detritus: spent sets of works like crushed centipedes, crumpled cellophane envelopes, scorched spoons, empty matchbooks. Two bikers sat on the steps drinking Budweisers. They watched us pass, eyes glazed, but said nothing. Entering I felt the customary frisson of excitement and blind terror; and was relieved to spot Hillary standing by the jukebox, resplendent in an old military jacket and embroidered turquoise shirt.
“Jeez, it’s packed,” shouted Ali.
Deer Park was so small it never took much to make a crowd. High school kids mostly; a few more bikers playing pool in the corner; some older kids who’d moved on to college a few years earlier, and either graduated or drifted back to town. Beer lights flickered through the cigarette smoke—Budweiser, Rhinegold, Pabst Blue Ribbon—and the jukebox was roaring “Jailhouse Rock.” There were Halloween decorations on the walls, leering witches and black cats. Over the bar hung a mounted stag’s head with a pumpkin nestled between its antlers. As we crossed the room people yelled out to us, and somebody began chanting—
“Alison Fox, she must be
The prettiest witch in the north coun-tree…”
“I got to piss,” Ali announced, and made a beeline for the bathroom. I turned to wave at Hillary. He was talking to a boy perched on top of the jukebox, a wiry figure with unfashionably short hair, dressed completely in black.
Hillary raised his beer. “Lit! C’mere—”
“Hang on!” I shouted, and headed for the bar. “Hey, Jim. What’s the deal? It’s so crowded—”
“Tell me about it.” Jim Charterbury worked at the Lifesaver factory down in Portchester and moonlighted at Deer Park at night. He pointed at one of the cardboard witches and shook his head. “Fuckin’ Halloween, man. Got the bikers howling at the moon. What’s going on with you?”
“Not much. Who’s that with Hillary?”
“Dunno, some kid just moved here. You want the usual?” I nodded and stuck a few crumpled bills on the bar. Jim poured two drafts, filled a shot glass with rail whiskey and dropped it into one of the mugs. I downed this, grimacing, and shivered.
“You look like my dog when you do that.” Jim slid me the other mug, put a stack of quarters alongside it. “Go crank up something beside Elvis Goddam Presley, will you? These bikers are driving me nuts.”
I took the quarters and my drink and elbowed my way through the room. By the time I reached the jukebox I wanted another beer.
“Hillary.”
“Hey, Lit.” Hillary handed his bottle to me. I took a swig—lukewarm, he’d been here for awhile—and glanced at the boy on the jukebox. “Jailhouse Rock” segued into “Born to Be Wild.” Behind the bar Jim gestured at me frantically, and I jingled the quarters in my fist.
“Hang on, I got to do something about this music”— I looked pointedly at the boy sitting on the old Seeburg. —“but first your friend has to move his ass.”
“Right.” Hillary made a low bow. “Jamie? This is Lit—”
I stared at him and nodded. I felt the weird clarity that came over me sometimes when I drank, when suddenly I could see how my friends would look when they were old: where the lines would fall alongside Hillary’s mouth, where his hair would thin at the temples. Other times it was an awful certainty that was like a rank taste in the back of my throat, the fear when I stared at Duncan dancing in Deer Park that something terrible was going to happen to him; the less numbing recognition that Ali was never going to make it as an dancer, no matter how much she still wanted to. These were things I didn’t talk about anymore. Ali laughed at me, and when I tried telling Hillary it made him nervous.
Standing there now I felt that same strange sense of recognition, and a profound, almost nightmarish, unease. I glanced at Hillary, but he just grinned. I swallowed, my tongue thick with whiskey and cheap beer, and looked at the boy on the jukebox. He wore black jeans low-slung on narrow hips, dirty black Converse high-tops, a moth-eaten black sweater.
“What are you, Johnny Cash?” I asked.
He met my eyes disdainfully. He was rangy, a few inches taller than me, with dark blonde hair cut so short you could see the shape of his skull, sleek as a ferret’s. That more than anything else made him seem otherworldly.
Everyone
I knew had long hair. The boys I hung out with, the boys I slept with, all resembled Hillary. Beautiful straight teeth courtesy of Doctor Tolmach, skin kept clear by weekly visits to dermatologists, shoulder-length hair thick and glossy as a golden retriever’s.
Not Jamie Casson. His skin was faintly sallow, and so fair I could see the tracery of capillaries across his cheeks, like a leaf’s fine-veined web. His eyes were huge, heavy-lidded; the flesh beneath them looked bruised. Great wounded eyes, of a startling turquoise, deep-set above a pug nose and thin, girlish mouth. The only person I’d ever seen who looked remotely like him was Lou Reed on the cover of
Transformer,
or maybe Louise Brooks in an old photograph I’d seen in the Courthouse Museum. I could imagine my parents approving of Jamie Casson’s hair, if nothing else.