Neil.
I T W A S 2:30 in the morning on a school night. I awoke to him tapping away, whisper-shouting my name.
“David...David!”
I was afraid to draw the blinds. I was certain that I was going to be killed or something else awful. But the worst of it was that it was somebody who knew me by name. I peeked through the blinds, and there he was. The big Baby Huey, fogging up my window with his breath.
“Ben...what the hell?” I said.
“Come out. Bring your keys,” he said.
“Will you shut up! My parents are sleeping.” Ben gave me a sheepish look. I put on a track suit and snuck out the back.
Outside, Ben was standing next to my car door. His fingers were curled under the handle. He was huffing for air.
“Are you in trouble again?”
“Go ahead and unlock the door. We’re going to San Thomas Park,” he said.
“That‟s two miles away—why are you sweating?” I said.
“I was just there.”
I’m still a little asleep. “You were already there?”
“I just ran to your house.”
I looked at the sweat rings under his arms, the wet V cascading down his shirt. “You just ran two miles?”
“I need your car.”
“What‟s wrong with yours?”
“Can‟t drive. Got a DUI last weekend,” he said. We pushed the car out of the driveway and half way down the street before we turned it over. We rode to the park. Ben explained while we drove. He told me how his friend Neil had never been drunk. They shoulder tapped for an hour, got a fifth of vodka. He told me how they went to the park. He forced Neil to drink the whole bottle, giving him chasers of orange juice to bury the pang of cheap liquor.
“And after he killed the bottle I put him on the tire swings. I pushed him real fast,” Ben said. He began to chuckle. “He was yelling at me to stop, all this screaming, but I kept pushing him around and around. Should have seen him. But then he got sick.” I asked him where Neil was.
We parked across the street because Police check the parking lot for bums and drunk kids like Ben and Neil. We walked past the basketball courts and through the playground. There was a wet patch of tanbark under the tire swing. Behind a large juniper we found him, laying face down a puddle of his own sickness.
“God, Ben! How could you leave him like this? What if he drowned?” Neil was comatose, blowing bubbles in a loose mud made from his saliva. He was mumbling incoherently. Neil’s face was covered in dirt and vodka and by the smell of him he had defecated himself.
“I know. I tried to move him, but he just kept wiggling. I couldn’t get a good hold of him,” Ben said. “It’s totally a two man job.” Ben started to laugh. “Look at him though...crazy huh?”
“He was like this the whole time you ran to my house?”
“Well, yeah, but I can run fast.” Ben grabbed his wrists and I clutched his ankles. Neil writhed. He protested in an assortment of grunts. Then his body went limp and sagged in the middle. We couldn’t help but drag him a little. We scuttled him across the street and installed him in the back seat. My car immediately reeked of two parts orange Vodka, one part shit.
“Hey David?”
“What Ben.”
“Do you think we could take him to your house?” ...
Brian W. Wood
