The Change

A break in the narrative thread.  There seemed to be no story in the traditional sense, just mood and tone and atmosphere.  New fellows, new faces.  Rhett.  He was fifteen and a pool shark.  He played for money most nights at the local pool hall, but it got to where nobody would play him any more, so he had to start shooting downtown.  I watched him play a few times, and in the end, I couldn't believe that grown men would simply hand over so much money to him.  I guess being such a kid helped him out in that.  But soon, nobody in town would play him, so he did the oddest, most incomprehensible thing I'd ever heard of.  He began flying to Atlanta on the weekends to play there.  I couldn't imagine my parents doing this, let alone a fifteen year old kid, but I knew it was true because soon he had a lot of money.  

When he turned sixteen, he bought a van, and it wasn't long before he found that he could make even more money selling drugs than playing pool.  He had made some connections in Atlanta, and now he could drive up instead of flying.  Steve and Rhett became good friends, and soon he was smoking pot and dropping acid on the weekends.  One night at the drive-in, Rhett parked his van sideways in the front row where nobody parked so that the driver's side of the van faced the screen.  At the time, two of the side panels were missing and the seats were out, so he had thrown in a mattress.  It was a party.  Everyone one was coming up and Rhett was dealing right there.  People were tripping, but I declined.  In truth, it was just sad to me, or I was.  This was the drive-in that I came to with my parents.  I'd always loved that, the family outing.  My mother would pack up food and we would watch the double feature, or they would, for I'd always fall asleep in the back seat before the second movie was done.  But here I was now, with a group of drug-addled loonies.  It was more than a crime.  It was a blasphemy.  

Still, there I was, sitting with the loonies and hoodlums, the thieves and would-be gangsters.  When Sammy passed me a joint, there was nothing to do but take my first hit.  I tried not to inhale.  But just then, a fellow came up who wasn't part of this crowd.  He was a minor athlete, a hanger on around the good kids, the ones who planned the prom and did bake sales and car washes to raise money for some cause or another.  He was big but soft and rather vague looking, a sort of "me too" kid on the periphery of things, a footman for that to which he aspired.  His father was a deputy sheriff.  We all knew that.  

"Hey," he said with a big, toothy smile, "what's going on?"  Everyone began to howl.  "What's going on?  Is that what you said?  Oh man, oh man, what's going on?  Did you hear that?  Did you hear that?"  If everyone hadn't been so fucked up, I'm sure he would have gotten a beating, but instead, someone passed him a joint.  The smile had passed now from his face, and without another word, he slipped into the darkness.  He was gone.  

"He was taking names," somebody said, and in a few days, we heard it was true.  Everyone who was in the van was now on some list at the police department.  

"He's a narc," they said.  

I was not there when the next thing happened, but Steve was and he swore it was true.  One night, the dick-brained narc, this big, vague idiot, showed up late at the pool hall.  This was not his hang out and not a place where he belonged.  He was just hanging out, they said, like some goofball, when Sammy confronted him by a car in the parking lot.  

"Are you a narc?" he asked him, and the dick-brain said, "No, man, I'm just hanging out."  And with that, Sammy put a gun to dick-brains temple and said, "I think you are a narc, and if I find out that you are, I'm going to kill you."  Dick-brain went all to pieces then, slobbering and crying and trembling and begging, but Sammy was unmoved.  "I'm going to kill you if I see you again, cocksucker, you understand that?  I'm going to kill you."  

No one saw dick-brain after that.  He didn't come back to school, and in a little while, his family moved.  

I guess there is a narrative there, but that is not how I remember it.  I just remember that everybody was changing, and everything was different.  The world was suddenly getting crazy, everything ratcheted up.  It was like a bad fog on a night when you just want to get home.