Chapter 14
Thursday, April 28, 1999
Ethan Lee awoke of his own accord at five in the morning. Lulu had not been around in days and he wondered where she'd been as he watched the county awaken from his porch top view.
He tried his best to find a black lab in a dark outfield three hundred feet below him but failed. The sun had not even tinted the horizon a slight pink.
Ethan took a codeine pill from his medicine bottle, swallowed it, then chucked the bottle into the woods.
"No more help from the AMA," he said.
He laughed for a few seconds as he imagined some beaver or badger eating the pills and feeling no pain for awhile. Of course, he thought, the little bugger might be killed from the resulting slowed reactions.
"Better you than me, Badger," Ethan said, perhaps a little too loud.
His parents had been fine with his stay at Easlon. As a child, he had spent many summer months in Easlon when his parents went on vacation. The Easlons had been his foster parents until Ethan was almost two, and though he did not remember them from his early childhood, his legacy as one of the smartest foster children ever to come through Easlon, Missouri preceded him. Mama Easlon spoke of him often.
Ethan pictured her long, silver hair, her brown eyes-so deep you could swim in them-and her spiritual, rosy Grandma face. She wore little glasses that made her look more like Old Mother Hubbard than some John Lennon loving, Greatful Dead following hippie.
He saw the round lights of a 1974 Volkswagen Beetle and knew his ride had arrived.
Brian Sun Easlon hated the suburbs.
"Nice house, asshole," he muttered to no one.
He flipped his cigarette onto the driveway, stepped it out and walked around the side of the house to see Ethan.
"That you Brian?" he heard Ethan say.
"No, it's Pope John Paul the Third come for the early bird special."
Ethan reached inside the door to his basement apartment, took one last look at sleeping Deborah, grabbed his duffel bag of clothes and his book bag, then shook Brian's hand.
"Good to see you, Brian."
"Always a pleasure, Dr. Danger."
"What the hell is that supposed to mean?" Brian helped Ethan put his bags in the front trunk of the Beetle.
"I heard about you, Mr. Bonfire Party Avenger, walking into a hail fire of bullets like some demon rush junkie. You need a shrink, or something man."
"That's why I got you, Brian Sun."
"Hey, Ethan, what the hell is your middle name?"
"Ain't got one."
"Lying fuck."
As they drove through the darkness, Ethan got caught up on the Easlon family.
"Well," spoke Brian as he lit a joint. "Mamma's doing well with her investments. She does pretty well with the technology stocks and she keeps everyone in check. Kristen Moon had a house built a little further up the hill and she lives with some real handy survivalist guy who's been earning his keep by fixing everything from computers to plumbing to carpentry. Hell, he designed their house. His names Robert but Momma calls him Scorpio and no one ever really cared to ask why.
"Mary Star and I still live at home with Momma. Mary Star's been asking about you, too."
Brian nudged Ethan with his elbow.
"And well, as you know, Dad died a few years ago, and it was pretty hard on Momma's Cousin Zeke and his wife, Gretchen. They never really leave their old house. They just sit around, watch television, drink too much and smoke too much, and well, that's about everybody I guess."
"Is the place still beautiful?"
"Beautiful as ever, I guess."
Due to the quality of the marijuana and the beauty of the rising sun, the rest of the drive into Easlon was serene, perfect and silent except for the soft hum of the Beetle's engine as it took Ethan home to heal.
Deborah Van Klein awoke when Lulu banged on Ethan's glass door at about six in the morning. Half asleep, she dumped some recently purchased dog food in the white bowl outside and stumbled back to bed.
The bed was empty.
She stood up straight and tried to focus. On Ethan's pillow was a folded piece of paper. She picked it up and read:
Deborah,
I am running away to prepare myself to deal with my fears and pain. We all mourn in our own way. Please call me on my cell phone and visit me as often as you like. Because of my love for you, I will not stay away long.
Ethan.
She slowly dressed and drove home.
As she drove, she decided that she would be strong. She would keep her back straight and her life in order. She would go to school. She would not let the burden of a little pain and misery wear her down.
All she really needed was one good breakfast.
"Do you have any reason to want to see your administrators on LSD?" Uniformed police officer, Charles Whitman asked Atwood.
"No," said Atwood, as if it were the silliest question that could be asked.
"Do you know anyone who would?"
"Not personally."
"Not personally, but you might no of someone who would want to see these administrators and counselors on LSD?"
"Sure, I imagine Charles Manson would love to see it."
Atwood Nash was not surprised to receive no response from his interrogator.
"Why weren't you in school, Monday?"
"Excuse me, Officer, but five of my friends had just died."
"Sorry," said the officer. "Just one last question."
"Shoot."
"Do you think you're strong enough to break the lock on this desk?"
He pointed to some counselor's desk behind him. All the desks in the loft were the same metal model.
"I have no idea."
Atwood Nash went back to class.
Morons, he thought. The police, the teachers, the counselors, the principals, they're all freaking morons.
Atwood was miserable and depressed because of his dead friends. He was saddened and appalled at the events in the counseling loft. Most of all, he was upset at the intense security measures now taken at LSD High School. Metal detectors had been installed. Police randomly searched and arrested high school students for minor drug possessions. And the worst part of it all for Atwood was that no one responded in any way that he had anticipated. All the sorrow went to the victims of the coffee dosing. The kid who did it was just a criminal. No one learned a damn thing, he thought.
By the end of the day, as Atwood prepared for roller hockey practice, the locker room rumors led him to believe over ten students had been arrested for drug possession and that Billy Oliver, a sophomore hippie, had been suspended for calling a police officer a "fascist faggot."
Atwood wanted to apologize for the mess he'd created, but he stayed silent. He couldn't have predicted this chaos.
Ethan predicted this chaos, thought Atwood. He told Joe it was a bad idea.
Fuck Ethan, thought Atwood. Fuck the cops, fuck the murder victims and fuck everybody everywhere.
Atwood, a first string, varsity hockey player, played roller hockey not only to keep his skills sharp but because, well, sometimes he wanted to hit people.
In the rink that afternoon, all the opposing players were police officers and principals.
He beat the hell out of them.
Easlon was exactly as Ethan remembered it.
The property started at a small river called the Haika. They made a right off the dirt road that ran along side the Haika and over a small wooden bridge. A sign in the front of the bridge read, "Welcome to Easlon, Private Property." The river was a soft green. Sunbeams shot through the trees and danced on the hills beyond.
"I love this place," Ethan said.
"Home," said Brian. And for no good reason, he repeated the word, "home."
After a few miles of driving through woods, the Beetle came upon a two hundred-acre corn farm.
"The Bauer's still rent this place?"
"You bet. Make pretty good money. They talk about moving if they can't buy the land, but we ain't selling."
"Good."
A little further down the dirt road, they came across three houses, all along the east side of the road, about an acre apart. The first and largest house was Momma's. She, her husband, and a few very skilled independent contractors had built the house with their original lottery winnings.
"Let's pull up in here, first," Brian said, driving the car into Momma Easlon's driveway. "She'll be thrilled to see you."
Momma Easlon must have heard Brian's car because she came running out of the house and across her nice green yard and up to the concrete driveway where Ethan stood, removing his bags from the trunk.
"Bright," she yelled (her nickname for him because he spoke his first two words, light and bright at seven months old after hearing Brian wine about his broken Lite BriteÔ game).
"Momma Easlon." He wrapped his arms around her.
"You're so damn big," she said, as he bent over to kiss her on the cheek. "God, I feel old."
"It's so good to see you, Momma. Have you been well?"
"Better than ever. And hey, it may be good to see Momma, but it'd be better to see her with some breakfast."
"Come on in the house, Sun. Thanks for bringing Bright on home."
Momma Easlon and her recently deceased husband had named all three of their children with Christian first names and hippie middle names. She usually called all of her children-including Ethan-by their hippie names unless scolding them.
"Star," Momma Easlon called into the house. "Is breakfast ready?"
"Oh yeah," said a soft voice from the kitchen.
"Hi, Ethan," Star said when she saw him behind Momma Easlon.
"Hi, Mary," Ethan couldn't believe how good she looked. She was eighteen now. The last time he had seen her, she had been a little flower child, way too skinny with no breasts or legs.
He gave her a hug and resisted the urge to pick up her perfect, sinewy, narrow, well-endowed body and cover her olive-skin neck with kisses.
Breakfast was normal. They ate quickly and spoke very little. Brian said he would be glad to help Ethan get his pitching back. Momma Easlon said she'd be glad to help him study. No one spoke of the LSD in the coffeepot or the sniper at the bonfire party. Mary Star and Ethan Bright played footsies the entire meal.
Ethan spent the rest of his day in the woods, walking around with Brian and Mary. They fished for bass, caught Bluegills, and fried them at a campsite next to the river.
Mary, Ethan and Brian went swimming in the nude, like they had as children. After playing splash games, they dried off and smoked joints as they talked of the crazy happenings in the world: Monica Lewinsky, Columbine, Saturday Night live, Prozac for dogs, etcetera. Their talk wasn't exactly small talk but it wasn't exactly real either.
No one, Ethan included, wanted to talk about LSD High School or Ethan Lee.
Brian left them to help Momma Easlon bring dinner to weird Zeke and his wife.
Deborah was far from Ethan's mind as he lay naked in the mud with Mary.
The sun was setting, and the beautiful, full lipped, blue-eyed beauty on top of Ethan kissed his chest and said, "Don't think so much Ethan. You're in Easlon. Just love."
Ethan's cell phone rang and he threw it in the river.
I am away, he thought.
Deborah Van Klein, in her perfectly clean, pink room could not understand what was going on. Ethan's phone was off. She couldn't understand why his phone would be off. She hung her parent's cordless phone back in the kitchen, told her parents she had a dinner date with another boy (to escape eating two fattening meals a day-breakfast had been enough) and left quickly.
Her parents were pleased she was seeing other people. Before she left, her mother had kissed her on the cheek and said, "Don't worry, Honey. As long as you are all right, we can stay here. We'll let you finish high school here with your new friends."
Leave it to Mom to make me feel like a burden while pleasing me, she thought as she started her car.
Ethan Lee and Mary Easlon dressed quickly after toweling each other off. Momma Easlon had rung the dinner bell.
Between dessert and coffee, Momma Easlon packed some expensive, kind marijuana into a large, glass pipe, passed it to Ethan and said, "Are you gonna' talk about it?"
Ethan hit the pipe.
"Yeah, Momma," he said. "I'll tell you."
He started with Kip, the old man in the wheelchair with no relatives and now no home, how people just destroyed memories in the name of progress. He talked about Joe, his best friend, and all the friends he had lost. He spoke of the insane coffee at his school (not letting them know who the culprit was). He must have pounded his fist on the table at least five times. All three faces at the table emanated concern. Violent acts and anger were not commonplace events in Easlon.
"Wow," said Momma Easlon. "You've been through a lot dear."
"Star," she said as she looked calmly on her loving children. "Take Bright up and show him his room. He's gonna' need his rest."
Star and Bright made love softly that evening as the moonlight crept through Ethan's thin curtains. Ethan stared into Mary's eyes. Just like Momma Easlon's eyes, they were deep enough to swim in. Unlike Momma Easlon's eyes, they sparkled like the ocean.
"I see why she named you Star," he said, gazing into her eyes.
"Don't get stupid on me Ethan, just be free."
He kissed her on the forehead and fell fast asleep.
Deborah Van Klein slept alone for the first time in almost a week. At first it was impossible, but her over sized teddy bear helped.
Atwood Nash passed out in the bed of one Mary Strothmire, who lived in her basement, three houses down from Atwood's antique abode. They had been friendly fucks for while and as such, barely spoke.
They had both devoured four bottles of red wine and said some things neither believed.
Mary told Atwood she was engaged to be married.
Atwood told Mary he was the LSD-coffee culprit.
"You are so full of shit."
"I know," he said with a smile.
"Well I'm not," said Mary Strothmire, whom Atwood had known since kindergarten, and who he'd always considered the girl next door-his girl next door.
"You're gonna be married," his drunken voice sounded stupid even to himself.
"I was, until Steven Carter shot my future husband."
"What?"
"Atwood, I'm carrying Brian Durbin's unborn child."
"Bullshit," he said before passing out.