Halloween Night 2007
Photograph by Carina Cain
By Carina Cain
On Halloween night 2007, Jack walked into a tree branch and cracked open his first beer. The latter happened first. He was fifteen and angry. He was dressed as Napoleon Dynamite. And as soon as Macy Webster slid the cold can into his right hand he decided he would get drunk this Halloween night, because he already hated the way he felt the rest of the time, un-drunk. So maybe drunk would be better and he’d unearth some temporary stasis that made being himself more tolerable.
The beer was bitter, though Jack liked the sound of its opening. A puncture and hiss of release. Like cracking all the knuckles on one hand in a single go. Jack hadn’t ever been able to perform this singular cracking, no matter how many times he tried. This beer was a nice respite.
Except the taste was revolting. Jack had tried vodka before, even gin. But only a dash in a plastic cup mostly full of Coke or pink lemonade. Never enough to overwhelm or disgust. And so now he was exactly that—disgusted.
Arielle Frank crowed when she saw him gag against that first sip of Rainier. “Don’t puke yet, Jack. I’ll never forgive you.”
Jack didn’t know what forgiveness had to do with anything, especially not puking up beer. But Arielle Frank was a cool girl, and he didn’t want to give her cause to think him a wimp. Cool girls like Arielle rattled him. Cool boys, too. Like Austin Merchant or Lucas Thompson. Cool people in general. It was there in the way they slouched their jeans, the way their chins never dipped down against their throats in acute angles. They looked up and out and made being a teenager seem reasonable and easy.
So Jack swallowed his first sip of beer and tipped the can for another. Arielle wasn’t watching him anymore, but that didn’t matter. He had a point to make. Jack lifted, tipped, and swallowed until the can was unburdened of its contents and his stomach felt a little sloshy. Then somehow he was holding another Rainier and repeating the process. Jack repeated the process at least four or five times until his head felt tilted on top of his body and the ground lunged up at him whenever he tried to walk more than a few steps.
“Jack is drunk! Jack is drunk.”
Someone was singing this out into the open air of the undeveloped corner lot where they were all huddled. He wanted to tell them to shut up, Jesus Christ. Please, just shut up. Because adults still existed outside of this moment and they didn’t like their teenage sons getting drunk off Rainier on Halloween night. Jack understood most adults, the modes of their operation, and the ways they argued. The ways they planned ahead by months or years, and the ways they limited looking back on planning already done. Crossing off tasks and writing down the next one. Life as the one big task. Jesus Christ, shut up.
“Nobody can hear us out here. And you are Jack.” Giggles and a pause for effect. “Jack, you are so drunk.”
The words bounced off his eardrums and fell onto the dirt patch by his feet. Jack squinted down at them and tried to will them back up to the region around his brain. Everything was wobbly. Jack wasn’t sure he liked it. This wasn’t what he expected. But what did he expect? Something good? He usually tried not to expect anything, especially goodness. Too much confusion and letdown.
“I have to pee,” Jack said. His tongue was sticking too far out of his mouth. He shoved it back in with his pointer finger. “I really have to pee.”
“Go over there, far though. Don’t pee on me, don’t pee on me.”
Jack wasn’t sure who chortled this, and he wanted to say of course I’m not going to pee on you, I’m drunk, not a toddler. Only he felt kind of like an old baby, unstable and all loose in his joints.
A hand nudged him toward a canted oak tree in the corner of the lot, and Jack let the force push him all the way there.
“I have to pee,” he said again, to the tree. It didn’t respond.
Jack sighed and let the left side of his body rest against the trunk while he fumbled with his zipper. He swayed and his elbow jammed against the grooved bark.
“Ouch.” And then, “Sorry.” But the tree remained steady and didn’t complain.
Jack began to urinate and it was like more than liquid was leaving him. A rush of too much and not enough all at once.
“Wow.” His tongue really didn’t feel quite light enough to use properly. “I don’t know what I’m doing.”
A sudden breeze lifted the tree’s arms up, twisting them into motion. A stirring all around him and Jack moved with it. He was done peeing and his hands found the zipper again, somehow. Somehow his hands found a low-hanging branch to grab on to, all gnarled and beautiful with orange leaves. He couldn’t see very well in the dark, but that was fine because he knew this tree’s beauty, and the beauty of its kind well. He had known for a while—from an early age. His grandmother had one of these trees rooted in the small plot of yard in front of her house. The tree was still there, but his grandmother didn’t have it anymore because she was gone.
Here, with his head making little orbits around his neck and shoulders, Jack tightened his grip on the branch and let his gaze wander along the lines of the oak. Against the blue-black of the sky, its limbs looked like a huge cluster of veins. Broken capillaries bleeding out amongst a few scattered stars. Spider veins are what his grandmother called them—those crimson squiggles that wrapped around her knees. She would point them out to him before he had the chance to take notice, or say something.
“Just so you know, Jack, this is what happens when you get old, okay? Look at these spider veins.”
And so Jack would look, and it was fascinating to see the way time appeared on her body. The way her hands shook slightly when she brought a fork to her mouth, or smoothed the blankets down just so on her bed. She only wore gold jewelry, and it gleamed against her swollen knuckles and the loose skin around her collarbone. Jack’s grandmother never tried to disguise her age. She was a proud woman, proud of her years and the things she spent doing with them.
“I danced like a maniac, Jack. You wouldn’t believe the moves I pulled back then. Left the boys to pick up their jaws from the floor. You wouldn’t believe it, Jack.”
He loved his grandmother’s eyes, and her sense of humor, and her small, meticulous methods of loving him back: stocking the freezer with pistachio ice cream for his weekend visits, raking through his hair with a horrible comb that left his scalp tingling for hours after use, leaving the comic page open on the kitchen table just in case he felt the urge to take a break from those Godawful video games, Jack, and laugh a little on Sunday morning. She ribbed him and told him stories and made him laugh until a cramp sunk its teeth into his side.
She had left him almost two years ago and even now he was raw from it. As if someone had taken a chainsaw to that oak tree on her lawn and chewed through all those rings of growth and fortitude until the trunk relented and split with a groan. Jack was that stump. Rough-edged and incomplete, but somehow still tethered to the ground. How weird and unfair.
Jack adjusted his hold on the branch and wobbled. He wobbled a lot these days. Being artificially wobbly was new, though.
“I don’t think I like this,” he told the tree, and the night around him, and everything that might be listening. He swallowed back a sickly clench in his throat. “Maybe I’ll get used to it.”
A squeal and laughter echoed from where all the people were and Jack let his breath expel from his chest.
“Okay,” he said to everything, leaning forward to make his way back toward the teenagers drinking Rainier on Halloween night 2007. “Okay, here I go. Are you seeing this?”
Jack giggled when his foot stomped down too hard on his first step. With the next, he pointed his toe like a ballerina and giggled at that, too. He took one more lunging step and walked straight into a spindly branch. It snapped solidly against his cheek and turned the pull of gravity against him. Down he went.
“Okay,” Jack said, on his back in the dirt with a warm trickle running down his face. “Okay, ouch.”
“Oh no, Jack! Oh no!” The shriek sounded far off and delighted. Someone cool had seen his fall. Jack could hear movement and laughter and sensed an imminent approach. “Oh no, Jack! Are you okay?”
Jack blinked, there on his back in the dirt, and watched as the wind ruffled the leaves on the branch that had handed him his felling. Spider veins above and around him. He breathed deep and let the laughter encase him. He didn’t bristle at those sounds of glee. Because how ridiculous—cracking open his first beer and walking into a tree branch. His grandmother would be laughing, too.
Carina Cain is a Bay Area local who graduated from Lewis & Clark College this past summer with a B.A. in English. She is admittedly too fond of the hyphen, and wholeheartedly believes that arts education is fundamental to the well-being of society.
