Free Wolf in White Van by John Darnielle Page B

I couldn’t without a straw, and the quiet that fell onto the conversation for the next few seconds was like a great canyon in a desert landscape. Steve reached inside the window of the truck and flipped on the stereo, and the radio came on. It was KLOS. They were playing “Renegade” by Styx.
    Kevin crushed his cigarette underneath his shoe and cameclose enough to me to really get a good look, and he asked me if I was sure this was OK. It would be hard for me to describe how badly I wanted to smile. I could imagine myself in his position, out there on the other side of me, confronted with the scars and the shapes, all the lines that look like they were left on the canvas by a careless or distracted hand. What are we frightened of? Things that can’t hurt us at all. I told him it was fine, it was kind of cool, that most people don’t even ask when you can tell they want to. He looked up from the stretch of former cheekbone he’d been scrutinizing to make eye contact and he smiled, I think because he understood that I was telling him I thought he was brave. Steve stepped up behind him but kept a little distance. Two might have been too many.
    But Kevin waved him over and Steve leaned in, and Kevin drew his index finger toward the recessed pit that lies due right of where my old nose was, and he held the tip of his finger near enough to the surface for me to feel his warmth, and said, “Bullet wound?” in a rhythm so casual that I felt like we were old friends, or coworkers, and I corrected him, saying: “Exit wound.” They both gave half-nods and kept craning their eyes around the broad surface before them: down the side, cresting the ear, banking back over above and across the chin, their slowly moving heads like lunar landers.
    I got a good look at them while they were circling me as respectfully and surgically as they could: they were a living tableau of denim with some stray silver accents here and there—rings, necklaces. They gave off a vague throb of energy, like thermal images of people on a screen. I recognized that throb. Once I’d held it inside myself, just barely. I felt comfortable with them. So I asked them whether my face freaked themout; I put it exactly like that, because I felt as if I was among members of my tribe. “Does it freak you out, my fucked-up face?” I said.
    I don’t really talk like that anymore. Those words, their sound, that summery lilt: all these came from somewhere in the past, or a buried part of the present. Whatever it was—past or present, or unknown future—it seemed to rise from the asphalt like a little invisible cyclone, swirling up around me in my mind. I felt like a panel in a comic book. In a different world, I might have looked like Kevin and Steve instead of like myself. I might have been buying beer and not candy, and smoking Marlboro reds, loitering in the parking lot and waiting for something to happen. The one constant in both possibilities was the liquor store, the parking lot. All roads leading to this quiet, empty place.
    Steve answered first. “Well, dude,” he said, and something in his tone made me want to cry for joy, “it is for sure fucked up, your face. But actually it’s freakier before you see it up close. Up close, it’s like …” He wasn’t sure how to finish the thought.
    “It’s like tire tread,” I offered.
    Among the three of us I thought I felt a kinship. Sometimes I think I feel a bond when it’s only my imagination. I’m used to that. But they laughed about the tire tread comparison, and they lit new cigarettes and offered one to me, which I accepted, and it gave me a head rush so strong that my vision washed out and I saw nothing but pulsing yellow for half a minute, and the song on the radio switched over from “Renegade” to “Even the Losers” as they asked me what was the worst part about having taken a bullet to the face and I said itwas actually the way it messes up your hearing, which is true. We had a long