Free World Gone Water by Jaime Clarke Page B

I’ll pull my hand back. At this point she begins to whimper and this is usually when I enter her. “Oh, yeeeeees,” I moan. “You have a pret-ty pus-sy, pret-ty pus-sy,” I sing as I hump to the rhythm my words are making.
    After I come, I pull out and roll off her. Jane gasps for air. We both grab for each other’s hand. We lie still for a moment, not saying anything, and then Jane mounts me until she comes too.

Journal #5
    The week Tim was suspended for starting fires in the boys’ bathroom, my reputation was revealed to me. Principal Edwards had summoned us for interrogation simultaneously, and everyone was shocked to see me return to my seat so soon. I imagined the others regarded me with an air of caution, wondering what I would do to retaliate against those who had nominated me to the principal’s ears. I dreamed of radical terrorism, toilets spouting like fountains, poison ivy on the swing set, ink in the lunch milk, the entire playground on fire. Transferring schools seemed bad enough, but transferring from Rapid City to San Diego in the middle of my freshman year was socially disastrous. Not picked for basketball or football or baseball, Tim was the only other kid no one wanted anything to do with. “Those guys are a bunch of fags, anyway,” Tim said. “Humping each other over a little ball. Fuck ’em.”
    Tim and I spent most of the time hanging out after school at Tim’s hideout, a tin construction shack left by the crew who had paved the highway behind my new home. We called it the clubhouse. It could hold up to five people, but only Tim and I ever went there. Weeds sprouted up inside the shack, nourished by the shaft ofsunlight the doorless entrance allowed. We collected cans there, rummaged from the Holiday Inn Dumpster down the highway, and cashed them in at the local recycling center. Weekends were our big score. In addition to the cluster of beer cans, we usually came away with a full library of porno magazines discarded by weekend surfers. When the bell rang at the end of the school day, Tim and I raced to the clubhouse and spent the afternoon leafing through the fleshy pages.
    Tim learned the delivery schedule at the Texaco next to the Holiday Inn and knew that when a truckload of goods came in, one of the clerks would have to leave a register to check them in. The other clerk was usually overwhelmed with cars pulling in off the freeway.
    So we started stealing beer.
    First it was six-packs behind our back. Then we started walking out with a twelve-pack each. Olympia. Hamm’s. Pabst Blue Ribbon. I selected mine more on the basis of color and design, but Tim always stole Coors.
    â€œMy dad drinks Coors,” he told me. Tim’s father left his mother when Tim was five. Tim never talked about him, except he always told me that his father drank Coors. I wondered if it was the only thing Tim knew about him. A small picture on the hutch in Tim’s apartment showed the three of them. Tim was in his mother’s thin arms. His father had his arm around his mother. They both had long, thin faces with eyes the size of marbles, and their hair was identically feathered in the style of the times. I never told Tim that my parents died in a gas explosion before I could really know anything about them, back when I lived in Sacramento. That was before I was shipped from relative to relative, first Denver and then Santa Fe and then Rapid City.
    We added our empties to the aluminum heaps outside the shack.
    â€œLook at this,” I said, fishing a used rubber out of an Old Milwaukee can. The tip was full and it was tied off in the middle.
    â€œGross,” Tim said, coming closer. He knocked it out of my hand and stepped on it. The white fluid leaked into the dirt. “Have you ever used one?” he asked.
    I shook my head.
    â€œI have,” he said. “On my neighbor.”
    I looked at him skeptically.
    â€œReally. You can too, if you