ACT I
Luke Laney sat on the white couch in the white living room, hoping his parents had summoned him to tell him he could finally start enjoying his driver’s license— six months after he’d gotten it— by driving Herbert, the crappy import in the garage whose defrosters smelled like a dog who’d swam in the ocean a couple days ago but, rather than taking a bath, had run through a field of wet grass. But Luke’s father was still riding the mower back and forth across the soylent lawn, and Luke felt a cold stone form on his solar plexus, sitting heavily like an evil-eyed buddha, making him nauseous, the same stone that had accompanied detention all those times he’d argued with teachers or said fuck too loud in middle school or the time he got caught pissing on Heinrich’s bike, although it wouldn’t make him puke this time, like it had when he and Ophelia had been caught in the acolyte’s closet before their confirmations.
Rita Laney stood in the living room, shifting between locking each knee as if she’d been carrying that motherly quiet that precedes a moment of judgement on her back all day, legs fatigued by its awkward weight. “Your father and I,” she said, “have decided to let you drive Herbert.” She paused and pulled a pharmaceutically pastel box out of a bag and then a tube of small plastic containers that, had his mother not been so square, Luke would’ve guessed to have been stolen from the self-serve sauce station in Finnegan’s or one of the burrito places around town. Luke felt his guts run wildly into the walls of his stomach and get tangled in his vital nerves like the idiot women in bad horror films who run into cobwebs. “On one condition. You’ll have to pass a drug test. And continue to pass them.”
Truth was, his disoriented guts were still a little stoned from lunch. He and Delailah had been late to chemistry because they’d smoked a bowl behind the gas station a couple blocks from school and had then sat too long in the autumn sun on the bank of the Clark Fork, wishing for the wind to whistle through the hacked-back brush that had lined the bank, before the word security had permeated everything, all the way to vegetation management. Oh my fuck, oh my fuck Luke thought too many times, the stone pushing his nausea to the point that he found himself wondering what his mom’s goulash would look like half an hour digested and coming up in Old Faithful blasts all over the white carpet. Maybe something like Mom’s hair.
“Does that sound fair?” Rita Laney struggled with the piss-test’s packaging.
“Uh, yeah.”
Rita Laney handed him one of the little ranch or ketchup or taco sauce cups. “Well, uh, you know what to do, right?”
“Yeah,” Luke said as he walked slowly towards the bathroom. “Try not to piss on my hand.”
Ok, ok, fuckhorse shitwizard. What if I fill it with water? She’ll never buy that, even if I tell her I just drank a shit-ton of tea. If I made the water yellow? He dug around the bathroom as quietly as he could, looking for anything yellow, but the handsoap was green and nothing else seemed like it would work. Fuck, shit, lobstercock!
“Luke,” Rita Laney yelled from the living room, “are you done in there yet?”
“I didn’t really have to pee, I’m trying.”
Luke pissed a little on his shaking hand as he filled the cup. He reached for the faucet, but decided not to wash and used that hand to steady his mother’s as he handed her the ransom she’d asked.
“You’re awfully quiet,” Rita Laney said. “I hope I don’t have anything to worry about.”
“Yeah, no, you don’t.”
Rita Laney dipped the thin stick of the piss test into the cup, then unfolded the instructions and looked at it from above in that awkward squinting way people who refuse to wear glasses look at everything. “Let’s see,” she said, reading more with her raised finger tracing the letters than her eyes, “if it turns green you’re guilty and blue you’re not.”
Luke took the instructions, reading The strip turning blue indicates the presence of the tested substance, while green indicates the test has yielded success. “Yeah… that’s right, yeah.”
The piss-stick turned blue. “Well,” said Rita, “here you go.” She handed him the keys to Herbert. “You’ll have to take another one in a few weeks.”
Stuart Laney came in the front door. “Luke passed, Stu.”
“A math test? Good job, Luke.”
“His drug test.”
“Drug test?”
“We talked about this.”
“Oh, yeah. Well… good.”
Stuart Laney smelled of sweat and that green crust that forms underneath lawnmowers, the smell of suburbia and the smell that follows the children of lawn care professionals to school, a reek of green in all the wrong ways. Stuart Laney mowed the lawn twice daily, waking early to run a pass before work and running another right after dinner. He patrolled it nightly after he came in and changed out of his grass-stained mowing clothes, picking up the sticks that fell from the Norway maples that grew in the backyard and along the street, scrutinizing the weeds that dared sprout, planning the next stage of his chemical war.
“I’m going to take a drive, if you don’t mind,” Luke said.
“Wear your seatbelt. Don’t do anything stupid,” Rita Laney said.
“Don’t worry. I’m just going to pick up some meth and hookers.”
“Pick me up an eight-ball,” Stu joked, laughing only as long as it took Rita Laney to glare him down.
Delailah hadn’t stopped looking at herself in the mirror on the visor and fiddling with her nose ring since they’d stopped driving half an hour ago. “You’re a lucky son of a bitch,” she said. They were parked across the street from a theater with one of those old marquees of colored lightbulbs that cycled through its four or five flashing patterns when a film was about to start. Delailah watched the reflections on the passenger window.
Luke lay back in the reclined driver’s seat. He watched the orange flashes strike thin outlines of Delailah’s jaw and ear. Her hair was pulled back into a messy thing, the way Luke imagined it would be if she planned on cutting it all off the next day. “Yeah,” he said. “But I wish I didn’t have to take them at all.”
“It’s so beautifully absurd, though. It’s the perfect malfunction of the machine. You have to fail drug tests. You have to smoke pot to drive. They wanted you to conform but they’re forcing you to break the rules they want you to follow. It’s awesome.”
Each time Delailah said “they,” Luke imagined a [who?] appearing in the corner of her angular mouth. “I have to take another test tomorrow. We need to find some greens.”
“We got stoned at lunch.”
“I want to be sure I fail the test. Do you know anybody who has some?”
Delailah made a short string of calls, each of which ended with “Alright, well thanks anyway.”
“We should’ve saved that last bowl for tomorrow,” Luke said.
Delailah laughed. “I love how you’re paranoid about not being stoned enough.” Her laugh snorted a little and she covered her face, then noticed a car coming down the street. “Shit, it’s Bertha!” She left the car door open and ran into the street, arms something like a falling person’s. Luke got out, closed both doors, and walked across the street to where Delailah leaned into the passenger window of Bertha’s car, but by the time he’d crossed the street, Bertha was driving away and Delailah smiling. Delailah’s teeth were large and like Incan walls, each one a different shape and size yet arranged into something that fit perfectly together.
They got back into Herbert and Delailah showed him a sandwich bag stuffed with something that looked like the residue that fell of his dad’s shoes when he came in after mowing the lawn. “What the hell is that?” he asked.
“Yeah, it’s shwag. Really damn shwag. But I thought you needed to pass that drug test tomorrow.”
Luke opened the bag and smelled. “It smells like hay. How much did you pay for this?”
“Twenty-five.”
Luke inhaled its odor again. “Seriously, this smells like hay. It probably is hay. I think you got ripped off.”
Delailah smelled it and her nose twisted skeptically. “I think it’s just clippings. Probably got smuggled in a hay bale. But there’s only one way to find out, naysayer. Let’s go up Pattee Canyon and try it.”
They parked at the gate to the closed Forest Service picnic area and walked to the little gully behind it. Delailah loaded a chillum by phonelight and hit it. As she exhaled she said, “It’s definitely pot. It’s shitty but it’s pot.”
At the end of the third bowl, Luke finally said, “I’m good. I should fail the test tomorrow.”
“Aiming for failure. It’s so absurd. The perfect parody. I wish the world that made this happen could see it. Only I don’t think they’d get it, you know? It’d be like asking stupid question at those abstinence assemblies. You remember that one time Mrs. Skulavik answered Bobbie’s question about genital warts? She turned red as a baboon’s ass when Bobbie’d said ‘one time when I was with this girl.’ And Mrs. Skulavik fucking just kept full steam ahead like an idiot ship. That was absurdly funny.”
The fact was, after the initial pause, Mrs. Skulavik had launched into a vivid explanation of all the painful and disgusting things genital warts entrain, and, though she told no one, Bobbie had gone to the bathroom after the assembly and cried in a salmon-colored stall, knowing her genital warts would never go away. Luke had been in the hallway when she came out of the bathroom, the skin around her eyes still the inflamed pink of that bathroom stall. When Luke had complimented her joke, she mumbled “thanks” the way someone with a mouthful of ice cream would while trying to juggle hacksaws. “Maybe they do get it and they just let it go because they’re sick of jackass kids, they’ve dealt with it for so long they just don’t care anymore,” Luke said.
They lay with the incline of the gully, looking up through the gap in the trees. It was clear and there’d be frost on everything in the morning. Luke looked at the moon, wondering what Delailah thought of its second-hand light, whether it was absurd or beautiful or both. He looked over at her. The chiaroscuro of the moon hardened the bony ridges of her face. He could see the goosebumps on her neck and her nipples rising slightly underneath her flannel. He wanted to reach out and feel the soft of her hair and her skin and the warmth of the other, to feel the society of flesh and to feel, for once, at someone’s side.
“I’m cold. And hungry. Let’s go eat the shit out of something,” Delailah said. She stood up and started towards the car before Luke had even turned his head back to look at the moon again.
