Old Mint River

A Short Story from Horrormaxx Vol. 1 by H.T. Boyd

I’ve been to a lot of NA meetings in my life. 

A lot. 

They’re usually held in drab church basements or the back room of some decrepit office park, but here we are: an NA meeting under the stars and the blue cosmos; a flickering campfire at our heels.  

The flames eat brush we collected ourselves. The smoke is bitter; it makes a dry smog that bites at my nose and stains my jacket with its stink. 

There’re five of us here, out in the middle of nowhere, North Georgia on the Appalachian Trail. 

God help us. God help me. It’s only the first night and my stomach hurts. I’ve got trail rash between my legs. My hands won’t stop fucking shaking. Moments ago I had to shit in a hole for the first time in my life, and I’m not eager to continue doing that for the next month.  

Jesus Christ—I’m not even totally dried out yet. My armpits are pumping buckets of ice water. I’m too hot. My skin feels chilly and prickly and loose. It’s like I’ve got the flu, except this is a flu that yearns for cocaine. 

—

This morning a van dumped us all off at a park and we just— went in—

Into the woods with nothing but tents and rain ponchos and shit trowels and boots. Canteens and meek provisions. We walked twelve grueling miles today. Over hills and in the sun. In the company of mosquitos. 

Now, it’s the close of the first day; the first of thirty obligatory NA meetings, and no one wants to talk. No one has hardly talked all day. It’s been too hot. Too exhausting. We pop off our shoes and inspect our blisters. We wipe our grubby faces. We sweat and we chug water. Addicts, all of us, at one time or another. 

The program director stands at a podium of fire. He’s not as beat up as the rest of us. He’s fifty years old, half of those sober. This is his program: The Appalachian Rehabilitation. Rolls off the tongue, I know. He does it four times a year and now he’s got calves like a He-Man action figure. Our brutal trek was a mere walk in the park for him. Earlier, he introduced himself as Counselor Paul McAdams. I guess this is his summer camp.

McAdams is one of those half-caveman, half-college professor kinds of guy. He wears those billion pocket canvas pants and a maroon vest with trail patches. He’s got long scraggly hair and an unkempt, round beard. His ugly face is like a harshly carved bar of soap; it’s made doubly harsh by these outrageous blue smoke Elton John glasses. 

“Alright, campers,” he says in this smarmy, vegan-cheese-hippie yip.

I have to shake my head. He really just called us campers. I am thirty-two years old.

“Well, we all made it through our first day. Yeah! Yep-sir-ee! First day is always the toughest,” he nods his head, and he’s quiet, and he licks his lips like a preacher man. “Well, I’m sure you guys don’t feel very good right now. In my fifteen years counseling at the Appalachian Rehabilitation, I haven’t met one soul who was happy at the end of their first day— but you know what? I hope you’re all proud of yourselves. You did it. You did the first ‘it’ of many ‘its’. You put in the work and you got to the end of the day. Everybody here has got someone back home who’s rooting for them and wow-siree-bob; you did it for them! Somewhere out there, under this same moon and these same stars, someone you love is going to bed tonight and, for the first time in a very long time, they’re not worrying about you. They know you’re finally on the trail to recovery.”  

There’re four of us—campers; or rather, junkies from rich families. I assume this much as this whole Appalachian Trail rehab shit ain’t cheap. I’ll bet you Counselor McAdams has a nice mansion back in Atlanta if he’s been doing this fifteen years. What a fucking con job it is. This operation has got to have zero overhead. No building. No guards. No employees— and I even had to buy my own goddam tent. 

This isn’t my first rehab. Let me tell you, I’ve been to some choice rehabs. Luxury resorts with spas and hot tubs and shit. I mean, the drying out sucks, it always sucks, but usually rehab is just a month at the spa. If you’re lucky, there’s maybe even a little tail. That’s the fun part; thirteenth stepping with a piece of bleach blonde strange. I struggle to remember a time when I didn’t find a rehab girlfriend for me to relapse with after we got out.  

This, of course, is my first time in a men’s only rehab. It’s just dudes here; dudes shitting in holes and eating canned beans—four of us— dudes. We did a ‘get-to-know-ya’ game in the van to the drop-off point. Around the fire are Anesh, Oswald and Desmond. 

Anesh: scrawny with a moptop. Innocent, black eyes like a lab rat. He’s a West Coast kid, like me. Family owns an instant coffee company. I want to say he’s a DJ or some other kind of bullshit musician that doesn’t require the actual playing of instruments. Also like me, he’s here for nose candy, but, from what I’ve gathered, a habit of synthetic marijuana has deep fried his brain into a golden brown hush puppy. Guy is a total space cadet. 

Oswald: He’s old. Like forty-five. He’s got this wide-white-guy-frog face. A God-fearing Catholic who made a few mil as a crew manager with a family construction firm up in Michigan. He wears a big cross necklace and an orange-striped fishing shirt. He shattered his leg while skiing a few years back and got hooked on opiates. He turned himself in for rehab after he stole a bunch of money from his—what was it? I think it was his brother-in-law. He walks with a limp, and somehow this is the most interesting thing about him. 

Finally, there’s Desmond. Desmond is, like, twenty. Young, black kid with well-tended dreads and a screaming red t-shirt that’s three sizes too big. His pants are hot pink, his shoes are thousand-buck white sneakers. Already ruined. A city boy. He’s not made for the woods. He’s too clean. Desmond hasn’t shared anything about himself. He’s quiet. A mean, stewing, quiet—but, so long as we’re guessing; I read him as one of those kids who likes to dress and talk like he’s from the wrong side of the tracks, but, seeing as he’s here, I’d guess he’s never missed a Christmas; he probably got busted melting heroin in a silver spoon. 

“Tanner,” Counselor Fuckhead McCheese says my name, “How about you start us off?” 

“Me?” My voice trembles, my hands tremble too. “I-I-I don’t have anything to say.”

“Nothing?”

“Yeah. Nothing.”

“You don’t have anything on your mind?”

“No.”

“Well, how about your heart—how do you feel?”

“Not great.”

The counselor wisens his eyes, I’m playing right into his trap. “Why not?”

“I guess—” I pause, there’re eight eyeballs on me in a flickering firelight. “I-I guess I’m embarrassed that I’m here.”

“So, you feel shame?” He takes a sip from a sticker-bombed canteen. “You want to talk about it? Go ahead. Introduce yourself to the group; just talk from the heart.”

I find myself gripping my wrist. “Okay, uh, my name is Tanner Jaffe, but, uh, yeah,” I sniffle, “—and, well, I guess it’s kind of obvious, but, yeah, I’m uh—I’m an addict.”

They do the thing you’ve seen on TV. They say ‘hi Tanner’ in this muttered church choir.

“Uh. My last bump was Tuesday morning. I cleaned out the supply before the van came for me—uh, what else can I say? What do you want me to say? Uh—er—uh—There is a demon that lives inside of me, he has no name, but he, uh, this demon, he, uh, makes me do coke. And when there is no coke to be had he makes me do crazy things to get it—and if I do enough coke, I become the demon and I do demonic kinds of things. How is that, counselor? Is that what I’m supposed to say?”

I say all of this deadpan. Lifeless and insincere. The eyeballs stare. No one provides comment. I don’t think they’re even allowed to respond. I’m on stage. This is slam poetry, this is free verse rap. I hate it. 

I can’t stand the silence, so I fill it up. “Uh. I took my first bump when I was seventeen. Yeah. Spring break in Amsterdam. Snuck away with some cousins. It was, um, love at first snort. What else— can I—uh—say? My family is quite wealthy, so, uh, it’s never been too hard to acquire coke. Uh—my dad is, uh, in the 70s and 80s he owned a textile company that made discount tuxedos, you know, easily tailored rentals for proms and weddings, but, uh, he’s more famous now as a candidate for the California Senate. You know; Steve Jaffee; Proposition Triple-One. The, uh, pray the gay away guy. Yeah, that’s my—old man. He, uh, asked me to attend this, er, sobriety workshop as a last ditch effort to get me on the right track and—uh, here I am I guess—sorry, I’m-I’m not so good at this.”

“You said you were feeling shame,” McAdams taunts me, “Let’s break that down.” 

“Well-uh-ackch- I mean isn’t this all supposed to make me feel ashamed? This is a punishment, right? I mean, sure we can use the words therapy and rehab and camp as much as we want, but, uhhh, this is a punishment. We’re all here because we’re too rich for prison, but we’ve done bad things and our families are sick of our shit. So—yeah. I think this whole ‘boy scouts wandering in the woods’ thing is designed to make me feel punished and embarrassed. Maybe even hurt a little bit. I mean, maybe I should be ashamed—we should all be ashamed. I mean, I should be home right now, with my family. I should be working, uh, a decent job and doing tai-chi every morning at six A.M. But instead I’m here in, uh, buttfuck, Appalachia; talking about my feelings over cans of beans and twig smoke.” 

McAdams chuckles, “Buddyboy, you got twenty-nine more nights out here in Buttfuck Appalachia. You better get used to talking about your feelings.”

It bothers me, the way he says fuck. It’s the way a judge or a preacher would say it. He hates that word but he’s throwing it back at me as if to tell me that the cussin’ won’t scare him off. 

I lick my lips, “Okay, then, so how about you tell me, Counselor: what do you want me to say?”

“I’m not your screenwriter, brother. I’m not your puppet master either. I’m nothing but a pair of ears. So, you’ve told us that this is a punishment; well, Tanner, if that’s the case, what are you being punished for?”

The other campers observe me. Titillated. These poor souls have been fighting mud, trees and hills all day. I’m their television now and they want some entertainment. 

I pause, I watch my fingers lock and unlock. “I guess—I’m at the end of a long line of things I need to be punished for. I’ve always been a fuck up. I’ve always had trouble with coke. It’s no secret. The whole state of California knows how much I love coke. It’s on CBC two times a week—Uh—Coke is like—” I close my eyes, it’s easier this way. “I-I-I mean, I’ve never understood how people got addicted to other drugs. Alcohol? Forget it, take a nap. Hallucinogens, leave them for the tree-huggers. Meth, it’s like putting your head in a microwave, but, coke is like—Do you guys know how they make coke? Any of you? Any of you ever seen a thing about it on the Edu-TV? How It’s Made? Cocaine is a leaf, first obviously, but they soak the leaves in gasoline. Yeah, pure, uh, unfiltered gasoline. That’s what makes it into a powder; that’s what gives it its distinct chemical flavor. So—coke is not a drug, really, it is fuel concentrate. You put it into your brain and you feel like a monster truck, like an airplane; a fucking stealth bomber. You feel like your hypothalamus has got eight cylinders of raw diesel power. And the best part is, you don’t feel crazy. Not at the moment. You just feel powerful and happy and fast—Coke is all of the drugs, it’s the whole drug rainbow—it’s all the good feelings—and it makes the world make sense—so—yeah—I love coke—I adore coke—and I’ve done a lot of bad things for coke. And I’ve embarrassed my dad a lot so—you know—”

I trail off. With eyes shut I am alone in darkness. McAdams encourages me to keep speaking. 

“In 2016 my dad read the writing on the wall and transitioned from a life in business to one in politics. You, knowing following a certain someone’s footsteps. And now he’s a family values senator, trying to flip California red— so, he’s got a tough job ahead of him and it’s hard enough to be a black republican in this country, but it only makes it harder when his son is out wrapping Lambo’s around light posts or getting busted with, uh, crack-whores to use a—er, politically insensitive term.” 

I open my eyes. Nothing has changed. There is still fire. Four men around it.

“After my last car accident, he requested that I get sober for him. And I did it. You know, I really did it. I went to a nice facility with swimming pools and yoga and shit—and I, uh, started 2017 as a clean man—and so—you know—as part of staying that way, my dad thought that I needed a carrot on a stick to stay away from my worst impulses, so, he told me he would help me start a business. Any business I wanted. So, I told him I was going to start a restaurant, a, er, steakhouse. Uh, we have a friend of the family who is a professional chef. You guys know, uh, Coastside Farms? Watson Steak Company? Wicked Ambition, the band? Yeah, Jack Watson is a personal friend of the family. My dad’s office is full of his signed guitars; we grew up going to his concerts for free, backstage passes and all that. You know, it’s no secret, Jack Watson struggled with addiction too. So, he got it. He understood my addiction. So you know, he kinda kept an eye on me, like a sponsor, uh, I guess, but we were business partners too; so—”

I’ve lost track. I must sound like a deranged lunatic. My ear suddenly itches, I scratch it wildly—

“So—me and Jack Watson, business partners, starting a restaurant. That’s all that matters. So, yeah, for the first time in my life, I was doing real work. Like, I was making spreadsheets and I was researching properties and, you know, hiring the kids who were gonna wash our dishes. We ended up buying a building on the Sunset Strip, and I got this sort-of girlfriend who was going to be the restaurant’s social media and hype manager. It was actually kind of cool; it was gonna be like a high end Hard Rock Café, you know, like Hard Rock Café but classy and with ninety dollar plates—and I invented this— this concept of personalized experience dinners where you could, like, pay to dine out with rockstars and stuff, you know, the ultimate superfan dining experiences—acoustic shows—and… and, uh….it was all—you know it was all pretty kick-ass—and I don’t know—I guess—right before the restaurant opened—I got too excited and I fell into some old habits.”

The fire cackles. Crickets sing. Counselor McAdams leans in—he smells where this story is going. 

“It only took one bump—I was at a meeting with some potential investors and they brought some coke out— and I thought I could take it— but then, one bump was one bender, and then— I, uh, I guess I became the demon—as I’ve put it. I—ended up selling our kitchen equipment to make way for a second bender and—I—well—when my dad confronted me about it I—uh—tried to stab him? Just a little bit?” 

It leaves my mouth in the form of a question, but there’s no doubt that it’s what I did. 

“I was out of my mind. You know. Coke rage. The world is a beautiful place when you’re on cocaine, but when you’re coming down, you get— angry— that you’re coming down. I was mad at my father. And he was rightfully mad at me. We were at his house. My parents’ house and— he told me he was going to send me—well—to this thing; to a men’s only survivalist camp in the Georgia wilderness, and I—uh—went after him with a letter opener. I never, uh, actually put a knife into him. I should clarify. I just kinda, I—stabbed and slashed at him. I worked him into a corner. My step-mom came home from Pilates, you know, thank God, right at the right time, and she threw a lamp at me— it was a whole thing—anyways—my dad wasn’t about to let the papers know what happened so, I spent a few nights in a private facility— and now, I’m, uh, here, uh, here with all you lovely guys.”

McAdams soaks in my story; he sits there like a big wheel of Vermont cheddar cheese, just stinking with psychology 101 fun facts. He is at the ready with a question, it pops out of him. “Would you say that your relationship with drugs is intertwined with a relationship with violence?”

I dodge the question, I can see the other campers are salivating. 

“—I should clarify, everybody here signed an NDA, right? If just one of these stories leak to the press my dad will sue everyone here into the stone age.”

“No one’s gonna leak your stories, Tanner. We might have come here as individuals, as broken, lonely people, but when we emerge thirty days from now, we will emerge as a team. By the end of our journey, the five of us won’t have any secrets.”

“Yes, I get all that about the journey, but they did sign the NDAs, yeah?”

“Yes. Yes they did. Your father’s secretary made sure.” 

—

Counselor McCheesewheel asks me some questions about drugs. And how drugs make me feel. And how drugs make me act. This isn’t my first rodeo. This is, in fact, my ten thousandth rodeo. The questions all blend together and eventually we get into the territory of repetition. Then the spotlight moves away from me. 

You do enough of this rehab stuff and other people’s speeches start to feel familiar. They might have new faces, new voices, but stories like the ones told by Anesh and Oswald and McAdams are basically reruns for me. 

Anesh doesn’t have a brain; like I suspected. He fell off the old skateboard one too many times. His head is void of any thoughts and so it was easy to fill it up with every substance known to man. He grew up with immigrant parents. They had no idea what was going on and no idea how to discipline him. He talks about missing his grandmother’s funeral and a week he spent in the looney bin. It’s all quite sad; but it’s all quite boring too.

Oswald is a cryer. He bawls into his hands and talks about Jesus and occasionally stares up at the stars, with snot trailing down his chin and will say something like, God forgive me for what I have done. The guy stole eight hundred dollars from his brother-in-law to get some illegal downers. It’s honestly not that bad. 

Counselor McCheesewheel takes a turn himself. He’s had twenty years of NA to perfect his monologue. It’s all so theatrical. He soliloquizes like Patrick Stewart delivering Macbeth. If you strip away the pulp, it’s not a particularly interesting tale. He was once a fucklehead crank on the streets of Albuquerque. High on methamphetamine and drunk off his ass, he found himself behind the wheel of a large (stolen) automobile and flattened a jaywalking rich girl at a crosswalk: an heiress to a magazine company of all people. He served his time. Got a degree in psychology while he was still in his orange jumpsuit. And here he is now: making millions of dollars to go camping. He can say all he wants to say about shame, but I’ll bet you, deep down, running over that girl was the best thing that ever happened to his net worth. 

Finally, the circle reaches its last participant, Desmond. He sits furthest from the fire, dreadlocks and pink pants cast in shadows. He scowls like he was hoping the counselor would conveniently forget him. 

Cheesewheel says his name, “Desmond, you’re up.” 

“I got nothing to say.”

“I’m afraid it doesn’t work that way, Buckaroo. Everybody here said their piece. What’s yours?”

He bites his lower lip, “I don’t have a story.”

The counselor chuckles, “Everybody’s got a story.”

He shrugs, “Not me.”

There’s a lengthy silence. Our eyes move back and forth from Cheesewheel to Desmond as they enter into a stand-off of wills.

“I can’t make you talk, Desmond.”

“Good—then don’t.”

“Is that really the attitude you want to bring to the circle? To the team? You want to be this team’s dead weight?”

“—”

“Okay,” Cheesewheel concedes. “Nobody can make you speak your truth. This isn’t torture. What I will tell you is this: you’re not the first guy on this trail who thought he was too good for it. This trail will break you, Desmond. It’s a long way to West Virginia. If the woods don’t break you, then maybe it will be the mountains or the rain or the bugs. Or maybe you’re just not ready to feel it yet, and that’s okay too, but you better prepare yourself. The more you fight it, the more you are gonna feel it. Feelings are powerful creatures. They’ll sneak up, bite you right in the face.”

“Man, fuck you.” 

Cheesewheel laughs out the nose. He’s heard this before too. 

—

It astounds me, but the night just keeps getting darker, and the crickets just keep getting louder. We sit around for an entire hour, doing jack shit. Mending our backpacks. Drinking water. Brushing our teeth. Cheesewheel encourages us to speak amongst ourselves, but no one wants to. No one but Oswald, anyway, he only wants to cry on his counselor’s shoulder. 

Eventually, it’s bedtime, or seeing as there aren’t beds, maybe it’s bagtime. 

Five campers retire to their tents. Thank God we get our own tents, right? If I had to spend my nights huffing one of these freaks sleep-farts, I would choke myself to death with my own hands. 

Yeah, the solitude of this nylon bag will no doubt become the sad highlight of this trip. 

We’ve got forty-five minutes until lights out. We’re encouraged to journal in this time. Or read. There’s only so much room in my backpack though. Most of it is reserved for dehydrated food and life straws and spare socks, but, praise Jesus, I saved some room for a calico-patterned notebook and a fresh copy of Addicted to Addiction by Dr. Dabney Endicott. Cheesewheel himself was kind enough to gift it to me. I poked through it in the van to the drop-off point. Lots of steps. Lots of Venn diagrams and pretty metaphors. 

I try to read, but this book feels like it was written by an over-eager tenth grader who has still kept their DARE promise. Plus it’s too quiet. I can hear Oswald crying—and if I’m not mistaken—I think I hear Anesh jacking off.

This rehab sucks. What I wouldn’t give for some headphones. Or a memory foam pillow. Or a manic pixie rehab bunny. Or an Xbox. Or a hot meal. Or just some air conditioning. Hell, at this point I’d pay something like 10,000 dollars for just a white noise machine and a stack of cardboard boxes to put under this tent. 

I try to sleep. Best I can. And if I can’t sleep I’ll just shut my eyes and be thankful I’m not walking.  

—

I guess you don’t know how luxurious a toilet is until you don’t have one.

Even guys in prison have a toilet. It’s a foot from their damn bed. 

I wake up in the middle of the night and I need to piss, but, getting up to piss is a whole process. So, I hold it. I nearly piss my sleeping bag. I wake up again and I need to piss so bad it physically hurts. But still, I don’t want to go through with the whole getting up process. Eventually it’s three A.M. and I feel like piss might come out of my ears.

So, I wake up. I unpack myself from my bag and get on my shirt, boots and grab my flashlight.

It’s dark outside. The moon is small and meaningless, obscured by branches. Fuck you, moon.

Maybe if you grow up with this shit you get used to it, but I think the darkest place I’ve ever been is a movie theater. I shine my flashlight out from our clearing and into the branches of an ocean of trees. Suddenly my head is flooding with every movie jump-scare I’ve seen in the last ten years. My peripheral vision is filled with little Linda Blairs with white eyes and green scab faces. I keep expecting something to pop out and shriek at me.

I go to the woods and carefully shine my light through a maze of twigs, scanning for ghouls, goblins, ghosts, whatever else. 

When I decide the coast is clear, I let it all out and piss on a branch.

“Hey,”

A voice is calm and casual, but I’m so on edge I almost swing around and piss on whoever is behind me. 

“You scared the fuck out of me—Jesus—Fuck you, dude.”

It’s Desmond. At least I think it is. All I see are two white spots for eyes hidden in what appear to be his dreads. I put my cock away.

“What, you need something?” I ask him, I shine my light at his feet. 

He hesitates and bites his lower lip. God, I hope this isn’t a sex thing. There’s twenty-nine more days of this nature hike with this kid. I will have zero desire to get sober if I come home with sexual trauma. 

“Rich kid—Rich kid,” Desmond mocks me. “I’ve been trying to catch a word with you.” 

I see a smile crack. Oh, it’s not a sex thing. It’s a meal ticket thing. I readjust my flashlight and can clearly see dollar bills rolling where his pupils used to be. I should have seen this coming. I’m not a stranger to punks trying to chisel a few bucks out of me. I wonder, what will it be this time, blackmail? A threat of violence? 

“So, this is an ambush.” I puff my chest. “What do you want from me?”

He shows me his palms. “I come in peace.”

“Yeah. Sneaking up on me in the middle of the night. Real peaceful. You got something to sell me, go ahead, sell it.”

He doesn’t miss a beat. “You’re a cokehead, yeah? Tell me this, rich kid, what would you do for a gram right now?”

I don’t miss a beat either. “I’d shoot a golden retriever puppy in the skull. I’d—take a piss on my grandma’s face, what do you want me to say? I’d do anything. Fuck you, what, did you smuggle in a crack rock? Think I’m gonna trade you all my freeze-dried scrambled eggs for an ounce of drywall?”

He shrugs and purses his lips. “Hey, if you’re not interested—”

“Sorry—” I hold a hand near my temple. “It’s been a long day. What do you got?”

“Nothing on me,” he checks over his shoulder for the campsite, then returns at a lower volume. “Just a rumor.”

“Yeah, about what?”

He flashes his light out into the woods. 

“It’s a long trail,” Desmond waxes poetic. “Runs more than 2000 miles. All the way to Maine. Lots of empty spaces. One could, theoretically, run a whole criminal enterprise somewhere out here. Probably never get caught.” 

“Whatever it is you’ve got to say, you should say it.”

“You ever heard of the Old Mint River?” Desmond cuts to the chase. 

“Can’t say that I have.”

“At the start of the nineties, when the Coast Guard got a real hard-on for drugs coming into the ports and just about every dealer, importer, and drug lord was going to prison, there was an effort by some young entrepreneurs to take the cocaine business domestic,” he rubs his mustache stubble. “There’s a farm out here. A coca leaf farm out in the middle nowhere. Runs premium shit out of Minton’s Pass to PCB, B-More and New York on roads where nobody thinks to look. Some folks call it the Old Mint River.”

I find the story dubious. “They grow coca leaves? Here? Appalachia? What, in an underground cave?”

“No. A little farm, like I said, in the open sunshine. Hey, if there’s a dollar to be made, somebody is gonna make it— maybe it’s not something you understand—but your dad certainly does.”

Alarm bells are going off in the sections of my brain that still function properly. Everything about this sounds like bullshit. In all likelihood, this is a scheme to get me kidnapped or murdered or arrested. The best-case scenario is that Cheesewheel put him up to this as a means to test my commitment to sobriety, but even this is farfetched. I should tell this kid to fuck off, but—other, larger sections of my brain are still ruled by the Incan god of Cocoiana and his warlord spirit sometimes makes decisions for me.

—So, I bite. “Alright, you’ve got your history lesson, what’s your pitch?”

“Seventeen days from now. Tennessee. Two of us take a detour. I got a map. I got some extra supplies. We’ll meet up with some friends of mine on Minton’s Pass. They can hook you up with uncut, farm-to-nose, purest cocaine this side of the equator. Made In America.”

I guess they call it fiending because it really does feel like there’s a fiend inside of me. There’s a gnarly little gremlin, he’s in my stomach and my heart. I feel him swinging between my ribs like they’re monkey bars. I guess I’m just a fool for advertising, but I imagine clean coke; real snow-blizzard, bleach-white, whole-milk shit, and at just the thought of it, I get a chub, and I cry a little, and I start to salivate. I even sniffle, on pure instinct. I have to take a hard breath. 

“Interesting,” I play it cool. “Very interesting. I’m sure there would be an astronomically high price for something like that?”

“This isn’t about money—not immediately anyways,” he laughs. “Maybe it is about money in the long run—but not where you’re concerned.” 

I swallow. I sniffle. My hands shake.

He continues, “Friends of mine are looking to make some friends in high places. You went to business school, yeah, Rich Kid? So, you know how it is; it’s all about who you know.” 

It takes me about five seconds to do the math. Desmond isn’t actually in rehab. He’s here for me. He’s here for my name. He’s a goddamned sleeper agent. 

“Is this about my dad?” I put the last pieces together. “My dad doesn’t play dirty, dude. Maybe if you sold guns or, uh, ran a gay-to-straight conversion camp, he’d go for a sit down, but if your people think they’re gonna buy me off with coke and then have your confederate cartel get buddy-buddy with my dad, you’re—you’re bananas in pajamas, man. He’d squeal so fast to the DEA they’d probably carpet bomb the whole Appalachian trail.”

“It’s not like that—”

“So, what is it like? Enlighten me.”

“These friends of friends of mine have some legitimate investments in the tobacco industry. The way we see it: long term strategy, your dad is, let’s just say he’s old school cool. One of those bring back the old ways kind of guys—”

I stare. Void of thought. 

“Maybe he’d agree with us when we say that the culture war on cigarettes has gone too far. We think it’d be nice to see smoking allowed again in airports and college campuses. Maybe even get smoking back in the movies. It’s a free country, right?” 

Now I’m the one chuckling.

He continues. “Don’t think too hard about the big picture. Here’s the headline for you: on day seventeen of this program, you come with me for a detour. We meet some friends on the Old Mint River, and they get you your first snort of a lifetime supply of the best coke in the U.S. In exchange; we get an audience with California’s next republican Senator.”

“So—what then? You’re gonna blackmail my dad into passing legislation that reduces smoking bans in public places? And that’s only if he wins, which, let’s be clear, is still a million to one longshot. That’s the—uh, big picture I don’t need to think too hard about? That’s a hell of a plan, Desmond. Who came up with it, Rube Goldberg?”

“It doesn’t have to be blackmail. And he doesn’t have to win—all that’s to say: story’s got the same ending no matter what,” he holds out his hand to make a deal. “You get coke, big tobacco makes a new friend. A mean friend.”

I take a long pause and I try to think hard about this, but it’s funny, sometimes I try to think hard, and my brain is like an engine that just won’t start. Without coke, I’m dry. I’m empty. My thoughts sputter and smoke and do not move. I have no cognitive momentum. I try to think about the deal, the implications, but, really, I just stand there, looking at some guy’s palm. I really don’t think much at all.

“Day seventeen, you said?”

He nods.

“Let me—” I can’t believe the words coming out of my mouth. “Let me try to get sober for a few days. I’ll let you know if I flunk out.”

His hand retreats. We head back to our tents. 

—

One day turns to two days. Which then turns to three days. Three turns to five. Five days turn into ten. We put in the miles. O’er woods and mountains we go. Georgia turns to North Carolina as we approache the Tennessee panhandle. Of course, it’s all the same in the woods: rocks and canopies and mosquitos. Dirt. Dirt. Dirt. My feet turn into purple yams. The inside of my calves turn into salmon fish scales. 

No one makes much small talk. No one wants to. We eat canned goods. We climb mountains of yellow bush. We run blisters into our heels when someone sees a snake. This is what the Vietnam War felt like, I often think, lugging backpacks through a forest that wants to kill us, only instead of firefights with the Vietcong we have nightly NA meetings, which are worse, honestly. Most nights I wish a little Vietnamese soldier would put a bullet in my head. It would be easier than listening to the Cheesewheel drag on about self-help books. And listening to Oscar welp and cry to Jesus or Anesh umming and erring his way through fifteen minutes of K2-diminished show-and-tell.

Through all of this, Desmond never opens up. Not once. And why should he? He’s a fraud. He’s not even a real addict. Every night the Cheesewheel asks him his story and Desmond tells him to fuck right off and Cheesewheel gives him fifteen minutes of NA prophecy. 

I wish I had gone with his strategy. I have to deliver slam poetry every night.  

—

Ten days turns to eleven. Somehow. The further we go, the longer these days seem to get. 

Shitting in the woods, I find, is not pleasant— and walking in on Counselor Cheesewheel shitting in the woods is doubly unpleasant. This happens on the evening of the eleventh day. I turn a corner and there’s his hairy college-professor ass. He turns back with grit teeth. He says. "Uh, oh, occupado!” as I watch a yellow turd fall out of his ass. Disgusting. I am too rich to witness such an atrocity.

The trail is hot and sticky, and my body becomes a minefield of different rashes and blisters and bug bites. Supplies run low and one day we fish for our dinner out of a river. Another night we eat wild huckleberries. These activities are supposed to encourage a sense of wellness, but nothing, and I mean nothing, has ever made me jones harder for cocaine than foraging for food. 

—

The twelfth night. Cheesewheel McAdams tells us that we hike the Appalachian trail because it’s the second hardest trail in the United States, and the first hardest trail, he tells us, is the twelve steps to sobriety. Cue your eye rolls. Sobriety is a lonely trek through hostile woods, he says. It’s a journey over mountains of self-doubt and through the riptides of rivers of temptation. It’s an expression of perseverance. We became addicts because we were weak, we become sober because we are strong.

He’s like a fucking human fortune cookie.

It all gets old. So much of NA is just poetry. It’s this song and dance of similes and metaphors that try to make the emptiness, and the hunger, feel brave. Feel meaningful. But it isn’t brave. It isn’t meaningful. It’s just hunger. It’s a dull pang for drugs. You can throw as much color as you want at it, the brew is always black.

I get up to talk at the nightly NA meeting and it is expected of me to scramble together my shame and my worst impulses into some kind of dragon to slay— or epic quest to be undertaken. But it’s not really like that. Addiction isn’t a real enemy and sobriety isn’t a real destination. I am going nowhere. We are all going nowhere. We have no monsters to kill. It’s all empty, like the darkness itself. 

Cheesewheel speaks; he says life is cast in darkness. He tells us that to live is to walk in a shadow of night. He tells us that there are candles we carry through life. For some of us the candle is family, for others it is religion. For others it may be a career or a hobby. Some of us have many candles. Some of us have but one— But, to survive, he says, to make something out of this life, we must find a light that guides us— And all I can think as he spins this endless metaphor is how bright a candle can be made with drugs. Cocaine specifically. If family and exercise and waking up at six A.M are candles, then cocaine is surely one of those flashlights that can set fire to a piece of paper. It’s Agent Orange. It’s TNT. 

I miss coke.

I say this in my session, that twelfth night, and I say this to myself when I hike the endless trail. I miss coke the way a starving-to-death babe misses its mother’s tit. I miss coke the way an angry ghost misses the body taken from it. Try my best, there are no poems for it. There are no metaphors that capture the feeling. The nightly poetry falls through my hands and when I go to bed, I dream about snorting lines and the way it made my snot drip taste like a lawnmower. 

—

We hike when the sun rises. Most mornings Cheesewheel will play taps on an MP3 speaker and us addicts will shuffle out of our tents and slog our blisters into the twiggy branches and the first purple light of day.

Sometimes, slogging my backpack on another back trail, I’ll catch a plane running overhead and I’ll imagine jumping so high that I land on the wing —and I ride the plane to wherever the fuck it’s going, and I go to the worst neighborhood in that city and hound the streets for crack.

Desmond’s offer is never far from my mind, our prospective detour on the seventeenth night; Old Mint River and the promise of cocaine fit for Zeus. I think I’ll do it some days. Other days I don’t. I never show Desmond my cards though. I never let him know.

I don’t want to get sober. Not really. But I don’t want to do cocaine anymore either. I don’t have the right metaphor to describe the feeling, but, I want to try on sobriety. I want to sample it. I want to see if it fits. A part of me thinks of coming home on day thirty, and maybe it will feel nice to be clean for a little while; to plunge into the darkness, with open, pawing hands searching for new candles.  

—

It rains on the seventeenth day. A summer monsoon as we climb a trail called Devil’s Whip into Tennessee. Water falls like bullets; they bounce off the hood of my rubber slicker. We hike straight upward into the storm clouds themselves— mountain climbing through mud.

Oscar is the first to fall. He plops down and the shit cakes into his fingers and knees. I think we all have a laugh, but by the end of the second hour we’ve all fallen down. We’re all caked in mud; it’s on our faces, it’s in our asscracks and between our toes. We climb higher and higher, until the plants die away and we’re on our hands and knees pulling through rock and thin air.

I don’t know what time it is when it finally stops, but, eventually, the last bullet falls. We come across a clearing of boulders and without prompt we all sit down to catch our breath. 

Usually, after a particularly hard section of trail, Cheesewheel will give us some bullshit lauding about our efforts, but, I think even he’s had too much shit beaten out of him. We all find our spots far away from one another and bask in the simple pleasure of a sky that’s not dunking rain.

I must fall asleep for a few minutes, but when I wake up there’s someone standing over me. 

It’s Desmond.

He’s absolutely wrecked from the trail. His rain poncho hardly fits him. His once pristine dreadlocks hang over his face like seaweed. Holes have worn into his pants. His shoes are wrecked. He’s got rings under his eyes, black and purple and ash. He looks like a corpse that’s just washed up on the shore from an angry river. I’m sure I do too. 

“Tonight’s the night,” He grovels, voice broken, voice weak. “It’s decision time, Rich Kid.” 

Desmond has been bothering me a lot the last few days. He’s been sneaking up next to me during a piss or when we were both at the back of the pack. He’ll ask where my head is at. I usually just tell him I haven't made a decision yet. But I suppose time has run out on that answer. 

After what we just went through, I almost feel like I should try to stay sober out of pure martyrdom. Besides, with all this sweating, I’m cleaned out. That fiend, that coke goblin in my guts, he’s begun to starve to death. I can feel him, laid out on my intestines as if they were a gurney. That demon in me, he breathes heavy and ragged. Maybe I—I don’t know—Maybe I’ll be alright without coke. Maybe I’ll start going to the gym or get really into organic foods.  

I tell Desmond as much. “I don’t think it’s gonna happen, man.”

He’s careful to make sure Cheesewheel isn’t in earshot. “No?”

“No.”

“Can I ask why?”

“‘Cause… fuck…Maybe I’m gonna get clean.”

Desmond is not so good at hiding his disappointment. “Yeah? Yeah, that’s great for you. Happy for you, man.”

“Let me ask you something, Desmond, ‘cause I’ve been curious about this. Did they put you in here just for me? Your friends? Are they paying you to go through this rehab trail?”

He doesn’t answer. 

“How much did they pay you? You get a commission? ‘Cause this shit sucks, but at least I came here for something. I can’t imagine doing this for—for pretend.”

“Look, man; you want to talk about what’s real and what’s pretend? The people I work for, they’re some real mother fuckers. They got hands in everything; Hollywood Hills, Capital Hill. It’s not just cigarettes and coke. You don’t want to come with me on the detour for a high, fine, come with me tonight for your future.”

“How do you mean?”

“Your future. Your legacy or whatever. You’ve said it yourself. You’re a fuck up. The whole country sees you as a fuck up. You’re the punch-line druggie son of America’s foremost Uncle Tom— Come with me tonight. Come meet my people. If it’s not coke you want, they’ll cut another deal.” 

My mouth falls open into a grin, but I don’t say anything. 

He asks. “What do you want, a career? You want a celebrity girlfriend? You want to make movies? We can—”

“I think I want to get sober, Desmond.”

“Aight,” he sighs, deeply. “I didn’t want it to come to this—but—”

After another careful glance to make sure the other campers are sleeping, or eating, or otherwise indisposed, Desmond reaches into a particular pocket. I know what he’s grabbing long before he grabs it.

Obscured from eavesdroppers, he flashes a little white bag at his chest. A dime of sugar. And the man wasn’t lying. Shit is white. If it really is coke and not baby laxative, this guy has some pure-as-pure-gets coke. The sick fiend in my guts falls out of his gurney. He tries to crawl out of my asshole so he can snort it himself.

“C’mon man, that’s not—that’s not cool.”

Desmond slides the baggie into the pocket of my rain poncho. I’m too tired to stop him, or maybe I don’t want him to stop. 

“You want to get sober. Pour it out.” 

—

It doesn’t rain any more. Still plenty of mud to trudge through, but no more rain. We crest the mountain and begin our descent from Devil’s Whip.

Coming down a mountain sounds so easy, but then you do it, and it just sucks in a different way from climbing up. It’s easier to fall; you have to bend your ankles in these funky positions. I wonder if there’s a metaphor here for building a life after rehab. 

The coke burns a hole in my pocket these last few miles. It’d be so easy, I think. Sneak off for a piss, take a snort. It’s no different than any dinner party. The fiend does jumping jacks around my guts. He howls like a kindergartener for a Happy Meal. He says we can make the bag last a week, in little doses. He claims we could even make it last the rest of the trek if we use it sparingly, but I think both of us know that wouldn’t happen. 

—

Darkness comes, as it always does. 

The storm delayed us; Cheesewheel wanted to get us to a recreational spot at the bottom of the mountain where there are showers and even a food store, but we simply don’t have the time or energy. 

We build camp tonight in the heart of some heavy woods; hardly even a clearing. Our tents are constructed between the jail-bars of tree trunks. We construct our fire in the least tree-y spot we can find, and here we set up our sitting blankets, our mini chairs.  

Some of us dry our clothes on the fire. Others simply hold out their clammy hands. Others eagerly eat cold beans or granola. The fire snaps. It’s quiet. The smoke is choked with wet brush and rises in foul-smelling, white-steam. We stink too, I’m sure, Oscar in particular. Old guy must have shit his pants.  

I don’t think anyone feels up for a session, but Counselor Cheesewheel McAdams calls for it anyway. Ragged and soaked, with his hair like a rat’s nest, he stands before us with this hideous church pastor flavor of side smile. I can see it in his horn-rimmed glasses; he’s cooking up some fresh metaphors for us.

“Devil’s Whip trail, huh? If ever there was a more appropriate name. Now: If the beginning is the hardest part,” he says, he raises a finger, “—And the ending is the hardest part, then surely, the middle is the hardest part too. That’s one of my favorite quotes from Doctor Dabney Endicott from his work: Sobriety for the Western Soul. Gentlemen, tonight we raise our water canteens to what was surely the hardest part of our journey. One of many hardest parts, am I right?”

The junkies grovel in affirmation. Oscar and Anesh raise their canteens. Desmond and I do not. 

“We might have climbed a mountain, but today’s trek was our journey through the Valley of Death. Now, I know everybody here is tired. Everybody here is beat up. I’m sure every one of you could say there was a point on today’s hike when you said to yourself, I can’t do this. I want to give up. But look around you. You made it. We all made it. Nine miles in the pouring rain, straight upward over the hostile trails of Mount Eustace. Yes, gentlemen, your feet are blistered, your legs are weary, I’m sure your very souls are soaking wet, but, hey, you made it. You—made—it! Say it to yourself, say it with me. I made it. I made it.  And if you made it here, if you made it over this mountain and through this day, surely you can make it when you get back home.”

He's really earning that paycheck. 

“We should rest. We have another long day ahead of us tomorrow—but first—I think we should go around the circle. Tanner, how about you lead us off?”

“Me?” I take a sip of water and shrug, this many days in, I’ve learned I can’t just say that I’ve got nothing to say. He’ll just badger me; no, it all moves faster if I just bullshit out a sad story or a rhyme about recovery. 

So I speak, not from the heart, no, but, with my tongue. “Well, as of this morning, I’ve been sober from narcotics for twenty days. Which is a lot. It’s a lot more than I thought I could do and— Yeah, today, sucked and—”

Jesus, what is there to even talk about? I’ve given these people everything at this point from how I lost my virginity to my week in jail to painstakingly vivid details of my father’s worst megalomaniacal meltdowns. I consult the circle, four faces disfigured by the trail are glowing in red, yellow and black shadow. Desmond gives me daggers.

“Today I really wanted to break. I’m used to three star restaurants and after hours clubs—the occasional helicopter ride—so hiking through the sticks, on Devil’s Whip, with shit on my knees and ice water in my socks—it made me feel like I was in the depths of hell itself. And—Counselor, you talk like we’re supposed to feel proud. But I don’t feel proud. I feel angry. I feel angry and, now, more than ever, more than ever before in my whole life, I want to get high.”

Cheesewheel leans back and clasps his nose with either of his pointer fingers. “Go on.”

“That’s it. That’s all there is to it. If there was an escape pod. If I could push a button and make this all go away. I would push it. And drugs are a damn good escape pod.”

“So you want to get high. I understand that. A part of you will always want to get high, Tanner. That’s your disease. Me? I’ve been sober twenty years—”

—Any excuse to remind us—

“—I want to get high too,” he says. “Right now. I do. I always will. So—let’s rephrase our terms here, Tanner. You want to get high, so what? Here’s the real question, buckaroo, do you still want to get sober? Because, this trip will be over in thirteen little days, then a few weeks in outpatient, and then, the only thing keeping you from diving headfirst back into addiction is Y-O-U. So, think about this before you answer, maybe you want to get high right now, but, long term, do you want to get sober?”

“I do.”

“So, let’s pretend, uh, by some magic circumstance, a dimebag falls from the sky and lands right in your lap—” 

—Oh, sweet idiot, if only he knew—

“—Would you do it?”

I answer immediately, “No.”

“Do you mean that, or are you just saying that because it’s the right answer?”

“No. I mean it. I mean. I think I mean it. I don’t know. I—don’t know— I’ve been a fuck-up all my adult life—and I’ve been on drugs all my adult life. And all my adult life has felt pointless and trivial and hopeless. I do coke because it makes the world make sense. So—maybe it’s a tough place to get to—and a lot to ask of myself—but I’d like to wake up one morning to a life that makes sense. And if that’s a life without coke, okay. I’m here to try it.”

I’ve got this weird pinch in my neck; I don’t know if it’s a mosquito or if it’s the painful fact that I might have just meant what I said.

A whimpering erupts from the spot beside me. It’s Oscar, he’s already crying. It’s every night with this fucking guy.

“Oscar,” Cheesewheel points to him. “Want to share with the group what’s on your mind?”

He can’t even string a sentence together, he’s already drooling. He has to pause and suck wind just to manage a single word, “Today, when—we were—at—the bottom of The Eustace Green —It was—after lunch—I looked up—and I saw him—I saw God—Up at the top of the mountain—At first I thought—maybe it was another hiker—like a guy with—long hair and a beard—but no it was him—it was Jesus Christ of Nazareth—he appeared to me—in a vision.”

Anesh rubs circles in Oscar’s back like he does every night.

“Well, that’s sure inspiring,” Cheesewheel chimes. “Although, if you’re seeing visions it might be a sign of exhaustion—”

“No! This wasn’t a hallucination it was—divine intervention—”

He collapses into his hands and it sounds like, I don’t even know what he sounds like, like a Chipmunks album played backwards on low speed. I can’t stand it. Fuck it, I think, I’m gonna do my coke.

“Hey, McAdams, I’m gonna go for a piss.”

“Okay, but don’t be long—and don’t—don’t wander too far from the firelight. There’s poison ivy out here, it’s everywhere.”

I sulk away, into a maze of branches and thorns. The voices fade.

Anesh first: Wait, on Eustace trail, yeah I saw that guy too, but that was just some guy with a beard. He had on Wayfarers and, like, a dog? I’m sorry bro, but I don’t think that was Jesus.

Then Cheesewheel: Let’s not take away Oscar’s vision. Oscar, what did it mean to you when you saw Jesus on the mountain? 

I walk until the firelight is a red star beyond the trees and I can’t hear any more of their moronic blubbering. I put the coke baggie in my hand and I shine my dollar store flashlight upon it. It sparkles. It twinkles. Like gold, like the cosmos, like—like a bag of powdered feel good.

This bag is empty, really. It’s emptier than an empty bag. It’s a blackhole wrapped in plastic. Escape. Sense. Light. 

I think about the drip; the acid hole at the back of the sinus, where bliss trickles in with the flavor of burnt bleach and diesel. 

I rub the plastic. I feel like there’s a tractor beam guiding the residue for my gums, but I fight it. I could snort this whole bag in one go. I really could. I might die. Maybe that wouldn’t even be so bad. At least I’d be off the Appalachian trail. The fiend is doing somersaults in my guts. He’s furiously clawing at my liver the way a cat tears away at an old couch. DO IT he shrieks. Rail it. Shred it. Swallow the bag. Get yegged and let the consequences be damned.

I open the bag and smell. Highway stink. My finger rubs the rim. Just one bite, I think. Just one pinky in for the booger sugar—but—

It pains me to do this. It physically pains me to act like the bubbly-bath,squeaky-clean, good-boy, boy scout— but I turn the bag sideways. 

The coke tumbles out in chunks and wafts of cloudy dust. Like snowfall, some of it is taken on a light breeze, the rest spreads into the fresh mud before my boots. White turns to gray turns to brown.  

The fiend crawls up from my guts, he uses my ribcage as a ladder and squeezes up my throat. He swims through my brain until he’s right up in my ear.

He whispers, “You could always come back later. It’s just a little dirt. You can still snort it. Walk away, sure, but you can come back. Tonight, while the fools sleep, we can come back and we can snort it straight from the dirt.”

I spite him. My fiend. I take my boot and I smoosh the coke, deeper and wetter until it’s an un-snortable coke mud.

—

I come back from the darkness. The fire is warm and I feel like a dope. Oscar is done crying and I’ve come in at the tail end of Anesh’s turn. 

“—But, like, maybe that’s why we put the work in,” he mutters. “Like—we—struggle because we know what’s right. It’s like you talked about, Mr. McAdams. Inside of us there are two wolves and—it’slikeum, we just gotta feed the good wolf until, like, the good wolf is like, powerful enough—and like—amped up—so that he can, like, kill the evil wolf—like with his claws and shit.” 

“That’s very good Anesh,” Cheesewheel folds his hands together. “Very graphic, but good,—Alright, before we call it a night, I thought it would be nice to go over the game plan for tomorrow. You might have heard me mention that we are a tad off course, so, I know you don’t want to hear this, but tomorrow we’re gonna have to make up for some lost time—”

I stop listening to Cheesewheel when I notice Desmond stabbing me with his eyes. They reflect back the fire. He’s trying to assess if I sampled his USA coke. He stares so intensely I can hear the question. 

No, I tell him, just by shaking my head. No. I poured the coke out. Every gram. Every spec. I’m going clean. My apologies to the cigarette manufacturers of America.

Cheesewheel drones on, “By Wednesday, mid-morning, this should take us up to Minton’s Pass. A particularly lovely trail, some call it the Old Mint River Trail, and for you history buffs, it actually has some stops we can take relevant to Civil War weapons smugglers, oooh, exciting, I know—now— ”

A twig breaks.

This is something you never want to hear in the middle of nowhere. It happens beyond our camp, the sound not originating from any of us in the party. It stops Counselor McAdams in the middle of his paragraph. Every head crooks to the same black patch of woods from where it originated. 

The Counselor chuckles. “Must be an owl or something—spooky—Tomorrow night we’ll probably end up camping just South of—”

He turns his head back towards the fire and—that’s when it happens. A figure barrels out from the woods. It’s not human. My first instinct is that it’s an avalanche. Mount Eustace collapsing in an earthquake. Formless black: it erupts from the trees and consumes Counselor Cheesewheel like a tidal wave. He squeals as it tackles him to the ground near the campfire. 

Reality seems to— disassemble. There are too many moving parts to assess it all at once. Desmond falls backwards and collapses into the top of a tent. Oscar goes in to help the counselor, but scatters the campfire as he does so. Anesh simply rolls into the fetal position— and me, what do I do? I don’t know what I do. I sit, perfectly frozen, my heart buzzing in my neck and my legs nailed to the ground.

I watch as this figure, this boulder, this stray storm cloud of perfect dark, eats my rehab camp counselor. In the now flickering light of a scattered fire, this monster reduces the Cheesewheel to shredded reams of cheddar. A hand is chomped clean off, right at the wrist. A wad of hair and section of scalp are pulled off as neatly as the skin from a fried chicken drumstick. As the counselor fights to escape, his clothes are ripped. In a matter of seconds he is without a shirt or jacket, and instead of clothes, the avalanche rock is ripping off sheets of skin, about the size of a standard US letter, and sliding them down a wet gullet.

A bear? No? Too sleek. Too thin. It’s a cat? A panther? A bobcat? No. It’s too god damn big! 

It doesn’t make sense to me. It’s a…I see stripes. Bloody whiskers. A tail like a swinging firehose. Stripes of gold and black and white belly. 

It’s a fucking tiger. Like— the thing from the cereal box. A tiger. A tiger out in the middle of Appalachia; a nightmare hybrid of an alleycat and a great white shark. And big. I could have never guessed how big a tiger could get, but, god damn, this thing’s the size of a Winnebago. 

I’m still frozen; I watch in disbelief as Oscar tries to fist fight this damn thing like he’s Siegfried and/or Roy. The tiger munches away at the counselor while Oscar, who, mind you, is a retired construction worker and has the biceps to prove it, just wails at the tiger’s skull. The jungle cat is never even phased. Eventually, Oscar tries going for the tiger’s eyes; this is when the tiger has had enough. 

Muscles move under the tiger’s fur like metal gears, and with mouth still full of McAdams skin, it stands up on its hind legs, yeowls, and bitch slaps Oscar. Oscar’s head spins clean backwards with a roman numeral three struck into his cheek. Several teeth fall out of his open maw before his body hits the ground with a hard, dead thud. 

It’s enough to get my legs moving. “Oh, Fuck!”

I try to stand but my legs are freshly boiled spaghetti noodles. All I can do is crawl backwards from the scene and stare helplessly as the tiger tosses around McAdam’s limp corpse like it were nothing more than one of those inflatable dancing guys outside car dealerships. 

A hand touches my shoulder, it’s Desmond, he has only just freed himself from the nylon tent. 

“We gotta run,” he tells me. “Get up, Get up!”

He pulls me onto my feet. I turn towards the woods, but then turn back. I see Anesh. Curled up in the fetal position by the dying fire. Desmond tries to pull me into the woods, but, I stay planted.

“Anesh, we can’t leave Anesh!” 

It occurs to me that this may be the first time in my life I’ve ever been brave or selfless. I move into this warzone and slug myself to Anesh. He has his face buried in his knobby knees. He trembles. 

I shake him. “Anesh, Anesh! We gotta run!”

Suddenly there’s heat. And it’s not the fire; it’s the wet heat of a mouth. It’s the tiger. He’s coming in for a big, wet kiss. I turn my head to face yellow teeth; the size of fucking Doritos. They are caked with brown cavities and fresh blood. Little chunks of Counselor Cheesewheel hang between them like white corn niblets. A pink nose drips, a hammy tongue stretches out. 

I guard my own face as I fall backwards. The tiger wasn’t coming for me though, he was coming for Anesh. He tears into his torso like a stoned college kid into a pan of cinnamon buns. It’s astonishing how fast it happens, how easy it is for the Tiger. The claws, the mouth, they dig so effortlessly past Anesh’s t-shirt and into belly-flesh. 

All the while, Anesh holds the fetal position, like they probably taught him to do in the event of a bear attack. Elbows at his ears. Eyes shut tight. Hands over his head. Anesthetized by adrenaline; he doesn’t even know he’s being gutted. 

Claws rip the skin so effortlessly as Anesh is disemboweled through a hole at his side and beneath his rib cage. Gooey organs in colors of fuchsia and purple and blue pour out like easter eggs on a nest of glistening intestines and sputtering, ambiguous inside fluids that remind me of beef stock. The tiger paws through it as if looking for the extra tasty bits.

It snarls and it snarfs. A sound like a giant pulling snot from its nostrils. A deafening, firecracker purr. 

Desmond grabs me again, pulling me by my biceps into the woods. “Run or die you fucking idiot!”

—

Movies make it seem so easy to run in the woods, but the actual woods are not so pleasant to run in. Especially at night, and especially with a weak-ass flashlight. Every three feet is a wall of trees, or a sudden drop in elevation. Desmond and I don’t so much flee the camp as we have a losing boxing match against thorns and branches and roots and bushes and spiderwebs. 

We get fucked up by the woods. We get scratches and we tear up our rain ponchos. At least once I grab what is most definitely poison ivy.

But we don’t stop. After seeing three grown men reduced to bargain bin chew toys, it’s hard to stop. 

It feels like we run for forty straight minutes, but, let’s be honest here, my internal clock is not exactly functioning at its highest efficiency. We come to a freshwater stream. Cold, mountain water. We splash through to the other side where Desmond tumbles into the rocky shoreline and I tumble down beside him.

Save for the churning water, it’s quiet. At least, I think it’s quiet; I can hardly hear a thing over my own interstate-highway blood rush. 

I shine the light all around, ever vigilant for a furry tyrannosaurus rex. 

Desmond knocks my light down. “Quit that dude, you’re gonna bring him straight to us.” 

I lower the light. Shapes move in the dark and the smudges play tricks on me. I try to settle my heart, but it’s still pounding. 

I finally ask the obvious. “What the fuck is a tiger doing out here?”

“Shit, that was Bumpy,” Desmond says, and I can’t help but think that’s an odd thing to say.  

We catch our breath, I count my lucky stars in the sky. 

“That was Bumpy,” Desmond says again.  

It’s such an odd word, it pisses me off and I just can’t let it go. “Bumpy, what do you mean? The trail, the road—is that like slang for shitshow? What’s Bumpy?”

“No—” he gasps for air—“That was Bumpy the Tiger. That’s his name.”

“Bumpy the Tiger?” I blink and then blink again. “Oh, okay, I’m sorry. You know the name of the tiger that attacked us? What you two are—familiar? You’re acquainted?”

“Yeah,” he says, to my surprise. “Bumpy—he was kind of a—he’s kind of like a pet once upon a time.” 

“I’m sorry?”

“The growers, the farmers—they live out here full time on the coca farms. Some overseas investors, they gifted us a tiger, you know, for security— for prestige.”

“Like Scarface.”

“Yeah, just like Scarface. And it was just an innocent thing at first. He was just like a dog, a dog that kept getting bigger and bigger. Then, somewhere along the way—the—the guys started giving him coke. A bump here and there—for shits and giggles. He was crazy for the stuff, it was—it was like catnip. They started calling him Bumpy. Bumpy the Tiger. Then a few years back he broke out of his cage.” 

My jaw falls open. I start asking several questions, but never get past the first syllable. 

All I can manage is a recap of the facts. “Bumpy the Tiger, is a, what, a coke farm security tiger that your Appalachian Mountain cartel has gotten addicted to cocaine? And, what, he—he— stalks the Old Mint River for an easy fix?”

Desmond’s eyes are wild. “Did you open the dimebag? You know, tigers, they got noses like sharks. He probably sniffed out the sample I gave you. Lead him straight to us.”

“Why, in God’s name, Desmond, would you not warn someone about a cocaine addicted tiger before giving them a bag of fucking cocaine?”

“Lower your voice! I thought it’d be safe, because, man, Bumpy’s supposed to be dead!” Desmond pauses and swallows air. “They told me Bumpy was dead. They told me they shot him last spring. He was coming around the trails, he was eating up the crops and chasing some of our smugglers. So, they put a bullet in him—at least that’s what they told me—Fuck!”

I’m still not sure what to do with this information. I guess, at the end of the day, the revelation that this tiger is not some anonymous monster, but rather one with an interesting biography, really doesn’t change the immediate gameplan.  

“Alright—fuck this— we need to get out of here,” I stand, Desmond does not. “We need to get out of the fucking woods. Do you have a phone? A map? Anything?”

“I left everything, all I’ve got is the clothes on my back. Why, you?”

“Just the flashlight—alright let’s be smart. McAdams said that we were near a basecamp with a store. A campsite with people and food. That was—north—he was taking us, which way did we run?” 

“Fuck if I know, man.”

“Well, think about it, we were—” I try moving my hands around like those of a compass, but, it occurs to me that I don’t know the first thing about cardinal directions. “If the sun set in the—east—where is the sun going to rise? Because that’s west, right?”

“The sun sets in the west.” 

“Okay. Alright. Yeah. Okay—do you remember where the sun set?” I would have no clue what to do with this information, even if he did remember. “Alright never mind— your people, the Old Mint River. You said they have a farm. A trail. Well, where’s that?”

It’s dark, but, I vaguely see it as Desmond rubs his hand on his temple. “Man, I told you: I don’t know. I’d need a map. And I left the map behind.”

I take command. “We’ll just keep moving then. We’ll keep going this way; eventually the sun will rise and we’ll come across—something—campers or a highway or a cave or a building or a goddamn—something!—We can’t just lie here and wait for that thing to come back.” 

“Calm down,” Desmond says. “I’m getting up.”

—

We continue on past the stream. There’s a clearing and a trail beyond that. It’s not labeled or anything, but a trail is better than fighting branches. 

We follow what little light the moon gives us, conserving our flashlight battery. The woods are dull and the path is winding. 

My head hurts. My rashes hurt. My stomach hurts. I get that funny kind of headache when your brain needs sleep but knows it won’t get any—and of course there’s this tension, I carry it in my neck, that any second that ten ton mammal-dragon could come galloping up behind me and pop my head like a watermelon.

“So—” I say. 

“So?” Desmond ducks under a branch that’s grown over the trail. 

“Yeah, so—So, what’s your story, Desmond?”

“How do you mean?”

“Well, two and a half weeks in and you never so much as told a lie. So, who are you—really?”

Desmond takes a pause before he responds. “I’m nobody.” 

“Alright. Fine. Then where are you from?”

He turns back to me for this answer, one I could have guessed. “Nowhere.” 

“What are you, a pod person? The cartel grow you out of the soil?” 

“As far as you’re concerned,” he says. “Sure, why not?” 

“You can’t tell me anything?”

“It’s best we save our breath.”

—

We walk all through the night. There’s this odd moment where time slips away from me. I’m slogging down this narrow trail of ankle-deep mud, and it’s dark, it’s the darkest it’s been all trip. Then, my head bobbles and three hours are just gone. Suddenly I’m on a wide, rocky trail. A grayish sunrise is creeping in through the forest floor. I don’t know if it’s sleep or brain damage, but I’m happy to be out of the night. 

I point in the direction of the sunrise. “So that’s west.”

“East. The sun rises in the east. Remember what I said?”

“Okay—well—does that help us any? Do you know where we are?”

We stop, and holy shit, every muscle in my legs shriek when we do.

Desmond scans the brush. It’s the same brush from Georgia. It’s all been the same. Tree trunks and shadows and the choir song of cicadas. Desmond lifts a finger and he quietly points down trail from us; to the right and beyond a steep curve, there is a mountain wall with two jagged tops.

“I think so,” He says. 

“You think so?”

“Yeah, I think so.” 

Without further explanation, Desmond resumes walking and without a better choice, I follow.

—

“I see something.”

The words hit me like an alarm clock. I’d been sleepwalking again. The world comes back to me. I’m on another trail, one of intensely green grass and black-trunk trees that have moss growing on them like sores and scabs. 

Desmond forces me to stop, he puts a hand out. “There, do you see it?”

My vision is blurry. I see: green and gray. Everything is camouflage. 

Desmond keeps pointing, he whispers. “Just beyond the tree line, off the trail, there’s orange—it’s a tent!”

He jolts, erupting into an all-out sprint; I struggle to keep up.

Whatever Desmond saw finally comes into focus after a good hundred meter dash. Just off the trail is a nylon tent, a nice one, sewn with materials of flashy blue, orange and silver.

The closer we get, the messier it all seems. There’s trash scattered around the campsite— as I roll around the clearing, I see an abandoned backpack. It leads my vision to the tip of a pony-tail and then a pale hand.

“Hello!” I scream for all of heaven and earth to hear.

Desmond shushes me, holding a hand at my face. “—Look!”

Turning the clearing, I see the rest of it. This isn’t a campsite, not anymore anyways; it’s leftovers from someone’s midnight snack.

Bumpy was here. It might as well be written in blood on the side of the ripped open tent.

Two campers are sprawled out. Butchered. The bodies here are of a woman and a man. A veritable Garden of Eden; the two rest neatly beside one another, mirrored in the same face-up, hands out position. They wear high-end camping clothes. The woman wears only one of her expensive mountain boots; the man is halfway out of his puffy jacket vest. These details are trivial; however, as the much greater spectacle is these people’s faces—or the lack thereof.

Either of these former human beings have been left without an identity. Their heads have been caved in, like kicked in pumpkins. There is yet a hairline and the point of a chin, but everything between is one bright-red mouth, a maze of gore and teeth and bone. On the man I spy a single eyeball, it hangs beside the ear. On the woman I spy a pierced nose resting curiously undisturbed a few feet from her gashed up hand. 

“Fuck.” It’s the only thing I can say. 

Desmond shushes me again. 

While I stand, frozen in total shock at the sign of these obliterated corpses, Desmond gets straight to work. He hops into the tent and produces a canteen of water and some wrapped granola bars. He puts these things into my hands.

“Eat, drink,” he whispers softly, quieter than the cicadas. “Be merry.”

He chugs water from another canteen as he rummages through the decedents’ last effects. 

“What a way to go,” I say at a new, low volume, only to myself. 

Desmond picks through bags and then rifles through piles of dead leaves. “You see a cell phone? A walkie-talkie, anything like that?”

I haven’t seen anything. I haven’t really been looking. I can’t stop staring at the faceless Adam and Eve. On the woman, beyond the place where eyes should be, is an area of cracked skull. A corner of brain pokes out. It’s not pink like you would expect; more orange and white. I’ve never seen a brain before: the human computer, the mind meat. It’s humbling, really. It makes me feel small. It makes me want to throw up. It’s a physically disgusting existential crisis. 

“Rich Kid,” Desmond snips. “Do you see anything useful?”

“No—” I say, the answer leaving me like a soft, involuntary belch.

I blink. “There’s some stuff in the backpack, over there.”

Desmond rushes over to the camping bag beside the woman. Closer than I would care to get to her. He flips the backpack over to find it’s been eviscerated too, ripped neatly down the middle. Pouring out from this tear is not clothing or camping supplies, but bricks wrapped in yellow plastic. One of the bricks has been torn open, it spills white powder. 

Desmond licks his pinky and dips it in, then he rubs his gums and swishes it around.

“Yeah, that’s our stuff.”

Now, I’m not here to brag, I knew some properly terrifying dealers back in my day—but—let’s be real here; the most coke I ever saw at one time could still fit in a fast food cup. This dead smuggler’s backpack is filled to its breaking point with bricks, plural, of uncut, bleach-white cocaine. Pounds of the shit. Gallons. 

The world falls away. Desmond, the corpses, the woods. Even the sky and the earth. It all fades to black. I’m left in a void with this glowing backpack of snow. I bite my lower lip so hard that it almost bleeds. A light gust of wind comes and sparkles just the tiniest taste into my nostrils. I drool.

I am struck with memories of childhood, when a gameshow would advertise that tantalizing life-time supply of some candy or soda, and, what a religiously awesome concept that was; here I am, a grown man, with that same awestruck wonder of a life-time supply. There’s enough coke in this backpack for me to drown in it. To carry me to eternity. I shudder. I go weak in the knees. 

Desmond feels around the belt-line of the female corpse. Before I can ask him what he’s doing, he unsheathes a hunting knife from her belt. He digs the knife into the coke brick like a cereal spoon and brings it straight to his nose. He snorts. A deep, satisfying vacuum suck. In an instant, his pupils expand to the size of quarters. 

He huffs and offers the knife up to me. “It’s not safe to travel with any of this stuff on us. If you want a taste you’d better do it now.”

“I—” I have to close my eyes. “I shouldn’t.” 

“You’re probably still in withdrawal. Medically speaking, your best chance for survival is to take a little bump.”

What I don’t say to Desmond is that it simply wouldn’t be possible to take a little bump. Not with a millennium’s worth of coke lying right there for the taking. No, I know the devil inside me. I know the creature that lives within the prison of my flesh. One bump and I’d be trapped here. One little bump and I would just curl up inside that backpack like a babe returning to the womb, and I would just snort and snort until my blood was the color of strawberry ice cream.

I refuse. Drooling, white-eyed, sniffing out of psychosomatic nostalgia; I refuse with a tiny nod side to side. Desmond carefully washes the knife with canteen water and places it into his own pocket.

“Alright, let’s check these bodies for a phone and then let’s get the fuck out of here. Why don’t you search Antonio for me?”

“Antonio?” I ask.

Desmond is already on top of the faceless woman, like he’s riding cowgirl. He’s rummaging through the dead woman’s pockets.

“That’s Antonio. Him. I’ve met these two before I think.” Desmond explains. “Antonio and Katie. They run the product to the trucks.”

“Oh.”

“They were a couple. Just got married too.”

“Oh, oh that’s sad.”

“Sure—Now, check Antonio for a phone.”

It takes some willpower, but I put my body to work and crawl over the body of the man with a collapsed head. Somehow, him having a name makes it all worse. I try not to look at—Antonio— as I work through his still-warm pockets, but, of course, I take a peak. How can I not? This close up, there’re so many more horrid details. A tongue is glistening with spit. A blood-painted ear hosts a gold cross. He still has his bottom teeth, the top are in a mangled nest of head innards that look like a smashed pomegranate, Nearby the remnants of an eyebrow are still frozen in terror on a patch of skin the size of a debit card. 

I check the pocket of his vest and—something squishes out Antonio’s face. It’s like a fountain spurt of black and yellow bile. It comes out of what was once a mouth. There, beyond former gums and former lips is a toothy meat cave, where the throat begins—it squirts and felches. 

Is it gas escaping the corpse?

“Desmond?” I say.

Antonio’s head moves. A left arm adjusts. Antonio isn’t a corpse at all. 

“Desmond!”

He’s panicked. “What? Is it Bumpy?”

I take a few steps back. “No, it’s your friend. I think he’s alive. Oh! Shit! Yep. Oh, he’s alive. Oh fuck!”

Desmond takes the place beside me, and it’s obvious he wants me to be mistaken, but Antonio just keeps squirming. Who knows how aware this guy is, peeled down to two of his five senses and in shock, but there he is: alive, mind in total darkness. He writhes. The shoes scrape in the dirt. He bleeds. He hurts. He suffers a suffering I couldn’t even begin to comprehend. 

Antonio tries to speak. This sounds about as pleasant as you can imagine. What’s left of a jaw and a tongue meekly whip about as a black hole pussy makes red and yellow bubbles.
 “We need to get him to a doctor.” I say. “We-we-we-we-we need an airlift.”

“No,” Desmond says.

He wraps his fingers tight around his new knife. “We need to put him out of his misery.”

“You can’t be serious.”

“Well, did you find a phone? Can you get us an airlift?” Desmond looks at me with a distinctly yegged intensity.

I recognize that manic confidence; he’s already made up his mind. 

“Imagine that was you,” Desmond asks, “Would you want to keep on living like that?”

“Yes! Yes I would. I would always like to be alive if the alternative is death—”

“After your face has been eaten off? You’d want to keep on living?”

“Sure! Helen Keller did fine. There’s plastic surgery and, I don’t know, they’ve got computers that let you see and stuff! And— I don’t know!? Face transplants? I mean, you watch enough daytime TV you see plenty of people get their faces eaten off and they go on to—to be inspirational speakers—and write books! And—and live full lives! And—This dude is your coworker. I mean, you know this guy. How can you—how can you—we need to get him to a doctor!”

“We don’t have a doctor. He’s blind. He’s dumb. He’s probably deaf. For all we know he’s concussed. If you want to get him medical attention, we’re gonna have to carry him, and we don’t know where the fuck we are. We’d be walking around at half a mile an hour with a guy with tiger-bait for a face. I don’t know where you got your fucked up idea of becoming an inspirational speaker, but if that were me lying there, mutilated beside the love of my life, I’d beg whoever found me to cut my throat.”

My own throat clicks. “So, what, are you gonna do it?”

He licks his upper lip. “Well, you’re not gonna do it.”

“No—”

A twig snaps. Somewhere else. This is not an extraordinary noise, but, when you’re as paranoid as I am right now, you hear a sound like that and you spin your head whatever direction it needs to go.

I spin my head, back to the green trail, and there is what I at first think is a vehicle. A great, striped bus barreling at 90 miles an hour. My eyes adjust and, of course, this is Bumpy; bulky gorilla tabby cat. He moves with a near impossible speed, sleek with ears retreated and claws out. Agile and delicate movements, almost unreal, like one of those Chinatown dragons with a dozen agile dancers under it.  

Now, by daylight, I can see his battle damage. This is an old, battle ravaged tiger. Bumpy’s been shot a few times in the head. There’re perfect circle holes in his ears and wounds around his snout. They form old green scabs, like those on the trees; no fur grows there. One eye is dilated to a black pearl with the thrill of the hunt. The other eye is faded to a pale blue marble. 

I fumble for escape right over the bodies of Antonio and Katie. Desmond fumbles with me as we retreat into the woods.  

“Get down,” he tells me.

“What?”

Desmond grabs me by the collar of my shirt and he yanks me down. We take cover behind a fallen oak tree not thirty feet from the crime scene.

“Don’t—move—”

Desmond mouths these words to me. My heart palpitates; every beat is as loud as a fucking car accident. 

I listen as this two-ton cocaine beast descends upon the campsite. I am relieved to hear the sound of sniffing, and claws pulling at junk. Bumpy didn’t see us. Not yet anyways.

“What’s he doing?” Desmond asks.

I poke one eye above the log. Bumpy has his teeth around Antonio’s ears and neck. He shakes him about; lazily finishing him off. 

“He’s putting your friend out of his misery.”

When Bumpy is done playing with his leftovers, he rummages through the coke bag. It would make a cute internet video if it wasn’t for all the blood and corpses; this big fuzzy goober poking around with bricks of snow. It seems Bumpy doesn’t grasp the concept of snorting; instead, he rips into the bags with his claws and munches on piles of coke like it’s sugar. 

Desmond asks, “What about now?” 

“He’s—getting his fix.”

I swear—Bumpy almost hears me. His head rises with ears perked, gums are powdered white, nose is dripping a gray-color juice. The one good eye is wild; the pupil expands to encompass the entire eye. 

When I check back, seconds later, he’s resumed his buffet. He munches coke by the pint, only pausing to breathe. 

“Alright, look man. I think I know where we are now,” Desmond begins—

“You think?”

“Yeah, I think.” 

He bites his lower lip and stares upward, it’s like he’s trying to read the inside of his own brain. “If that’s Katie and Antonio, that means we’re on the old Mint River Trail—and if that’s Minton’s peak up there, that probably means the site behind us was their stop on their first night. If I remember the map right, that just means it’s about nine miles west of the coca farm compound.”

“The compound? Fuck your compound, Desmond, I want real people. Not a drug lord’s summer camp—”

“It’s a forty mile hike back to civilization—And that civilization is nothing but a trailer park. You might not like it, but, right now, our best bet is to go west to the Old Mint River compound. The farm has guns. Cabins. Food. First aid kits. Beds—”

“Alright already, alright, shut up already, you’ve sold me. How do we get there?”

His eyes roll back once more; he’s trying hard to remember. He unfurls his hand and tries to figure west from east.

He subtly points, a left turn from the trail we were just on. “There ought to be a trail through that opening. It will go up Minton’s peak. We’ll go up, go around the mountain and come down the other side and then, after a few miles more, we’ll find the compound.”

My sixth sense tells me to check on Bumpy again.

The big guy is still ears deep in the coke bag. Maybe he’ll OD, I think. Farley himself. But no. He pulls out and chews with his maw towards the canopy. He’s so pumped he’s practically glowing radioactive orange. His paws tremble. His lips purse and kiss the open air as he sucks off the last residue from his lips and whiskers.

Suddenly, he does that thing cats do: I had an old girlfriend call it the zoomies. This cocaine tiger just starts tearing shit up. He pounces at invisible targets, he turns an oak tree into a scratching post. Then he roars, and it’s a movie sound. It’s an eardrum shattering bellow, the kind of sound a dinosaur makes. The trees and all the branches shutter at the king of the woods. 

I remember that feeling. I’ve had more than a couple nights where I felt just like Bumpy. 

The big guy lays down on his back, right between his last victims.

“I think he’s blissed out—we should move—while he’s distracted.”

—

Desmond and I hike. It’s not an easy trail, but the weather is forgiving. We hike straight upward, one unforgiving hill after another. Fields of dull gray rocks, like poorly sculpted cemeteries. 

I don’t try talking to him. It would be a waste of energy.

Eight miles doesn’t sound like much. What is that? A fifteen minute drive? A half of one single second at cruising altitude on a jumbo jet? But the miles move slower on blistered feet and a brain that hasn’t slept. 

We don’t rest. It seems unwise to rest when Bumpy could wake up any moment and smell us down to the exact inch.

So we walk. Like we did every day before. And we never stop walking. We walk up hills, valleys, over streams and then the start of a mountain and around a mountain’s face, through so much mud and so many wood stripe tunnels. The same dirt. The same insects. The same cramps and rashes and blisters and bruises.

—

The day runs away. It’s almost evening now. The sun is in the earliest stages of shifting from white to dusk’s orange. My brain feels like an egg that’s somehow been pickled, fried and hard-boiled. 

After a rise in incline, we come across a vista. It’s magnificent really. Five boulders extend to make a diving board above the canopy. It’s like a fucking greeting card; an ocean of neon acres, Appalachia goes on forever like some magic kingdom, on until the trees become a hazy green slime that fades into the farthest reaches of baby-blue daylight.

Endless nature. Not a human being or a building as far as the eye can see. 

We do stop here. At long last. It’s like some kind of caveman instinct. I climb to the end of the farthest reaching cliff and I sit. I let my beat-to-shit legs dangle in open air. 

Desmond stands, only a few feet behind; he hands off the water canteen.

“Last sip,” he says. “It’s yours.”

I don’t hesitate to drink it down. “What, am I starting to grow on you?”

“No, you need it. You’re older. You’re less experienced.”

“Older—I’m in my thirties—” I wipe my chin. “—So, how far away are we?”

“Home stretch,” he says with a hint of faith.

“That could mean anything. A Mile. Five. What?”

“It means home stretch. I’m talking thirty minutes tops.”

I take a hard breath, the air is thin. “So, it’s almost over?”

“—Not out of the woods yet.”

I don’t know if that was a joke or not. I don’t laugh either way. 

—

It’s easier to move now. Hope works like that or maybe it’s the lack of oxygen. My head is empty, my lungs whine, every inhale snaps and crackles like fresh cereal in milk. We come to a fork and take the right-hand path. It takes us down the mountain. The bobbing of momentum gives me a headache, but I remind myself not to complain. Soon there will be a bed and a roof. If I’m lucky, a private toilet. I imagine a white hippie chick with hairy armpits. You know, the kind of girl who would live on a weed farm (maybe there’s a coke variety of this kind of girl). Maybe she’s got blue hair. Maybe she falls in love with me and nurses me back to health and she’s got great tits and I sleep on them. 

It's gonna be hard to stay sober on a cocaine farm, I think. But I push the thought away. I’ll conquer that beast when I’m safe from the other one. 

—

We slog. The headache gets unbearable, sharp and dull at the same time; the headache drips down until it’s in my toes and fingertips.  

“Talk to me,” I say to Desmond. 

“About what?”

“I don’t know. Just—say something. I’m starting to feel like I might faint.”

Desmond points at a spot in the skyline, a particularly tall tree upon a hill, two football fields away.

“See that tree? On the skyline. The compound is just on the other side of that.”

It’s getting hard to breathe, I have to pause between my words. I think it’s the heat and the thin air. “Cool— Cool. Still. Tell me a story or something. Tell me—Tell me something.”

“What?”

“I don’t know, man. Recount your favorite episode of The Simpsons. Tell me a dirty joke. Fuck, just, recite the ABC’s. Something.”

He says nothing. He walks. I inch behind in his shadow, rapidly deteriorating at the finish-line. I need conversation to stay awake.  

“What’s your name?” I ask.

“You forgot?”

“No. I just figured your identity is fake. Your addiction is fake. Why wouldn’t your name be fake too? You don’t even look like a Desmond.”

“—And what is a Desmond supposed to look like?”

“I dunno—not you.”

He lets the conversation die again, but I can’t let him off the hook. “Okay. So what is it? Mike? Malcolm? No, you don’t strike me as an ‘M’ guy. Charlie? Are you a, uh, a Frankie?”

“You’re just gonna guess?”

“You could always tell me.”

He turns back, first time I’ve ever seen this mystery fucker genuinely smile, “I don’t have a name.”

And it’s the funniest thing, the funniest thing since a tiger ate Cheesewheel McAdams, but I believe him. 

I do my best to chuckle. “Fuck you.” 

Something in the woods snaps. I’ve come to learn what this means. Desmond, or, the man with no name, turns back. His expression of utter terror spells it out perfectly. Bumpy is behind us; I turn and I see it too. 

There’s no stealth about his assault. He doesn’t need stealth. We’re too weak to warrant stealth. 

Bumpy is not quite running, but falling down the mountain, again, like an avalanche. An avalanche of black and orange stripes. It almost seems like he’s grown, he’s somehow the size of a wide-load eighteen wheeler with a front grille full of steak knives. Bits of coke puff from Bumpy’s face like steam from a locomotive. 

One white eye shines, the other, once green, is now blackened with a cocaine-blissed pupil. 

Desmond erupts into a sprint. He’s younger, faster, better trained. He pumps his arms and I struggle to keep up.

Stitches form in my stomach. The nerves die off in my toes. My heart gets wonky. I might just collapse into death before Bumpy even reaches me.

Desmond pumps harder, he pulls out ahead, he’s going to disappear soon. I’ll be alone. I’ll be one hundred and sixty pounds of jungle-grade meow mix. 

Difficult as it is to form strategy through the fatigue and fear, a thought occurs to me. I remember— I’ve been taught precisely what to do in this situation. 

I heard it in business school, back before the coke made me flunk out. Wasn’t even a few years ago. The university invited my dad to give a speech for orientation, and he spoke, literally, directly about what to do when you’re running from a monster in the woods. 

I’d heard the same advice from high-school principals, coaches, college admissions counselors. It’s the very adage of the American way; capitalism at its heart: if you find yourself running from a bear in the woods, it’s not about running faster than the bear, it’s about running faster than the guy next to you.

Sure the idiom usually refers to a bear, but the advice works for a coked up tiger in a pinch.

Without so much as a dimebag of remorse or hesitation, I use the last of my life force to sprint. I destroy the cartilage in my knees, I blow out my lungs, I use gravity to my advantage and I fall forward on the path until I pull up to Desmond’s side. I take this momentum and put it into my fist. 

Desmond turns to look at me, he probably thinks I’m about to share some bright idea with him, but no, I spin my upper body into one wicked punch that lands squarely on his nose. 

It catches him off guard. He hobbles to a stop and when he’s stopped completely, I do my best to make sure he stays that way. I knee him in the balls. Hard. Like they taught me to do to a prospective molester when I was just a boy in karate.

It all happens too fast, Desmond can’t quite understand it. All he really knows is that something hit his face, his eyes close, and in that darkness his testicles suddenly explode. All he manages is a ‘What the fuck?’ 

For good measure, I push him to the ground. Desmond folds into a pile of dreads and sweat and pink pants, totally blind and completely emasculated. Bumpy is right upon us now. I turn and I run. I leave behind my sacrifice. 

I know I’m safe when I hear Desmond’s scream. He screams like a child after the drop of a roller coaster; this high pitch vibrato song. It shakes side to side as his body is shaken side to side, then, suddenly, the sound is muffled. 

I check over my shoulder once, briefly pausing to catch my breath. It’s hard to see it all happen through the branches, but it looks like Bumpy is giving Desmond mouth-to-mouth resuscitation. When Bumpy comes up from his first breath, Desmond no longer has a face. Nothing. No nose or mouth or eyes. He’s been made faceless, same as he was nameless. From the distance, it appears as nothing but a T-bone steak framed by stray dreadlocks. Desmond, or whatever his name might be, is still alive though—I can tell as he blindly stabs at fat and fur with his knife. It sinks into Bumpy, again and again and again, around the cheeks and neck—but the blade never even so much as phases him.  

I stop watching. I run and I run and I don’t look back.

—

I follow the trail to the point Desmond had instructed. Finally, around a corner, I come face to face with an iron fence, the kind that typically surrounds impound lots or construction sites. It is eight feet tall and chain-link, chrome coils of razor wire across the top. 

A white sign reads PRIVATE PROPERTY; TRESPASSERS WILL BE SHOT.

“HELLO?” I scream.

On the other side of the fence is a narrow perimeter of trees and brush, but beyond them I can make the shapes of wood huts and cottages; a little secret village. I’ll be damned. There really is a secret coke farm out here. 

I shake the fence and it loudly rattles. “HELLO!”

Nothing. 

I follow along the perimeter, hoping to find a gate or an entrance; even just a spot without razor wire coils.

I don’t make it very long before I hear it. Raw power. A thunderstorm on four clawed feet. Bumpy is already finished with Desmond. He isn’t about to let me go quietly. He’s prowling in the trees. Over twigs and snaking between the trunks. He’s on my scent. He can smell what little cocaine there is left in my sweat. He wants me. He wants to take away my face.

My legs are so weak that I have to use my hands to pull myself along the fence.

It might give my position away, but I scream anyway. I wrap my hands into the wire fence and violently shake, “HELLO! PLEASE! SOMEONE!”

I can smell Bumpy, pennies and spoiled hot dogs on his tongue. Cocaine on his breath. That kitty litter ammonia stink. A glance backwards finds him fighting through the last line of the branches. 

It’s at this point I have to stop and choose my fate. I can try to climb a tree, which will only prolong the inevitable, or I can collapse into the fetal position and have my spinal cord ripped out through my asshole. Or I can run, but, I don’t have another teammate to sacrifice. 

There is a fourth option, I realize. I glance upward, from my withered hands where the wire fence tops out at a bushel of impenetrable steel razor wire—how impenetrable is it, though? 

I’m not sure which of these options is the best. Maybe I’m just fucked and all that’s really left of my own free will is a decision for how I get fucked, but, eager not to end up like Antonio or Desmond or Counselor Cheesewheel, I jump onto the fence and climb upward, bravely into the reams of razor wire.

I hear Bumpy at the fence below me. I think he even sniffs my foot. He doesn’t roar, but he exhales, somehow exasperated. Even Bumpy is baffled with the choice I’ve made.

He jumps. I don’t see it, but I feel it. I feel the iron wiring move as the tiger stacks his massive weight into the chainlink. 

I pull harder, upward, brazenly tugging my own body into the death loops. The gap between two rings is wide enough that I can easily fit my head, but, then, to go further, I have to squeeze my shoulders. On nothing but raw adrenaline, I force my upper body into the coils. It’s like driving a loaf of bread into a slicer, only this loaf of bread is my mortal personhood. Three inch long and inch deep knives cut into my shoulders, then my stomach, then my pants. They easily cut through clothing, and I’m surprised to find the blades oddly warm from a day basking in the sun.

It all just sort of—happens. This—Hellraiser type shit. The adrenaline guarantees I can’t feel it. It’s just like being at the dentist. Loops of razors fold, and pop back into shape, slicing at my cheeks, running blades down my wrist. I almost fall and must instantly grab a loop for stability; I grab directly on a blade and it neatly slices my fingers and palm. 

I don’t let this stop me. I ignore the pain and pull until my body is safely contained; horizontally laid into this fence top death-tube. I look down my body. My clothes are shredded and in some, maybe most, of those shreds are deep, deep, gashes. Long bleeding lines, like mouths, like the faces of ham sandwiches, and they gush this blood that’s hot, and thin, and it’s incredible how much of this blood there is. 

I feel air against my cheek. Wet, hot. 

Once again, I’ve find myself face to face with Bumpy. He’s partially climbed the fence. His nose is at my nose. I can see the freckles in his one good eye. I can make the shimmering buckshot in his forehead. All that separates us is a loop of razor wire. He opens his death trap jaw. It stinks of hot roadkill. He tries to give me his patented French death kiss, but a razor wire gets in his way. It folds into his jowls and a section of blade cuts his tongue. The tiger pulls off from the fence with a frustrated snarl.

—

I’m sure the Cheesewheel would have had a metaphor for this. I’m sure he’d say Bumpy represents my yearning for coke, and the fence is— the fence is— sobriety, and the coils of razor-wire, why, those are the judgements of other people, or, maybe they are my own self-doubt. Or they’re my tortured past.  

Fuck the metaphor though; I feel wet and sticky. I look down and I’m completely soaked in blood and the stuff’s starting to harden like super glue. It comes from a whole party of lacerations and drips into the dirt below like rainfall described in the Book of Revelation. 

Blood pumps, steady, but not fast, out of my arms and my shoulders and my hands. I can’t say how much, but it’s more blood than I’d even guess I had. I mean, logically, if I saw that much blood I would assume whoever lost it was long dead, but here I am, thinking thoughts and being alive and bleeding, bleeding, bleeding. 

My body is tangled like headphones in a junk drawer. I can’t hardly feel it, there’s too much to feel. My back is arched awkwardly over the fence-top, there’s razor wire wrapped around my legs. One loop is collapsed below my back and its tension drives another loop into my crotch, into my belly, they cut deeper with every micrometer I move. The more I fight it, the more it holds me and cuts me. 

Bumpy doesn’t know quite what to do. He sits eagerly at the bottom of the fence near the blood pools where he wildly pants and drools and rocks back and forth like an excited kid waiting up for Santa to come down the chimney. He’s waiting on a wrong move. He’s waiting on me to fall. 

I guess I should feel victorious. I guess I got what I wanted. I’ve survived death by coke tiger, but, at what tremendous cost? Here I will die. Twenty one days sober, fatality by razor wire fence. 

I try to sit up, to straddle the fence top, but, the loop at my groin pops outward, it splits my shirt right down at the middle and takes a ribbon of flesh. 

“FUCK! SOMEBODY HELP!”

I almost fall again, and for the second time, I grab hold of a blade. It catches my fingers, putting a neat slice across every single one of them.

—

The sky turns pink. The clouds turn gray. The woods, black. 

It’s beyond me how or why I don’t pass out. But, as I continue to fight the bushel of razor wire it becomes clear to me that I should have let the tiger eat me. At least it might have been quick. 

I manage to get on the opposite side of the fence, my body halfway out the death tube, but it’s just about diced my legs, there’s this one cut, the death cut, down the chest, it looks like the first cut of a frog about to be dissected. I swear I can see ribs. 

I’ve had to pull out of my pants and jacket. They hang on the blades around me; shredded. I’ve lost my underwear and one shoe. I’ve only got on a t-shirt and it’s totally soaked from cuts along my abdomen.

Bumpy yet waits. He watches me like a luau roast pig on a spit. That smell must be driving him crazy. You have to wonder if he prefers blood to coke. 

I’m his television now. The one working eye follows my every movement. He slobbers at the sight of so much delicious man.

It’s funny. I used to have a girlfriend with cats. The face Bumpy is making now is the face her cats used to make when she got out the can opener. 

I find myself chuckling. Oh, fuck me, what a silly and ridiculous way to die. 

I keep fighting my way out of the razor wire loops. Gentle. Slow. Eventually I fuck up though, I uncurl my leg from a loop, and try to sit my weight down, but there’s a blade at my seat. It pops directly into the space between my legs, running right through the pants and carving a lengthy second anus into me. I involuntarily yip, I jump. I fall.

I tumble from the fence. My foot catches a loop of wire and it spins me. I plummet eight goddamned feet, which doesn’t sound like a lot, but, for me it’s so long it feels like an entire red eye flight in coach. I land on hard gravel and the impact breaks my left forearm— Just snaps it like a breadstick.

I cry. I can’t be blamed. I’ve never been much of a crier, but, if ever there was a reason to do so, it’s this.

Bumpy throws himself at me. I feel the wind shooting out from his mouth. But I’ve fallen on the other side from him, I realize. He bends the chain link and grabs it with his inch long claws.

He can’t get me. Not with a fence between us. I’m not his kill anymore. I’ve been killed by the damn fence. A broken arm under me and an almost naked body torn to shreds with a thousand weeping gashes; no Bumpy, I am not yours. 

I crawl backwards, into a thin perimeter of woods, dragging the exposed and lacerated flesh of my ass through rocky gravel, a newly dead arm flopping at the side like a small, dead animal tied to my shoulder. 

Bumpy watches me for a moment, licks his lips, and then he too saunters off into the woods. Off to find more blood or coke or faces to eat off. 

I hobble to a stand. I remove my shirt and do my best to tie it around my gushing right arm where the cuts are worst. The blood coagulates and dyes the shirt brown. I move. I walk the best I can; it leaves a wake of thin red lines and drops. 

—

I am completely naked, save for an arm sleeve and a single boot. The setting sun feels strange and radioactive against my open wounds. It quickly dries the wet blood. Turning it sticky and fading it to the color of shit. 

Patches of my body are dyed muddy black, others pale, others pink, swollen, others run with cherry-Kool Aid rivers.  

I wiggle my sock around in my one good boot and it’s floating in a stew of body fluids. 

I’m woozy. The blood was already thin, now it’s in short supply. There’s a haze over my thoughts. It feels like when the room starts to spin after too many tequila shots. That border state to a blackout. Only this is a blackout I won’t wake up from. 

I emerge out of the woods and onto the grounds of the Old Mint River Compound. 

The camp itself is not what I had expected. I had imagined something out of a spy movie. Rolling hills and armed guards in bulletproof vests. My dying hope was a doctor and an infirmary, but, for all of Desmond’s promises, this place here is meek; it is like a four acre summer camp. There are a few cabins about the perimeter, they are sloppily constructed of brick and lumber. A helicopter landing pad rests decidedly empty by an outdoor cafeteria. Center to it all is the coca farm. 

Grown in even rows, the plant appears like holly bushes or mistletoe in lines of clay pots; the leaves only a dustier shade of green. They wouldn’t be out of place on the lawn of a country club. Branches rustle with twigs of red coca berries. They wave softly in the wind. 

“HELLO!—ANYONE?”

I identify the shape of a person; lying there under the shade of a coca plant. It’s a corpse in blue jeans, with an AK-47 laying expended beside it. I peek beyond the branches. He’s faceless; like the others. A mask of teeth, eyeballs, hair and bone in all the wrong places. 

Bumpy’s already been here. He’s already massacred the whole farm. There’s a line of bodies, I follow their shapes as they mark a trail of expended magazines and blood splatter leading to a wide-open gate at the property’s end. 

A wide open gate. 

I got dissected for nothing. If I’d just run a little longer—just a few hundred feet, I’d have spared myself from dancing in the razor-wire hula-hoops. 

“Shit,” I cry, and I drool, and I almost fall down onto my knees, but I don’t.

I hobble, falling with every step, leaking, as I make my way to the largest building here. It’s a metal hanger on the other side of the helipad. 

I collapse through a metal gate into its dry heat. The floor here is dirt; its walls are rusty metal. It has no lights, only a fading brown amber that pours in from the windows above. 

It stinks. It reeks of gasoline.

This is the factory. 

At the far left is what looks like the waste from a landscaping company. Coca leaves are gathered in brown bags. Beside them is a shelf of red jerrycans, and beside them is a collection of blue drums where picked leaves are actively soaking. 

Further to the back, in the shadows, beyond a faceless corpse in scrubs and rubber gloves, is a great steel trough with sparkling white contents; a goddam bubble bath of white powder. 

I spill my blood as I walk to it. 

Beside a shelf of empty plastic bags, this trough is filled to its brim with finished product. Cocaina. Love of my life. The only thing that ever really, truly, made me happy. My only candle in the valley of shadows. My light in the darkness. 

I laugh. Tears and snot-fused blood drip off my nose, but, I laugh. 

With barely operating fingers, I gently touch the side of this trough. It’s the size of a—well, it’s the size of a coffin. A box fit for me.  

I do not hesitate. I ease my body into the trough with the intent to drown like a cockroach fallen into an open sack of sugar. I sink my naked and lacerated limbs below the surface, burying them the way a child buries themselves in sand at the beach.

Excess powder overflows from the sides, while fresh, stinging coke, coagulates in my thousand open wounds, including my new womanhood. It enters my blood at a thousand ports. I remove my t-shirt-made-tourniquet and bury my split arm into white sand. Coke holds the arteries, the bones, the soul. The dark magic works its way to my heart, and in mere seconds I feel it shine as bright as a dying star. 

It hits my heart. There’s more coke in me than blood now. You could plug my heart into the municipal co-op and I could power a city better than any nuclear power plant.

But, oh, the brain. It’s not in the brain yet. 

I roll over and put my nose in. I suck. I suck on a breath I hope to die in. Coke soaks into my pores, my cuts, it sticks to the sweat and bleaches me into a white-skinned vampire. My eyes explode into black. Sweet, stinking, fuel shoots directly into my mind and I am left with only a taste; of bleach; of gasoline; of infinity. 

There isn’t a drop of blood in my body that isn’t vibrating to boiling point. Tanner Jaffee is dead. He is in the darkness beyond the candlelight with Desmond and Antonio and Anesh and Oswald and McAdams and Katie. I am the fiend now; faceless demon of antiquity, more persistent than Bumpy and centuries older. When this body dies, he will simply move onto another junkie. I am but his temporary vessel; a nose through which to suck this wicked mana. For however brief this moment might be: I am the spirit of cocaine. It laughs with my borrowed mouth; a maniacal, uncut joy. A joy without spirit. A joy without will. A joy without pleasure, but certainly power. The sound of laughter echoes off the harsh surface of the metal factory equipment and bounces back at me. This is the song of that joy. A hymn. 

It is interrupted by a puff of hot breath. 

I glance up and find that I am once again face to face with Bumpy the tiger. No longer a fence between us. He’d come right in through the wide-open gate. One eye stares directly into mine. He hesitates before he opens his mouth—he reaches in. He licks me like a loyal dog welcoming his master home. 

I swear, on what’s left of my life; he smiles —and I smile back.