Devin Miller
Devin Miller is a sophomore at UNC. He enjoys taking writing classes, though he finds that studying leaves little time for writing. So far, he has had six stories accepted for publication in various magazines.
In the summer, Rick Taylor took up running at night. It was just too damn hot during the day, and the humidity made the air heavy and thick. There was one stretch of his jog—down Landmark road—where the afternoon thunderstorms collected at the bottom of a hill and filled the little valley with mosquitoes and gnats. He didn’t have to worry about them at ten or eleven at night.
After a long shift at Pizza Inn, Rick wanted nothing more than to fall onto his bed and sleep all night. But there were rewards to jogging. He was more creative at night—his best stories always came after a long day—and Rick was hungry for new ideas. He always looked up as he jogged to Eight-Mile Crest.
He had published two stories so far—nothing too breathtaking, but he swelled with pride when he thought about his name in the byline. He had sold “Thanksgiving Space Race” to Atomjack Science Fiction; the idea had come one night while driving home. A meteor streaked across the sky just as he was pulling into his neighborhood, and it seemed to crash in his mind and bring the story along with it. The second one, “Asteroid Zoo,” had just come out in the June issue of Allegory E-Zine. That story had fallen into his head the first time he decided to try running at night. In between, he had written stilted realistic fiction and a lot of hackneyed fantasy, but no science fiction. It was becoming clearer to him that his future as a writer was with sci-fi, and he figured that the more time he spent under the stars, the better.
But his well had been dry ever since “Asteroid Zoo.” His days were scheduled—up at ten, spend an hour reading or doing nothing, eat lunch, write until three, go to Pizza Inn and work until nine-thirty, jog and think about story ideas, shower, in bed by one. He wrote every day, but when he rose from his desk chair after composing, he always felt a twinge of disgust and disappointment, the feeling he got when he bit into a stale chip.
Rick ran nonstop to Eight-Mile Crest, walked for a few minutes, then ran home. The Crest was a hill off Deer Park Road, the main road in a subdivision of double-wide trailers. From the hill he could see all the trailers, the crape myrtle farm outside the subdivision, and the tobacco fields that sloped down toward the moving lights on the highway.
He had an old Walkman for listening to audio books, but at night he didn’t want anyone else’s words to obstruct his own. He flipped the switch to FM and tuned to 96Rock’s Late Nite Shuffle. The night the batteries died, he started to get desperate. None of his recent work pleased him, and the phrase “writer’s block” flashed in his head like an alarm. There were several routes to the Crest, and the sky was clear—he decided to take the long way.
He was almost there when the radio cut off and silence replaced Cream’s “Sunshine of Your Love” in mid-verse. He took his headphones off, admired the view, and thought of nothing remarkable.
Rick walked back the way he came. He was looking at Orion’s Belt when he heard the end of the song.
I’ve been waitin’ so long, to be where I’m goin’, in the sunshine of your looooove.
A light was on in one of the double-wides. It fell out onto the yard through the open front door and windows and lit up a yard cluttered with old lawn chairs, a rake, two full trash bags, and, just visible around the side of the trailer, a push mower. Through the door Rick could see people sitting in a small living room. Smoke collected on the ceiling. They were talking softly over the radio and laughing.
One of them turned and looked at Rick as he walked under an amber streetlight. He turned away again, and Rick reached Landmark road and ran home.
Every night for the next week, Rick cut off his Walkman when he ran past that trailer. They were always there, always talking and laughing and listening to 96Rock, volume low. Once, when he passed under the streetlight, he saw one of them jerk a thumb in his direction. They filled his thoughts during the minutes he paused at Eight-Mile Crest. What did they talk about? What were their stories?
There were five of them gathered on the porch the next night, and the pull of curiosity—as irresistible as gravity, Rick thought—made him raise his hand. They all waved back. He heard them muttering.
“Runnin’ Dude’s back.”
“Like clockwork.”
“Hey! Runnin’ Dude!” a man shouted. He stood up and beckoned with one hand. The other held a beer. “Come over here.”
Rick hesitated, but only for a moment. He jumped the ditch, walked between the chairs, avoided the trash, and came to the front porch. The man who shouted was in his early thirties. He held out his hand.
“Jerry Downs. Pleasure,” he said. He smelled like beer, but his eyes were alert and his speech was clear. Rick recognized him as the one who had jerked his thumb.
“Rick Taylor.” They shook.
“We’ve been wonderin’ about you, Runnin’ Dude,” one of the others said. He reached across the arm of his plastic deck chair and shook Rick’s hand as well. “I’m Joey Hampton. So you gotta tell us—why you runnin’ by here every night?”
Rick shrugged. “Just to stay in shape I guess.”
“Then you probably don’t want to stay and have a beer,” Joey said.
“I wouldn’t mind one.”
Jerry had walked into the grass and now came back with a lawn chair. It struck Rick that there was as much furniture in the yard as on the porch. Jerry set it down in front of the steps and passed Rick a Michelob. He pointed to the others. “That’s Espirio.” A Mexican. “Nubs.” A kid a little older and more worn than Rick. “And that’s Iz.”
“Hey Rick.” Rick recognized Iz from high school—they had shared several classes. He was a smart guy but lazy, never did any of his work. Rick reached across the porch and shook hands. Iz had a joint in the other hand.
“We hang out here almost every night,” Jerry said, “call ourselves ‘Los Cinco Outlaws.’ We were gonna have the whole name in Spanish, but Espirio doesn’t know the word ‘outlaws’ in English, so he can’t translate.”
Bandidos, Rick thought, but said nothing.
“I would have thought you’d be in college,” Iz said.
Rick shrugged. “Took a year off to write.”
“A writer,” Joey said. Then he turned to Espirio and said, “Escritor!” Espirio laughed a high-pitched squealing laugh that was contagious. He closed his bloodshot eyes, ran his fingers through his tall, Elvis-style hair, and sat back in the chair muttering, “Dios, Dios . . . .” Rick missed what was funny.
“What do you write?” Joey asked once they were under control again.
Rick always found this an awkward question. “Science fiction, fantasy, that kind of thing.”
“Fantasy, huh? I read some of that stuff,” Joey said.
“You do?”
“Oh yeah.” He sat forward and rubbed his hands as if preparing to be profound. “I think every guy does at some point, you know? For example, those literotica websites. I read a few of those stories last week on my work computer.”
“Not that kind of fantasy, you pervert,” Jerry said. “He’s talking about Lord of the Rings, unreal stuff, supernatural stuff.”
“Oh.” Joey sat back. “My bad. Some of that shit can be scary man. You write any horror?”
“Sometimes.”
He leaned forward again. “Allow me to give you an idea for one. Ready? Ready for it? It’s . . . a pinwheel cap.” He made a motion like he was throwing a dart.
“A pinwheel cap?”
“Yeah, you know, one of those little green caps with the spinny thing on top that you can flick and it goes around? I saw one in an episode of The Twilight Zone once. Scary shit man, I’m telling you. You could make a fortune.”
“I’ll write that down.” Rick took a swig.
“Where are you working now?” Iz asked.
“Pizza Inn.”
“Yum,” Nubs said. “You bring some pizza tomorrow, I’ll bring some weed for you.”
“Deal.”
With that they became Los Seis Outlaws.
Rick stopped his jog and visited with Los Seis Outlaws every night for the next month. He had never associated with their crowd in high school, and he was starting to regret it. They were such vibrant characters—most nights he laughed with them so hard his eyes hurt. There was something about them that appealed to him, and he had a feeling that it was related to writing, though he wasn’t sure how.
He caught up with Iz, discovered he was working with his dad as a plumber. Jerry and Espirio both worked in construction in Fuquay, a town about ten miles west. Nubs, who always had oil stains in the folds of his knuckles and smelled of grease, was a mechanic at a local shop. He was sometimes too tired to come by. Rick noticed the ring and pinky fingers of his left hand stopped at the second knuckle and asked him if he had lost them in a work accident.
“No way, Runnin’ Dude,” he said. “I’m way too good with my tools to lose a finger. Fireworks did it. Been ‘Nubs’ ever since.”
Rick only stayed about an hour each night, long enough to finish two beers. A few times he walked and brought pizza for everyone, and Nubs would pass him some weed and they’d smoke together. He had done it a few times before but was never really into it. He only took it because Nubs was so damn happy to have pizza, and once he had the weed, what the hell else was he going to do with it?
The whole place seemed centered around the meeting circle. In the rest of the trailer there was a bed, a dorm fridge, and a TV with rabbit ears wrapped in aluminum foil. Sometimes, Rick felt a little sorry for Jerry, living alone in a trailer. But he had a group of friends, and Rick started to realize how close the group was. If Jerry asked for a favor, they’d all pitch in. He didn’t know how it had happened, but Rick was one of the group now, and they’d all be willing to help him too.
“You seem a little down, Runnin’ Dude,” Nubs said the next night. Rick had worked the morning shift and spent the afternoon trying to write. He had met his goal of two thousand words, but they were choppy and forced. All the stories he was juggling around now felt fake, trite, overdone. He had reread some dialogue between two characters in one of his newer stories, realized how awful it sounded, and deleted the whole thing.
“What’s draggin’ you down?” Joey asked. “That last hit too strong?”
He looked at the bowl in his hand. “Nah. It’s work.”
Jerry got a kick out of that. “Work? How stressful can Pizza Inn be, Runnin’ Dude? Me and Espirio’ve been workin’ with bricks and concrete almost ten years, and you’re burned out from a year of takin’ buffet orders?”
Rick shook his head, and the room shifted too slowly. “Not that work. The writing.”
“I could never imagine writing a whole fuckin’ book,” Joey said. “I’d get bored. How do you do it?”
Rick considered telling him he hadn’t done it—not yet—but he shrugged and motioned to the room, the beer, the weed, the shambled lawn, the double-wide trailer that belonged to Jerry, but which also belonged to Rick and Los Seis Outlaws, and Rick saw himself without writing, and he saw himself there for a very long time.
“It’s my ticket out.”
On the afternoon of August 14, Rick stared at his calendar for an hour without doing anything else. The application for fall classes at Johnston Community College was due at midnight. If he didn’t get it in, he’d start his sophomore year at Pizza Inn. One year, he’d told himself when he graduated. One year to focus on writing, and then back to school.
He read the application, then opened a blank word document and began to type. What came out was a story about six astronauts aboard a wrecked vessel, drifting aimlessly through space. Each character talked about his problems until they finally figured out how to propel the ship home. It was the first decent thing he had written in weeks.
He brought pizza from work and walked to Jerry’s trailer. It was a nice night and he felt proud about his new story, but it was hard to enjoy it because of the application deadline. Maybe this afternoon’s writing session had been a sign of good things to come. He would give it until Christmas, he decided. If his writing hadn’t taken off—or at least shown some serious promise—he would start classes in January.
When he got there, Jerry was alone. Rick set the pizza on an empty deck chair. “Where is everyone?”
Jerry had half a Michelob in his lap. His armchair faced the TV, off. On the radio, Mick Jagger sang about how he saw a red door and wanted to paint it black. Jerry tipped back the bottle and drank the rest in one swig. He brought it away from his lips and flipped it upside down; not even foam came out.
“Espirio got sick at work today. Iz called and said he was drivin’ through the rain, and his wipers went one way and came back with a deer. Maybe Nubs is helpin’ him fix it up. Maybe he’s too tired again. I have no idea where Joey is. Want a beer?”
“Sure.” Jerry was already opening one. “You okay?”
He shrugged and sunk deeper into his chair. “You know what today is?”
“August fourteenth.”
“That’s right. I started my job ten years ago today.” He opened another beer and sipped it. “Been shovelin’ concrete for ten fuckin’ years. Happy anniversary.” He reached over and clinked Rick’s bottle. Suddenly, Rick wondered what Jerry had wanted to be when he was nineteen, and it struck him as strange that he had never though to ask. A suffocating anxiety seized him.
He ran home. He didn’t know what time it was but he knew he had to hurry. He sucked in deep breaths of warm night air and broke his two-mile record. If he could write while he worked, he could write while he studied. Plenty of writers had a day job—a career—before making it big. It was perfectly respectable. He clicked “Submit” at 11:56. Then he opened a blank word document and wrote until morning.
© Copyright 2009 Devin Miller