COLLAPSED by Michael Holladay

When I was at Andy’s house he looked at me and said, “I want to stone that place to the ground.” We were getting high on the basement couch, and he was behind a thin mist of smoke. He was talking about the tobacco warehouse his dad inherited, now dilapidated. Or, his dad called it a warehouse, and so did the granddad before him. Giving it that title was generous though. A joke, really. It was more like a shack. Andy tapped his foot up and down in saggy sweats like he was going to jump out of himself, waiting for a response. I was pretty sure he was looking to me and not my friend, Nick next to me. Nick was silent because I could tell he was hardly paying attention. I heard every word and was silent because I kept noticing the scar creased above Andy’s mouth, which I wanted to kiss since before he knew me.

“Let’s do it,” I said to impress him.

“Come on,” he said and got up, which meant we needed to follow.

He led me upstairs. Nick trailed behind Andy, and I trailed behind Nick. I creaked through the house, careful of the floorboard squeaks my feet could ignite. This was a hushed thrill for me, something covert I didn’t know the consequences of. Andy strutted ahead, taking us past the living room where his dad was in a Wild Turkey pass out, with no care of waking him. I caught some flickering light from the TV emitting onto Andy. He wore his pants down low, and so did Nick: Andy imitating music video rappers, Nick imitating Andy, me in my coupon purchased Penny jeans from a shopping trip with my mom. I was the tagalong.

“Oh shit, look at those tits,” Nick said and halted in front of me so quickly I almost ran into him. He was peering into the living room where Andy’s dad had on a porno. Andy was in the kitchen now, and I would lose him if we didn’t continue.

“Hey, be quiet,” I said.

“The old man’s out cold. Geez. When did you get to be such a pussy?” Nick had never called me that before and began using it recently since we started hanging out with Andy. I had been friends with Nick since middle school because in middle school you needed to call someone a friend. His face was drenched in freckles that hadn’t faded with ears his head hadn’t caught up with: puppet-mouthed – a ventriloquist dummy. I tried to imagine this face more clearly in the dark, sneering at me, assessing me based on our three years of friendship in which we couldn’t have really known each other. It was hard to pity him, because he was the reason I was there in the first place. He had somehow made friends with Andy. He could make that initiation of friendship I couldn’t – if friendship was what you wanted to call it. He had started buying weed from Andy, probably because he was desperate for a sense of rebellion, and desperate to distance himself from me. He was there to get high. I was there because it was Andy.

“Let’s go. Come on. You can fuckin’ watch porn anytime,” I said and passed him.

Andy was already outside, and the footsteps in the sparkly dusting of snow tracked him to the middle of the farm behind the house. I began running to catch up, placing my feet in his indentions on the wasted land, hopscotch jumping to match his stride. The Oldsmobile was parked a yard away from the house, looking abandoned. Andy picked me up in it earlier with a supped up sound system rattling out any words I thought to say to him. His dad lived in the boonies, and I forgot where this tobacco shack was. I knew it was on the outskirts of a tree patch people in town called a forest. I also knew it was right before Mike Kilroy’s land – an eighty year-old legend who owned part of the long-gone farm with Andy’s granddad. Kids called him Ol’ Kil because rumors went around about him on a constant stake-out for anyone trying to cross the wire fencing onto his acreage. He’d shoot you down or sick his Rottweiler depending on whose story it was. A week ago, the last time I was at Andy’s, we stepped over and smoked right in the middle of Ol’ Kil’s yard.

I looked behind me and couldn’t see the house anymore. It was either out of sight or the dark and snow mixed with its white chipped paneling and three lopsided black shutters. Ahead of me, Andy had stopped. The only reason I could see him was from the flood light’s faulty bulb, flashing him like a signal. He was standing in front of the shack.

“So, this is it, huh?” I said and immediately regretted it. Obviously, it was.

Andy shoved his hands in his jacket pockets with head cocked up like he was trying to solve a complex puzzle. I tried to match his line of vision instead of looking directly at him. His newly buzzed head was caught in the wind chill. “Do you want this?” I said and held out an extra cap.

“No, man. I’m good.”

“So, what now?” I asked.

Nick was finally crunching his way to where we were. “It’s freezing out here,” he said while sniffing a runny nose

“I told you,” Andy said. “Find as many rocks around here as you can and throw all of them at this place.” The shack was ash covered from a previous fire and stood on black molded wood. If any tobacco residue was left, it was rotting like algae – dead and sickening. I could smell it from where I stood next to Andy – in the right radius to catch both the faintness of decay and his drugstore cologne masking body odor. He picked up a stone, tossing it from one hand to the other in a single juggle and then launched it against the building. Ash grafted off and hit the snow as it shook. He ran closer and found another rock, larger this time, and threw it against the wood, the sound making the cry he couldn’t, in place for his silence. “Like this,” he said to me. “Come on, Patrick. Let’s see how hard you can throw. Help me take it down.”

About a month ago when I had told my dad where Nick and I were going, he said, “You’re not going around that kid.” It was a Friday night when he was behind the local paper over a chicken fried steak dinner.

“Why?” I asked.

“Not over to that house. Not around that dad of his.”

“Why?” I asked again.

“No good trash is why,” he said, a man indignant that Andy’s dad loused around all day on inherited tobacco money and let the land stay ruined. “A damn shame,” he had said. Andy’s mom had been part of the town rumor mill since I had known – took up with some man she had been cheating with who worked at my dad’s construction site. She worked at the drive thru Dairy Dip, and some girls from my school used to go through and make fun of her, and wives in town made jokes about how their husbands weren’t allowed to go there if she was working. I also knew his dad was probably squandering the granddad’s money, and it had an expiration date. “I don’t want you around a good for nothing shit,” my dad said.

“But Andy’s not his dad,” I had said.

I overturned rocks, trying to find the right size. I threw one, and it made a pathetic smack, hardly moving anything. “Give me a break,” Andy said. “That was a pebble. Get a big one and get some heat on it.” He launched another that pelted a snap into the air. A few boards fell. He was laughing, almost manically. “Or like this,” he said, and he hauled out a huge rock from a ditch. He cradled it with both arms, swinging it to get momentum, counting to himself. I saw how big this one was, and I looked at the shack.

“Andy, wait. Are you sure you want to do this?” I said. He pretended not to hear me the same way I pretended not to know about the bruises on his side, bruises I saw a few weeks ago when his shirt lifted as he leaned into his dad’s fridge to get me my first beer, bruises I wanted to curl inside of and absorb so I could make them better. The rock hit the shack, taking it out. All of the boards on the left gave way and caved in on themselves. I crouched for cover, and Andy towered over the debris as it fell.

All that remained was a frame against a thumbnail moon, and after a distant dog bark, quiet. Nick kept saying “Holy shit,” surveying the damage. Andy paced like he didn’t know what to do. I looked toward the house to see a porch light turned on. There was no way Andy’s dad heard. Not with how drunk he was. Not with how far away we were. Or was it that far away? Or was he really out cold like Nick said? There was no way to know. I didn’t want to imagine what Andy’s dad would do to him – not tonight or the next day.

“We need to get out of here,” I said to him.

His face was still. “Where?”

“Come on,” I said and started toward the trees.

Andy was following me now, and we came to an enclosed area. I was panting, and he was barely out of breath. He leaned against a trunk. “Damn,” he said. “That was great.”

“Yeah, for sure,” I said and sat down on a stump. Andy put one foot against the tree with his thigh flexed out like he wanted me to see it. I allowed myself and then looked up to him.

“Why do you always do that?”

“What?” I asked, scared.

“Look at me, like, I don’t know. Like you know something I don’t.” Back before all of this, back before Andy dropped out of high school, we had a class together. I sat three rows back from him. He used to slink his feet into the front desk’s book cage and coast, sometimes giving one word or smartass answers to the teacher, bragging each month about a new girlfriend, or cocky about a move he made on the JV basketball team he eventually got kicked off of. He was the kind of guy who was all confidence but didn’t know how beautiful he was. He was looking at me pointedly now like maybe he knew I noticed.

“I don’t know anything,” I said.

He squinted at me. “You’re all right, Patrick.” He pulled out a joint, which is what he did when he didn’t want to confront something. We passed it back and forth until he said, “Hey, come here and shot gun with me.” I didn’t know what that was, and he explained. He had the thin strip in the gap of his teeth, and he said to get closer, so I stepped forward with my lips inches from his and pretended to suck in the smoke correctly. The diamond studs he wore seemed to be carved out of the frozen stream ahead of us and pinpricked into his cold-red ears. I exhaled and kissed him. He let out a moan like I should stop or continue or both, so I let him decide, and we kept going. When I put myself against his upper body, the material of his jacket swished, and I imagined what he looked like underneath. He pulled me in closer, our torsos touching, bodies pulsing to shed our clothes, but the cold contained them. I felt him hard against my leg like he wanted me to.

I pulled back. He looked at me with a mouth raw in chapped flakes. Time to say something. Time to acknowledge what he maybe didn’t want to acknowledge. I put my hands on his sides, trying to keep him warm. “Do you want me to…” I said, trailing off, and I squatted down.

“Yeah, yeah,” he said and started undoing his pants. “But hey,” he said among belt buckle chimes. “This doesn’t mean anything.” I took him into my mouth, and it was like the wind stopped from the wet heat. I wanted to take in all of him: his stained sweatpants, the waffled long johns underneath, the musky sweat clinging to them, his wife beater, his stomach hair. Somewhere in the distance Nick was shouting about where we were. Somewhere Andy’s dad was either raging in anger or still asleep. Somewhere was what I thought I was protecting Andy from. Somewhere was the collapsed wreckage of everything I helped him leave behind.

***

The first time I met Andy’s dad, their house was a mansion by my standards, because it had two stories and was bigger than a shotgun. Andy pulled up in the driveway and led me and Nick past the full porch. A swing was to the right with half the chain broken off, so it sat on the ground lopsided. Next to it were metal chairs with tarnished rust eating the spray paint. Miller cans lined the handrails like targets at a shooting range. Andy took me and Nick hot-boxing through town, and it felt like I was treadmill walking – feet moving but in one place, and Andy’s house was shifting around me.

Andy introduced me to his dad in the living room, who got up from a recliner, his recliner, that didn’t want to let him go. He shook my hand tighter than a bear trap and said, “You Frank’s boy, aren’t you?” My hands were probably still grazed in yellow dust from Dorito scarfing in the car. He let go and wiped his hand on his cutoffs.

“Yeah, that’s my dad,” I said.

“Runs firsts and thirds at Lester’s Construction. Right?”

I nodded, and he eyed me, then sipped from his Bourbon tumbler, the ice clanking his teeth, his finger-squeezing gold ring clanking the glass. The guy his wife ran off with – the guy who worked at my dad’s company – his name was either Gus or Russ or it may have been a different guy now.

When Andy’s dad pulled his drink away from his mouth, he sucked his front teeth against his lips in a lemon pucker – a ferret squinched face. “What’s wrong? Can’t speak to me?” he said.

“Dad, come on. Leave him alone,” Andy said.

Taxidermy animal heads ran along the paneled walls, and Andy’s dad was in the middle of them. He looked Andy over for a long time, examining, sizing up. “Boys, can you go into the kitchen for a minute?” he said, which was pointless because we could hear everything from there. He gave me another once over and didn’t acknowledge Nick.

In the kitchen, Nick and I sat at a table with congealed Dinty Moore Stew and stacks of unopened bills. We listened to Andy’s dad booming, berating. I only caught pieces like snippets of hunting entrails. “Why are you such a worthless fuck up? I told you to have that cleared from the back yard today.” I could see sharp hunks of hardwood through a window. They were wrapped in frayed tarp. I learned later of half-ass plans to build a new toolshed. Even if Andy had brought in that hardwood like his dad asked, it wouldn’t have mattered, because the wood had set outside too long and was damaged by rain and rot. “What have you done all day?” Andy’s dad said, which was bull, because he hadn’t done much himself other than recline and drink. “You’re a goddamn good-for-nothing,” he added. I thought of the bruises. They were purpled like a gooey plum smeared on concrete, patched into Andy’s skin. Fragile. I heard his dad say, “A useless condom rip, and you know it.” One time Andy told me his mom probably wasn’t his mom. He thought maybe his aunt but wasn’t sure.

I dared to lean around the corner and saw Andy’s head hung low and belittled. Beneath that though, below a blushed face was a smirk, or a slight resemblance to a smirk, as much of one as he could give standing in front of his dad. And, he said, “Right,” like he was agreeing because he had to but was really saying, Just you wait, and I will get you back. For all the pain. Whatever way he decided to do it, I wanted to be there.

I sat with Nick while Andy hauled the pile of wood from outside and into the basement. He had to do it by himself. His dad’s orders. At one point, I looked to Nick like we should help, but he didn’t want to say anything to me. It took Andy an hour. Nick sighed but was only annoyed because this was preventing him from getting stoned, ruining his fun. I watched Andy follow his dad’s instructions piece by piece.

When he was finished, Nick and I made our way into the living room with him. His dad was snoring with gasps like the gurgling of a clogged drain, inhaling deeply like he was about to suffocate. Andy sat in the chair next to him, and I sat on the couch. The deer and raccoon heads loomed over us, petrified with mouths that would drip slobber if they were alive. Dead things filling empty space. Andy pulled the lounger’s handle and went back with legs in the air, resting, aligned with his dad. He closed his eyes and breathed heavily in a slow rhythm. His face was skeletal and defeated, hollowed out like he wasn’t his own person. Just like me.