Delivery - Chapter 1 & 2

Chapter 1

I drive a two-door silver 1997 Ford F-150 with a long bed. The truck bound for me the moment my grandpa passed. My grandma selling it to my mother for a thousand dollars and given to my older sister who had just turned sixteen and taken with her to California and later returned to me when I turned seventeen. I cannot recall my last moment with my grandpa but I can recall the first. The rural math teacher pumping gas into his new Ford and driving me and my sisters twenty miles through the red lands of Yavapai county to catch a matinee in Sedona. I was maybe four then. I was nineteen when I left home in the Ford for my sophomore year in college, my last semester at the University of Arizona.

I was raised in the suburb of Chandler on the southern edge of Phoenix and had left for Tucson with an hour of sunlight remaining for it was between these hours that God was painting. In the beginning the sky was blue and smeared in spirits. Violet washed into peach, peach into scarlet, and after driving twenty miles through flat desert scrublands I passed the treaty lines of the Gadsden Purchase, the dry riverbed of the Gila River. It was a land before time. Like all of life had gone extinct. The only plants that survived mutated and thorny. Outside of Casa Grande gold skimmed the surrounding farms and the town laid under the sun like the first city of men. I sped through the town and reached my favorite stretch of the drive. A twenty mile straight shot to Picacho Peak, through a land so arrogantly opposed to the orthodox idea of life that through its own immense disinterest delivered an entirely new form of beauty. Dry plains of stoic masochism neglecting all else to solely focus its existence on stargazing upon the immense skies which torched it. A junky land hooked on colors.

The peak appeared through the windshield. It was a rock bred from myth; some fingertip of a titan snipped during its imprisonment. A volcano lost in time and place. Spectral conduit for the ancients. Waypoint for pagans and missionaries alike. The road before me open and wide and the western mountains small and distant in the violet haze. I drove through a pecan orchard that was dead and dusty and upon coming out of it the rock reappeared, clawed by storms and punctured with cacti. The western promontory basked in amber. The eastern slope consumed in shadows.

In Marana laid cotton fields soaked in the blood of silver and farther on the sun retreating from its massacre behind the mountains in a gleam of honey and after that I spotted the Catalinas. The night huddled above its jagged grey peaks, clouds whirling in smoke and foaming in bone, and higher up still Mount Lemmon, watching, judging, as if somewhere within its cliffs there was a cave awaiting a leather-skinned prophet to come find it. The city of Tucson laid below.

My new home in Tucson was a long and low single-story two unit duplex a mile north-west of campus. My roommate my best friend from high school, Aaron. We split the rent of at $325 apiece. My parents paid my half of the rent but Aaron had to pay his own so had moved in when the lease began the first week of August to look for a job. He found a cook position at a pizza shop, living and working alone for two weeks until I arrived. He called me often to try to convince me to come early. I favored living with my parents. There I had a king size bed. My room in the duplex could only fit a twin.

After finishing unloading and setting up my room I went into the living room and found Aaron sitting in the middle of the couch.

“You all set up, Corbin?” He asked me.

He still had on his black hat from the pizza shop he worked at. The hat was dusty with dough and spelled Rotinos in bold red cursive. He had told me the name of the shop before but I hadn’t remembered until seeing the hat.

“So, Rotinos, how is it?”

“The food, or the job?”

            I shrugged. “Both.”

“The pizza is really good, you’d like it. The menu is way too damn big though. Way too much to make. Job itself, I don’t know. It’s like most restaurants. A lot of standing and doing the same grinding stuff nonstop. It’s numbing and I wish it paid more, but they’re giving me a lot of hours, which I need. I can get you a job there, you know? They’re hiring drivers.”

“Nah, I’m good.”

“Why not?”

“I don’t know.”

“Come on. It be so easy. And you’d get to hang out with me all the time.”

 I had no desire to work. I figured I had the rest of my life to work. I didn’t need to work either. My parents supported me and I had some savings from my summer job. My parents weren’t dropping large deposits in my bank account every week, but I had rent and utilities paid for, and after that, a budget enough for food and beers. I didn’t need anything else. I was fortunate. I was content. But I couldn’t say this to Aaron. Aaron had to work. Aaron had even told me during the summer that he was almost certain his dad had stolen from a college fund his grandparents had set up for him. That his dad had been hiding a big gambling problem.

“I’ll think about it,” I said, finally, about the job offer.

“Well, what are you going to do for money?”  Aaron asked.

“I’ll go off my savings for a while,” I said. I started looking for the remote. The news was on and I wanted to find a game. I found the remote and started flipping through the channels. Aaron’s phone began to buzzed with texts.

            “Rob and Michael are coming over,” he announced.

            I squinted my eyes at the television. 

            “They’re leaving the gym and will be here soon,” he followed up. “You eat anything yet?”

            “I just got here,” I said. I changed the channels through sitcom re-runs.

            “You should eat something. We’re drinking.”

             “Can’t we do this tomorrow night?”

            “Rob says he’s got a surprise for us.”

            Aaron had a cheery smile on his face. I had questions but knew best not to follow the smile. For some people, Aaron’s smile either made you love him or hate him.  

I found a baseball game and put the remote down.

“Go make something, quick,” Aaron said. “You’ll regret it if you don’t eat something.”

All I had were hotdogs, cereal, soup, and some cookies my grandma made.

“You’ll regret it,” Aaron reminded me.

I got off the couch. Aaron waved a finger at me. “Don’t bitch. You should have answered one of my calls earlier. I would have brought you back a pizza. I was calling you earlier to see if you wanted me to make you one but you never answered.”

I stopped before I entered the kitchen and looked back at the couch. “You want me to throw in an extra hot dog for you?”

            “You going to microwave them?”

            “Yeah, probably.”

            “Then no.”

            “What about a cookie?”

            “Sure.”

            “I got oatmeal raisin, peanut butter, or chocolate chip. What you want?” 

            “Peanut butter.”

            I ate hot dogs and cookies for dinner. Then we got a knock at the door. Rob and Michael had arrived.

Chapter 2

Rob was from Wyoming and liked to drink whisky and play Mario Kart. In choosing a college I suspected Rob decided to go somewhere where he could find plenty of people to drink whisky with and where he could get away from the cold. Arizona fit the description and of course the sun-kissed girls that went there made the choice an easy one. Rob had become good friends with my oldest friend, Michael. They became friends freshman year as they both pledged the same fraternity. Aaron and I shared a dorm freshman year and occasionally Michael slept over on the weekends. It was a Sunday when I first met Rob. I was drunk and awoke at three in the morning to find this blonde kid giggling in my room and dumping all my chips over a blacked-out Michael. I leaned out of my bed and told him his prank wasn’t that funny. He was wasting my snacks too. Rob disagreed. He thought it was hilarious. I told him to shut up and went back to sleep. In the morning Rob felt bad in the morning and took us all out for breakfast. He also gave me a fifteen-dollar gift card to Walmart. Rob always had gift cards. He said his family mailed him gift cards because they knew he’d use most money they sent him on booze. He was always offering to take us out to eat with the gift cards he had. It’s easy becoming friends with a guy who’s always buying you food. He was a nice guy too underneath that shell of his.

Rob and Michael we’re not impressed with the duplex. The tour Aaron gave them lasted a minute and even that seemed to take too long for them. We quickly headed over to their place.

Rob and Michael lived at a place known as “The Hut” and they wouldn’t shut up about it. The Hut was a collection of four dingy homes a mile north of campus shared between members of Michael and Rob’s fraternity. The backyard walls separating them had been torn down to create a communal yard between the homes and with a pool already in place behind one of the homes, they had thrown down some cheap tarp, built a shoddy wooden hut, and loaded the place up with kegs, coolers, and a thousand plastic bottles. The place was no Las Vegas pool party but for a bunch of college kids soaked in jungle juice and eager for action it was a permanent slice of Spring Break.

The Hut was dirty and disheveled but nothing compared to the disaster it would be in a month. Rob and Michael lived together in the three bedroom that was closest to the pool, a sorry looking stucco home emanating pale green light with swamp coolers that clung to the windows like tics.  Rob gave us a tour of the living room and kitchen. The only thing to show between the rooms were a chair, a couch, and a fridge full of frozen dinners and beer. He quickly took us to what he really wanted to show.

Rob’s room was tidy and smelled of lavender and looked to have been painted in Wyoming crude oil. Fresh thick black paint covered each of the walls to make the room feel roomier than it was or at least that was Rob’s explanation. In the middle of the room he had a king bed with black silk sheets and a poster of Clint Eastwood from A Fistful of Dollars hanging behind it. Other classic movie posters were hung up all over the room. Rob only liked movies that came out before he was born. The Searchers, The Graduate, Phantom of the Opera. Those were the few posters I remembered him having. We all had shitty posters in our rooms then, Rob just had the classiest.

Rob walked over to a small wooden bar he had set up besides his closet and pulled out a bottle of whisky and a couple of shot glasses and stood there with a grin you’d never see on any real bartender. My throat quivered. It was a handle of Albertsons club whisky that couldn’t have cost more than twelve dollars. I was somewhat certain the last memory I had with Rob was the both of us puking whisky in the backyard of some house party. The thought of one shot of Albertson’s club whisky made me woozy. The size of the shot glasses didn’t help.

“Welcome to the bar, gentleman,” said Rob, his tan skin glowing. “First drink is on me.”

I looked at Aaron to see how he was taking it all in. He shook his head with wide eyes as he motioned his gaze between the Casablanca poster behind the bar and a small frame hung beneath the poster. Inside the frame was the famous quote from the movie. “Of all the gin joints in all the world, she walks into mine.” Aaron chuckled. “You are one corny motherfucker, you know that?”

“I think you mean genius,” said Rob, pulling off the cap to the whisky. “You see, the drinks outside, in the backyard, they’re going to be a hot mess when the parties get going. Girls don’t like coolers, or kegs, or contrary to Toby Keith, red solo cups laying around a bunch of creepy frat guys. Girls want to take straight shots of vodka with their friends and listen to their songs. So, ask yourself, where are they going to do it?”

Aaron and I knew exactly what Rob had planned the moment he stepped behind the bar. Rob just liked to hear himself talk. Rob smiled and brought up an iPhone dock and a pair of speakers. He put on Taylor Swift and started to dance.

“You haven’t even told them the best part,” interrupted Michael.

“I’m getting there chief!” Rob snapped back with a giddy smile. “Cool your jets you dog.”

Rob stepped back and motioned a hand across the wall in a showman-like manner. Among the black wall behind the bar there was a spot left unpainted and in this unpainted square of white were two names etched at the top in black Sharpie. Rob and Michael. There were two jagged black tallies under Rob’s name, one short and thick tally under Michael’s, and above each of the names there spelled something I was afraid of, The Rob Bomb. Rob pulled it out and confirmed my fears.

“This here is the Rob Bomb,” said Rob, “And if you finish the Rob Bomb, you get your name on the wall and a tally to go with it.”

I squinted my eyes at the object.

“What the fuck is that?” Aaron asked.

The Rob Bomb was a slender, tall, frosted glass with a duck printed on the middle of it. The duck was fat and cartoonish. It looked like something made for Rednecks who liked Mai-Thais or Long Islands. I figured it must have come from some Podunk thrift store Rob had stopped at between Tucson and Yellowstone.

Rob poured the whisky into the three shot glasses he had aligned. His teeth gleamed and his blue eyes crinkled. After pouring the shot glasses into the Rob Bomb he chuckled and proceeded to refill the shot glasses. With whisky up to the duck’s hips, he giggled and took the three refilled shot glasses and dumped them too down the duck’s throat. He drowned the duck with one more shot of whisky.

“It’s a seven-shot shooter,” Rob announced, his eyes wide. “The ultimate shot. Me and Mikey popped its cherry on Monday.”

Aaron approached the bar for a closer look at the glass. “You got to be kidding me. You guys actually drank that? That’s disgusting.”

“You don’t drink it,” Rob said, pointing to the glass. “You take it like a shot.”

“Gross.” 

“You ready?” Rob asked.

Aaron’s scratched his cheek. “I don’t know –”

“It aint as bad as it looks,” said Michael.

“You drank two of those in one night?” I asked, staring at the two tallies under Rob’s name on the wall.

“No,” said Rob, “I had one by myself on Wednesday when I got back from work.”

Rob always seemed to have a different job. He had the gift cards his family sent for food, but he still needed money for booze and the out of state tuition. Rob also never understood the idea of not working. Working was a part of life for him.

“You just casually drank that after work?” Aaron asked, staring at the glass.

“Yeah,” said Rob. “I was meeting up with a Kappa. She had already been downing wine with her sisters. I needed to get on her level.”

I felt sick looking at the glass. “Why would–”

“I’m in,” said Aaron. I looked at Aaron in disbelief. Aaron looked at me and simply shrugged his shoulders in response. Rob hollered in triumph and escorted Aaron behind the bar. Aaron had been working hard and living alone for two weeks. So had Rob. They were ready to cut it loose.

“I’m going to pass,” I said.

“What?” Rob exclaimed. “No, no, no, no, no, you got to-”

Michael waved a hand towards Rob and took a seat next to me on the bed. He wrapped an arm around my shoulder. “Come on,” he said.

“Michael,” I said, pointing to the cup, “that…thing…that looks like fucking awful,” I laughed.

Michael waved his hand to dismiss the idea. “Ah, you’ll be fine. Come on, what else have you got to do tomorrow? This is the best time to do it. No better time than right now. You’re young, you’re healthy, and you got nothing to do. It’s inevitable you’ll want to do this, so let’s just do it.”

“True…but I, I don’t think I want to be hungover all day tomorrow.”

Rob spoke up from the bar “Stop whining, you bitch. I’ll take you to breakfast tomorrow. We’ll have some Tylenol and coffee and go to Denny’s. I got a gift card. Now quit moping like a bitch and get over here. Aaron’s fucking ready to go.”

I looked to Aaron. He smiled at me and said, “Come on, just do one with me, Cor’. I can’t go home and be the only one that drunk. We got to christen the new place.”

Michael was right. It was inevitable, and I was getting a little excited. “Alright,” I said, “I’ll do it.” Rob cheered and laughed and began pouring the shots out.

Aaron, Rob, and Michael each took a Rob Bomb and when it was my turn I couldn’t stop thinking about hot dogs. I looked at the empty glass and the duck printed on it. The duck was hammered, dripping in brown as if it had staggered out of a pond of liquor. Rob poured more whisky down its throat. When the glass was full, I picked it up to my chin, gave a little squeeze to my throat, and smelled it. It smelled like a musty cabin and as the taste of beef started to rise from the back of my throat, I brought the glass to my lips, met eye to eye with the duck, tilted my head back, and drank. I winced, cried, coughed, and reached blindly for water. The others howled in laughter.

It was a rush, a bitter electric blast to the chest and dome. In twenty minutes we were hammered. It was only eight p.m. and none of us yet wanted to play Mario Kart with Rob. Aaron and I started to wrestle with Michael. Michael pinned each of us under a minute and so Rob challenged him to another Rob Bomb. It was only fair, Rob explained, as Michael was an all-state wrestler only three years ago. Michael agreed and smiled at the challenge and finished the Rob Bomb under six seconds. We thought it a record that couldn’t be beat but when Rob saw he was no longer the leader in scribbly black tallies on his wall for his own challenge he proceeded to finish the drink in four seconds. Woozy and stuffed with whisky, we went outside for some air. We found the pool.

The water was still and dark and when we jumped in waves of starlight raced in silver ripples and crashed against the edges. We drowned each other for fun.