After the People Lights Have Gone Off by Stephen Graham Jones Page B

pictures, worse.
    Jonathan folds the paper towel up into perfect quarters, leaves it on top of the holder—this is an apology—then breathes in, out, in, out, until he can control it.
    When he walks back into the glare of the sun, a few more of the families and their campers and RVs are gone, sucked into the future. Replaced by others just the same.
    Because he doesn’t deserve the river—it’s pretty, perfect, so blue—he sits with his back to it, sits on a picnic table, punishing himself with the jeans-model pose now, doesn’t even brush the crumbs and whatever off, sits long enough to see his shadow move across the pebbled walk, long enough that the chi-chi birds finally dart in close enough for him to reach if he wanted to. He doesn’t.
    The black birds, though, the ones Jonathan has always thought must smell bad, they don’t come that close. Maybe he knows what they are.
    Jonathan nods to them. Swallows.
    His shadow sundials around him and he’s got to pee but doesn’t.
    Fourteen carloads of family angle into their designated slots, back out again. Continue.
    Jonathan cries. Refuses to wipes his face. Can’t stop thinking about the thick socks in the trunk, for some reason. How he was looking forward to sleeping in them. And the plastic taste of the water from the tall green jug that looks like a gas can.
    He laughs at himself. Stupid, stupid.
    At dusk, at what Jonathan considers to be precisely dusk, Lucas returns.
    Not from the woods all around, but walking down the ramp from the interstate.
    He got lost, Jonathan knows, and zeroed in on the sound of radial tires, stumbled out into the ditch.
    Good for him.
    His shirt’s tied around his head like this is an adventure, his ridiculous shorts rolled up past his tan lines. And he’s Lucas.
    Jonathan steps down from the picnic table, the seat of his shorts adhering to something surely unmentionable—jelly?—because if Lucas has to walk the whole way over, this won’t work.
    They meet at the yellow part of the curb, only awkward eye contact.
    “We still have to get some sunblock,” Jonathan says, kind of biting his lower lip and hating himself for biting it.
    “And water,” Lucas says, his hand close enough, swinging enough, that Jonathan can catch it with the side of his hand, the world taking shape around that slight contact, that skin-on-skin.
    Now, the car. No hugs across the console yet, no pats on the thigh, no negotiated radio stations, just the click of the headlights, the wash of halogen before them like a spray of impossibly bright particles. Silence.
    It’s enough.
    At the next gas station, the sunblock on the counter, Lucas catches Jonathan’s eyes: his wallet.
    Jonathan takes Lucas by the shoulders, turns him around: no wallet. Just the tacky tattoo of a ruler on Lucas’s lower back, that Lucas admits he regrets.
    “You had your front pocket one, though,” Jonathan says. “Right?”
    What he’s not saying: The one I bought you. That you loved so much.
    “Wanted to go rugged for the trip,” Lucas shrugs back.
    The wallet’s Lucas’s dad’s old one, Jonathan knows, and will never understand. But he doesn’t have to, he tells himself.
    Jonathan buys the sunblock, stands in the parking lot looking back the way they came.
    “Do you remember where you took your shirt off?” he says to Lucas. “Was it on the road, at least?”
    Lucas doesn’t say anything, doesn’t have to. Something contrite about the way he’s standing there in front the ice machine.
    How could Jonathan not love him, how could he not want worse than anything to go sixty miles back, feel along the shoulder of the road with their headlights, trucks slamming by inches from them, their campsite going unclaimed, the pasta they’d planned drying out in the back seat?
    And, because of the way the exits are in this state, it turns out to be seventy-two miles, not sixty. Full dark.
    “It’s black, right?” Jonathan says, creeping along the shoulder, leaning over