Just Beneath My Skin by Darren Greer Page B

and hunting and fishing and there are no cars or airplanes.
    Jake used to take me fishing.
    It was in South River, where these two trees with funny shapes leaned out over the water and we’d put our lunches and water bottles in the shadow of the trees out of the heat. Jake’d tell me stories and sometimes we’d come home with trout for my mother.
    My mother loves trout.
    I’d hold them on a stick while Jake slit open their bellies with a jackknife and removed the guts. I’d stare into their dead fish eyes when he did it. Thinking I was glad I wasn’t a trout. Thinking I was glad I was part Indian, and how someday I’d like to ride in a birchbark canoe.

WHEN JOHNNY COMES OUT OF the bathroom I am so restless I can barely sit still in my chair. I think he’s stayed in there so long because he wants me to get antsy. He wants me to try and leave so he can shoot me. The acid is working in him hard now. I can see by his eyes things are starting to change. They aren’t good changes either.
    â€œGet up,” Johnny says to me. He still holds the gun down at his waist, but he waves it threateningly towards me.
    â€œWhy, Johnny?” I say. “I’ve been sitting here like you asked me.”
    â€œGet the fuck up, McNeil. We’re going for a walk.”
    By now Charlie is passed out again. I can’t understand how he can sleep with a whole hit of acid in his blood, but he’s snoring away, curled up like a baby on Johnny’s sofa, his back to us. Johnny looks at him once and then back at me. I am on my feet like Johnny asked, but standing there, looking at him. “Johnny, man,” I say. “What you gonna do?”
    â€œThat depends on you,” says Johnny.
    I can see I am fucked. Somehow, Johnny has convinced himself I am the enemy, that I have done something to him, even if he can’t say what that something is. I give up, turn, and go outside.
    It stopped raining hours ago, but I left my coat inside and it’s cold. I ask Johnny if I can go back and get it.
    â€œYou won’t be needing it,” he says. “Get going.”
    He herds me across the driveway and across to the walking bridge over the river below his house. The river here is narrow, but too fast for a boat, and his father built the bridge out of mooring rope and old dory planks years ago so he wouldn’t have to walk up to Eight-Mile Bridge to get across to hunt. I hated walking across that bridge with Johnny when I was young. It swayed when you went, and there were big gaps between the boards and I was afraid it was going to let go. Now, for the first time, I was hoping it would, as Johnny told me to walk across it with the gun at my back. I kept looking down so I wouldn’t miss the boards, and for a minute I thought of this other book we read in college, called Inferno , by this other Italian guy named Dante. He wrote all about these people dying and being herded across this river called Styx, where on the other side this monster with a long tail would wrap it around them and then toss them into whatever circle of hell held their punishment.
    Dante was a sick fucker.
    People got burnt alive, or eaten by birds called harpies, or had to eat each other and then crap each other out, or were buried up to their necks in shit forever.
    I try not to think about it.
    On the other side of the bridge there is a narrow worn path. In the fall when Johnny and I go deer hunting this is the way we come. Johnny built a blind in a clearing about a quarter mile back, and we used to sit and smoke and wait for the deer to wander out. Even as kids we used to go there with our BB guns and shoot squirrels. I ask Johnny if this is where we are going. Johnny says nothing, except to tell me to keep moving. I’m trying to think of ways I can get out of this. I’m not so scared anymore. For some reason, the dream I had about Nathan and my father when Johnny was in the bathroom made me feel