I hadn’t seen Joe Soliday, my best friend in those days, since we graduated.  I heard he was on furlough from Afghanistan for his father’s funeral.  Joe’s father was old and blinded from an explosion at the glass factory.  The family was dirt poor.  Maranda, Joe’s sister, was smart but suddenly quit school at fifteen, got into heavy metal, tattoos, and piercings.  She called herself Raven and hung out with the goth crowd.  Before her suicide a year later, rumor had it she was prostituting for dope money.

“Hey, Pig, look at you!”

“Hello, Samantha.”

I always thought we’d get married.  Like a lot of my classmates who had talent or brains, she left East Palestine right after graduation.  I’d been skulking by the punch bowl all night spying on her, aching with desire whenever I heard that laugh of hers.  It was like listening to Lisa Stansfield all over again at the high-school dances when she’d warble those high notes.  Samantha’s laugh was like that—bright notes light as bubbles floating to the ceiling.  

“Seen Joe, Sam?”  I asked.

“Nope. He was here when I arrived, but I haven’t seen him since.” 

“I was hoping to talk to him,” I said.

“Your best bud.”

I wondered what three tours in Iraq and Afghanistan as an infantry sergeant had done to the quiet kid I used to know.

“Little Joey Soliday, combat soldier, who’d have thunk it, right?”

“The Army gave him a home,” I said.  “He didn’t have much of one in this shithole town.”

I was thinking of how our two most prominent citizens used to torment him, and I was ashamed I didn’t do something then.  Samantha must have read my mind.  She said, “He told me to tell you he was going to put some flowers on his sister’s grave.  He said you’d understand.”

“He said I’d understand?”

“Yeah,” she said and popped her gum like the teenager I remembered and worshiped. 

Then she said:  “What happened to his sister was terrible.”

I thought she meant Maranda’s suicide, but what she told me turned my stomach.  Before she went goth, Joe’s sister was lured to a party by some older girls—a birthday party for one of our jocks, Shane Slabine, a guy who beat me up in middle school and bullied everyone smaller.  Slabine always had big Steve Cipperly to back him up.  Slabine’s the city solicitor now; his pal’s the sheriff.  They have the town locked up politically. 

Those girls coaxed Maranda into trying some Oxycontin, and then doing a strip tease for our school’s star athlete.  By the time she staggered out of the bedroom hours later, clutching her bra and panties to her chest, she was bleeding from every orifice and her hair was matted with semen.  Every male at the party had his turn with her.

“Jesus,” I said.  “I never knew that.”

I spotted Slabine backslapping with some out-of-town classmates.  I wanted smash his smug face.

Another ex-jock came up to him and whispered in his ear.  His face darkened.  I watched Slabine get Cipperly and the two of them do a fast walk toward the back exit.  I waded through classmates shaking off drunken embraces, but by the time I had crossed the room, they were gone.  

When I returned inside, Samantha was surrounded by her old clique and their spouses.  I watched them dance to Hall & Oates’ tunes.  I never got to talk to her again that night.  I decided to call my reunion a washout and go home and drown my sorrows in Wild Turkey.  

Cipperly and Slabine never made it home that night.  They went missing and the town was wild with rumors for weeks—everything from money stolen from Mexican cartels to terrorist hijackings.  You couldn’t buy a loaf of bread in a Dairy Mart without hearing some old fart offering up his own goofy theory to the bored cashier.  A hundred FBI agents swooped into East Palestine.  

A month later, they turned up. The paper described the bodies of Cipperly and Slabine as being in “advanced decomposition” by the time a couple deer poachers found the bodies near Jerroe’s Creek in an abandoned cabin ten miles outside town.  When they found them, their skin had turned soapy and slipped off the bone.  Local gossips went into another feeding frenzy.

A week later, I was having a brew in the Red Horse when this old geezer sat down on the stool next to me. He did light work in the hospital’s pathology lab.  He was known to everybody, a kind of charity case the town maintained as a kind of duty.  He told me what the papers left out.     

“The M.E. counted dozens of cuts in them, all criss-crossed in the skull and arm bones,” he said. “I seen the knife scars when they was on the table.  Warn’t no crazy butcher, according to the doc.”

“What are you saying?”

“That other ‘un, Cipperly, he warn’t tortured like his friend.” 

“What do you mean?”

“His jugular was slit, ear to ear, like, and he bled out like a stuck pig. Doc prit-near had a conniption fit when that dumbass detective asked him how long he lived lyin’ there in a big ole puddle of his own shit and blood.”

I greased him with shots and Jack back to get the details.  In his mumbling, fractured way, he said Cipperly was done first, being the bigger man; he was hogtied, then his throat was slit neat right through the trachea.  “Strap muscles of his neck hangin’ loose like, you know, how you do them ribbons into bows on a birthday present with a butter knife.”  The broken end of a broomstick extended from his anus but that never made the papers.

“The sheriff was filleted and skinned like a barbequed bratwurst.  Whew, made me goddamn sick to see ‘em like ‘at—”

I didn’t say anything for a long time.  Joe’s sister was cremated.  There was no gravesite.  There was no place to put flowers unless . . .

He said you’d understand. 

You can’t turn back the clock.  But the past is right here—just inches from our foreheads.  Those four riders of doom in the Book of Revelations and all the evil they’re supposed to bring us . . . hell, it’s mostly what we bring ourselves.  As it says right there, “The beginnings of sorrows . . .”

I never heard from Joe Soliday again.

THE END