Somebody dies at the end. Somebody always dies at the end. It’s like you’ve got a couple of pens — exactly the same pens — and then you lose the top to one of them. A felt pen, so it’s going to dry out if you don’t find that other top. But you never do, and for the rest of your life, you’re wondering, maybe I should’ve switched the top from the other pen to that one. Maybe it had more juice left.

Or maybe it’s not like that at all. My life has sped away from her death like an arrow with a thin string of razor wire attached — almost invisible, but try and walk through it, it’ll cut your head off.

She was beautiful and young, and she died at age twenty-two. She would’ve been twenty-three in July, but she died in late December, in the middle of her senior year. Slim, I called her. Her name was Kim Salvia. She’d been held back in first grade because the teacher thought her too dreamy. Not many people at Alba knew that — Alba College. I was a senior too, and more than half in love with Slim. She stood six-feet one with long, swaying blonde hair. She never had the slouch of some tall girls. If anything, her body appeared to be reaching upward, straining to extend itself further into the world. When she tilted her head to listen to me, her hair hung straight like a glistening curtain and I wanted to kiss her secret, exposed ear. Sometimes I did.

My friend Charles had driven up from Detroit because his fiancée Robin had just dumped him. We’d already gotten measured for our tuxes, so it was serious shit, and he wanted to get away, visit me, his old pal L.C. — Lawrence Carter, his running buddy from back home who’d gone off to college to seek his fortune and thus was constantly mooching money every time he came home and wanting to stay out all night even when all the other home boys had to get up and punch in at the factory the next day.

My life has sped away from her death like an arrow with
a thin string of razor wire attached — almost invisible, but try and walk through it, it’ll cut your head off.

Kim was driving back to Detroit — passing Charles on I-96 driving the other way, most likely — to see Robert Fripp at Ford Auditorium. Robert fucking Fripp. She was into that weird King Crimson shit. That was the thing with her — she was dreamy. It took us three years to fall in love with each other because she danced like a hippie, and I danced like a rocker when I danced at all — all stomp, no flow. We fell into each other’s arms the minute we returned to campus that fall, and all she did was hug me one millisecond longer than usual, but it was long enough for me to know that was where I wanted to be.

So, what was I doing sleeping with Gina? Yeah, somebody cheats on somebody, that’s part of it too. While Kim was out of town, L.C. (me again) got really drunk and slept with Gina, one of Kim’s friends — though I was wildly incapable of finishing what I started, so technically the act was not consummated. Until the following morning. This is a confession, so I guess God’s in the house too.

I didn’t known what to do with Charles, or what he was expecting, but after I let him in, he pulled out a fifth of whiskey and his hash pipe, and we didn’t say much, sitting at the old sticky kitchen table in the house I shared with some hippies who were trying to smooth out my rough edges and get me to just mellow out. They were friends of Kim’s, which is how we met, though Alba was so small, you met everyone eventually, whether you wanted to or not.

Charles kept trying to give me money back for my lost deposit on the tux, but I kept waving him off in some odd ritual of affection. It was the only thing I could think to offer, some small monetary consolation. Words weren’t doing much good. After we killed the whiskey, we took to the streets to walk my dog Mudboy. I saw the light on at Gina’s. She and I had slept together the previous year, and we were part of the same weird circle of friends who had, it seemed, all slept with each other at some point and gotten it over with, though sometimes paired up again in one random configuration or another.

“Larry — hey what’s up?” Gina said. Nobody at school knew a guy named L.C. She yanked her door open like she herself was making a grand entrance.

“My friend Charles,” I gestured to him, “up from Detroit. We’re partying.”

“I see you brought another friend,” Gina said. “Oh, Mudboy, how you doing, you big baby.”

Kim loved snow, and if she were there, we’d have been out rolling around in it and laughing. I was already ashamed in advance of where I knew the night would take us.

She bent down to pet Mudboy, a black lab with a bit too much spirit. A dog I had gotten maybe because “chicks dig dogs” or because my girlfriend from freshman year, Cathy with a C, had moved in across the street from me with Michael, the wimpy little painter with the curly hair who just understood everything in ways I was apparently incapable of.

“You’re looking kind of wasted.” Gina grabbed me around the waist and pulled me into her apartment, Charles staggering in behind us. I dropped Mudboy’s leash, and he started roaming around, whacking everything with his big tail and snorfling a pile of Gina’s clothes in the corner.

“Chill out, Mudboy,” I said. I kicked the snow off my boots and then fell back into the pile of clothes. It had started to snow as soon as Charles arrived, and it was still coming down hard. Kim loved snow, and if she were there, we’d have been out rolling around in it and laughing. I was already ashamed in advance of where I knew the night would take us.

“Have a seat, Charles,” we both said at the same time, though there were no seats, and I’d already claimed the clothes pile. Charles had drunk his way up the interstate, so he’d had a head start that was catching up with him.

“And what’s new in Detroit?” Gina asked.

Charles tried to speak. It sounded like “Bleaay, bleeah, yeck.” Then he broke into tears, his head sinking down into his thick neck as he tilted over onto the ratty green rug.

“His financier dumped him right before the wedding.” I said, rolling my eyes for only Gina to see because at college, marriage was frowned upon as some ridiculous set-up that had produced our dull parents. She let the financier/fiancée thing slide. It wasn’t a term we threw around much.

“Bummer,” she said. “What’s a young stud like you wanting to get married for anyway? Aren’t you in college somewhere?”

None of my friends back home were in college. Gina would’ve known that if we’d ever actually had a serious conversation about anything. Mostly, we’d just get stoned and have sex, though that had stopped since things with Kim had taken a serious turn. Gina was my first after old whatshername living across the street with wimpy whatshisname.

Gina and I were like that. Some good things there — random, unpredictable sparks — but not anything we’d write home about if we ever wrote home.

Charles had calmed down a bit, but he could only shake his head. He was working afternoon shift at Chrysler’s, which might have given Robin some time for bobbin’ with somebody else. She’d told him that wasn’t true, but they always say that. I’ve said it myself. Unless you’re actually caught in the act, why hurt someone even worse? I preferred to be lied to.

You know how sometimes the weather’s in this in-between place and you keep taking off your jacket then putting it on again, then you end up leaving it in somebody’s car, or worse, back at the bar where you’ll never see it again? Gina and I were like that. Some good things there — random, unpredictable sparks — but not anything we’d write home about if we ever wrote home. Maybe she would’ve given Charles a tumble if he weren’t so drunk and lovesick, if he hadn’t fallen asleep on her floor. Mudboy kept licking his face, which made him laugh in his sleep, and I took that as a good sign.

Charles finally got up and agreed to walk Mudboy back to my place, where he fell asleep in his clothes on the dog-hair covered couch. I found him there the next morning, along with Mudboy, who was stupidly wagging his tail, happy to see me when I returned from Gina’s.

See what I mean? I was disloyal to my girlfriend, my best friend, and my dog, all in one night — the trifecta of bad behavior.

“I don’t know, Larry. What about Kim? She’s my friend — I don’t want….” She was pulling my shirt off while we talked.

“We don’t have one of those — whachacallit — agreements of exclusivelessness. She’s down there with Robert fucking Tripp right now.”

“Fripp. It’s Fripp. And she’s not sleeping with him.”

“But would she if she could?”

“Larry.”

“Did I ever tell you I like your underwear, how it’s shiny and smooth and everything?”

“It’s okay — I’m too wasted,” I said after various manipulations and manifestations. It had become obvious at that point. Then I fell asleep, and in the morning woke her up with hungover hard-on urgency.

“That’s the Larry I know.” Gina laughed sleepily and pulled me to her. She was a sociology major from upstate New York who talked about the City and dressed up like Lou Reed for Halloween. But she was no Kim. I would have grown up for Kim. I could have even grown to appreciate King Crimson, given the time, but at that age, time was a coupon with no expiration date. It always gave me a discount, it never turned, went bad.

Out on Old U.S. 27, between Elwell and Shepherd, a pipe stuck out of the ground, and anyone could drive up and fill up jugs full of cold, wonderful spring water. That fall, when we’d first started going out, Slim and I drove there in my old Plymouth, skidding into the gravel at the side of the road. Our bodies jerked forward, then back, in sync, laughing as empty plastic milk jugs tumbled over us from the back seat.

The world was no trick when water tasting like earth itself came out of a pipe in the Middle of the Mitten where Old U.S. 27 and U.S. 46 cut the lower Peninsula into four quadrants, where each winter the snow blew across…

They just stuck Old in front of the road instead of renaming it. Old Slim and Old L.C. on Old 27. In three months, she’d be twenty forever. Melodrama, she’d say to that. And I’d say, I’m no stranger to Melodrama. In fact, I’ve slept with Melodrama, and she’d hit me over the head with one of those jugs.

We tossed the empty jugs into the weeds and she did a little dance around the pipe. The kind of dance one does when surrounded by fields of flatness to rise above the earth, to levitate.

“C’mon, tough guy,” Slim said, “Let’s boogie.” I just smiled. I felt exposed on Old 27, the cars and trucks whizzing past on that long straight road, though whatever held me back was breaking down bit by bit under your gentle prodding, and I like to imagine, given enough time with you, I might have even stripped naked and danced down the yellow line in the middle of the road.

There I go, switching to you again. That happens a lot when people die. I want to go on talking to them, reminding them of that one time when…. Fair doesn’t have anything to do with it. I’ve been trying to write about her for thirty-two years and counting, passing right on by Old 27 — all I got so far is “Her hair like lit candles and a voice far off singing.” Or “She is the one pipe sticking above the earth, the one that flows always.”

The world was no trick when water tasting like earth itself came out of a pipe in the Middle of the Mitten where Old U.S. 27 and U.S. 46 cut the lower Peninsula into four quadrants, where each winter the snow blew across, leaving a mysterious white stripe like a bandaid on the state’s giant palm.

We filled the jugs one by one and shoved them into the back of the car till driving home, I could not see behind me. On the way, we stopped at the Elwell Tavern where we met two aging former Edmore Potato Festival Queens.

How lucky is this?” Slim asked.

“Pretty damn,” I said. “French fries for everyone.”

She fed me French fries and licked the ketchup off my face as the setting sun shone through the bar’s ancient glass-block windows.

I’m not too crazy about still being sad. Just a little crazy. The car — it was a Satellite — was so loaded down with spring water that it scraped bottom backing up onto the road. Kim made up a song about jugs in space that would bear repeating if I could remember it. Or maybe it was all in the presentation.

After she died, I shared the last of the water with Mudboy, pouring some into his red, plastic bowl. A gesture I believe she’d appreciate, she who loved dogs and children and —

It’s winter now, like when she died. Her nose would be running if she were here, pushing fifty, like me. Excuse me for believing she’d still be lighting up the world —

Let me throw it in reverse, though I can’t see out the back window: her long blonde hair hanging sideways from her tilted head as she bent toward the pipe, her throat open to the cold, cold earth-water. Her breasts hung loose under her peasant blouse, sweat trickling down between them. I was going to say something smart about that, but I just watched her neck as she swallowed. The most beautiful thing I’d ever seen: a neck swallowing water. Who could’ve predicted that?

When she’d had enough, she looked at me, a little trickle at the side of her mouth, and she smiled. Then we lived happily ever after…

“Charles, man, I’m sorry I kinda blew you off last night.”

“What am I gonna do, L.C?”

“Let’s smoke a bowl, drink some coffee, and eat some weighty pancakes.”

“After that.”

“Drive back home and tell Robin to fuck off.”

“Is that what you told Cathy?”

“Nah, I broke down and cried. I got down on my knees in the middle of the street in front of her house and begged her to come back. But that’s just me.”

“I don’t get it. There’s not even anybody else. It’s like being by herself is better than being with me.”

“Sure she ain’t got something on the back burner? Something cooking on the side? Somebody knocking on the back door? Somebody driving slow by her house, honking then speeding off?”

“What?” He shook his head. “Not Robin. You forget what it’s like back home. I’ve been over her house every night planning the fucking wedding, then yesterday she says, ‘No wedding. I need time to think.’ I says, ‘does that mean we’re still engaged while you’re thinking,’ then she doesn’t say anything, she just takes the ring off and…”

Charles pulled the ring out of his pocket for the hundredth time since he showed up and started to cry again. “Who needs time to think?” he murmured. “Thinking, man, it just don’t pay. Everybody knows that.”

“There’s a guy up here who hugs trees,” I said, hoping to change the subject. I knew Robin did indeed have someone else, having heard it from my brother on the phone right before Charles showed up.

“See, that’s it. Fucker’s got too much time to think.”

“He got up in English class when we were reading some poetry — Walt Whitman, by the way, who seems like kind of an asshole, but once in a while I think he’s onto something — he gets up and says ‘I dig this Whitman dude. I hug trees.’”

“We all laughed. Even Miss Mousy, the politest girl in the world from St. Louis, Michigan, the ‘official’ Middle of the Mitten, gives a little titter. Then a couple weeks later, I see him down by the river actually hugging tree after tree.”

“How much is this college shit costing you again?” Charles scratched his unshaven chin.

“Mudboy ran up to him, sniffing around like he was gonna piss on him, but then the guy sees me and starts waving like I’m a hundred miles away, though I’m only about maybe thirty yards. ‘Want to hug trees with me?’ he asks.”

“Dude must be lonely or crazy.”

“Lonely, that’s what Kim said.”

“What’d you say?”

“’Nah.’ I just said ‘Nah.’”

“You ain’t told me much about Kim,” he says. “What was that all about last night?”

I was starting to feel hungover with what I’d done. “Kim’s cool,” I said. “You’ll meet her.” Though he never did.

Kim. Slim Kim. We had taken our sleeping bags down to the river to sleep under the stars on the clearest night in the history of the world, Alba, Michigan version. We lay on the banks of the Pine River. She was writing a song in pencil in her tiny blue notebook, trying to come up with a good rhyme for fear.

“Beer,” I whispered, and she hit me. Our sleeping bags, though two different brands, two different colors — red and blue — magically zipped together, and we lay curled into each other for warmth. I was exactly her height. She was so thin that she chilled easily, her lips bluing, even through her smiling, chattering teeth. Mid-October — a little late for sleeping out in Mid-Michigan. But the sky was clear, the moon was a whopper, and the river electric with flashes of white foam and glints of light.

“Atmosphere,” she said, writing it down.

“There’s a lot of rhymes with that ‘ear’ sound,” I said, listing them alphabetically in my head. “I am mere without you near,” I said, and kissed her on the ear. “Ear,” I whispered.

She reached around and pulled me tighter into her.

“Walt Whitman didn’t use rhymes.”

“That’s what makes him cool,” she said. Kim was a literature and art double major. She was going into elementary education. I was majoring in business. My father insisted that I study something that could make me his boss one day.

I have no idea why Kim fell in love with me. Maybe it was what she called karma. She had gone to Warren Woods High School, and I had gone to Warren Fitzgerald. We were the only two kids from the city of Warren — a suburb full of factories on the edge of Detroit — in the whole college of twelve hundred. If kids from Warren went anywhere, it was to community college or Wayne State. In the rare case of going away, they went to Michigan State. Nobody in Warren had even heard of Alba, but both Kim and I had found it. Both of us needed that middle-of-nowhere in order to find ourselves. I wanted to stop drinking and dry out (that part didn’t work out so well), and I didn’t want to follow the boys into the factory, so a small college hours away seemed like the perfect place to sober up and hide out. I think Kim needed to go to a place where they didn’t think she was too dreamy. Where they didn’t expect her to play basketball. Where they didn’t expect her to have the baby if she got pregnant. Where it was okay to hug trees (even if they laughed at you).

I would have hugged trees for her, that’s what I’m trying to say. Because she wasn’t crazy or lonely. Open, that’s the word. She had these long arms, and when she spread them to take me in, I felt like the world had granted me some special privilege.

We had three months. Could it have been real, lasting love, given enough time? Time, time — that was the rhyme that killed her.

“Psst. There’s the tree guy,” I whispered. We watched in silence as he moved through the woods hugging trees about fifty yards away. Not every tree. He had some kind of system. I could never get far enough into the head of somebody like that to figure out what that system might be.

I have no idea why Kim fell in love with me. Maybe it was what she called karma…. We were the only two kids from the city of Warren — a suburb full of factories on the edge of Detroit…

“He must be lonely,” Slim said. She snuggled down, putting her ear next to the ground as if maybe she could hear his soul sliding through the dying grass. Mudboy ran up to Tree Hug and nosed him in the crotch, but he just bent down and petted the dog — said some words and scratched his ear. Mudboy followed him for a distance, then returned to our little campsite.

I liked calling her Slim because of the liquid sounds that mimicked her flow through life. She didn’t have a hard K in her body.

“Maybe you’re right,” I said. “That bark must be rough.” I put my ear to her back.

“As rough as your beard,” she laughed. Mudboy curled up on top of our legs at the bottom of the bag and fell asleep. We breathed together in silence. I closed my eyes and held my ear against her—one cold ear, and one warm. I whispered, “Are you still awake?”

“Mmm-hmm,” she sniffled. Her nose was running. I handed her my handkerchief.

“You always have a handkerchief, L.C,” she said.

“I had bad allergies when I was a kid,” I said. “The kids used to do imitations of me blowing my nose. It was hilarious….” I’d let her call me L.C. because of the sweet rise in her voice on the C. It was tenderly wearing down the gruff L.C. I’d been hearing my whole life.

“At least you weren’t held back,” she said. “I was already the tallest kid in class, then they held me back a year. I was Gigantor Girl.”

“Nah, you’re my sweet, sweet, Slim,” I said. “And I love you, by the way.”

Love. Three years with old whatshername had done little to give me insight into what that meant. After she cheated on me with old whatshisname, I hadn’t wanted to give her up out of embarrassment as much as anything else. Alba was a small school. Everybody knew what was what, but Slim didn’t care. She believed in a lot of things, but she did not believe in ghosts. She believed in opening up to the future like a giant sunflower facing the sun.

We finally fell asleep, waking with dew on our faces, the damp sleeping bag. She was red and I was blue and we were zippered together in Pine River Park where no camping was allowed. Then we lived happily ever after….

I was back in Warren for Christmas break when one of my hippie housemates called me with the bad news. I drove straight back up to school, me and Mudboy in my old Satellite. I took the back roads so I wouldn’t have to pass the spot of the accident, though I wasn’t sure exactly where that was. Snow blew over the flat straight back roads of mid-Michigan as if no roads existed at all. I was crying, Mudboy licking my face as if he understood human grief. If only licking each other’s faces was enough, but it truly was not.

She believed in a lot of things, but she did not believe in ghosts. She believed in opening up to the future like a giant sunflower facing the sun.

When I finally get to Alba, first thing I do is find Gina and we fall into ragged grief together. I just changed tenses, I know, but I’m suddenly there now. Gina’s short, maybe 5’4”. I’m hugging her and crying down into her hair and staring forward into the space where Kim’s face should be. I know that sounds stupid. It was the first time I felt like a piece of the world was missing forever.

Here’s where I should offer redemption. To suggest she didn’t die in vain, that I became a stronger person, that I dedicated myself to trying to live a life she would’ve been proud of. But I was an amateur at grief. The coach should have left me on the bench and told me to watch and try and learn a thing or two. Not standing at the free throw stripe with the game on the line.

Gina and I spent that night together. Yeah, and we had sex too. Fast, wild sex. And then again. But all I felt was one sharp pain. Like a blackboard not being erased, but being blown up into a thousand brittle black pieces. I let Mudboy outside and forgot about him. When I left the next morning, Gina pulled me to her and whispered softly, “Don’t ever come back,” and I think I understood. She kissed a tear from my cheek and sent me out the door.

When I walked out into the cold on the grayest, cloudiest morning in the history of the world, Alba, Michigan version, Mudboy was gone, but when I got back to my house, he was waiting on the front stoop, wagging his little butt off. Dumb dog knew his own way home, trusted me to return.

Charles did tell Robin to fuck off, but she wouldn’t come to the door, so he had to yell it from the street. Which was okay back in Warren, yelling from the street. Slim got away from the yelling because of the financial generosity of a grandmother who painted watercolors in her basement. Slim was going to be a teacher of little kids in her soft candle voice. Her smile would light up a generation or two. Would have lit up. Maybe/would/could have. If she could’ve passed that one math class. If that community college class would’ve transferred. If a full moon lit up the river on graduation night. If she’d believed in ghosts. If she had simply lived.

Slim Kim. The mystery of her long strides. Leaves in her hair. Once she slept on the floor with Mudboy instead of on the bed with me because I was such a smart-ass and when was I ever going to grow up and stop being so cynical? I never felt so alone as on that mattress by myself.

Growing up made me more cynical, like it does to most people. I keep waiting for the reconciliation of the unfinished. It’s like if somebody writes you a note on a tiny piece of paper and rolls it very, very tight. Then she puts a pinhole in an egg and blows all the egg out. Then she puts that tight stick of paper into the pinhole and she says it’s a message for you someday when she’s gone. And then she’s gone and nobody knows what the hell you’re talking about when you ask if anyone found an egg in her room, her family wondering, who the hell are you? So you never find out. The idea of the egg lasts forever, this little oval hollow in your heart. You get married, you have your own kids, your hair turns a distinguished gray, and you never become your father’s boss. But you never sleep down by the river, any river, ever again, in a red-and-blue double sleeping bag.

When I graduated, I gave Mudboy away — Charles took him, and he spent the rest of his life in a safe, fenced-in yard in Warren, Michigan. I hadn’t taken very good care of him — that’s probably obvious by now. He’d become a burden, chewing up my books and records, alone in the house I shared while he waited for me to return from chewing up things myself, from being a jerk, assuming there was always time to rewrite the paper, get a better grade. Maybe I should have tried hugging trees first before driving out to Millvale and taking him from a dry barn and into a rainy afternoon after whatshername dumped me. Mudboy had been an impulsive mistake — one of my consistent weak spots, those impulses. Charles was wrong about thinking. Stopping to think things over was something I did learn. But I was a slow learner. I was a slow dreamer.

I should have been held back.