Flings Read Free Page A

that what the occasion required was music. Music consecrates everything and this was a holy moment, or it would be soon.
    He picked a spot near—but not on—the grave of one Mollie Fletcher, 1832–1845. Poor kid. He piled the notebooks on the ground, then turned his attention to his iPod, a first-generation model about the size of a pack of cigarettes. He scrolled down to Rilo Kiley’s Take Offs and Landings because Rachel had first turned him onto them, back three years ago when she’d been a bright-eyed indie rock girl. And because the first song on the album starts out “If you want to find yourself by traveling out West / Or if you want to find yourself somebody else that’s better, go ahead.” So it was pretty much perfect in every way. He turned the volume up as loud as it would go, knelt before his little pyre like Hendrix in that photo where his guitar’s burning, hit the play button, stuck the device in the breast pocket of his plaid snap-button shirt. He coaxed a flame from his Zippo and held it to the pages of a spiral-bound Mead with a blue cover. It took. The cover curled up from its corner, revealing its white reverse side even as that whiteness blossomed into an orange that was already browning, the brown almost as quickly again becoming white-gray ash borne away on the breeze. He watched the fire take on a life of its own. Jenny Lewis’s high, honeyed voice swarmed all the space between his ears, and everything she sang was the most important thing he had ever heard before, though he’d long known all these lines by heart. By the time he got to that song with the chorus that goes “These are times that can’t be weathered and / We have never been back there since then,” his great work was history and he was singing along with her. Cocooned in noise and self-pity, Danny felt like a pure spirit, righteous, the king of his own broken heart. He never heard the police approaching, or their shouts for him to get his goddamn hands in the air.
    What could he have looked like to those night shift beat cops? A Satanist, perhaps: yowling on his knees before a fire in the old cemetery at close to the witching hour. His hands were in the air now, a lazy arrhythmic sway, but he still couldn’t hear them, so they tasered him and he writhed on the ground in an ecstasy of suffering. His pants went piss-dark; the earphones flew free of his whipping head. From his new dirt-level vantage the wimpy fire looked scary and right. Then a second zap sent his eyes up into his skull.
    Everyone came in the morning to bail him out. It was like the day he’d flown in, only Rachel was there, too, and everybody looked somber and fatigued. Danny was hungover, ashamed, rotten on Portland—fuck his court date; all he wanted was to leave town. They talked him down over breakfast at the Cricket—the same place he and Rachel had lunched the day before, lifetimes ago now. And what had the whole thing been about, anyway? He wouldn’t say, only forked apart sopping pieces of the house special, his hand shaking as he raised it to his mouth. They let it go.
    Not much changed between him and Rachel. They kept things status quo while her internship wound down; then she decided to go back to Schmall, not explicitly to get back together with Marcus but everyone knew it was in the cards. Percy’s job moved him to Eugene and he didn’t invite Kat along. She was bartending downtown and doing great for herself. She took over the lease at Rachel’s place. Ellen got hired on at the film company but was just killing time. She wanted to go to law school, she thought.
    Danny had a problem—he was homeless, almost broke, and needed to stick around town to finish his community service, or else live the rest of his life with a bench warrant out on him in the state of Oregon. He got a job doing shitwork for Greenpeace. Hey, you got a minute for the whales, the seals, the trees?