That Was Then, This Is Now

"There was this other color," M&M said to me seriously but half-afraid, as if he thought I'd turn into a spider any minute. "I don't know its name; it told me but I forgot. It said I was being paid back for all the carrots I ate. I didn't know--I thought--I didn't know about the carrots before. I don't think it was my fault." He was crying, tears were pouring down his face, but he hadn't changed his expression. He looked so thin and scared, not a bit like the M&M I knew. "Do you think I should be paid back for something I didn't know about?"

"No," I said, clearing my throat. "I don't think it was your fault." I put my arm around him and held him. He was shaking real bad.

Cathy came back. "Daddy's going to meet us at the hospital. Can you carry him?"

"Yeah," I said. I picked him up easily; he couldn't have weighed more than ninety pounds.

"I'm so tired," M&M said. "I was gone so long, and I didn't have any sleep." I carried him down the stairs and out of that house. Nobody made any move to stop me. Nobody seemed to care.

Cathy drove us to the hospital. Halfway there M&M started suddenly and screamed, "Where am I?"

"It's O.K., kid, you're going to be O.K."

"Where am I?" he was screaming in terror. "Why don't I know where I am?"

I was just sick. I didn't know how Cathy was managing to drive the car. I never felt so bad before. I just held onto M&M. There wasn't any sense in trying to talk to him. I felt then that he was as much my little brother as Cathy's. That's how bad I felt.

Mr. Carlson was waiting for us at the hospital. We drove right up to the emergency entrance, and there he was. I got out and picked M&M up again, but I didn't have him for long. Mr. Carlson took him and carried him into the hospital, holding him very close, very tight.

M&M was telling him about the spiders.

10

We stayed there at the hospital until the doctor could talk to us. He couldn't tell us much--physically M&M would recover, but mentally . . .

"Will he always be like he is now?" Cathy said. She had really been brave--no crying, no hysterics. Only by the tense, tight way she was ripping the hem out of her shirt was she showing how bad she was shook.

The doctor replied, "I have no way of knowing. He might get better, or he may have lost his mind forever. Either way, I don't believe he'll ever be completely the same. LSD is a powerful drug, people react to it differently. If these kids would only . . ."

I tuned him out. I won't listen to sermons. Besides, I was hacked off at that doctor. He shouldn't be saying things like that. He should be saying that M&M would be fine, that tomorrow morning he would be the same again. Couldn't he see how what he was saying was tearing Mr. Carlson to pieces? Couldn't he see what it was doing to Cathy? What kind of a doctor was he, anyway?

"I want to drive you home," I said to Cathy.

She shook her head. "I don't want to go home. I want to stay here."

"Cathy, I want you to go home," Mr. Carlson said. "You can't do anything here and I want you to be with your mother when she hears about this. M&M will be asleep for a few hours. I'm going home in an hour or so. Wait until I get there before you tell your mother." His voice broke. "What are we going to tell her?"

"Come on," I said, putting my arm around Cathy, guiding her to the car.

"Wait a minute," Mr. Carlson said. "Bryon, I want to tell you how much I appreciate all you've done. I'm really proud of you, son."

That was the first time any man had ever called me "son" without making me mad. I didn't know what to say, so I just nodded to him and gave Cathy a squeeze.

In the car Cathy broke down and cried. I drove to the park and stopped. I held her while she cried. She was almost hysterical. I was crying too. I couldn't stand seeing her hurt like that. I just couldn't stand it. "Don't cry like this, baby," I said. My voice was shaking. "Cathy, don't. It won't do any good."

"Oh, my God," she sobbed. "What if he's lost his mind forever? He was such a sweet kid, the sweetest damn kid in the whole world."

This was the first time I had ever heard her swear. I tried to think about this fact, to focus on something like that before I lost control and became hysterical too. "He's going to be all right," I said. "He'll be just like before."

"No he won't." Cathy was trying to stop crying now. "He won't ever be the same." This set her off crying again. My shirt front was soaked clear through. She just hung onto me and cried while I patted her head. Finally she sat up. "I love you so much, Bryon," she said. "I don't know what I'd have done without you."

"I love you, too, baby," I said. This was getting easier to say. "And don't worry about what the doctor said. He's one of those hippie-haters. M&M will be O.K., I know it."

"I'd better go home now," Cathy said. "I have to be there when Mamma hears. Oh, this is just going to kill her."

I let her out at her house, but I didn't go in. I figured this was a family matter, and I wasn't a member of the family yet.

*

I was surprised to see how late it was when I got home. Mom was asleep. I went into my room and lay down without bothering to turn off the light. Mark wasn't home yet. I was tired. I felt empty and drained. Nothing can wear you out like caring about people. I was tired, yet I knew I wouldn't be able to sleep. I closed my eyes, but I kept seeing pictures: all these people were spinning around in my head--Mark and Charlie and Mike and Angela, Cathy and M&M and Mr. Carlson, and Tim and Curly Shepard. Life had seemed so simple once, now it suddenly seemed so complicated. I could remember a time when my only worry had been paying Charlie the three bucks I owed him. Things used to be simple and now they weren't. I wanted a cigarette bad. I halfheartedly searched my pockets, but I knew I didn't have any. Then I remembered Mark's spare carton and rolled off the bed and reached under his mattress. I felt something strange and pulled it out. It was a long cylinder-like thing. I unscrewed one end and all these pills came rolling out.

I am not dumb by any means. I have never used drugs except for a couple of tries with grass, but I knew what they looked like. I looked at this bunch of pills--there were hundreds of them, and it was like a machine in my head went click, click, click. And it came up with an answer I didn't want.

Mark was selling this stuff. This was way too many pills for anybody to have if he was just taking them himself, and besides, I would have noticed something different about Mark if he had been taking them. You can't use drugs and not show it--I knew too many kids who were users not to know that. Mark was selling. Mark was a pusher. That was where he was getting his money. That was why he had known about the hippie house; that was why they had known him; that was why he had known where to look for M&M.

M&M. Cathy.

M&M was in the hospital, and maybe he was messed up for life--and Mark was selling the stuff that made him that way. Maybe this wasn't LSD, but it was a step in that direction, and God only knows what all Mark had been selling. I thought about that blond, dead-looking chick and about M&M screaming about spiders and about Cathy half-hysterical with grief. I thought about Mr. Carlson and the bitter doctor, and the whole mess was swirling around in my head, and it felt like it would burst wide open.

When I thought about the cause of all this misery, I became very cool. I very calmly called the cops. M&M had lost his mind and Cathy was hurting, and I did something about it. Then I sat down on a chair in the front room and waited. It seemed only a minute later when Mark came in.

"Hey, still up?" he said. Then he stopped. "What's the matter--Bryon, you look awful! What is it?"

I held out the cylinder.

"Oh," Mark said, after a pause. "You found them, huh? Well, don't worry, buddy, I don't take them. I have a good enough time like I am."

"Just how are you, anyway?" I said.

"What?" Mark said, confused.

"M&M is in the hospital--acid trip. They think he may have lost his mind."

"Man, that is awful. That poor kid." Then he looked at me. "Bryon, don't look like that. I said I don't take them. Don't you believe me?"

/>   "I believe you," I said dully.

"We needed the money, you know. I tried getting a job, but with my police record nobody'd hire me. Then I met this guy on the Ribbon--he set me up. I figure I don't have to take it to sell it, so what's the worry?"

"M&M--" I began, but I was too tired, too numb to talk.

"Is that what's buggin' you? Listen, I didn't sell M&M anything. He got it from somebody else. Lookit, Bryon, they're going to get it from somebody if they want it, so why can't I make some money? I never forced it on anybody. I never tried to talk somebody into using drugs so I could make a buck."

He could have talked all night and I wouldn't have changed my mind. This was wrong. For the first time in years I thought about the golden-eyed cowboy who had been Mark's father. Was Mark a throwback? To what? I wondered tiredly why I had never seen it before: Mark had absolutely no concept of what was right and what was wrong; he didn't obey any laws, because he couldn't see that there were any. Laws, right and wrong, they didn't matter to Mark, because they were just words.

"Bryon, what is it?" Mark cried suddenly. "Listen, if it bugs you that much I'll quit. I'll stop selling if you don't like it. Shoot, I never thought it would bother you. I sort of thought you knew about it."

Don't drag me into this, I thought. Don't try to make me out to be blind, just because you are. Aloud I said, "I called the cops," and I felt as if I was talking in my sleep. Mark went white.

"What?" he said softly, disbelievingly. "What did you say?" We could already hear the siren. "Bryon, you know what something like this would do to me with my record. Bryon, tell me you're lyin'." Mark was pleading desperately.

I thought maybe he would run for it, but he didn't. He just sat down in a chair opposite me. He was white and his eyes were black with a rim of gold around them. He looked the way he had when he had been clobbered with that bottle. "Bryon," he said quietly, like he was trying hard to understand, like he was totally confused, like he thought maybe I would answer in a foreign language, "why are you doing this to me, buddy? Bryon, just tell me."

I couldn't tell him. I didn't know.