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up.”
    “Not as fucked up as we’re going to be if they find out we were with him.”
    Pete tossed the roach into the water below, watched it twist away downstream.
    “Let’s motivate,” he said.
    Cozart shrugged and they rose in springy limber looseness from the pipe. Cozart hummed loudly and dipped his arms like a thermal-riding hawk, which he always did at this point in the evening and which Pete wished he would not do tonight, since it reminded him of that chopper, brought back the unsettled fear and the image of unsuccessful escape and a dozen other things he could not name. He’d had trouble sleeping since Saturday night, which seemed like a month gone now. Every minute was tensely lived; even when high (and he’d spent the whole week wasted) Pete felt the seconds ticking away. He was used to feeling a similar if slightly lesser anxiety—he almost always had something to hide those days—but this was different. His life could go either way now, which is why he longed to be rescued, airlifted to safety, why the sleepy strip mall that awaited him on the other side of the woods seemed every bit as chaotic and dangerous as those six-month-old images of falling Saigon.
    “Where we headed?” said Cozart.
    “Where else?” said Pete. Nightly they made this trek, out of the woods and along Raleigh Road past porch-sitters they did not acknowledge who eyed them as if they were proof of the end of civilization, two shaggy-haired, insolent boys stumbling crooked and giggly from the woods, creatures from some primitive past or lawless future, either way, bad news. Once, high on angel dust sprinkled atop hash oil, Pete stopped in front of a porch filled with disapproving spectators, yelled out, “We’ll be back for your daughters when they come of age,” and yanked his pants down to punctuate his threat. Cozart and friends wrestled him into the backyard of an empty ranch house, where they hid from the cops all night under a sprawling magnolia.
    Remembering this, Pete flushed with shame. He kept his eyes on the pavement as they crossed South Boulevard to the thronged parking lot of the Glam-O-Rama.
    The Glam, it was called. Or GlamRock-A-Rama. Pete and Cozart hung there during hours not spent at the black pipe. The Glam was the southern point of a paved triangle that drew half the county’s teenagers into a tedious but perpetual orbit. Kids from the neighborhoods north of town,—known to be redder of neck, more given to fistfights and drag races—hung out in the parking lot of the Little Pep. The West Siders lined the sidewalks in front of a coffeehouse run by the Episcopal Church, which was in a cool storefront though strictly chaperoned by the minister’s stringy wife, who did not wear a bra and played Jim Croce songs on the guitar and sometimes asked to smell the boys’ breath. East Trent was 95 percent black; by choice, historical precedent, or both, the blacks kept to themselves.
    The Glam was nothing special, a Laundromat frequented by washed-out young mothers with too many kids and a wretched enough trailer life not to mind doing clothes among a crowd of stoned and surly kids. There were two pinball machines and a Foosball table in the back, which the owner put in after he realized the kids were not going to leave him alone. He’d even added a jukebox, which Pete immediately commandeered, loading quarters into the slot and punching up the same two Allman Brothers songs—“Melissa” and “Blue Sky”—every night for months.
    And then there was nothing to do but waste quarters on pinball and more Allman Brothers, say the same things to largely the same people as every other night of his life. Saturday night was godawful, he wished it had never happened, but at least it upset the rhythm. There was a time, early on, when pot made things magical, transformed the woods behind his house into a fairytaleish domain, made his every nerve and capillary tingle, as if he’d been brought into the world in every