Welcome to Deadwood

Chapter Seven

   He held a cigarette between his thumb and index finger, rolling it backwards and forwards and slouching against the cracked, leather seat. His hair fell over his face, obstructing his eyes, as he chewed compulsively at his fingernails. Leah had her hands gripped around the steering wheel as she pulled up outside my house, just behind my truck. I had been peering out of the window for the last five minutes with my nose pressed up against the glass, expectant. As I left the house and jumped down the porch steps, Isaac leant out of the convertible with a gleeful grin, exhaling a lungful of cigarette smoke; Leah wafted it away in disgust. 

   I chuckled and rested on the bonnet of Leah’s 1970s mustang, twisting my baseball cap round so that the peak shadowed the back of my neck. Tapping my palms against my thighs, I reclined against the windscreen and looked up at the sky, squinting into the bright light. Leah lay besides me and I could feel her watching me, her eyes tracing my profile. 

   “What are we doing?” She asked. 

   “I thought we could go to the creek,” I said. 

   “That sounds like fun.” 

   “I’ll race ya’,” I turned onto my side and smiled mischievously. 

   “Okay,” Leah giggled, nodding. I watched Isaac for a moment, as he stood against the porch picking dirt from under his fingernails, the cigarette hanging from his lips. “After three?” 

   “One, two,” I paused and could see her muscles tensing as she waited for my word, “three.” 

   We both clambered off the rusty car and started sprinting towards the water, over the open land stretching beyond my house. My lungs were working hard to get oxygen to my limbs; I had underestimated how quick she would be, how athletic her petite figure really was. Beneath the skinny jeans and tank tops, her thin frame, were tough sinews, muscles wrapped around bone. She was laughing carelessly, like a child yet burdened with the horrors and tragedies of this world, and I could not help but yell out, the sound waves reverberating into the atmosphere. 

   Leah broke ahead of me and threw her body forward into a cartwheel, her legs remaining straight as she returned to the ground and continued to run. She turned back to see my reaction and shrugged, raising her arms over her head. 

   “Cheer camp,” she called back to me, “all the way out at Eugene.” 

   “Paid off,” I grinned, slowing down as we approached the bank of the river. I looked over my shoulder towards the house and saw Isaac ambling towards us, his hands stuffed into the pockets of his torn jeans. “I take it he isn’t into sports.” 

   “Not if it involves getting sweaty or out of breath, no, sport isn’t really his thing.”

   “I’ll be right there!” Isaac shouted, rolling up the sleeves of his shirt and looking at his smoke, as if there was something he had not noticed before, as if it were the first cigarette he had ever been given. 

   “If he doesn’t stop smoking those, he’s going to kill himself,” Leah said wearily, cupping her hands around her mouth before yelling. “YOU’RE KILLING YOURSELF!” 

   “I’M A POET, LEAVE ME ALONE!” 

   Isaac jogged the last few meters and set himself down in the grass, a little out of breath. He stubbed out his cigarette and put the end into a little plastic bag he kept in the back pocket of his jeans. “I don’t mind killing myself but I don’t want to inflict my bad habits onto the environment,” he explained as he felt us watching him with curiosity. He was a chain smoking mathematician with an ethical duty to the environment; I loved this about him.