Thomas and Niko in the City of Trees

Chapter 14 - Part 3

We go back up there to rejoin the others. It's at her suggestion, not mine. When we get there, Thomas is practically humping the front fender of Markham's 4Runner. He has an oversized can of beer in his hand. "Damn, I really need to get my hands on one of these," is what he's saying. "This has the four-liter six, right?"

Markham shrugs. He's not the type to know what kind of engine is in his car. He's strutting around behind Thomas, acting all proud as if he paid for it himself, which he certainly did not. "You'll get there one day, dude," he says.

They're all holding drinks, so Lexie and I go around to the back of Markham's car. He meets us there and shows us the spread, eagerly offering Lexie a whisky-coke. Everybody knows it's her favorite by this point. She even lets him make it for her. Someone turns down the music and there's a strange moment of peace where the heat hasn't faded yet and people are only one or two drinks in, just standing around, sweating it out, rotating in an out of some shade cast by the cars and a single bent-up little tree. There's ten of us up here on this dry hill, each heading for new places and new adventures and all that shit in another month or two. Nobody's saying much during this in-between time. Personally, I'm sort of taken by the way these brown hills are turning golden in the late-day sun, as the ravines cutting between them slowly plunge into shadows. But maybe I'm the only one.

And then things pick up. It was just a matter of time. The music gets turned up again and more beers and mixed drinks get passed around. We dig into our provisions and the sun gets low in the sky. We're acting like little kids, playing this lawless game of tag that spills over the edge of the hill down into the ravine. You should see the way Thomas chases me. I run for this depression about a hundred feet down towards the creek, and then my foot catches on some tangled brush and I fall in the dirt. I roll onto my back and he's just towering over me, blanketing my whole body in his long shadow.

I'm inclined to say we have a moment. You'd think it would have happened earlier, when we were alone in his car on the way over, but it didn't. He's reaching his hand out to help me up, and I'm reminded of that night on Northview when he did the same, despite being completely shit-faced at the time. Back when we knew nothing. Damn, we've come a long way since that night. Anyway, the gesture wasn't lost on me then, just as it isn't now. We don't break our eye contact as he pulls me up. He has this look that he's giving me, and it says, "It's just you and me." And for a second, that's how it feels. But all the others are still around, and it looks like the game has ended, and the girls are picking their way down the hill.

There's no fire ban, so Driggs brought five or six pieces of chopped wood along. We pair off with our proper partners and collect whatever additional fuel we can find, from big dead pieces of sagebrush to dried-out willow branches at the base of the ravine. Lexie and I gather some rocks together and start forming a vague circular pit, and then everybody brings their folding chairs around. I will say this: once we get the fire going and the sun sets behind the hill, it's a chill little scene we've managed to pull together. We're all having a pretty fucking good time.

Maybe I'm sounding like a broken record. Maybe you're thinking you've heard all this before. But I'm here to tell you, it's different this time around. As the night moves along, as every last one of us continues to partake, and especially as the four of us sneak off to smoke this swollen joint Lexie rolled that morning, the ballad of Thomas and Niko is playing nonstop beneath it all. Once we're back in our chairs around the fire, I'm just watching the moon, and it's like, all these other people, all the shouts and the laughter and the innuendo—it's all just layers of static. If you start stripping those layers away, one by one, you get down to that steady current running below. I can even hear it now, if I listen really hard through the gaps in all this noise. It's just trickling away down there. And guess what? One look into Thomas's eyes tells me he can hear it too.