It Could Be Almost Paradise

In El Dorado you drive for hours, just to feel like you’re going somewhere. Your dad tinkers with cars and he’s given you one he loves, a 280Z. It’s too fast for you. You get reckless and twist past the pines. Once, you skid in a ditch on a zigzag turn. Another time, you open the throttle on a straight highway and rear-end a brown pickup full of stoners. No damage, dude. They’re the only stoners you’ve ever seen in Arkansas, and when you drive away you start to wonder if they were even real.

You know each other by car in your town. Mustang is Craig. Fiero is Jess. Mister Mustard is Ethan in an old yellow station wagon. Jeep is Mac.

Firebird is Chris. One night, you’re in his passenger seat on Calion Highway, when a doe bursts from the trees and the Firebird strikes her with a wet thump. Chris doesn’t glance at his crumpled fender. He kneels beside the dying animal: Oh, no, girl, I’m sorry. His face is a pale oval in the headlights when he looks up at you. What should I do? But you don’t know. He drags her body to the narrow gravel shoulder.

At Chris’s prom, under rainbow lights in the Lions Club, you slow-dance. Together you’re awkward, a jumble of sticks. I can’t wait to leave this town, you say.

Why’s that?

There’s nothing to do here.

We’re doing something right now. He presses your palm.

I did this last year. I’ll be back here next year, and then what?

Then I guess you go to Little Rock.

That’s hardly a city.

Guess I’m just a country boy, myself.

Nothing wrong with that, you say. Are you starting at SAU?

I don’t know, he says.

You’re a senior. You must have thought about it.

I just can’t see myself in the future.

You put your head on his shoulder and listen to the music. It could be “Almost Paradise.”

The news reaches you at Mister Mustard’s house. It’s a shame about Chris, says Ethan’s mother in her blue kitchen. What is? you ask. She peels off her oven mitt. You’d better sit down, honey. She slides out a carved oak chair.

If you don’t sit, maybe you won’t be told something terrible.

Chris and some other boys went muddin’. There was an accident. Chris was pinned under Mac’s Jeep.

I don’t—Do you mean—?

Honey, I’m sorry, but Chris is gone.

You remember that night at prom. You remember his clear sky eyes, wide open, so he always looked a little astonished.

Chris wasn’t your boyfriend, so he isn’t yours to mourn. He started dating a serious girl whose blue eyes have yellow in the middle, Michelle. She used to date Craig with the Mustang, but Craig shot himself in the head. You don’t want to imagine what it’s like to be seventeen with two dead boyfriends. You say nothing to her rather than the wrong thing.

But senior year, you and Michelle are both cheerleaders. She tells you in a damp gym that before Chris died, her little dog Sugar started barking when he came over.

She’d just bark and bark and bite at his leg. And none of us could understand it, ’cause she’d always adored Chris.

How long was this before he died?

Just the two or three weeks before. It all made sense after the accident.

***

Some Problems

I realized I wasn’t sure exactly when Chris died.

I looked up a photo of Chris’s gravestone. It turned out he died a week or two after I drove off to Texas for college. But how could that be? Maybe I was told about the accident when I visited at Christmas freshman year. But if so, Ethan’s mom didn’t tell me, because Ethan wasn’t home that Christmas. Was he?

Jess read a draft of this story and claimed Chris and Mack weren’t muddin’, they were deer hunting. I disagreed. She still suggested “for symmetry” (dying doe plus Chris’s death) to change muddin’ to hunting. But how would the Jeep have fallen on Chris while hunting? And if Chris hunted, why would he have been so sad about hitting that doe?

He did hit the doe. But it must have been on Mount Holly Road. And his car probably wasn’t a Firebird. My mother had one, and I like the word “Firebird.” He might have had a sports car.

If I found out about Chris after high school, how could Michelle have told me about her psychic dog? Did I have a false memory all these years? No, the dog must have foreseen her first boyfriend’s death. I didn’t really know that boy, so “Sugar” attached to my memory of Chris instead.

Now I was questioning all my memories about Chris. I couldn’t remember if we were at prom when he said he couldn’t see himself in the future. I only know it was dark.

I do remember his eyes.

-Angela Arcese

Angela Arcese is a book editor, born and raised in Arkansas, who now lives in Brooklyn, New York. Her work has been published by thi wurd, a Glasgow, UK fiction publisher. She is currently translating Proust’s Swann’s Way and sharing it one paragraph at a time. Find her on Twitter @ad_arcese and on Instagram @angela.arcese