Clean

      You think of that night endlessly from your imprisonment, the decisions made, the chain of mistakes. It had begun with your two buddies, a quart of cheap vodka and a half-gallon of orange juice; one of these friends had suggested the confrontation. Said this kid, Barry, was cutting in on your girl—well, she wasn’t even really your girl yet; the flirtation was just in its formative moments—was something that you, at sixteen, had no intention of allowing.

      He’d been walking home, at night. He worked at a burger place in that little scrub-oak town out near the Cape Cod Canal and, even drunk, you’d known a spot to intercept him. Again, at the suggestion of your friends. There he was, his backpack slung on his shoulder, looking at you as if he’s not even sure who you were. You’d decided you would rough him up, and he decided to fight back, and you’d picked up a rock, and you’d swung it at his head. A minute later he was on the ground, dead.

      You think of how, as drunk as you had been, you instantly sobered. The discussion was quick, and its determinations would last for a lifetime. You waited for him to somehow come to; soon enough he was irredeemably cold. But you three had decided by then. No one would tell. No one would try to explain that the moment was one of passion and mistakes. In your long memory, telling wasn’t even part of that shaky conversation, your voices all gone weepy and scared.

      You took the rock, with its rime of blood, and threw it in a pond. You filled Barry’s backpack with other rocks and into the pond that went, too. You were driving your old Pontiac, and the first odd decision was to drive home, go in your bedroom, strip the top sheet off your bed, and bring it back to the scene as your buddies waited, hidden in the nearby woods with Barry, the body dragged in by the feet. You got your mother’s gardening trowel from the nail in the garage. Then her garden claw.

      By the time you drove up, watching for headlights, you had calmed a bit. You were thinking now, your head clicking with logic and forethought that was a revelation in itself. Your buddies had kicked the blood under dirt and you wondered as you came back if they had been talking of turning you in. Apparently, they had not.

      The body was wrapped in the sheet and you drove to a place you thought would work. Again, the choices made: A place close to your house, less than a half-mile, too easy. But a place far enough away from other houses and with somewhat yielding ground. Three of you, all high-school athletes, did not tire that night, rotating through the clawing and digging, going deeper, no sloppy shallow graves here. When his sheet-wrapped body went into the groundwater that had gathered at the bottom, it felt for that glorious instant as if the problem was now solved. You all filled the hole with dirt and stomped it down, then drove to the ocean at dawn and walked into the surf, fully clothed, emerging salty and bloodless.

      This was ’72. You think of forty years gone past, and the girl. For days after, you did the calculus, of risk and probability. You realized in that panicky first day that his wallet went into the ground with him; everything had not been fully considered. You and the other two never spoke of it directly again, and you weighed the human factors you could not control. You sensed, by the light of day, some shrill and growing prospect of being caught. Then, you got lucky. Barry, an aspiring hippie, had been trying to get your girl to take off with him, hitchhiking with backpacks, cross-country. He did not get along with his parents; he craved adventure and escape. She told the police she guessed he must have gone, and then she keened at her presumed abandonment. You heard about that at school and felt a surge of both relief and fury, that Barry had made the plan and that she had apparently considered it. You hated her for choosing him.

      The conclusion was simple. Barry was deemed just another wandering soul, a longhair, a dreamer. He’d return in due time. The only thing was that your mother could not stop going on about the missing bedsheet. Where did it go? How do you lose a bedsheet? “Now you’ve broken up the set,” she said. You heard her telling the neighbor about her son mysteriously losing a sheet, and you wanted to make her stop.

      The girl: Barry gone, you dated her for a few months but found you had nothing to talk about. She turned out, in fact, to be mildly irritating, and that was that.

      Senior year: Thinking back over the years, you are appalled to consider how little you worried about what had happened. In fact, you barely thought about it at all. In your mind, it (you could not bring yourself to use the more specific word) wasn’t even your fault: You’d been egged on, drunk, by the other two. You met other girls, and you played your games, and you avoided the vicinity of the grave. You were an adolescent who did not dwell on things that might ruin your fun. Your decisions came from that, and you surprised your parents