I hung up and handed the phone to Minh. She told me to call his parents, so I did. I left a message on the machine, and then I wasn’t sure what to do. If I were religious, I’d have gone to church or read the Bible. But I wasn’t.

I finished laying the railroad ties. Then, lacking any better ideas, I went down to the basement.

The tiki lounge was almost complete now. After the holidays I’d installed a fake thatched roof over a small bar upholstered in leather, with colored track lights that caught on the tumblers and shot glasses. I had velvet ocean paintings lit by matching brass fixtures and rice-paper fans artfully placed on the wall. I even had a jar of vintage paper umbrellas for the specialty cocktails I would someday mix. At some party in the future. I wasn’t sure what for.

I poured myself a Scotch and took a seat at the bar, strangely thrilled that my oldest friend was now dead. My own story was somehow burnished by the sordid drama. But the better part of me was utterly humbled by the news. I’d always thought I’d know Benny until the very end. I was glad his folks hadn’t seen him in those last few months. It probably would have broken their hearts.

For some reason, my thoughts kept coming back to one memory in particular. It must have been when we were about thirteen, hanging out in the forest near Reese Road. Benny was sitting over on the white, fallen snag, shaded by broad maple leaves, wearing his combat boots and the heavy, black raincoat of that period. I was sitting on a stump, loosening the shingles of a dried pine cone. The air between us was milky with cigarette smoke.

As usual, we had nothing to do. We had no way of getting anywhere, and we could rarely think of anything worth trying close to home. Mostly, we just killed our time smoking in the woods and talking, though I don’t remember about what.

At some point that day we’d decided to throw some rocks. We had no reason, but we didn’t really need one. Throwing rocks we discovered, was its own reward.

We started with small ones, winging little nutsized stones and waiting for the distant knock if we were lucky and hit something. From there we progressed to bigger things. We went a little crazy that day. We lifted rocks and banged them against the trees, chipping into the yellow meat. We rolled small boulders down the incline of ferns until they cracked angrily against something at the base of the ravine. We pounded the woods until our arms ached and our breath was ragged. We taught the woods a lesson they would never forget.