There was a different texture to talking about such things in the bright warm light of the morning, different than it had been even brushing up against those subjects in the darkness of my grandmother’s back porch as the night rode on and on and our pot-stoked mellow flooded toward simple fatigue and finally to sleep. In a way, I was relieved that Chiggers was leaving, for I had sensed he wanted, more than anything, to talk about what had happened over there. But I was afraid that talking about it would bring the sluggish constant flow of the Nine Dragon River into a torrent, one which we would not be able to control or navigate and which would pull us both under its powerful current. How I wish now that I had held him there, had asked him to tell me more about how he felt, about how he was, but I did not. Sometimes I imagine myself telling him that he should picture me beside him when those black ghosts faded out of the shadows of that dream jungle, my radio warm and the handset of the Prick 10 already at my ear, already calling down a hellfire of salvation from the bright wet sky. But of course I said none of those things and Chiggers slipped behind the seat of the grime-encrusted Fairlane in silence, not speaking again until I had moved to walk back up the steps to my grandmother’s. He called out my name then and I turned. Chiggers sat framed in the open window, his hair in dark greased furrows and his eyes black but his mouth upturned in a grin. “Got a present for you,” he said. And when I reached the door he handed me, through the window, a paper sack. I could smell the pot within, its sticky aroma emanating everywhere. “Shit,” I said, “let me get my wallet.”

“It’s a present,” he said. “You can’t pay for no present.” Then the Fairlane roared to life, its engine rumbling low and heavy in my chest. And a few moments later he was gone.

“YOU LOOK TERRIBLE.”