Patrick Zweig X Art Donaldson - Blog Posts
the road trip
or, how they spent their last summer.
an: not reallyyyy proof read, so if you note any grammatical errors, mispellings, etc. feel free to let me know. creds to @ithemes for the border, and a special thank you to my dear friend @blastzachilles for reading most of this. you will never fail to bring me out of a well-practiced shell. i hope you enjoy, and, as always, likes, comments, critiques and reposts are very appreciated.
Despite what everyone thought of him, and his general raucous demeanor, Patrick was a good driver. Maybe it was the devil-may-care attitude that kept him from getting that clammy-handed nervousness that Art defaulted to behind a wheel, but it earned him the title of “Pre-Graduation Road Trip Driver”. He only pretended not to be insulted when everyone clapped Art on the shoulder and told him to say a prayer before getting in the passenger seat. Patrick was reckless with plenty of things, sure. Reckless with girls, reckless with his body, reckless with the amount of Four Lokos he drank the night before Ms. Anderson’s logarithm test, reckless with himself. But not Art. Never Art. It’s the only reason Art had stuck around so long, he thinks.
He was proud of himself and his little Honda, one that he’d gotten with his own money and a smile so bright it exposed the chip in one of his bottom teeth. Art had asked him about that when they’d first met, why he only ever smiled with the right side of his mouth. So he pulled down his bottom lip with his index finger, exposing that little semicircular inconvenience, the one that hissed when it met with cold. “‘S from a fight”, he’d added with a lax shrug, hoping the nonchalance wouldn’t betray the fact he was dying to tell the story. But Art couldn’t read him that well, not then at least, and nodded. Said something about being ‘more careful next time’. Art didn’t notice the sag of his shoulders, either.
It’s funny, now that they’re on this trip, commemorating their last summer together, 12 to 18 went by so fast. The woman at the gas station in Maryland had said it was sweet for two boys of their age to be so close, ‘Usually sibling rivalries only get worse around college, what with the competition for the better letter and all’. She had no way of reading why the boys had winced, Art shoving his hands into the pockets of his cargos, rocking back and forth on his heels like a guilty toddler. Patrick just said, “Not brothers”. That seemed to throw her off kilter more than that thick tension growing in the inch of space between Patrick’s hoodie sleeve and Art’s bare arm. “Sorry, sorry. You two just… seem like brothers.” They laughed in that way only two people who want to be anywhere but their current standing is, grabbed their cigarettes from off the cracked countertop, and left with the ring of the bell above the too-heavy front door.
That night, when they’d curled up on the scratchy sheets of their motel beds, which groaned beneath each movement, Art turned towards Patrick, picking at his nails and flicking the detached skin somewhere across the room. “Why’d you say that?” He asked, mumbled through concentration, like lifting his lips just a micrometer further apart was some Herculean effort. Patrick turned over, staring at the blinking orange lights of the digital clock on the nightstand. “Say what?” Art looked up then, rolled his shoulders back, the thin pillow letting out a puff where his head met it. “That we aren’t brothers”. There wasn’t offense in his eyes, stormy and addictive in all the ways that made Patrick remember he was the worse of the two, but curiosity. Well, the obvious answer was that they weren’t. Patrick grew up one place, under some surname attached to ‘dignity’, ‘family pride’. Some surname no one ever bothered to remember the proper pronunciation of. And Art? He grew up under the setting sun in mid-July, allowed to dirty his clothes because they were never expected to remain white. Somewhere where grass was allowed to grow without getting cropped down to just above the root. All-American, sweet as cherry pie, golden retriever boy with a starched collar for church and an ever-burning fire on the grill. Art grew to know what softness was, and Patrick could play parrot, replicate it with enough accuracy to be recognizable, and enough lingering signs that it was an approximation to make people hope it just got quieter with time.
Then again, what really made someone a brother? If it was just the DNA, then that meant nothing. Patrick knew just what it was to be related to someone, and not have them be family. To love someone, but never like them. And wasn’t Art doing better then? Art had seen Patrick laugh, cry, trip over an untied shoelace and fall face first into a puddle. He helped him up after snorting a little, rarely one to fully laugh, like the sound was some kind of finite resource. And Patrick had seen the worst of Art, from his slobbery first kiss, the one where he bit the girl’s lip too hard and she’d pulled away bleeding, to the one summer he’d dyed his hair black. He fancied himself a philosopher at the time, something about ‘reflecting his inner darkness’. Even if Art claimed it to be there, that Patrick had grown so accustomed to seeing it he hardly recognized it as being bad anymore, he could never quite pick through his own admiration to find it. So that night, stereotypically, Art dug out his grandfather’s old pocket knife, the one from one of the World Wars, and cut a line across their right palms, Art’s just a bit straighter than Patrick’s. When they pressed their hands together, wincing at the pressure against the weeping gashes, they didn’t shake their hands, like the men they were growing into. Just held them there, flat palm to flat palm, dripping into the non-descript, darkly colored carpet, just looking. Brothers now. Art wrapped his hand in toilet paper, flicked off the rickety lamp with stained, formerly white lampshade, and went to bed. Patrick just watched himself bleed for the night, and then watched Art sleeping.
It was harder now to drive, with the pulsating behind his hand, like a miniature heart had grown there, occurring with each day spent driving. But they’d arrived in Colorado a night or so ago, spent yesterday making good of those cigarettes by a lake they didn’t bother to check the name of. Two girls had come by, never shared their names, and the boys didn’t share theirs. They all just passed cigarettes back and forth like they were secrets in their own right, like they weren’t all sharing saliva, like they didn’t recognize the sunkenness in each others’ eyes as matching the sunkenness in their own brains. Patrick thinks sometimes that he’s got cinder blocks tied to his feet, one’s he can’t see, and that’s why it’s so exhausting taking that first step out of bed each morning. He wondered then, if he walked out where the water swallowed up his lower half, and he tilted his head back to greet the invisible face of God, with eyes of stars and flashing plane lights, stretching his arms out like he’d catch the breeze in his embrace, if he’d sink to the bottom. When the girls left, and Art had passed out against the trunk of a tree, he’d tried. He was only slightly disappointed to find that it wasn’t all that deep. Art woke up when the press of Patrick’s wet boxers touched his thigh, and he didn’t seem mad. He smiled, actually, with the left side of his mouth exposing moonlit teeth. Patrick wanted to ask what there was to smile at, but realized maybe it was just him. He doesn’t know why he kissed him, or who started it first, but Art slinked off afterwards into the backseat of the car, leaving Patrick to curl his hands into the dirt until he knew how to carry his own weight again. They didn’t talk about it the next day, or the day after.
After Colorado, they’d gone to Nevada. Something about Art ‘needing the ocean’. They’d found an empty little dock to perch on, Art sitting at the edge to allow the soft, mid-ocean waves to lap at his skin like a dog. The ocean had always reminded Patrick of Art. He thinks it’s the stillness among the chaos that bears the resemblance. Patrick had always loved the ocean, some of his fondest childhood memories spent jumping over the incoming crash of water on the shore. If he had to forget everything, he hopes he’d fall in love with the ocean all over again. He’s sitting behind Art, but only by a bit, bare, crossed feet in line with his hips. “I was reading something the other day. Did you know Patrick means noble?” He huffs, watches the way Art’s back dimples and ripples with muscle, the way that his hair looks a richer gold in this light. His hair looks like the sun. Or maybe, the sun looks like it. “I don’t know about that.” He replied after a breath. He wanted to tease back, say that Art meant… well, art, but he realized that there’s not one way to define what art is. People argue on it all the time, and he’s not intelligent enough to be the one to define it. But it’s usually beautiful, even where it’s ugly. It usually evokes something. And Art’s all unscathed besides where he tore a patch of skin off his knee, wet and pink with the newly exposed layer awoken before its time. He’d fallen off a rock while trying to get a picture of the sunset. He deleted it afterwards, anyway. The colors weren’t right. Art was holding a bottle of something, unopened and dark, the condensation dripping in and out of the divots created by the spaces between his fingers. He sits back on his elbows, squinting under the glare of the sun, and in it he thinks he can see disapproval. He flicks his shades over his eyes. “Hey, Art?” Art doesn’t turn his head over his shoulder to meet Patrick’s eyes, just hums a little, shoulders moving with it. He’s staring at something. Thinking, maybe. He usually is. “Do you think, you know, after you go to Stanford, we’ll still be friends?” Art lifts his head, softens like he’s fourteen again, and Art, who fancies himself a philosopher to this day replies, “I think we’ll always know each other”.
Patrick heard something, maybe fate’s, breath hitch, as if something had clicked into place. Something had been decided for them, and for the most part, they were none the wiser. Patrick grins that right-mouthed smile of his, rests his back against the splintered wood of the dock, hands crossed behind his head. For now, he can only hope that decision is something good.