Logan hadn't cried since he was a teenager. He remembered vividly the helplessness that accompanies the loss felt when God chooses to take. He remembered his grandmother, in her hospital bed. Deep, gravel in a can, breaths barely seemed to escape her lungs and he knew that the woman who had helped raise him was on the way out. He didn't feel anything at first, she'd had a brain aneurism, what was there to feel. It was a bitch of a thing an aneurism. If it hits you in the right spot, you're as good as dead. It came later, on the way home from the hospital that he felt the deepening void of dread and shock. His mother had called and said that shortly after he left, his grandmother was no more. He remembered sobbing like a toddler who scraped his knees. Deep long bawl's of regret and the realization of mortality had assaulted him like a mugger in the night. It was different now. He thought of Jason and replayed everything they had ever done together. The memories, marching to the beat of emotion. Happy, sad, happy, sad, took him on an emotional roller coaster ride from hell. He remembered fishing, baseball games, family affairs, stolen girlfriends, fights, and drunken expeditions. The last one made Logan laugh out loud. He remembered being a shade under the legal drinking age of this country, a shade being about 4 years too young. 17, at 17 he and Jason had gotten into the liquor cabinet in his fathers workshop, hidden behind old fishing rods and boat parts, it lay. The cabinet that contained the forbidden drink of men, the cabinet that held the wildest of turkeys, his excellency James Beam, and the great daniels of house Jack. Logan chuckled even louder as he thought of how he and Jason had begun this one particular drinking mission. They had infiltrated the garage and had pretended that those bottles that lay in the cabinet were royalty. They were missing artifacts of an age not yet discovered. They were relics of prohibition. They were in fact, by law, forbidden. It added a layer of excitement as they cracked open the cabinet. Logan was the first to conquer this particular historic site, catching a wild turkey bare handed and drinking its guts, he was a man now. He felt the burn of adolescence leaving his body with every swallow the warm throw of manhood encased his body and after he and Jason had fed the fire of manhood to the brim, they decided why stop there. It was Jason's idea, trudging through the swamp and it was an incredibly stupid one. Logan remembered thinking it but never saying it because the way he felt, no poisonous animal, gator, insect, or swamp person would dare to trifle with the first slayer of turkey wild. However, the gusto they both felt immediately left them as they waded across hip deep mud. Jason attempted to bring humor to the situation by encouraging Logan to pretend that they were in the army, Vietnam, and given assignment to sack a camp that contained Vietcong spies. It did no good, they were both shivering scared, completely sober and getting sucked into mud deeper with each step. They must have spent 3 hours trying to get out of that sloshy hell. Logan remembered getting home that night, his father who was supposed to be gone until the next day, sat patiently as Jason and Logan scraped up the drive way. Logan thought fondly of his father for the first time. He had expected to be hit with a tire iron and locked in his room for the rest of time. Jason was close enough with the family that Logan's father might have whooped his ass too. But it didn't go down like that. Logan remembered looking at Jason as he looked right back at him, ready for the punishment designated for law breakers like them. Instead, Howard Albright took a deep breath, looked them up and down and laughed harder than Logan had ever heard him laugh before. Mr. Albright, to Jason, had looked on the verge of hysterics as he gazed upon these two idiots caked in mud so thick that they couldn't bend their legs. Logan thought of the way they probably looked coming up the drive, stiff legged, like a pair of penguins or guys who had just shit themselves, either one would have sufficed to sum them up. Howard Albright shook his head and stated calmly. "I can't bring myself to do it boys, its priceless, in addition to you two idiots looking like you've been tarred and feathered, it's just too good. You see those bottles over there? Those my good men are so watered down that you'd have a better shot of getting hammered on O'Doul's than you would by chugging that shit. You see boys; I've been keeping an eye on you. I've seen you both pining after that liquor cabinet like a couple of hound dogs. So I figure what the hell, I'll have some fun. Your mother and I took the liberty of draining most of those bottles at the last cookout we had, added about a gallon of water to it and put them back to see if we could trust you. I'll be honest it hurts a little that we couldn't but it feels a hell of a lot better now looking at you two dumbasses." Logan remembered his father at this moment in time with crystal clarity. He bellowed once more, called for his wife to come look, snapped a polaroid, and left Jason and Logan stiff legged, mute, and shivering there in the threshold of the garage.
