Читать книгу Whiteout Conditions - Tariq Shah - Страница 8

I

With the last of my loved ones now long dead, I find funerals kind of fun. Difficult to pinpoint what it is. I’m drawn to them. Call it an article of faith. They aren’t what they used to be. And I am not my old self.

I’m thinking of the deep boom and hush after the pastor shuts his thick tome of hymns, and the heavy groans of the pews when everyone kneels.

What comes to mind are the high school boneheads loafing around the holy water stoup, too rad to grieve, or who never learned how, never learned that it is learned, like formal dinner etiquette, or gallantry in the face of certain peril.

It’s the secret stoner altar boy glad to swing his censer, the blown-apart family uniting for a minute to ridicule the reverend’s lopsided toupee. The great uncle with trouble reading in the filmy pulpit daylight, his index finger trembling.

Or when I drift off during an old man’s eulogy, only to get clocked in the forehead with a truth bolt changing my vision of retired Honda dealers forever. At a certain point the mileage accrued by hearts, like any muscle car, is just too fantastic.

Once it was the apoplectic rage of a niece pacing the narthex, denied the chance to damn her uncle to hell, tell him she loved him.

Sometimes it’s the waterworks, other times, the hearse.

It was the pious haste with which Muslim grievers dug the grave, buried the doctor, how that left everyone in a swarm, a bit head-spun, and forgetful the dead’s dead.

The wholehearted embraces given me by Evangelists to whom I didn’t speak at all, the fervent strangers touched I’m there, who cared I’d come, each hug verging on a submission hold, and it’s the bright secret that won’t quit tap-dancing behind my benign expression that I keep from them, that ensures their enthusiasm and sincerity are squandered on me.

Or a jogger, sometimes there will be a jogger, who will gawk like a rubbernecker, or just keep jogging, maybe go a little faster.

Seeing my buddies in suits for the first time, a grandmother past remembering why she’s there. Sometimes it’s as simple as a song of tribute sung by someone who can’t sing at all. You see people for who they are, and they don’t mind being seen, and it’s lovely in a way, that unabashed flawed-ness in the face of such heavy exposure, perhaps never to happen again.

All of which would likely be overlooked were I choked up by the stiff in the coffin.

It’s everyone wondering what I am doing there. It’s all the suspicious looks—why aren’t you sad like us? How they all ping off me.

Shadowing Death. Handling death like a snake charmer fishing cobras from his wicker basket, wholly impervious to fang and by now safely immune to its venom. And how sometimes, it’s the other way around.

Funerals are kind of fun, yes. I’ve cultivated a taste. It’s become a kind of social pursuit. It was a kink, of a kind.

But now Ray. I see his face, the one in the photograph the reporter in the field held up to the camera, with its fresh acne, and his right cheek’s dimple deeper than I remember, and him already taller than his mother, and I’m having trouble sustaining a positive mental attitude. Now, a python’s double-jointed jaws, Death opens wide. But, what do I know about such creatures?

*

I consider putting all of this to big old Hank, who, after sucking down his third screwdriver beside me on the plane, gets talkative, wonders why I’m flying, what with the weather—Chicago had a heavy white Christmas chased by a short thaw, but the Channel 9 weather guy predicts a monster on the horizon. I say, “funeral,” as though it were a destination wedding.

He’s a day trader on the futures market. Manicured nails, plump baby face, silver cufflinks. He would think I’m horsing around, some sort of wise guy, and eventually expect a rational explanation, request a change of seats. But I’m coming clean.

“Ever play with matches as a kid?” I ask.

He clears his throat and nods, uncertain, as a pocket of choppy weather jostles the cabin, making Hank spill half his drink all over his nifty polka dot tie. After glancing down the aisle, he sucks the alcohol directly from the raw blue silk.

I pretend not to notice. Outside the window, Illinois’ patchwork of snow-dusted farmland scrolls underneath us, the color of month-old bread. The freeways and interstates carving colossal esoteric runes into it. The tiny black trees that suture it all together.

“Vince and I,” I say, “we used to slick our arms in Aqua Net and light ourselves on fire. Our new rippling blue sleeves blowing our minds. Funerals are like that now. Only everyone else is burning for real, and I’m completely fine.” I down the dregs of my coffee. “You ever do that?”

Hank buckles his safety belt, says he can’t stand landings, so I drop it. All this turbulence is getting to me, too.

*

I’m back home, braving O’Hare’s crowds—the holidays are through but concourse K is still a nightmarish glut of holly jolly backwash—slowpoke vacationers and duty-free shopaholics, Bing Crosby, and on-sale candy cane pyramid displays that all hound me faster for the exits.

It’s been a few years since I last saw Vince, who is on his way to get me out of here. We are off to Big Bend, to bury what’s left of his little cousin—Ray.

I heard about it on the morning news. I caught the tail end of the broadcast. The young face on the screen seemed an organic extension of something startling in its familiarity to me. The sensational nature of the incident pushed the story into wider media markets, I think. All the way to the East Coast.

So I gave Vince a call. I said I would come out. Give a show of support. Though I could have done less, I said it was the least I could do. Vince and his family sort of took me in after my own family’s disintegration.

The last time I saw Ray, I think, he was eight and I had just finished school. It was Vince’s birthday, middle autumn sometime. We cooked out. I remember Vince giving Ray his first taste of liquor, a swig from his Solo cup of Captain Morgan-and-whatever. Then spending the afternoon with them, shooting hoops in the drive, a few old folks in lawn chairs giving color commentary.

I remember watching Ray take that sip and Vince asking him, “How you like the taste of that?”

Ray made this sour face and said, “Beer’s better.” All the old folks ate that right up.

*

Slinking out past the baggage carousels, I have a post-flight cigarette that hits me so hard I swoon and gag like a rookie. But the parking garage fumes are a pleasant surprise. There is something I find nostalgic in the odor—all maple syrup and gasoline and the exhaust of a couple hundred idling taxicabs.

It’s been around five years since I’ve been back, and yet the puddles of slush by the wall where smokers shelter from the cruel gusts seem pitiless as ever, black and bottomless, an inky soup. I’ve missed even them.

Here the sky yawns white all day, then rips your head off like afterburners once the sun falls off the horizon. But when the cold comes, it comes like a dream, lugging the dark in a big black sack. And my body readjusts to the old song it knows by heart.

Planes arrive and depart. I know Vince’s circling around here somewhere, eyes peeled for someone I barely resemble now. I forget the kind of car he drives. It’s one of those big dependable American makes, four doors and the type of interior that’s not the leather option. The sort of car they don’t really make anymore, built with a once-fine quality and craftsmanship that has long since fallen out of practice. One of those made-up names that seems real.

But who knows what state it’s in. I smear out the smoke and wait on the outer traffic island for some kind of sign of him.

*

My dad never drank. That lent him a certain polish that Ruby, the other woman, must have found magnetic. He was always the designated driver, the voice of reason drumming sense into whomever was first to get rowdy at dinner parties, the one who really had no patience for Mom’s drunk juggling, and who more than anything, seemed to love to be the one to carry her up to bed.

I, on the other hand, loved it when she drunk-juggled. She always started off small. We’d be in the kitchen getting dinner ready, Dad either home or on his way.

“Hey, Ant, check this out,” she’d say—never when I was looking at her—and when I did, she’d have a couple fingerling potatoes going with one hand, while the other swirled a cast iron pan of chopped onions.

I would applaud her, then resume whatever homework, finger painting, or action figure brawl I’d been absorbed with.

A little bit later I would hear, “Uh oh!”

I’d look up again, and there’d be red and green bell peppers vaulting into the air. And then the salt shaker, a few tablespoons. By her third glass of merlot she’d be on to the chef’s knife, the cleaver, three or four champagne flutes.

One time, instead of the performance, I watched her face. Despite all that deadly hardware being airborne, her expression wasn’t one of deep focus, but simple amusement. She was only interested in my wonder, beholding this marvelous act, this peculiar talent of hers.

When she caught me looking at her, she winked. Then, calmly, she closed her eyes. Mom kept the spectacle going until a flute hit the floor, exploded, and we both laughed our heads off.

She was gifted with the hands of a surgeon. They never trembled, or fumbled, or missed, even in the numbing winter mornings and dark. Her hands were steady, clever instruments, and worked with an agile precision that I found beautiful to watch.

For a long time I believed her touch cured the migraines I would get as a boy. Her palms were dry and cool, soft as calfskin, and seemed to draw the pulse from its place behind my eyes. But the relief came from some other place, I think now.

She kept her nails plain, and whenever the Avon lady encouraged her to paint them, or worse, hinder them with Lee Press Ons, Mom would get this crooked kind of look and see her to the door.

She claimed she could do chainsaws, had juggled them before, but we only ever had the one.

After the divorce, her weird charm grew brittle. Over time, she became the sober, pragmatic one. What home had become eventually became normal, until high school started. Everything changes for everybody, but for us especially, since the doctors felt a lump in her left breast. Then a mass at the base of her spine. This was right around homecoming, and Dad, who had at least kind of still been around, began to venture further out to the periphery of our lives until he was more absent than present, more answering machine than man.

But she still drunk-juggled from time to time, around the holidays, or the date of their anniversary. I still clapped like hell. She died that fall, just before Thanksgiving. The funeral was sober, pragmatic.

I have no idea whether Ruby drinks, or whether it was his sobriety she found attractive, or just the veneer it cast—either way, he must have preferred her figure to Mom’s wildness. And I don’t hope he is dead but I act according to that assumption. When I find myself low on that, I simply wish it.

The way it goes. I don’t pull sour faces anymore—I figure dead or alive, he’s gone for good. That’s pretty reliable. It does the trick. Still—beer is better.

*

Vince lays on the horn when he sees me. I heave my bag into the trunk and hop in like we’ve done this a hundred times.

“Your hair is long,” I tell him. It’s past his collar, though it’s also receding.

“Need to get a cut soon. Caroline likes it.”

“So the lady next to me at the airport bar got bombed and would not stop pushing her dopey son’s deep funk band on me. Deep funk or free funk, I can’t remember. He goes to JUCO. He’s the next Ornette Coleman, so that’s something. No, it was liquid funk, but what that is I do not know. Playing a lunchtime set at the Cubby Bear tonight or tomorrow. Gonna be ‘a real toe-tapper,’ apparently.”

Vince doesn’t even smile. “Things are good with you, then.”

I shrug—at him, and at everything I could tell him, at all I could say in response, my hoard of thoughts and tidings and urges that want a voice, a breath. I keep them stashed. “Feels nice, riding in this behemoth again. How’s things with you?”

He twists around to scope out a gap in the traffic to merge into. “We’re managing,” he says.

The windshield has a hairline fracture knifing slowly toward the center of the pane, the one-knob-missing radio doesn’t seem to get anything but AM, and I’m up to my ankles in wadded Taco Bell trash, which I bury my feet in, searching for the floor.

“Could you not stomp all over my stuff, please? I need all that for work and if I give back a bunch of broke equipment to my boss…”

I hold up a plug head. “What, this?”

“That cable’s for the reciprocating saw. It’s not mine. Don’t monkey with it.”

“Maybe you shouldn’t leave it tangled up on the floor under blankets of garbage.”

“It was fine how I had it before you started getting your muddy, salty shoes all over everything.”

“Here, I’ll coil it up.” I root through the fountain cups and wrappers to the orange cord beneath it all and begin looping it.

“Eh, don’t worry about it,” he says. “They had a piano guy playing at the mall this year. Some Christmas thing. Thought of you for a second.”

“Flattered.”

Vince smirks. “Beneath you, forgot.”

“How are you, other than managing? What’s Caroline up to these days?”

“She and the kids are in Disney World right now. That was their Christmas gift—an arm and a leg of their old man’s. They’re staying outside the park though, at some high school friend of Caroline’s with a place in Kissimmee. Flying back sometime Sunday.”

“They must be a handful.”

“She made me zap my balls last month. Two’s just shy of too much for us.”

“Wendy was big on starting a family. Saw herself having five, six. A great big litter. Red flag right there, if there ever was one.”

Vince nods. “Who’s Wendy now?”

I wave away the question. “Ah, just a girl. You know. Came and went.”

Vince cuts in front of a van, into hectic traffic, his car spewing bluish exhaust behind us like a sad magician’s trick.

I just shrug.

The route gains familiarity, despite my time away. A few ancient billboards still stand, though they are largely dilapidated beyond recognition—just a smoky eye, half a restaurant logo ripping in the wind, the unnerving command Hurry!—being all that’s left of them. I struggle to find something to fill the vacuum of silence between us.

“Know any good songs?”

He shakes his head, and we’re quiet again.

As the road meanders west, forest thins into strip mall, and thick, crooked black cracks start riddling the road home.

“You missed our turn,” I tell him.

“No, I didn’t.”

“You did. Our exit was back there. We need to go north on 94.”

“We’re taking a quick field trip. Have to run an errand.”

“Traffic’s gonna hit any minute.”

“Just pipe down, will you? Giving me a headache.”

He pulls up to a drab McMansion with a high stone archway and a roller hockey net knocked over in the yard. There’s a pair of dark-tipped steer horns mounted in leatherette above a big glass door with a bright brass knob.

“Stay here,” Vince says, getting out. From the rearview I see him pop the trunk, hear the heavy equipment—more power tools, most likely—hit the ground. The lid thuds shut, making the car bounce a little bit. Then it’s even quieter than before.

I crane my neck to look around: not a single soul, no one around. Two minutes become five. I light a cigarette and get out to stretch my legs and escape the car’s reek of old fries and strawberry air freshener. Five minutes become ten and I stroll to the end of the driveway, where I can see, just beyond the T-intersection that we turned into, a street sign that reads “Evergreen Lane,” so bent it points to the pothole beneath it.

I look back at the house: not a creature stirring. I’m halfway down the block before I realize it, my feet like those of an old horse returning to stable.

I knew it was probably a lousy idea, going back to my old house. Until the idea came into my head, I hadn’t thought about my old place at all. It was a corny idea. I had no idea what to expect it to do. It was an ugly house, just like all the houses surrounding it. It was drafty in the winter and a sweat lodge in the summer. It slouched on one side, drooped, as if it had once suffered a stroke. Barely any backyard, no real front lawn. Hard water, orange water from the taps, unless you plunked a 25-pound block of salt in the softener a couple times a month. A basement that flooded every year when the pipes froze and burst. An attic overrun with yellow jackets. And the only thing shabbier than the aesthetics were the memories I still had of living there. But anyway, when would I be back here again?

I take a right at the corner, go up Evergreen Lane, even though I know Evergreen Lane, and Evergreen Lane never looked much at all like this. Though the land is the same—a soft rise just before the plummet that leads to the river and the concrete bridge leaping it that transforms into bland, interstate high-way—almost everything on top of it has changed. My feet keep going. I’m losing light, but feel it’s close. I search the stores and little homes for their numbers. I walk past an unlit credit union, a bargain store with guitars hung in the windows, and I worry I might have passed it, or forgotten the way, but that’s impossible. I go by a dialysis center, a seafood place, some kids trudging home with their sleds. I knew this place backward and forward.

Soon, there is a bowling alley, its sign of neon red pins already searing through the new evening dark. I slow to a stop. I’m standing in the parking lot of Holy Roller Lanes & Arcade. Looking around me, I see, one street over behind a break in some spindly, wind-bothered trees, the crooked house of an old neighbor, whose face resists my mind’s conjuring. Someone I didn’t like, or didn’t really know, or who was more a friend of Mom’s than of mine.

It dawns on me then—I’m standing in my living room.

Behind me, a car horn sounds, and there’s Vince, watching me, smoking out the window. “They made your street a cul-de-sac. Guess your old man sold the place when the alley opened up. Had to make room.”

“What was the hold up back at that house?”

“Needed to return some gear, borrow some good shoes.” He shrugs. Classic Vince, really, but still.

“Oh, a real emergency then.”

He snorts, gestures at the empty lot. “And this? Some kind of five-alarm fire?”

An ambulance screams by, making us dizzying blue and red until that recedes as the sound goes flat. I kick a hunk of asphalt into the middle of the lot.

“Expect the world to stand still for you? You need a hug?”

“Ah,” I say, “to hell with it.”

I bite my lip. One pain muffles another, and who cares. Then with a quick little tick, we’re the off yellow of the street lamp overhead. For that moment, we’re lit up, then we keep going.

*

Once we’re into a bit of open road, I say, “How’d that hand happen?”

Vince holds it up like he’s surprised to find it braced and bandaged. “Work accident. Hammered myself,” he says. “Stupid of me. There was a babe walking by. It’s not bad. Tingles more than anything.”

“You should get your balls zapped again. Maybe they didn’t finish the job.”

He coughs. “That was a joint decision. Me and Caroline are fine.” Vince adds, “It’s Marcy and Dan in rough shape…”

He fingers around in the change holder for his pack of Pall Malls. When he finds them he lights up, steering with his knee. We drift from the left lane to old tawdry snow—a running scab of gray snot where the road’s shoulder was. He rolls down the window. Cold air gushes in. The guy behind us beeps and Vince corrects course. I light one too.

He shouts over the roar, “They couldn’t identify the body. So I did.”

“How’d he look?”

“How you think he looked?”

“It was just a question, okay?”

“He looked like everything else Bullets ever got at.”

It’s so easy for me to forget things about people I used to know. Just hearing that name.

I remember trying to teach Bullets tricks when he was a pup. Shake hands, I’d command, tapping his outsized paw. I got bit one day doing that. Just a nip, but that’s when lessons ended, maybe a month before I moved away.

He was our friendly neighborhood dirtbag pervert Gavin Kwasneski’s dog. Even as a kid, Gavin was pretty foul, prone to peeping, cornering girls, lifting skirts, that kind of thing, but that was all one heard about back then. Still, the lore gave us all the creeps and whenever something new happened, we would look askance at him right before looking the other way, preferring thoughts less vile. Years passed.

One afternoon he knocked on my door. He began explaining to me the sex violations that landed him nine months in Joliet Correctional, from which he was freshly released—rehabilitated, a new man, he claimed, with a very off-putting kindness in his voice.

I never knew any of the people Gavin hurt, and aside from these encounters he barely registered in my or Vince’s life at all. He was just one of those things people bury as well as they can. Because that works for a while. One day though, as you’re going about your business, you end up tripping on a tiny little itty-bitty rock in the ground, the rock turns out to be a bone, and you can’t help it—you start digging.

Gavin had a puppy with him. He gathered it up in his arms.

“This is my new doggy,” he said, and held out a vanilla-white pup, its nose pink as a piglet’s.

“Hi, doggy.”

I remember the pup gave a yawn. Gavin dropped him; it hit the ground hard. Then they shuffled over to the next house.

*

“They’re shutting down the high school,” Vince says. He feeds his cigarette through the window slit but it flies back in, onto the backseat.

“Nice. I loved snow days.”

“Not for the weather—for the mourning, you dummy. They’re having some sort of memorial for him on Monday.”

Vince goes to swat out the burning filter with his free hand but he can’t reach. We swerve hard this time.

“Not even two feet of snow on the ground,” he says, “and it’s like twenty out. They won’t even think about closing unless it’s below zero.”

I tell him to just focus on not killing us. Keep a window cracked.

*

I love that funeral parlors are like fake living rooms. How they appear to be equal parts resort hotel lobby and sitcom set for the bereaved. The knockoff Turners and Titians proudly hung in the foyer, the bowl of Starlight Mints, the chandelier around which the staircase dovetails. The ashtrays, all at the ready, inside every desk and coffee table drawer. The raw wood aroma you get opening up the cabinets, of sawdust; the unvacuumed carpeting strangers trample with their dress shoes on, the film of spilt coffee burning on the gummy hotplate.

I love that it could almost be someone’s home, nondescript save the marquee in the drive, the brass plaque beside the doorbell. They try so hard, and yet the further one pokes around, the more abnormal it becomes—the bare cupboards, hollow clocks, empty closets, the absence of cohesion a family brings to a household, with their framed photos, dog-eared Sports Illustrated issues, their toothbrush cups by the sink and the general disorder of socks, muddy sneakers, dishes, junk mail that enlivens the places we inhabit. That there are no watercolor paintings, softball schedules, shopping lists, bright silly magnets—nothing is ever stuck to the door of the fridge.

The whole show—the bouquets and black-out drapes, the living room chapels, the organs droning out dirges to drum-machine beats, the discount casket coupons thumbtacked by the phone, padlocked basement door—none of it is morbid, to me, anymore.

I love the hearse, the motorcade following behind it, and the little paper tickets you put in the windshield, and running red lights, headlights on in the daytime. The little plastic hooks by which the living hang potted flowers beside the graves, like lanterns. I love the giant register everyone must sign. I love the bad lemon tea on offer, the stale cookies in their plastic tray, how there’s never milk, only powdered sugar-free creamer. I love that it’s all a terrible party thrown midday, midweek, at a house with never enough parking, nothing at all to do, that no one can stand to be in for more than an hour. Except me.

*

The problem was little Ray had Dan’s .22 revolver pointed right up his own nose when Vince and I got back from our emergency beer run. He was in the TV room, watching Bert and Ernie, just as he’d been when we left ten minutes before. He beamed our way as we walked in and kicked off our shoes.

“Hi, Vin. Hey, Ant,” Ray said, waving hello with the pistol.

Vince froze. “Where the hell you get that? Put that down.”

Ray hugged the gun to his chest.

“That is not a toy, leave it be. I got a surprise for you.”

“A surprise?” He jumped for joy.

“Ray, stop. Listen now: please place that gun on the carpet— nicely. Right now.”

“Why?”

“Just do it, please.”

Ray took a tentative step toward us, then a step back, as he thought it over. “It’s mine. I found it.”

“Goddamn,” said Vince, and he looked at me. I set down the bag of beer.

“Ray,” I said, “what about a trade, yeah? You give me the gun, I’ll give you—these…” I dangled the car keys before him. Ray pointed the handgun at me.

“Cars are better, bud. How about it?” I said, giving them a jingle.

“I’ll even throw in this king-size Snickers,” Vin said. “That seal the deal?”

Ray’s attention reeled back to the TV, to Bert and Ernie counting sheep.

“Ray. The gun…” I said.

“Fine…”

And then the thing went off. Startled, Ray’s hands went to his ears as he started crying and ran off to his room. Vince got the .22.

I started calling him “Ray the Gun” after that. Then that turned into just “Raygun.” He was “Raymond” before all this, a dweeby little spazz born with coke-bottle glasses and an overbite.

Vince likes to dispute this fact. He claims we both came up with the nickname. If being in the same room as someone who thinks of something means you think up the thing too, then yes, Vince helped. But he knows the truth.

I wasn’t close to Ray like Vince was. But I did contribute.

Ray loved it. It made him feel tough and dangerous. And then you have all the variations: Death Ray, Gay Run, Stun Gunner, and so on.

I suppose I felt good about making him feel cool like that. A nickname lends personality to the bearer, indicates a reputation, prior achievements of note, that there are people on your side—a tribe, however dwindling. Says, I have done things, I have friends. But all the nicknames turned out pretty useless in the end.

*

As Vince drives, I say, “Ray the Gun. Remember that day?”

He glances my way. “Dan broke a broom handle on me that night, that’s what I remember.”

“Dan’s the one to blame—you keep a loaded handgun in a shoebox under the bed with kids in the house, you’re asking for it. He ought to know better. Under the bed’s the first place they look.”

“You should have let me handle it.”

“Like you’re some hostage negotiator. It was not the smartest tactic in the world—fine. Did anyone get shot?”

He frowns at the window, changes lanes again.

“What use is there arguing about it anyway? Look where we are now,” I say.

He lets out a long, slow breath. “I remember us posting up on the couch after all that, just in time to catch The Undertaker tombstone Mr. Perfect. Not missing a beat.”

“No use letting all that beer get warm…” I say.

“Marcy kicked both Ray’s and Dan’s asses that night, actually.”

“And you beat mine. Nearly broke my nose. Don’t think I forgot.”

Vince wags his head. “Raygun. Damn…”

Remembering the bullet hole, like a shark’s vacant eye staring at me, lodged in the wall just inches wide of my left ear. The one and only slug ever shot off in my presence, that for the longest time I was convinced had my name on it. But the world had different plans for me, didn’t it. I put on my everything’s-fine grin. The world is screaming past my shoulder in a humming blur of frozen sludge and rail.

*

And then there was later that summer, the summer I left, and the heat wave that claimed over 200 lives across the county. The power grid couldn’t handle the strain and failed on the second night; everyone was plunged in a smothering dark that left everything tacky, damp, and smudged. All of us slightly addlebrained and reluctant to get the mail.

Leaving the front and back doors open only invited breezes that came in and swept through the house like the trapped air of a hot parked car. Playing the piano left it slippery and glistening with so much sweat I worried it would somehow warp the action on the keys. I didn’t play for days.

Vince was turning a little bitter, a little weird about me leaving, but we still hung out pretty much every day, drinking Schlitz or clowning around or griping about not having money, or planning Vince’s wedding, or having nothing to do at all, really. That summer sucked, for everybody.

We were all fooling around out in back, playing with the hose, trying to get a water war started against some of the neighborhood gang. The afternoon humidity made everyone too slow to choose sides, set ground rules, so it never really materialized. We mostly ended up sprawled on the porch, telling each other what we wished we had to eat—even though the fridge was probably full of stuff, it never looked good to us and even if that were not the case, the heat left us with little motivation to do much but moan and groan.

I wished for a foot-long barbecue beef and cheese submarine sandwich, butter garlic fries from the Lemon Tree diner up the road, a gallon of raspberry iced tea. Vince wished for thick wedges of cold pizza, a strong bloody Mary.

All Ray wished he had was popsicles, so we took a walk down to Bad’s General Store because they sold bomb pops. We were too lazy to find our shoes, so we just cut through spiky yellowed lawns and searing back lots in bare feet and towels ’round our swim trunks. Rudy Tomczak wouldn’t care about selling to shoeless kids on a burning day. We bought the last box.

We passed by Gavin’s on the way back, and there was Bullets tied up in the sun. His leash was looped in the tires of Gavin’s pickup parked in the bed of gravel outside his house.

The dog was pinned in that punishing midday blast of light and couldn’t get to the Tupperware bowl of old gross water that a couple pill bugs thought was a swimming pool. He was mangy and hyperventilating, letting the green flies roaming his belly and face have their way.

Ray started wandering over, wanting to get a better look. Ray was curious. He maybe thought Bullets was already a goner and wanted to check it out. We trailed him, brushing stones and twigs off of our heels, while the alien frequency of the cicadas droning rose and fell and made the stillness that followed somehow deeper and sort of blue to me.

Ray, shielding his eyes from the sunlight shafting through those elms, walked over. When Bullets growled, it was more like a purr of annoyance, seeing as he didn’t bother to move.

Nearing up until he was about within arm’s reach, Ray offered Bullets a lick of his orange popsicle. Like it was a microphone, he pointed it toward Bullets’ slack mouth, grew closer until the cold blunt nose of it landed on the dog’s tongue. I neared too, as Ray gently ran it back and forth like he was applying chapstick, letting it melt until Bullets tasted it, smacked his lips, and suddenly snapped to life and began lapping at it desperately.

Vince and I watched for a while as Bullets licked down Ray’s bomb pop and even took the popsicle stick. Ray rubbed his belly, shooed the flies. Well, I thought, Ray made a pal today.

Then Vince went back to the road to smoke in the shade there.

“Yo,” I said, tapping Ray’s bony shoulder, “time to go.”

“He’ll fry.”

“We’re gonna get in trouble. Come on.”

Ray frowned. “Would you wanna dry up like a worm in the road?”

“You’re a little puke, Ray. I swear.”

So, I get to freeing the stupid leash from the front tire it had gotten wound around when the dog must have tried hiding underneath the truck to escape the heat. The growl Bullets gave me was this gurgling in his throat. When he bared his teeth I clapped his mouth shut, held him by the muzzle, held it closed, and getting nose-to-snout, told him to be nice, I was helping him.

His growling unraveled as I shushed him and got him to chill out, but still, those blank eyes stared right into me, black as tar bubbles.

I said to Ray to give him some room, and unhooked the leash from Bullets’ collar. Then I stood and let go. Bullets immediately galloped over to the water bowl and drank it dry, bugs and all. Then he started bouncing around, all giddy to be free, and leapt into the trash cans, knocked one over, and started disemboweling the garbage bags inside. What anything chained up too long would do.

We were walking out when we heard a voice go, “No, no, no no—you don’t get to pet my dog. No one does. Only me.”

And there came Gavin from around back, coming toward us, sweating awfully. Glistening streaks ran down his face, darkening his sleeveless shirt.

He knelt next to Ray and casually took him by the back of his neck, suddenly trying to be neighborly. “Now, you know this is private property. You know this is my dog,” he said to Ray, shaking him lightly as he spoke. “You stay right there,” he told Ray, and Ray obeyed. So did I.

I saw Vince approach, storm-faced, pick Gavin’s hand up off Ray, and the whole world seemed to be reversing course at light speed. Vince was mad as a hornet, though Gavin had all kinds of weight on him, had all kinds of weird cunning. But Vince was spry. I almost couldn’t watch.

And Gavin was a little shocked, watching his own hand get lifted away like a hot pan taken off a burner. But then his eyes grew keen, sort of bright with a weird joy he seemed to want kept secret. But I’d seen it before—we all had, at one time or another. With Gavin, you never knew what you were going to get—sadism or whimsy, Hook or Peter Pan. But, however he did choose to behave, it was always with a wild leer like that, trying to be hid, trying to be—harnessed.

Sometimes he was the alligator, too. Endless appetite, never too far.

Shrugging off that small invasion of his personal space, he gave a sharp whistle to grab the dog’s attention, and after giving chase around the pickup a little while, managed to horse collar Bullets. “Sit down,” he commanded, and twisted the collar until the dog did as told. Just as quickly, Gavin’s mind changed.

“Move, dumb dog,” he said, and dragged Bullets back over to the truck, where he leashed him up again.

“Go easy…” Vince said. I could tell he spoke before thinking, the way he studied the dirt after the words left his mouth.

“I know, I know,” he replied, sorry as a cardinal caught whoring, as he got up from his feet with a little whine, came over to us, and loped a long sweat-slick arm over Vince’s shoulders. He began walking Vince around, talking to him. Casual as can be. Vince even let him do it at first, even when Gavin got real close and was whispering into Vince’s ear.

“I love the dog, I do. Lot of responsibility in raising animals. You have to be firm…”

When Vince tried shrugging Gavin’s arm off his shoulders, it became a headlock. The snare was triggered. Though he was much taller than all of us, his body was somehow both gangly and obese, like a tortoise in a too-big shell. Gavin worked him, smothering Vince in his armpit. Then he pivoted our way as Vince grunted, doing what he could to break it.

Gavin, playing the heel, mildly staring at me and Ray as Vince toiled under his flabby hold. Bullets, going into hiding under the pickup.

The seconds under that ugly gaze of his felt twisted and— outside of time, though it must have been only a moment, him watching us with this lazy, sleepy face, relishing our helplessness. Vince bucking madly then, throwing elbows into Gavin’s doughy paunch. Ray starting to cry.

And then Gavin, grating his knuckles back and forth over Vince’s scalp, muttering “keep fighting,” bringing the whole thing to a hard boil until he finally quit it.

Vince, deep red and sucking air, turning away to smear off the sweat.

“We’re just playing around, don’t be scared,” he said to Ray, this idiotic leer on his face. And as if it would prove his point, Gavin snatched at Ray’s towel. There was a brief mock tug of war. He gleefully hammed it up a little, then released him, chuckled and scratched at his prickly throat.

“It’s too hot,” said Gavin, himself out of breath. “Parents, cops—you tell anyone, you’ll be sorry…”

We all edged away until reaching the road. Gavin, bent double, hands on knees, watching us like a cross bull in the shade, before wandering around off to the backyard again, leaving the spilled trash all over the failing grass, where a couple Styrofoam plates cartwheeled from a weak breeze into the shrubs.

I took a final look behind me and there was Bullets, who barked some happy barks of goodbye before loping off to thrash around with the beach towel Ray’d left behind.

We walked most of the way back in a shaky, hyper, post-fight rush of disbelief. Vince smoked about ten cigarettes along the way. In a few days, there would show, along his neck, his clavicle, a swath of soft gray bruising, the imprint of Gavin’s arm where he’d gripped him. He said not a word about it. Sometimes bruises are a badge.

The subdivision was a ghost town. As we passed the wood sign reading “Orchard Park” at the turn-in, it felt recently evacuated, which I took to mean the power had returned. Vince said nothing at all for a long time, until he noticed Ray had gone silent too.

“You good?” Vince asked.

Ray nodded. “Thanks, man,” he whispered, and making his limp arm into a kind of swung weapon, playfully thwacked at Vince’s side. Little dude code for love you.

“Next time it’s your turn.”

Ray studied the grass, sounded a nervous moan. He looked to me, his expression—Is that so? But I ignored it as though he wasn’t there at all.

Still, he kept looking, his hands wringing themselves.