The Cellar
Page 3
I slid his glass across the table. He drank it in a single gulp.
"Let's go get dinner," I said. "I'll pay. Nice steak or something. Whatever you want." I left my drink untouched and started to get up.
He sucked in air through bared teeth. He craned his head as if hearing something above the building. He blinked hard several times.
"One more drink. One more to honor Dave."
I tossed a few twenties on the table. I glanced over my shoulder at the bartender. He scowled. "Let's go. They're done with us here."
Tug spit a snort of laughter. "I fucking served! Put my life on the line so these shits could live safely. One more drink! For Dave!"
I glanced around the bar. We were not welcome here anymore.
"Tug. The car. Let's go."
His eyes widened, looking as if they would burst out of his head. "I'm going to get my drink." He pounded both fists on the table and the glasses and bottles jumped.
I was done. I was not going to be drawn into his madness. I had seen this too many times before, the sudden vortex, the sucking of everything around Tug down a drain.
I cast a backwards glance over my shoulder as I was at the door. Tug was at the bar, white knuckled. The bartender was backing away. The pretty woman's face has disintegrated into a silent caterwaul. Every other patron had risen.
I could have turned back. I could have pulled at my friend's arm. I could have thrown even more twenties across the bar. But I didn't. I didn't want to take on his problems.
And, in the end, what I did that night really made no difference. Not for what was to come.
9
In the time since the Sandman, I've tried to figure out what it means to be a hero.
Not necessarily to see if I fit society's standards.
But more to figure out if heroes are built on lies.
But some heroes seem be truly the stuff of legend.
That's why I can't be a hero.
There's that fellow Mad Jack from World War II. He led his men into the heart of battle when he could have run far away from the front lines. Smoking cigars and filling out paperwork.
No. He stepped into the bloodshed. He met death eye to eye.
He was the last man to kill someone with a bow and arrow in wartime. He captured two score German soldiers with a sword. With a sword.
He even escaped from a death camp.
Everything I read made him out to be a hero. No flaws. No cowardice.
He ate his own fear.
I was nothing like that.
I couldn't be a hero.
They never should have called me that.
10
A week later, back in the San Francisco Bay Are, I sat in the holding room in the county jail. Park was all smiles, his cuffed hands on the table, his tattoos sinking behind his orange jump suit.
"You got me again, man?" he said. "I'm putting your kid through college here."
I thumbed through the paperwork, flipping pages, shuddering at the photo of the old man lying in a glistening pool of blood. Did that much blood really come out of a person? It dwarfed him.
"What happened here?" I asked, swallowing hard.
"Does it matter what story I tell? Just do your job and get me out of here."
"Won't be a bail hearing until Monday morning." My throat was dry. I wanted a glass of water badly. But more than that, I wanted to get out of there, and to get away from Park. He was a disease, a murderer, and he was dragging me down.
When I stood up from the table after shaking his extended hand, I was skittish like an animal. Was the old man's wife going to be in the hallway? Was she going to pound me with her fists? Would I have to coldly face her tears?
Maybe it was time to drop Park as a client. Maybe it was time to make a change.
My career didn't start with people like Park. I never meant to represent the scum of the earth. During law school, I made my name being part of a team researching death row cases. We poured through files late at night, interviewed hard-to-find witnesses, and wrote passionate legal briefs. And we won. We lifted condemned men, innocent men, from death row.
I remember the tears in the corner of Josiah Lawrence's eyes, his leathery hands clasping mine, the word's fumbling out of his mouth. He had been railroaded. A black man accused of stalking and raping a white woman during a time when racial hatred seethed just below the surface. Evidence had been fabricated. Witnesses had been threatened with the revelation of old crimes.
He was to die, for something he had never done. The system had failed. Justice perverted. But I stood up against it. I stood for what was right. Maybe back then I was a hero. I was in the eyes of Josiah Lawrence. I was in the eyes of social worker Liz Morgan.
In those heady days, I easily slipped into the job of an assistant Public Defender and could have walked that path, but we suffered. Debt. The medical bills for Liz's sick father and then mother. So the enticement to work in private practice was a ripe hanging fruit, and I plucked it.
But in all that time. No more death row cases. Only murderous bastards like Park or greedy scoundrels like Spencer. Didn't matter how many accidents at his plant as long as the conveyor belt kept running and the money poured in.
I left Park in that holding room and walked back out through the halls of the jail. No one waited for me. No angry father. No weeping mother. Two police officers down the hall laughed about a shared joke. A family sat on a bench. Outside a handful of lawyers huddled on the steps.
Nothing had changed. The world spun as madly as it ever had. If I had felt some great shaking, some great need for change, the world showed no sign of it.
I did not go home right away. I drove through our town and out onto one of the country roads pulling off onto a gravel shoulder where I could look out over the hills. The grass had turned long ago. The winter had been wet, breaking the drought, and it was not long ago that the hills were covered in green. But then summer had passed without a single drop of rain, and the grasses quickly died and went to seed. They like to say that California's hills were golden, but really they were yellow and brown, matted with dead grasses, a tinder box ready to erupt.
I rolled down the car window and listened. In the distance a small bird twittered. The grasses waved to the coming afternoon breeze. It was stifling hot, hot enough that it gave the air a thickness, and made each breath an event. A lizard wiggled along a log and then leapt into the hissing grasses.
I loosened my tie, tore it from my neck, and tossed it in the seat beside me. I could not unbutton my shirt fast enough. The pressure was choking me.
In the valley below, cars hummed. The endless business of the Bay Area. Even here in the hills, I could not escape it. How far would I need to go?
The sun burned the skin of my arm that hung out the window. Late summers were brutal. An unbearable heat. But it was a lie. Soon enough, the winds would blow in from the ocean. The weather from the north would drift down, and the days would shorten, darkness winning over. Another summer would be gone. We would drift towards the winter. Another year lost.
I pulled my hand back inside the shadowy coolness of the car. I could not recognize my own skin on the back of my hand. It wrinkled. Veins bulged blue. Age spots had seemed to pop up over night.
I knew where the years went. I lived all those years. But they were gone. Lost. The myriad of people I could have been, the hundreds of paths I could have chosen, all lost, collapsed, desiccated like the mat of grasses on the hills, the memory of green faded.
I needed to make a change.
I started the car and drove recklessly down the winding road.
I came home to an empty house. I waited. By dinner I wondered where everyone was. By midnight, I abandoned the couch for the bedroom.
The noise of Liz stumbling in the dark woke me. The smell of whiskey streamed across the room.
"Out late?"
"I want a divorce," she said. "I'm done."
I sat up in the bed and rubbed my eyes. "Liz..."
That morning, with coffee in hand, I wandered the halls. I pressed my ear to the door of the guest bedroom. Her breath was heavy and regular. She was not going to get up any time soon.
I went back upstairs to wake Bridget. She was going to be late for school again. Her door was open. The bed a tangled mess. She was not there. My stomach pitted. Did she never come home last night?
I returned again to Liz's door, and held my fist, ready to knock.
That's when my phone vibrated.
I retreated to the kitchen.
"Tug, you made it out of that bar alive."
"No thanks to you."
"Still in Colorado."
"Back in town. And I've got the ashes."
"What's that mean?"
"Dave's ashes. I got them. The lake. The promise we made to each other?"
"You really got the ashes? What are you? Mad?"
"You can't back out of this one, brother. Don't you remember? We made a promise. A blood oath. We may have failed Dave in everything else, but we owe him this. We promised to spread his ashes by the lake."
11
We made that promise decades ago, and it was one promise that I knew that I could not break.
We swore that oath up at Dave's family's lakeside cabin in the Sierra foothills. We road tripped up there without parents – only the five of us teenage boys – one last blowout party weekend before junior year of high school, before we needed to start thinking about the future of adulthood and college and responsibility that loomed before us.
The five of us – me, Tug, Dave, Jay, and Lipsky – sprawled, Heineken cans in hand, on the shore of the lake. Beneath my thin shirt, stones pressed into my back. The air smelled of pines and the algae of the lake.
Overhead the stars were thick as if all stars in the sky had been spilled at once. Such a difference from how we viewed the heavens from the Bay Area where the light from the cities made the stars less visible. Behind us through the woods, the windows of Tug's family cabin burned yellow.
"We should come back here every summer," said Jay. He had pulled his shirt off and his skin was pale, almost glowing, in the dim light. He looked like a ghost. I almost expected him to drift off into the night. "Fishing, drinking beer. Just the five of us."
"And shoot shit," said Tug. "Next time we bring guns. No more Dungeons and Dragons."
I had expected Lipsky to protest. Lipsky said nothing, sitting quietly against a fallen log, the beer held in two hands by his mouth, his bony knees jammed together. He had been the one who had brought up his game set, and set up player sheets, dice, and figurines on the dining room table, only to have Tug swat them off the table. Lipsky had thought that since we were away from football and girls that we would fall back into our middle school ways.
I stared out over the waters of the dark lake. The surface was black. On the far side, two of the other houses were lit with occupants. Old time band music drifted lightly in the air.
Tug stood up and began peeling his clothes off to his underwear. "Swimming time, boys." Even then, back in high school, he was a bear of a man – well-developed muscles, hair on his chest, more man than teenager.
We all stripped down to our skivvies and joined him. The water was gasp-inducing. Icy from the distant snow melt that fed it. I ignored the cramping feeling in my feet and calves as I stepped carefully over the large slick stones. Soon I was deep enough that I could lean forward and glide along on my belly into the dark waters.
Without speaking, we all swam towards the floating dock where we had spent the day smoking dope and cannonballing and talking about the girls in our grade and how they might have changed over the summer or how we would have liked to see them change.
Jay was the first to the dock and I reached it soon after him and pulled myself up. The wood still held the day's warmth and it felt good against my clammy skin. I lay on my back and stared at the stars, not needing to say anything.
The last to reach the dock was Dave, which was unusual since Lipsky was the slowest swimmer and the least athletic among us. He could not even make the tennis team back in freshman and sophomore years.
Dave arrived with a sudden clang and I sat up to see what the noise was. Then I saw why he had been the slowest. He had brought a six-pack of beer. He handed out beers to the rest of us. "Gotta have some reward for all our hard work."
"Ain't no proper party without beer," I said. "And ain't no beer without Dave."
We popped the tops and were about to bring the cans to our lips when Dave spoke.
"Hold up a second."
Lipsky spit foam from his lips. "Oh, man."
"Lipshit already ahead of the rest of us," said Jay.
"The Dungeon Master in his mead," answered Tug.
"A toast?" I asked.
Dave stood on his corner of the platform and the deck bucked with the sudden shifting of weight and I could almost imagine all of us flung from the surface of the earth and into the sky.
"A promise," said David. Even in the pale starlight, I could make out his plump ruddy cheeks, the thick belly. He raised his can. "Make me a promise, boys."
"I can't get you laid no matter what I tell the girls," chimed Tug.
"I promise to drink all the beer you bring," I said.
"No, no, come on, guys. I'm actually serious."
We quieted until we could only hear the sloshing of the waves against the platform and the floating melody of our neighbor's tape deck.
He raised his beer again, and this time we joined him. "I love this place, man. I love being here with my boys. My best friends. The best moments of my life."
I swallowed at a sudden tightening in my throat.
"Promise me this. Promise me that when I die, when I am old and decrepit..."
"Like Mr. Gomez," Lipsky snuck in.
"Promise me that when I die, you'll spread my ashes on the lake. The four of you together, or whoever outlives me. Spread my ashes in this little piece of paradise."
That night we raised our beers, swore magnificent oaths, Lipsky's the most elaborate sounding like it came right out of the mouth a mountain dwarf, and sealed our promises with deep gulps of watery beer.
That night we had made a promise.
And now decades later the time had arrived to honor it.
12
I did not come home right away that night. Not after what Liz had said to me that morning. I did not want to talk about a divorce. After finishing up legal briefs in my office, I slipped to the bar across the road. I drank. A collection of whiskey shots. Somehow I made it home, lucky that no cops were out, lucky that I didn't drive straight into a telephone pole.
Maybe it would have been luckier to have done one of those things. Then I would never have gone back to the lake. None of this would have ever happened. The story would have ended.
It took me three times to get the key into the lock.
Liz was at the top of the steps, robe wrapped around her, arms even tighter.
"You're drunk," she said.
I shrugged and stumbled through the tilting hallway to the kitchen.
She was there when I finished dragging bread and cheese out of the fridge. I painted the bread thick with mayonnaise. I wasn't sure if it was a good idea but I was hungry and it felt right at the time.
"What I said," she said. "I should have said differently."
I took another huge bite of the sandwich, and then when my throat was clear I shoved my head beneath the faucet and gulped the icy water.
"You're never here," she said.
I steadied my hands on the marble counter top. This conversation could not last long. "I'm here every night."
"Not what I meant."
"This house, your new car, never a worry about money. I don't cheat on you. I don't hit you. You should see the things I see to know how good you have it."
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"You're not the man I married." Her eyes looked tired. Swollen. The edges thicker with crow's feet than I remembered.
"That's called life. We all get older."
She circled my hand in hers. "You got lost somewhere along the way. You broke."
I balled my fist. "You certainly know how to woo a man."
"Do you even see what's happening to Bridget?"
"You were the one who was supposed to raise her. Why else did you stay at home all these years? You're the one who fucked up, not me. I held up my end of the bargain."
Liz retreated to the doorway. "Randy's drawing up papers. You should get someone."
I choked back a laugh. "That bastard. Figures." He was an idiot. An incompetent attorney. Liz would get nearly nothing when I was done with him.
I woke up later to the sound of the oven clock. I peeled my face from the counter top. 4 am. The alcohol still flooded my veins. But I was steadier. No longer so shit-faced. But still drunk.
I grabbed the walls and descended the hall to the guest bedroom. My new home for a while. I fell back on the bed and the world only tilted a bit. I sat up before it could spin. I sucked more water out of the faucet and then sat hard on the bed. I flicked on the television for the company of the noise. Some basketball recap. The losers were finally winners after all these years. Just the opposite of me.
What next? I wondered.
Sleep would not return. Eventually I found myself pulling out boxes from the closet. Old family photos. Useless gifts from our wedding. Tax receipts.
Then I uncovered what I was looking for.
A boxful of the remnants of my childhood. A baseball cap with the bill creased in the middle. Movie ticket stubs. A wrist rocket, the band of which snapped when I drew it. My old high school year books for Junior and Senior years.
I was nearly done with the junk from my past when I found a folder with a Sharpie scrawled title. "Campaign Docs."