“Sometimes it feels good to get it off your chest.”
“Do you do that? Tell your story to a church basement full of strangers?”
“Sure.”
“Do you tell everything?” He shifted to stare at my profile.
“The meetings are only an hour.”
“Don’t joke about it!” He grabbed my forearm, and his intensity made me turn to look. We drove beneath a streetlight, and I saw his eyes were wet. “Think about the worst thing you ever done,” Fred said, and paused a long beat. “Is it part of your story? Do you stand up and tell it?”
I felt his hand on my sleeve, watched the road ahead, made an honest inventory. “I guess not,” I finally said. It came out half rasp, half whisper.
Fred’s hand relaxed some. “Why not?”
“Some things…”
“Yes,” my father said. “Some things.”
* * *
I drove a long clockwise loop, each of us thinking our thoughts.
As we paralleled a reservoir, getting set to turn south and head back to Shrewsbury, Fred said, “If you ever fell off the wagon, what would you fall into?”
“What do you mean?”
“What would you drink?”
“Knock it off.”
“You gonna tell me you never think about it?”
After maybe half a mile I said, “I used to.”
He slapped his thigh. “Well okay, then. You tell me yours, I’ll tell you mine.”
“First few years I was sober,” I said, “I had a two-days-to-live plan. You know, if the doc said you had two days to live, what would you drink? Jesus…”
“Keep going.”
“It was a long time ago. It was a crutch, a game I played so I wouldn’t have to think about the rest of my life coming at me.”
“Tell me.”
“I had two options,” I said, shifting in my seat, surprised it was kind of fun to talk about. “A summer plan and a winter plan.”
“Summer plan first.”
“Simple,” I said. “Rolling Rock longnecks. No cans, no shorty bottles. Got to be the longneck.”
“How many?” Fred said. “Six? Twelve? A case?”
I laughed awhile. Looked over, saw Fred wasn’t laughing: It was a serious question. “Never got that far,” I said. “Once I took that first sip, the daydream kind of faded away.”
He folded his arms and stared through the windshield. “What was the winter plan?”
“Take a highball glass,” I said, “and fill it almost to the top with crushed ice. Not big ice cubes from the fridge, not those crappy little gas-station cubes with holes in them, but real crushed ice from a decent bar. You know what I mean?”
I glanced over. He was staring like I was a circus freak. “I know,” he said.
“Then slow-pour Wild Turkey over the crushed ice. Bring it this close to the brim.” I showed him a quarter-inch with my thumb and finger. “There you have it. Summer plan, winter plan.”
He said nothing for a long time.
Finally I said, “Fred?”
“The sound the bourbon makes when it hits the crushed ice,” he said, eyes dead ahead. “That’s the thing.”
I nodded. “Warm on cold.”
Now I was looking straight ahead, but I felt Fred turn to face me. “You got both of those from me,” he said.
“Did I?”
“You know goddamn well you did.” He put a hand on my shoulder. “My legacy.”
I said nothing.
“I’m sorry,” he said.
I said nothing.
* * *
Later Charlene and I sat in her bed, pillow-propped against the cherry headboard. She wore sweatpants and a T-shirt and designer reading glasses that cost more than a good riding lawn mower. I watched her read a three-hundred-page magazine about keeping life simple. I liked the lines that radiated from her eyes and bracketed her mouth.
“You look cute,” I said.
“Don’t get any ideas. Sophie will be awake another two hours.” She flipped to an article about suitcases. “Fred go to bed?”
I nodded. “Tired as hell.”
“Did he enjoy the meeting?”
“Nah. He zoned out.”
“Old dogs.”
“Yes.”
“You two were gone awhile. Did you go for coffee after?”
“We drove around.” I didn’t want to say more.
Charlene closed the magazine and set her glasses on it. Then she put her left hand beneath my chin and thumb-stroked my cheek.
“I need a shave, I know.”
“Shush.” She stroked some more, ran the thumb around my lips, kept her eyes on mine. “You came back, Conway.”
I said nothing.
“You came here. I don’t care why. Maybe you were worried about Fred, or maybe you were worried Sophie would blab about whatever you all did this afternoon that’s such a big damn secret.” She leaned and kissed me, a soft kiss on the lips. She smelled like moisturizing stuff. “Thank you for coming here.” She set her magazine on the bedside table, clicked off her lamp, and lay down with her back to me.
I clicked off my lamp, stood, stripped, climbed into bed, spooned her in the dark.
“What’s on tap tomorrow, Charlie Chan?” she said, yawning.
“Trey and Kieu want to talk to me about something or other,” I said. “And I need to deal with Montreal and his muscle-head.”
“Is that safe?”
“Got help.”
“Care to divulge a bit more detail?”
“Mmph,” I said into her hair.
After a while she swatted my hip. “I said no funny stuff.”
“Ain’t nothing funny about this, baby,” I said, and wriggled.
When she giggled, I knew I had her.
Trying to keep quiet made it even better somehow.
CHAPTER NINETEEN
After, Charlene fell asleep, still on her right side. I lay on my back, my hand on her left hip, waiting to sleep.
But didn’t, and knew why. Rolling Rock and Purgatory Chasm.
It’s a state park—hiking trails, scenic views, like that. The big feature is a half-mile-long canyon with granite walls.
When I was thirteen and moved to Massachusetts to be with Fred, he wasn’t completely gone yet. He was a guy who couldn’t hold a job because he drank too much, but he wasn’t a pants-pissing, grate-sleeping, panhandling bum. That would come later.
He’d bragged about crewing for a race team, so one evening at dinner, mostly to make conversation, I said I’d like to drive race cars. Jesus, I was thirteen. I wanted to play center field for the Twins, too.
“Stand up,” he said, rising himself. He was buzzed already, and his knees banged the card table we used for dinner. His Rolling Rock longneck tipped one way, then the other, but he snatched and drained it before it went over. “I said stand!” He thumped down the bottle.
When I did, he said, “Hands like this,” and extended his arms, palms up.
I copied him.
“Don’t let me slap ’em,” he said—and then slapped my palms, hard, before I knew what he was talking about.
“Don’t let me slap ’em!” my father yelled, slapping my palms again. “Reactions! Quickness! Instinct!”
I got it. I was supposed to whip my hands away and avoid his slaps.
So I did.
Easily.
My father got madder and madder, his slaps wilder and harder, as I made him whiff. He stood there in blue Dickies and a matching work shirt with his name on the breast, beer breath rolling off him, just about falling down now each time he lunged at my hands.
“Quick little fucker,” he finally said, and turned his own hands palms up. “Now you do me.”
It was too easy. I nailed him four times in a row.
Finally he said, “Think that’s quick? That ain’t quick. Come on.” My father plucked his keys from the card table and a Rolling Rock from the fridge, started out the door, backtracked, grabbe
d two more beers, and led me from the apartment.
It was early July, the end of a hot day. We rolled down the windows of the pickup—a beat-to-shit Dodge that looked like whoever’d painted it turquoise had used a roller—and hit the road. My father showed me how to hold his extra beers by the top of the neck, to make sure they didn’t get any warmer than they had to.
After a while, I asked where we were headed.
“We’re gonna do a little rock running at a place I know,” he said. “See how good your reactions really are. You wanna be a racer? This’ll give you a taste.”
I never learned how he found out about Purgatory Chasm himself. Probably went there with work buddies to kill a six-pack or two.
Soon we pulled in, parked, climbed out. At seven thirty on a hot weekday, we had the place to ourselves.
A short walk brought us to the mouth of the canyon, which ran downhill from where we stood. Its floor was fallen rocks, some the size of my head, others as big as my father’s truck.
My father worked on his second Rolling Rock. A cooling breeze swept up from the far end of the canyon.
“What are we doing here?” I said.
“Pay attention.” Paytenshun. He drained his beer and flipped the bottle to shatter on a rock way to our left. “So you wanna be a racer.”
I nodded, but wished I hadn’t brought it up. Wished we were back at the apartment for a typical summer night: me building a model while my father watched the Red Sox and drank himself to sleep. Wished I hadn’t badgered my mother into letting me move here. Wished I was at home in Mankato, throwing a tennis ball at the back of the house while she washed the dinner dishes.
My father squatted to set his face level with mine. He teetered some but held the squat. “When you’re racing,” he said, “things come at you every second. You got to think big and think small at the same time, see? Can I beat that prick into the corner? If I do, will he get a better run off it than I will? Is his car heavier? Whose tires are better? Like that. You wanna know what it’s like, making decisions like that?”
I nodded.
“Run, then.”
I said nothing.
“Run!” he said, pointing. “Down the hill. Best way I know to build the reflexes, what they call the muscle memory.”
I cut my eyes down the slope, wondering if he was trying to kill me, or at least make me break a leg. You’d want to be careful walking down that slope, those rocks, most of them jagged, some of them loose—and no way to tell which until you put weight on them.
Run? Maybe a mountain goat could do it.
“Run, Mister Quick Hands!” my father said, his smile torqued, his breath Rolling Rock. “Test yourself! Run!”
I hopped downslope to a rock that looked like it wouldn’t move. Then to another, then another.
My father laughed. “You call that running? Looks more like a bunny hop.”
I spun. “Why don’t you do it then?”
His smile went even tighter, and I thought he’d come down and hit me. He had a couple times before.
But instead he shook out his arms, limbering up, and tightened his belt one notch. “Watch this.” He slipped the last Rolling Rock from his pants pocket, bit the cap off, spit it out, and drank.
And he took off.
And he was beautiful. Weightless, fearless, doing what he was born to do. The mean drunk in blue Dickies disappeared, replaced by something that was half dancer and half gazelle. I watched him dab from rock to rock, barely touching each. By the time the less steady chunks of granite shifted, my father was already gone two strides. He disappeared behind a stand of trees faster than I could have run the same distance on the middle-school track.
I waited, thinking if this was a test of race-driver reflexes, my father must have been a damn good racer.
Five minutes later he strode around the corner with a near-empty beer in one hand and sweat beneath his armpits. “You still here?” he said. “Didn’t try it yet?”
“I can’t believe how fast you went.”
He tried to hard-ass his way past the compliment, but his mouth twitched. “The key,” he said, pointing down the hill with his bottle, “you don’t think about the moves. Your brain needs to trust your feet to find the right spots. Get it right, you’ll be surprised how fast you can go.”
I looked down the slope and tried not to feel dizzy.
“Three,” my father said, and drained his beer.
“Two,” he said, and belched.
“One,” he said, and lobbed the green bottle over his shoulder. The moment it smashed on a rock he said, “Go!”
And I did. Three paces in, my head figured out what he’d meant about trusting your feet. Another three paces and I felt my shoulders loosen as I bounced from rock to rock. Three paces after that, my feet got the message.
I flew.
I didn’t even look at the rocks my feet were touching. Instead I looked far down the hill, picking the path I’d be following in the next five seconds or so. My feet acted on their own, touching, adapting, springing, my ankles always rolling just right.
Before I reached the bottom I knew I looked just like my father, that this was what I was born to do—reacting, skimming, racing, moving. Moving fast. Faster than anybody. Maybe faster than my father.
When the stones petered to swampy grass, I slowed in three choppy steps, cool beneath oaks now. I trotted uphill smiling. I wanted to do it again.
I cleared the corner at the final rise, took one glance at my father, and tried to hide my smile. Probably didn’t, though, because he cut loose with a big laugh I hadn’t heard since I was six years old. “Not bad,” he said. “Not bad once you got the hang of it. Feels pretty good, huh?”
I wanted to talk about the feeling. I wanted to ask how he discovered this place, these rocks, this running.
Instead I nodded and said nothing.
We stood side by side. Once I thought my father was going to put his hand on my shoulder. But when I half turned he scratched his side instead, put the hand on his hip.
Soon I said, “Again?”
“Energy,” he said. “I remember when I had some. Three two one go!”
I took off, bounding faster than I had before. After thirty yards I felt, rather than heard, something behind me and knew my father was on my tail. So I moved even faster.
“You’ve … got … the reflexes,” he panted, his drinking and smoking catching up with him. “But can … you … do it … with a hungry driver … right on your ass?”
We built momentum until we were skimming down Purgatory Chasm at a dead-nuts sprint. My father’s longer legs paid off and he pulled alongside me, needing only two strides for every three I took. “Can … you … do it when … the money’s … on the table?” he panted, and squeezed ahead half a pace, then a full one. With thirty yards to the finish he decided he’d won and eased into a fast jog, trying to win with style.
But I dug up the last bit of air in my lungs and exploded, running absolutely as fast as I would have on a sidewalk. Two strides, four, and I was catching him, his wind too far gone to let him accelerate again as I floated past, eight strides from the finish—
My father hit me in the ribs with an elbow.
He would spend that night, the next three years, maybe the rest of his life explaining how it had been a dumb accident—a wheezing geezer flailing, a showboating son squeezing a little too close in the excitement of the race.
It wasn’t any fucking accident. Fast Freddy Sax watched me pull alongside, knew he had nothing left in the tank, and threw an elbow that was meant for my left arm but caught me high in the rib cage instead.
The pain-burst blew up my instinctive running. I took an ugly flat-footed step with my left sneaker, one with my right, and sailed through space. Airborne, I actually reached forward with my left hand like a football player trying to extend the ball past the goal line. I was still thinking about winning.
My right elbow was the first thing that touched down. It shattered o
n a chunk of granite the size and shape of a straight-six engine block.
An instant later, my head hit the same rock. But I think I was already knocked out.
* * *
At seven thirty the next morning, Sophie and I sat in my truck in the Shrewsbury High School parking lot. We were waiting for a bus; Sophie was headed for a Girl Scout camping weekend down on Cape Cod.
The parking lot was a nuthouse: thirty or more minivans and SUVs spilling girls, dads hood-leaning and chatting, moms smearing sunblock on their daughters, pressing money into pockets, triple-checking things they’d double-checked at home.
I’m no expert, but I could see almost all the girls were a year or two younger than Sophie. She was quiet for a change, nervous. I thought I knew why.
Her first two years, she was more or less raised by her sister, Jesse, who was seven when Sophie was born. Those two years were the tail end of Charlene’s meth-and-crack career, when the state Department of Social Services took her daughters away and placed them with her sister. It was the kick in the ass Charlene needed; she’s been bootstrapping ever since. Now she owns a transcription-and-translation company that’s worth a couple million, easy.
For the most part Sophie acts grown up as hell, but since the girls went back to their mother nearly a decade ago, she’s never been away for anything more than a one-night sleepover.
As two yellow buses rolled in nose to tail, I touched Sophie’s head. “Thursday, Friday, Saturday nights, home by dinner Sunday. Piece of cake.”
“This is training-wheels camp,” she said. “This weekend is to get all the little girls”—she made a slicing gesture at the minivan in front of us—“ready for the real three-week camp in August.”
“So?”
It was quiet thirty seconds. Finally Sophie said, “So what if I don’t want to go for that long?”
“Then you won’t.”
“Mom will make me.”
Hell. She was probably right about that. Charlene was happiest at work, didn’t like it when kid schedules got in the way. She probably should’ve hired a nanny a long time ago but had refused for the same reason she stayed in her smallish house: She didn’t want the girls feeling like they were something special.
Purgatory Chasm: A Mystery Page 19