Red Light Run

by Baird Harper

  A small, fierce-looking woman in a skirt suit looked up from her desk. She pointed at Rick and said, “I’ve been expecting you.”

  “You have?”

  “Sure. You’re here to bury your pal.”

  “Emmit Page,” he said. “His wife’s already here. Buried, I mean.”

  “Oh, I’m aware.”

  Rick swallowed. “Do teenagers still leave graffiti on the headstone?”

  “And beer bottles and condoms and Ouija boards and—”

  “It’s a shame,” said Rick.

  A hollow smile creased the woman’s face. “You have no idea where the shame ends.”

  “Pardon?”

  “I can’t let your friend in here,” she said. “Not even for the great quarterback.”

  “Look . . .” He located a nameplate amid the clutter of her desk. “Look, June, it’s not Emmit’s fault that a bunch of teenagers—”

  “It’s not that,” she said. “I just can’t allow it. Not in a million years. Emmit Page’s son-in-law killed Victor’s wife.”

  “Who’s Victor?”

  “Victor’s the boss,” she said. “He owns the cemetery. I heard the news about your pal this morning and I’ve been waiting all day long for you to roll in here to ask me the stupidest question ever.”

  Rick scratched his head. “I didn’t know any of this.”

  “I suppose I believe you,” she said.

  “But it’s just that his wife’s already buried here, and—”

  “You’re really still asking me this?” She spoke loudly as if there were others in the room to hear it. “After what I just told you?”

  “I knew Glennis’s husband was in jail for something.”

  “Vehicular manslaughter.”

  “Yes but—”

  “But you understand now,” she said, her voice turning almost peppy, “that we’re done discussing this matter?”

  “I’m just trying to put the guy in the ground.”

  “Ricky?” she asked. “Is it still Ricky?”

  “It’s Rick now.”

  “Ricky,” she said, “honestly, it’s your truly terrific luck that my boss isn’t here right now to hear you prattle on about how we should help out your pal whose lush of a daughter is married to the piece of shit who killed Sonia.”

  Rick heard footsteps. He turned to see a young man in a Middle-Western shirt coming down the hall.

  “I know it’s not your fault, sweetie,” June continued. “But that’s probably why the good Lord timed it this way, so that I don’t have to watch you send Victor into yet another grief spiral. It’s miraculous timing, almost like that famous throw you made to your pal.”

  The college boy appeared at Rick’s side. This was a kid with some muscles hidden underneath the beer meat. He put his hand around Rick’s upper arm, his fingers pressing into the old self-inflicted scars. “Time’s up, dude.” And then they scuffled their way across the lobby, before Rick straightened his jacket and walked out on his own. He was still coming out of this daze the whole walk back to the car, sucking oxygen, cursing the woman and the college boy and the whole shitty way his best friend’s life was turning out even after it was over.

  “This goddamn town,” he said to the bartender. “I’ve been trying so hard to make it a bigger place, but it’s still such a podunk shithole.” He went on about his attempts to improve Wicklow, about his now-scuttled venture into affordable housing, about his subsequent conversion of the burned-down trailer park into a postapocalyptic paintball arena, and about his newest effort to repurpose the mill into an even bigger paintball venue.

  “I can’t imagine,” the bartender said, “why people don’t appreciate you turning our disasters into playgrounds.” Rick hated this man, the way he’d wincingly smile each time he refilled a glass. But then, seven drinks later, Rick didn’t hate anyone anymore, not even the awful bitch at the cemetery. What he did hate was how rapidly his drunkenness had come on, as if the dizzying rage he’d felt when the college boy grabbed his arm had made him weak to the booze, and now he was stuck here, miles from his house, too drunk to drive home, and drinking more still, trapped and joyless.

  “Is that what this is?” he moaned. He was in the bathroom now, retching into the urinal. The bartender had a portable phone to his ear, saying, “Yes, as soon as possible, yes, the quarterback, uh-huh, going to the mansion on Hill Road.”

  “How the hell do you know where I live?” Rick shouted. But there was no real surprise in it, nor any alarm when a team of strangers helped him so gently off the floor and out to the waiting cab.

  //

  “My name is Rick . . .” he said in the morning, wearing his hangover like a pale stinking mask, “and I’m an alcoholic.”

  “Hello Rick.”

  “It’s been eleven hours since my last drink . . .”

  Someone in the back groaned, a female voice he couldn’t place in the blurry crowd. “I didn’t mean for it to happen,” he went on, “but I lost my best friend yesterday, and the cemetery won’t bury him, and it’s harder than you’d think to get investors on board with an apocalyptic motif . . .”

  Afterward, Angela the mother of two with the jean jacket approached with a plate of Oreos. Every week after the formal session they stood together and kept a quiet, unpausing conversation. Anything not to be alone in that underground room in the community center.

  “Were you the one groaning?” he asked her.

  Angela waved her hand dismissively at the rest of the room. “Eleven hours of sobriety isn’t so bad,” she said. “It’s much worse if you can’t come in and admit to only eleven hours. You’re already back on the wagon, Rick. You’re fine.” She nodded sternly. “But what’s this about your friend?”

  “Long story.”

  “He died?”

  “Maybe it’s shorter than I thought.”

  “This was the guy with throat cancer?”

  He took a cookie off her plate and tried to explain. Angela came from someplace else—Indiana or Iowa—so it was all new to her, the story of Janice’s murder, the years of Emmit living in infamy, the troubles Glennis had found in her own life.

  “Oh sure, I’ve seen the wife’s grave,” Angela said. “I take walks through Oak Hill sometimes. The teenagers. Jesus. What the hell is wrong with people?” She downed her coffee then glared hatefully into the empty paper cup. “I don’t know, maybe the rust is to blame.”

  “The rust?” Rick asked.

  “All these cancers going around. I feel like it must be all the rust, and the runoff. Like it’s gotten into the groundwater. Nothing but oxidation and decay. There’s your apocalyptic motif.” Angela shook her head, then looked at him more forcefully. “Cremation,” she said. “Trust me.”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Your friend, he wanted depraved teenagers humping all over his final resting place too?”

  Over Angela’s shoulder, Rick watched a pair of men chatting with a younger woman. Her back was to him, but her body made a nice shape under the sweatshirt.

  Angela shuffled into his line of sight. “You need to get past this, Rick, and quick. Or else you’re gonna be in here eleven hours later every day this week. Burn him, scatter him, move on.”

  The young woman in the sweatshirt excused herself from her conversation and drifted toward the table of refreshments. She moved her hand over the plates, touching cookies and pretzels, then deciding against them. Finally, she put her hand into a bowl of crackers, lifting one to her face.

  Janice.

  //

  “You could’ve warned me about the cemetery,” Rick said as he put his car in gear.

  Glennis drew her seat belt across her torso, then decided against it. “I was pretty out of it yesterday.”

  “And today—what? You’re sober?”

  “I do appreciate you trying to arrange it.” Her voice sounded washed out, almost kindly in its exhaustion. “I do wish we could bury him with my mom.”

  “Well, trust m
e,” he said, “it’s not gonna happen.”

  Glennis held the last nub of a cracker in her fingers. As the car picked up speed, she rolled down the window and set it free.

  “Isn’t there a Bohemian cemetery out on the state highway?” he asked.

  Glennis shrugged.

  “What about cremation?” he asked.

  She rolled the window back up.

  “No?”

  “I’m thinking,” she said.

  “We could scatter the ashes, at the quarry maybe. Just you and me.”

  “The quarry?”

  “Your dad and I used to hang out there as kids. Everyone did. We threw parties there, after big games. It was a special place. It was where cheerleaders lost their virginity to football players.”

  Glennis unzipped her purse. “I lost my virginity to an apocalyptic paintball entrepreneur.”

  “Jesus, Glen—” He took his foot off the pedal as they approached the intersection at the center of town, Motel Wicklow slowing down on their left. “I don’t know. We’ll scatter him somewhere. The point is I don’t think your dad would be served by a bunch of people standing around talking about him while, you know, trying not to talk about him.”

  Glennis looked at the motel. “I have such a headache.”

  “It goes away eventually,” Rick explained. “I can coach you through the first few days of being clean, but what you really need is a sponsor.”

  “I’m not so sure about this.”

  He glanced sideways. “You’re not sure about cremation or sobriety?”

  The red light held them between the motel and the bar, with no cars passing in the other direction. Glennis pulled a beer can from her purse, snapped back the ring, and took a drink.

  “Great, Glennis. I can tell you’re really serious about your sobriety.”

  “The light’s green, Rick.” As he accelerated down the road she took a long drink and then another, tipping the can back a half dozen times in a row and then dropping the empty into the cup holder.

  “Okay,” she said, as they pulled up to her father’s house. “I think I can do it.”

  “Do what?”

  “Yeah,” she said. “I’ll go along with it, but there’s somewhere you’ve got to take me first. Tomorrow.”

  “What are you talking about, Glennis?”

  “Cremation,” she said. “You’re right. It’s the right thing to do. Let’s do it. Okay then. But first I need this one favor from you.”

  //

  Rick drove home and sat in the car in the garage with the engine off, smelling her boozy breath still inside the cabin, staring at the gleaming dots of beer on the rim of the can, the prints where her lips had touched the aluminum. He leaned over and smelled the beer inside the can, the pooled glint of one last sip lying at the bottom. He tried to shake off the urge. He was being set up, he told himself. She was undermining him. She was getting back at him. He pulled his hand away from the aluminum, crossed his arms. But then he felt again the raised scar tissue on his biceps, the initials of his best friend’s wife.

  “But I didn’t do it,” he said to no one.

  And no one listened.

  He looked at the beer in the cup holder.

  “Don’t do it,” he said.

  He lifted the can.

  He felt the tiny liquid weight inside.

  //

  On the way to his meeting the next morning Rick added up the hours since that sip. And then the smaller number of hours since he’d gone back into the car in the middle of the night to shake the last last drops of beer onto his tongue.

  “Shit,” he said, staying in the car, staring at the community center door. “Shit . . . Shit . . . Shit . . .” The whole hour slid by this way—cursing, radio on, radio off, his hand occasionally finding the door lever before pulling away again. It was Angela he couldn’t face. Or perhaps she was the only one, and it was the rest of the room he feared. The door to the community center opened and the familiar faces made their way out into the parking lot. Then Glennis emerged.

  “This isn’t your meeting!” he shouted out the window as he swung his car up to the curb. “This is a meeting for people who actually want to get clean.”

  Glennis squinted into his car. “Rick?”

  “This is my group, Glennis. And you’re not even trying to be sober.”

  “I’m trying,” she said in an unbothered voice. She was dressed up in a skirt and blouse, her hair down, makeup putting some color back into her face. “Anyway, where’ve you been?”

  “I’ve been trying like hell not to drink.”

  “Yeah, I hear that.” She tugged the door open and slid onto the passenger seat. “We can pick up the ashes this afternoon, but I need that favor first.”

  As they drove down the state route, Rick could feel his rage giving up on him. Glennis’s touch with the radio felt oddly magical, transitioning from rock to bluegrass to a sensual electronica that ran a warm thumping knife under his ribs. He just drove and listened and let his mind go empty while she fidgeted with her bracelets, occasionally dipping her hand into her purse for a flask.

  The prison appeared in the distance, the watchtowers first, then the concentric brambles of razor-wire fencing, the stretches of matted grasses in between, not yet recovered from the long winter.

  “How long does this usually take?” he asked.

  “There’s a lot of waiting for doors to buzz open.” She stiffened as the car nosed into the checkpoint. Rick expected her to do the talking, but she only grinned anxiously at the guard.

  “Here to visit Hartley Nolan,” Rick declared.

  The guard said, “Didn’t expect two of you.”

  “He’s staying in the car,” Glennis finally managed.

  Rick parked at the edge of the lot where some hollowed tree segments had been piled beside a dwindling mound of gray snow. Glennis disappeared into the building. The radio turned stale. Commercials across the dial. The guard in the checkpoint hut came out onto the blacktop to look at a prop plane buzzing in the southern sky.

  “Don’t worry,” the guard said, ranging closer. “They don’t let ’em laze around afterward.”

  “Pardon?”

  “The conjugal,” the guard said. “They only get about forty-five minutes.”

  Eventually Glennis reappeared, the collar of her sweater turned under, her hair tied back in a ponytail. She got into the car without a word and they rode in silence back through downtown Triton, until he asked if she wanted to get lunch.

  “I’m not hungry,” she said. “But okay.”

  At a riverfront café near the casino, she ordered a gin and tonic as the maître d’ handed out menus. When the waitress arrived, Glennis reordered the drink. Rick asked for a burger and an iced tea.

  “Honestly, Glennis,” he said as the waitress walked away, “it doesn’t look like you’re even trying.”

  “Can we fix me next week?”

  “It doesn’t work that way.”

  “It needs to,” she said. “Right now it does. My husband’s in a cage and my father’s in an oven, so I could actually use this cocktail.”

  The waitress set the drinks in front of them, then scurried away.

  Rick leaned forward. “Is this my fault, Glennis?”

  “Is what your fault?”

  “You,” he said. “The state you’re in. Am I the one who fucked you up?”

  “That’s an interesting choice of words.”

  “I’m not asking for forgiveness, Glen. I was a piece of shit back then. I was a drunk. But I do need to know how bad I’m supposed to feel. I need to know the toll I’ve taken.”

  Glennis took a long drink. “Did you know,” she finally said, “that there are people in town who still think you killed my mother?”

  “Rumors never die,” he said, looking across the gray river at the big pink hotel. “I was on a submarine when it happened. It took a while for the police to figure that out, but you know that, right? That I was in the middle of the
Atlantic Ocean? That I was under the Atlantic Ocean when it happened?”

  “I know.” Glennis reached for her drink again, but behind the glass he could see a reddening around her eyes. “And my dad was in Taiwan on business . . .” she added in a wearied voice, as if it were a school fact she’d been made to memorize.

  “That’s right,” he said.

  Tears squeezed from the corners of her eyes. “I know this is weird,” she said, “but I sometimes wish someone who’d loved her had been the one to do it. For her sake, you know, not to have been so alone at the end.” She tipped the glass back and back until the ice collapsed onto her face. Then she busied herself wiping her mouth and cheeks, her eyes. The food arrived and Glennis looked suddenly hungry, so he cut his burger in half and ordered her another cocktail, and then he drove her back to her father’s house and he left her on the couch and went out and sat in his car in the driveway trying to conjure again the sight of Janice’s face in that window.

  //

  The next day, he drove over to Emmit’s house, where dozens of people had gathered. Some of Rick’s old high school buddies were there, men he’d have nothing to say to that didn’t revolve around two-a-days in August or last-second Hail Marys. A throng of Emmit’s former co-workers mingled in the kitchen, and the dining room was full of women who’d worshipped Janice in high school, or hated her. Either way they’d have taken some satisfaction in her fall from grace, though he imagined the years since her murder would have dulled that cynicism into a cautionary tale they’d probably told their teenage daughters.

  Glennis made her way over to Rick, towing a prim stylish couple she introduced as Hartley’s parents. The mother wore black pearls. The stepfather was a man in pleated pants with a dapper Indian accent. They spoke kindly of Emmit, murmuring their sorrow upon hearing the news, remarking resignedly at how insufficiently they’d known him. Rick nodded and nodded. Glennis drifted off into the crowd.

  “Tell us,” Hartley’s mother hissed as soon as her daughter-in-law was out of earshot, “is Glennis still drinking?”

  Rick looked around the room. “She’s certainly grieving, ma’am.”

  “Yes, but—”

  There was a commotion in the living room, and the crowd hushed as Glennis climbed on top of a chair. “Thank you, everyone, for coming . . .” she said. Rick could feel the mother-in-law’s attention still hanging on him, but he kept his eyes trained on Glennis. “My father was born here and he died here,” she began. “But in between, he mostly stayed away. Early on, travel was just something a young salesman had to do. But later, when he could’ve taken up with the home office full-time, he stayed on the road for reasons I know you all can imagine. And later, when I began to grow up, he moved us away from Wicklow entirely.” She crouched, then stood up again with a dark ceramic urn now in the crook of her arm. Seeing the urn himself—his best friend reduced to a pint of dust on the arm of a grieving drunk waif—Rick felt unsteady too.