Buy the Ticket, Take the Ride

by Sweany, Brian;

  “The actress who plays Harley in Guiding Light. Of course, it’s Beth Burke, dumbass.”

  “What’s she want you for?”

  “For a date. Beth wants to go out with me on a date.”

  “You and Beth…dating?”

  “Don’t get carried away,” I say. “There’s a difference between a date and dating.”

  Hatch mumbles something under his breath. Or it might be the shot of Jägermeister I just swallowed rendering me temporarily deaf. Jesus, that shit is nasty.

  “What’d you say, Hatch?”

  “I said that if you guys last the rest of the summer I’ll give you my fucking truck.”

  Hatch isn’t offering much. He owns a year-old teal-green Ford Ranger rear-wheel drive pickup that has a four-cylinder engine, the towing capacity of a one-legged Shetland Pony, and a tendency to careen off the road if you so much as ask for extra ice at a fast-food drive-thru.

  “Keep your truck, dickhead,” I say.

  I force down four more shots of Jägermeister over the next mile and a half of river. Predictably, we fall behind Derek and Claire’s canoe. We catch up to them at the exact wrong time.

  “Oh shit.” I try look away but not soon enough.

  Hatch is also caught off-guard. “What, Fitzy?”

  “It’s Derek.”

  “Dick games?”

  “Dick games. Looks like Helicopter Man.”

  We’re in a shallow area. Hatch beaches the canoe on a patch of loose gravel. “I hate fucking Helicopter Man.”

  Derek has been drinking basically since the Waffle House. Claire sits in the front of the canoe. Derek just took a piss, and now he’s standing up in the back of the canoe, his shorts down to his knees. Three canoes float by, including an older couple scarred for the short remainder of their lives. Derek has a beer in his left hand, a cigarette in his right hand, and in the middle hangs his naked, semi-hard phallus for the whole world to see.

  First Derek moves his hips in a circle, sending his dick in a counter-clockwise spiraling motion. “Helicopter Man!”

  Next he rotates each hip forward and back, his dick flipping from right to left. “Ping Pong, Ping Pong, Ping Pong!”

  Then he rocks his hips forward and back, his dick flopping up and hitting him in the belly then going back between his legs and hitting him in the balls. “Jai Alai, Jai Alai!”

  Claire is embarrassed, right up to the moment Derek talks her into flashing him. She thinks no one notices. We all notice. Her breasts are small but nice.

  It’s getting well into the afternoon. Our flotilla is crawling the last mile to the livery. Hatch has stopped trying to steer, letting the current spin us in circles. Every movement in our canoe is telegraphed by the shuffling of a carpet of empty aluminum cans.

  Hatch throws an empty beer can at me.

  “Jesus, Hatch. Do you have to be a constant fucking roughhouser?”

  He ignores me, throwing another beer can at my face. “You going, Fitzy?”

  “Going where?”

  “Off the bridge.”

  A century-old railroad line runs through Empire Ridge. That line crosses the Sycamore in the form of a rusted iron truss bridge just northeast of the canoe livery. About twenty-five, maybe thirty feet separates the water from the railroad tracks. We’ve made the jump numerous times. It’s harmless, assuming you avoid the rocks and tangles of tree roots you can’t see beneath the Sycamore’s tawny surface.

  We float under the bridge. I look up, smiling. “How about I jump off the top, Hatch?”

  “You’re shitting me.”

  “Nope.”

  I’ve seen one person do it before. You climb the actual ironworks to the top of the bridge. It doubles the height from track level. This is the jump that kills people.

  I find the idea of it irresistible.

  We beach our two canoes at the base of the bridge on the west bank of the Sycamore. I start climbing. My right hand moves from one tree root or sapling to the next, careful to avoid the thorns of the boysenberry bushes that have naturalized along the embankment. I reach the level of the train tracks.

  The hot, sticky creosote smell hits me with the force of memory. Memories of walks with Grandpa George. The railroad ties baking in the sun. The crickets chirping. The boysenberry bushes. I don’t believe in messages from the grave. But if I did, somebody is talking my fucking ear off.

  Hatch has followed me up. “You know, you don’t have to do this. It’s still quite a ways up there to the top.”

  I follow his eyes to the top of the bridge. “I don’t have to do this, but I need to do this.”

  “Suit yourself, then.”

  Hatch jumps, but I keep climbing. I move quickly, the rusted iron hot enough to burn bare flesh. The rivets and joints give secure footing all the way up, although I cut myself in a half-dozen places. The chants of “Go! Go! Go!” urge me forward.

  I reach the top. The air is heavy, motionless save for the waves of visibly humid heat coming off the bridge. That’s what air does in July in Indiana—it hands you a wet fur coat and says, “Enjoy!”

  My knees are shaking. I make the mistake of looking down. What’s the rate of descent for a near-two-hundred–pound object from this height? I used to know this type of shit in high school. I want to say your weight doesn’t fucking matter, something along the lines of your velocity in feet per second is equal to the distance you had already fallen. Fifty, sixty miles an hour—that sounds about right. Fuck. This is going to hurt.

  My arms at my side, I turn my back to the water. I bend my knees, springing up and out from the bridge. I do a back flip with my eyes open. I see the bridge, the sky, the river, and then the bridge again. The fall is fast. My stomach is in my throat. The wind rushes through my ears.

  I hit the water.

  The force of the impact twists my right ankle, wrenches my arms up over my head like they’re made of rubber. A huge booming sound slaps my ears as the water closes over the top of my head. It feels like somebody has punched me in the face.

  I hit bottom.

  There aren’t any tree limbs or rocks. But my feet are stuck in the thick, unyielding mud.

  I try to push off the bottom with both feet. My bad ankle lets me know what it thinks about that. I’m stuck a good fifteen feet below the surface of the Sycamore.

  And I’m running out of air.

  “Swim, Hank. Swim goddammit!”

  It’s a disembodied voice. My father, maybe? Jesus back to annoy the fuck out of me? Whoever it is, I listen. I open my eyes to try and see. I’m surrounded on all sides by a green-brown darkness. A ribbon of yellow, heaven-like haze dapples overhead.

  A cascade of bubbles roll out of my mouth as I scream underwater, wasting precious oxygen. I swallow a mouthful of river water. As my panic begins to acquiesce to resignation, I give one last kick with my good left foot.

  It’s out! I’ve managed to dislodge my left foot from the muck. I bend down, grabbing my sprained ankle with both hands. I heave my injured foot out of the mud. Reaching, I clap my hands together as if I was an angel praying, or Susanna Hoffs walking like an Egyptian. My arms doing all of the work as I rise up. The water burns my lungs.

  I break the surface to the cheers of my friends. Dirty river water and bile shoots out my mouth in multiple heaves as I crawl ashore. My ankle is already swollen. My shoulders hurt. My ears are ringing. My face is warm just above my lips, the blood pouring out of my nose.

  Someone once told me your body forces you to awaken from dreams of jumping off high places before you land, because the psychological trauma of landing can kill you.

  Today I landed. Death took its best shot at me, and it pussied out.

  Or did it? As much as I might want this to be some type of Messianic bookend to these last few years, my sins washed away in the muddy shallows of the Syca
more River, life just isn’t that perfect.

  I forgot to take my wallet out of my shorts when I jumped off the bridge. There’s your fucking bookend, and it isn’t Messianic. It sucks.

  Somewhere on the bottom of the Sycamore River, folded alongside my driver’s license, my college ID, and the last seven dollars I had to my name, my faceless belly dancer is drowning alone.

  Chapter fifty-one

  “Nervous?”

  “About what?”

  “Your big date.”

  I made a jar of sun tea for Mom today. She loves sun tea. About halfway into trimming her goldmound spirea bushes, she invited me out on the back porch for a drink. We talk between sips.

  “It’s just Beth we’re talking about.”

  Mom and I have reached an understanding, if not a full-on truce. And barring an actual how-to manual for dealing with all the shit of these last eighteen or so months, we just woke up one day, stopped surviving and started living. That, plus she now gives me plenty of heads-up before her dates with Tom.

  “Hank, you’ve had a crush on that girl for years.”

  “I’ve had crushes on a lot of girls.”

  “This one’s different. I can feel it.”

  In the interest of full disclosure, Mom has experienced “feelings” about every girl I have ever dated and even some I haven’t. She and Angelina were all but ready to pick out china patterns. I once brought Pattie Reisen down for dinner and busted Mom commiserating with my girlfriend of a whole three weeks about how clunky the name “Pattie Fitzpatrick” sounded.

  “You mark my words,” Mom says. “Beth is the one.”

  I stand, wiping my hands on my shorts. “Oh don’t worry, Mom, I’ll mark your words. You don’t mind if I do that in pencil, do you?”

  “I talked to her, you know.”

  “Beth?”

  “Yeah. She waited on us at Casa Columbo.”

  “You and the Tomster?”

  “Be nice. Tom’s a good guy.”

  “Once you get past the comb-over and the black spandex shorts you mean?”

  “I said, ‘Be nice.’”

  “Oh, I’ll admit Tom’s growing on me.”

  “He is?”

  “Like a fungus.”

  “That’s at least something. By the way, congrats.”

  “For what?”

  Mom hands me a white envelope with an Indiana University return address. “Your grades came in from IU.”

  I take the envelope from her. “And I assume you’ve already looked at them?”

  “I figure it’s my prerogative as long as I’m paying your tuition.”

  “Understood.” I pull the folded piece of paper from the envelope.

  Mom has never been one for suspense and is the absolute last person on earth I would entrust with a secret. “You avoided academic probation, just in case you’re wondering.”

  “Well, Mom, I’m not wondering now, am I?”

  I scan my grades: one B, two C’s, and a D. An exact two-point-zero. At midterm I was failing every course. Finals week remains a blur to me. I have a vague recollection it involved abstinence, caffeine, nicotine, my first and hopefully only experimentation with crystal meth, and maybe some studying. The abstinence part isn’t entirely accurate, given Alexandra EncarnaciÓn, Jeanine’s college roommate, drove down from Purdue late in the week to sit on my face for a couple of orally stimulating nights.

  “You barely made it, Henry,” Mom says. “I expect to see that two-point-zero back up into the threes.”

  I stuff my miraculous report card back into its miraculous envelope. “Count on it, Mom.”

  Mom takes a sip of her sun tea then sets her glass down. “You finish sorting through all those videos?”

  I repeat the gesture, finishing my tea in one swallow. “Pretty much.”

  I had found a box of Dad’s old VHS tapes when Mom and I were cleaning out the attic yesterday. Most of it was junk—a grainy copy of the last episode of M*A*S*H, Season 1 of American Gladiators, some marching band competitions from the seventies and eighties, and an almost unwatchable eighty-six minutes of foreign soft-core called Six Swedes at a Pump Dad had confiscated from me and curiously never discarded. I did come across a few gems—the 1988 Notre Dame/Miami game, a local public-access cable interview of Dad, about a half-dozen of his television spots for the dealership and, of course, the vasectomy tape.

  I watched What’s a Vasectomy All About Anyway? from beginning to end. The video was at least ten years old, the actors resplendent in bad hairdos, shoulder pads, and short shorts. After an extended consultation with the urologist in which the husband and wife overact to the point of the whole thing turning into an unintentional sketch comedy, the video ends with Mom, Dad, and their two-point-three children eating dinner on their back porch. Portions of this back porch scene—most notably, the image of the father wielding tongs and an I’m-going-to-get-me-some-tonight smile as grill smoke wafts around his aura of masculinity—are shown at least a half-dozen times throughout the program, as if to ease the apparently common post-vasectomy fear men have of not being able to grill dead animals while looking like the perverted brother of Kurt Rambis.

  “I have something for you,” Mom says. “Come with me.”

  “What is it?”

  “Just follow me.” Mom leads me around the outside of the house. We get to the garage. She is holding the garage door opener in her hand.

  “What are you up to, Debbie?”

  “I hate when you call me Debbie, Hank.” Mom presses the door opener. She seems pretty proud of herself at the moment. “But every prince needs a chariot.”

  The garage door opens, and I see my grandfather’s ’68 Oldsmobile 442 Coupe with a 455 CID engine backed by a modified W-45 rated at 390 horsepower retrofitted with cylinder heads from the W-30 and the camshaft from the W-31 to generate more rpms. I think I remembered that right.

  “The Beast?” I say, astonished. “But I thought everything that was titled under the dealership went with the sale.”

  “There was one exception,” Mom says, grinning from ear to ear. “John kept the Beast in my name because it was my father’s car.”

  “No shit?”

  “No shit,” Mom says.

  I run my hands across the Beast’s hood. “She still suck down gas?”

  “I filled up the tank, so don’t you worry about that. Where are you and Beth going anyway?”

  “Up to Broad Ripple. We’re going to have dinner, see some live music. I don’t want to throw anything too intimidating at her for a first date.”

  “A first date? The implication being you’re already thinking about a second date?”

  “Mom, can you let me make my own decisions and my own mistakes without the running commentary?”

  “But, Hank, I’m just—”

  “Getting yourself into trouble…again.”

  My tone is more casual than caustic, more casual than Mom deserves. Have I forgiven her? Have I forgiven Laura? Not hardly. All I know is Laura spared our child, and Mom has raised that child to be a beautiful four-year-old boy. These are both debts I can never repay.

  Chapter fifty-two

  I turn the corner onto Beth’s street. At the end of the road, I pull into her driveway. I honk the air horn.

  Beth answers the door. She’s barefoot in tight khaki cargo shorts and a T-shirt. Her hair is pulled back in a ponytail, her perfectly applied makeup the lone hint she’s trying to impress me. She takes my hand and guides me to the family room at the back of the house. Her parents are waiting for me.

  “It’s been awhile, Hank.” Dr. Burke offers me his hand. “Nice car.”

  “Yes, Dr. Burke, yes it has. And thanks.” I see a lot of Dr. Burke in Beth. The high forehead. The blond hair. His eyes remind me of my father’s—trustworthy, honest. What you’d ex
pect from a pediatrician.

  “Please, Hank. Call me Stan.”

  I never assume this type of informality when talking to a girl’s parents, even when it’s insisted upon. “Thanks again, Dr. Burke, but if you don’t mind, I’d like to work my way up to Stan.”

  “Suit yourself.” The doctor smiles. He’s already comfortable with me.

  Go figure. I was around the car business for the first twenty-one years of my life, a solid sixteen of those years spent in a classroom with my nose up some teacher’s ass. Making adults comfortable around me is hardwired into my brain.

  Beth’s mom hugs me. “Nice to see you again, big guy.”

  I flash my for-women-only smile and kiss her on the cheek. “Hi, Mrs. Burke.”

  She returns the smile. “Oh, you’re going to call me Joan. And that’s an order.”

  Joan looks more than a few years younger than the doc. Her hair is dark brown and cut short, but other than that, she’s all Beth—her eyes, her slightly turned-up nose, her high cheekbones, her five-feet-nothing height. Joan heads up the local theater company. I see the pictures on the wall of Joan and Beth on stage together. In one of the pictures, Joan is dressed as Miss Hannigan and Beth as Annie.

  Beth’s parents have always been nice to me. They of course float the requisite, “How’s your mother doing?” I’ve come to accept as the lead-in question for any random ice breaker with someone in Empire Ridge over the next decade. We will also accept “How’s your little brother?” or “How’s the family?” or any variations thereof.

  Dr. and Mrs. Burke are good talkers. They keep the conversation going for ten minutes. I finally just interrupt them.

  “We better get going if we want to get a seat.”

  “Ready when you are.” Beth is one step ahead of me, Birkenstocks on, purse in hand. She’s changed her shirt. She smells of perfume, that same subtle lavender scent she’s worn since I first met her. If I could bottle innocence, that’s what it would smell like.

  “Let’s do this.”

  We say our goodbyes and walk outside.

  “I love this car,” Beth says.

  “Yeah, Mom surprised me with it.”