Toni shook her head. “It’s never enough for you, is it.”
“Never enough? Are you serious? When was the last time we made love?”
“That was your dick in my mouth just now, wasn’t it?”
We stood staring at each other for what seemed a long time. “You know what I mean.”
She arched an eyebrow, folded her arms across her chest. “Do I?”
“Well if you don’t then we really are in a world of shit, Toni.”
“Is this where I’m supposed to pretend to have some clue as to what the hell you’re talking about?”
“We don’t make love anymore,” I said, glaring at her now. “You take care of me, service me the way a hooker services a john, for Christ’s sake. No passion, nothing real or heartfelt, just efficient, emotionless and robotic sexual acts.”
“A hooker—that’s a nice thing to say to me.” Her lips trembled. “Asshole.”
“Look, I’m sorry.” I reached out and put my hands around her waist. She felt so small, so easily breakable. “It’s just—I don’t understand what’s happening to us.”
“Neither do I.”
“It’s like everything’s broken, all confused and doesn’t make sense anymore.”
“Don’t be so melodramatic.”
The heat that had risen within me was gone, leaving behind a void, a feeling of nothingness. “You act like it doesn’t matter,” I said.
She looked away and mumbled something, but the phone rang, interrupting us again.
I snatched it from the bed angrily. “What?”
“Hey man, it’s me, Rick.”
“Let me call you back.”
“We need to talk. There’s some weird shit going on.”
“Fucking now what?”
“We were wrong about Bernard,” he said, his tone nervous. “He did leave a note.”
I felt my heart drop, but it was only my knees as I sank back down onto the bed. “What are you talking about?”
“He left a suicide note, just not in the usual way.” Rick cleared his throat. “I was going through my mail from yesterday and—I know this sounds fucked up but—there was something from Bernard. He left a note, man. He just didn’t leave it down in that basement. He sent it to me.”
CHAPTER 5
The sky had turned an odd shade of gray.
I parked next to an empty basketball court surrounded by chain link fence and hurried across the street, hesitating once I’d reached the dead front lawn of the apartment building. I noticed Donald’s car and Rick’s Jeep parked nearby. Although this was the poorest neighborhood in Potter’s Cove, it was normally a vibrant part of town, but the area was quiet, the streets still. Two old men talking at the base of the front steps shuffled their feet against the raw wind and ignored me as I moved onto the landing and into the relative warmth of the foyer.
A door to my right opened with a loud squeak to reveal an emaciated black woman with a sallow face. I visited Rick often, and despite the high turnover rate, I recognized many of the tenants on sight. But this woman was definitely new; I hadn’t seen her before. Dressed in a bathrobe and slippers, her sunken eyes blinked at me slowly, like a cat. “You here about the plumbing?” she asked.
“No, ma’am.”
“You here about the plumbing?” a high-pitched voice echoed.
I glanced down to see a small boy peeking at me from behind the woman’s frail legs. I offered a restrained smile and winked at the boy, who immediately hid behind his mother. The woman sighed, stepped back into her apartment and closed the door.
A battered staircase eventually led to Rick’s third-floor apartment. I hesitated to listen for a moment then knocked lightly.
Rick answered quickly, his expression tense as he stepped away from the door and ushered me in. The apartment itself was small, decorated modestly and bore the clutter of a man used to living alone. Beyond the main den were a kitchen and a hallway that led to the bedroom. Since his former girlfriend moved out, the apartment had taken on an impersonal, somewhat transient feel. The only items that revealed Rick’s specific presence was one wall covered with framed photographs and newspaper articles chronicling his high school athletic career, and a table beneath showcasing several trophies and faded ribbons. It was a shrine that had always seemed to me nothing more than a constant unpleasant reminder of distant glory and opportunities lost. Most teenagers with the athletic prowess Rick had possessed went on to college with full scholarships. Some eventually made it to the professional ranks. Instead, Rick went to prison after nearly beating a man to death during a brawl over a parking space at a local restaurant. Even though several witnesses testified that the man had swung first, many also testified that Rick had continued to beat the man long after he had clearly lost consciousness. The brutality of his retaliation, along with the massive medical injuries the man sustained, gave the judge ample reason to make an example of Rick. And that’s exactly what he did, sentencing him to twelve months in Walpole State Prison, a maximum-security institution that housed some of the worst criminals in Massachusetts. He served the full term, and that year behind bars effectively destroyed any chance at college or a career as a professional athlete. It also changed him forever. Rick had always possessed a volatile, violent temper, but the time served made him harsher, and in many ways potentially even more violent. Memories of visiting him in that horrible place blinked through my mind. “Aren’t you usually asleep this time of day?” I asked casually.
“Yup.” He tried to appear unconcerned. “You want something to drink? I got Cokes in the fridge.”
“I’m good. What’s this shit about a note?”
A toilet flushed and a moment later Donald appeared from the hallway looking horribly hung-over. He gave a less than enthusiastic wave and lowered himself onto a worn couch. “The plot thickens.”
I wondered if he remembered I’d been at his cottage the day before. “I’m listening.”
Rick sat on the arm of the couch, grabbed a padded manila envelope from the cushion and tossed it to me. “That came in the mail yesterday. I didn’t check my mail until this morning.”
I caught the package; it was nearly weightless. Rick’s name and address had been written across the front in black marker, and a label advertising a private mailbox and mailing service served as the return address. “Mailbox Universe? That’s here in town. If Bernard’s been dead almost a week why did you just get this yesterday?”
“Listen to the tape.”
“Bernard must have left them instructions not to mail the package until a specific date,” Donald said. “You can pay them to do that.”
I nodded. “But why wait so long?” When no one answered I reached inside the torn opening and pulled out an unmarked cassette tape. I felt nothing else, so I peered inside the envelope. It was empty. “What’s this?”
“His note,” Rick said.
“He recorded it?”
“He must’ve used that Walkman we found in his duffel,” Rick said. “I remember seeing a Record button on it.”
I moved to a chair, sat down and put the envelope aside. “You already listened to it?”
“Rick has, I haven’t.” Donald sighed. “I didn’t want to have to do this twice.”
“There was nothing else in the envelope and the cassette’s unmarked,” Rick told me. “I didn’t know what the hell it was until I listened to it.”
I stared at the cassette, entranced and repelled at once.
“When I heard Bernard’s voice I almost shit myself,” he said, drawing my attention to his slowly flushing face. “When I heard what he had to say, I think I actually did.”
Rick took the tape from my hand, walked it over to a stereo in the corner and dropped it into the cassette player. Multicolored lights on the equalizer came to life, rising then falling quickly, accompanied by a loud and steady hiss. The lights continued to dance as the hiss became breathing, and finally, the sound of Bernard’s voice.
“If you’re listeni
ng to this…If you’re listening to this then it means I really did it.”
He sounded different than I’d remembered, not just because on tape everyone’s natural tone is somewhat altered, but because he sounded hollow, like he was speaking to us from the bottom of a stone well. I sat forward, hands together.
“Rick, I sent this to you first because it seemed like the right thing to do. I know you’ll listen to it, and I know you’ll make the right decision and share this with Donald and Alan. No offense, guys, but if I sent the tape to either of you I’m not sure you’d tell Rick or even each other. But I know you’ll do the right thing, Rick, you’re the chief. You’re Warlord.”
My eyes met Donald’s, then Rick’s. The Warlord was the leader, the head Sultan who ran our pseudo gang. When Tommy was killed Rick had become warlord—a term we’d used somewhat jokingly, and one I hadn’t thought about in years, but it summoned the past in vivid terms, and I was relatively certain that had been Bernard’s intention. Although toward the end he’d become a shell of what he’d once been, Bernard spent most of his adult life in sales, and like any good salesperson he’d been skilled at speaking to people and eliciting from them the responses he needed or wanted, a flair for manipulation, in terms less kind.
“I had the people at the mailbox place hold off and mail the package on a specific date,” he continued, his voice eerie and laced with a faint echo. “I figured by the time you got this and listened to it you’d know I was…gone. I’m sure you all have questions and confusion and you’re probably pissed with me for doing it, but…believe me when I tell you, guys, it was the best thing. Rick, you probably think I’m a pussy—a coward, right? That’s what you’re saying, anyway, but deep down, you know that’s not true. And Donald, you’re just sad and bitter about it, while Alan, I’ll bet you’re all withdrawn and introspective, like always. We’ve known each other too long, fellas, too long.
“But it’s funny how even after all these years you find yourself wondering just how well you really know anyone. Hell, we’ve all been tight since we were kids—been through a lot together—but we still have secrets, don’t we? All of us. None of us are ever exactly, precisely what we claim to be, are we? We’re one way with some people, another way with other people, maybe another way still when we’re all alone. That’s what it boils down to, fellas. At night, when you’re lying there in bed looking at the ceiling, remembering the day, thinking back through things you did and what lies ahead, when it’s just you and whatever god you pray to in the dark…that’s when all the masks are peeled away and it’s just you. Just you, and whoever…or whatever you are.”
There was a garbled sound, and then the hiss returned.
“Is that it?” I asked.
Rick shook his head in the negative and held his hand up like a traffic cop signaling cars to stop. More breathing followed a series of clicking sounds; Bernard had stopped recording then begun again. When he resumed speaking his voice sounded the same as before: distant and almost artificial. “You guys ever wonder why we were friends? I mean really wonder. The last few weeks I’ve spent a lot of time thinking, going back through the past, remembering good times and bad—all of it—as much of it as I can, anyway. When I was a little kid, maybe five or six, my mother told me that in this life we’re lucky if we have one or two true friends, people we can really count on and who stand by us through thick and thin. That’s if we’re lucky.” Bernard gave a quiet sarcastic laugh. “Isn’t it strange the way we stuck together all these years? All of us are from working-class families, all of us townies but…but that’s where it ends, really, wouldn’t you say? Even in school it made people wonder. Guys like us—so different, one from the other—might’ve been friends when we were little but surely once high school hit we’d go our separate ways and settle into the appropriate cliques. But we didn’t. In a lot of ways we got closer, didn’t we? In a sense, anyway. Rick the jock, Donald the bookworm honor student, Alan the rebel without a cause, Tommy the all-things-to-all-people charismatic leader…and then, me. The joke, the dork.” Bernard’s voice cracked, a clicking sound followed; then silence.
I glanced at the windows on the far wall. A light snow had begun to fall. It seemed too late in the season for more snow, but just like Bernard’s distorted voice speaking to us as if from the beyond, there it was.
“Christ,” Donald said softly, “how much more of this is there?”
“He sounds like he’s in a tomb,” I heard myself say.
“I think he recorded it down in that basement,” Rick said as the hiss on the tape gave way to another loud click. “That’s why he sounds so far away, those cement walls are distorting his voice.”
Bernard continued, calmer now, “I’m not stupid, I know how people saw me. Except for you guys, anyway. We were all well practiced at that, disregarding each other’s faults, no matter how hideous. There’s always been a bond, a common ground between us. Rick, you and me were only children; we both knew what it was like, the pros and cons of being the only one. No pressure there, huh?” Heavy breathing, a rustling sound. “And Donald, good old Donny. You and me, we know what it is to be different, don’t we? We know what it’s like to be left out, made fun of…terrorized. Isolation, that’s what we know, isn’t it Donny. Self-imposed or not, isolation’s an old friend too.”
I glanced at them quickly while their names were mentioned. Neither made eye contact.
“Alan, we knew what it was like not to have a father around,” Bernard said next. “How it was to grow up with a single mother, what it is to love and be close to your mother and all the shit people give you for that. Momma’s boys, you and me…and proud of it, right?” He laughed lightly, and this time it sounded somewhat genuine. “And then I think about Tommy and I wonder…I wonder what it was we shared. It took me a long time, going over it again and again…and then it came to me. Tommy was like all of us in one way or another. If you took the best parts of each one of us and put them together into a single person, you had Tommy.”
Donald, who was staring at the floor, nodded slightly. Rick had turned his back on us and was standing in front of the window, gazing out at the snow. But he knew Bernard was right too—Tommy had been the best of us.
“I always felt bad for you, Alan, because you were there when it happened. After he died a day didn’t go by when I didn’t think about staying after school that day, and how if I hadn’t, I’d have been with you guys. Maybe I would’ve been the first one off the bus that day. Maybe I’d have been lying in the street instead of him. Would’ve made more sense…”
My throat cinched and I struggled to control my emotion. I had been two steps behind Tommy that day, and the same thoughts had crossed my mind ever since. How easily it could’ve been me instead. How perhaps it should have been.
“But the one thing we all shared, the one thing we all knew,” Bernard said through a lengthy sigh, “was pain. We all know pain don’t we fellas, and the rage that comes with it. Yeah, we know rage too. We know the rage of never amounting to what we should have, could have been. Falling short, that’s been our specialty.”
Donald pushed himself to his feet and began to pace, arms folded across his narrow chest.
“Rick, you could’ve been a pro football player. It’s all you talked about from the time we were little, and you had it, you had it, man. But the rage got you. You almost beat that poor bastard to death over a parking space. For what, to impress some fucking girl you were dating at the time? The guy was in a coma for three days, for Christ’s sake. A coma, Rick. For a parking space. I remember going to visit you in prison. We’d all pile into the car and make the drive to Walpole, everybody dead quiet—God those were the longest trips because nobody said a word the whole way up and the whole way back. And when I went away one of the things I was running from was having to go see you in that fucking hole. You were always so strong—so much stronger than I was—I couldn’t stand seeing you broken, locked away in that place.
“And look at you
now, man. Fifteen minutes of rage in a parking lot and your whole life went to shit. Is that fair? Is it? Is that fucking fair?” Bernard hesitated, apparently cognizant that the volume of his voice had increased considerably. When he continued, his tone had returned to one softer and more controlled. “Are you happy, Rick? Life turn out the way you hoped? A bouncer at a nightclub, alone, still chasing chicks like a high school kid, hanging around your apartment staring at those old trophies. Jesus Christ, man, a far cry from the NFL, huh?”
Donald looked at me through bloodshot eyes. “This is absurd, why—”
“Be quiet,” Rick snapped, his back still facing us.
“I don’t think any of us need to hear this kind of—”
“Shut the fuck up and listen, Donny.” Rick turned slowly, looked at us over his shoulder with dark eyes. “We’ve never had to hear anything so much.”
“And then there’s Donald,” Bernard said flatly. “The king of underachievement. Fucking royalty in that department, huh, Donny?”
The nearly gleeful tone in Bernard’s voice surprised me. I’d never known him to revel in someone else’s pain, particularly if that someone was a friend. Donald’s expression had shifted from discomfort to near-frenzy. He glared at me, and I tried to convey a look that told him it was all right, that everything would be OK.
“I always wondered who you thought you were punishing,” Bernard went on, his lifeless voice cutting the silence. “You’re the smartest guy I’ve ever known, Donny, and one of the most unhappy. Remember when we were kids and you’d talk about moving away when we grew up? You used to talk about going to Paris and Berlin and London—all these places that seemed so impossibly far away back then. You wanted to teach, remember? You had it all planned out. A teaching job in some little European village, where it was quiet and you could sit and read and be at peace, that’s the dream you talked about. The dream you should’ve realized but never did, because the demons got in the way, then the booze fucked everything up. But we all know the booze wasn’t the real problem, don’t we, Donny?”
The Bleeding Season Page 6