The Local News

by Miriam Gershow

  During halftime, Rochelle, the flag girl with the thick thighs, loudly dropped her flag, and everyone cheered. She looked like she might cry. Tip said to me before the second half started, “Are you wearing makeup?” which embarrassed me deeply, and I stupidly told him no. Lola joined us near the end of the game, still flush-faced and dervishlike from the routine. She practically sat in Tip’s lap and made unsubtle conversation about what I was doing sitting here. I answered obtusely. She asked if we had noticed Rochelle, and Michael called Rochelle a dumb heifer and Tip called her thunder thighs and Lola told them to shut up, but without much conviction.

  “Let’s drive after this,” she announced near the end of the game. “I’ve got my car.”

  Driving was the default weekend activity when no parentless house was available. I’d never taken part before. It consisted of cramming as many people as possible into cars and circling the city in wide, repetitive loops, honking at other cars full of either Franklin students or unfamiliar faces from other schools in hopes that something, somewhere would materialize, like a keg of beer in an open field or a restaurant that would let students take up tables for hours even though they ordered only coffee or pie and tipped very little, if at all. Likelier, though, it meant simply spending an hour or two packed into the backseat of a smoky car.

  Franklin lost in the final minutes. A junior named Callas missed a free throw and someone chucked a pop bottle at him from the bleachers. It missed. The game was stopped for a few minutes while the rent-a-cops unsuccessfully searched the bleachers for the offender. The whole thing—the pop bottle, the loss—turned the crowd antsy and downbeat. Kent and Gregory got into a shoving match in the parking lot before a couple guys stepped in, yelling, “Chill! Chill!” People complained loudly about being fucking cold. Girls stood in groups squealing about indeterminate topics. Everyone kept saying, “Okay, what are we doing?”

  Lola managed admittance to her car with the aggressive precision of a maître d’ at a swanky restaurant. She selected Penny and Diana from the flag team (Bayard she directed to a crammed station wagon across the lot, Rochelle to a Chevy Bronco that was already pulling away); she then selected Kent and, of course, Jerold. She shooed me away from the front seat when I tried to go shotgun. It ended up with four of us in the back—Penny, then Kent, then Jerold, then me. We sat crushed together—we had no choice—and there was discussion of staggering ourselves forward, back, forward, back to make more room.

  Jerold put his hands around my waist and guided me forward, positioning me in this weird tilt until I was half on the seat, half on one of his legs. He gripped me tightly, and I felt thick-throated and warm. I wondered if he could feel my heartbeat in his hands. When he let go of my waist, he left one hand resting on my coat at the small of my back. Kent grabbed a beer can out of his bag and passed it around, froth foaming from the mouth of it. I took a long swig, and it was flat and rancid-tasting, but I didn’t care. I passed it to Jerold, who said, “Thank you, Lydia,” the first words spoken between us that night. I watched him drink, feeling the familiar prickle of disappointment. A few wiry hairs grew from his chin. A rash of zits clustered between his eyes.

  We passed all the familiar sights of Fairfield—the Radio Shack, the impotently flashing neon sign for the darkened Delta Car Wash, the nearly full parking lot outside of the Denny’s. I pressed my face against the glass, though my awareness was on the hand at my back. The two of us sat quietly while Kent talked about what a chump Greg ory was and the girls grew shrill and fluttery in their reassurances, trying to calm him down.

  Soon Jerold slipped his hand beneath the bottom of my coat and placed it over the waist of my pants. He rubbed me there in small circles, which didn’t exactly feel good—the friction of my waistband against my tailbone was mostly irritating—but still seemed to send all of my blood to that one spot. A dull tingling began at my cheekbones and soon spread along my entire face. Lola yelled from the front seat, “How’s everyone doing back there?” and I made a noise that came out strange, a phlegmy laugh. I drank more beer each time a new can came around. Jerold’s hand inched up my spine. His hands were soft and slightly clammy. I tried to imagine how it would be if these were Denis’s hands, rough fingertips abrading my skin.

  Lola kept turning around to grin at me. I could see from my peripheral vision the way Kent watched us. Each time Diana giggled, which was quite a few times, I was sure it had something to do with me and Jerold. It was damp and more than a little claustrophobic in here. For a while I just closed my eyes and arched my back some, trying with what little space I had to inch away. I didn’t want to think of what might come next, if he were to try to reach around to the front of my shirt, try to make a grab.

  Suddenly, though, Lola was rolling down her window, blasting us with air. Jerold’s hand dropped from my shirt. There was a similarly packed car driving next to us, its passenger window down. A girl called out “Croft’s!” Croft’s was a sprawling park spanning several blocks. In the summertime its picnic tables were overrun with family reunions and kids’ birthday parties, not so much because of quality as because of lack of other nearby options. At one end, old wooden playground equipment sat bowed and cracked. At the other end, a maze of crisscrossing trails wound through an anemic “forest” of trees, leading essentially nowhere. In between, there were several dilapidated picnic gazebos, weeds growing through cracks in the cement floors. In the winter the park sat idly beneath snowdrifts and ice, deserted except for cross-country skiers or the occasional hardy vagrant.

  People were meeting up there. The idea of spending a cold night at Croft’s amid a marauding pack of teenagers held little appeal, except when weighed against the option of staying in this car indefinitely, crowded onto Jerold’s warm lap.

  When we arrived, it seemed as if half of Franklin had beaten us there. A few stragglers wandered by themselves or in pairs, but for the most part, large groups gathered at the gazebos and the jungle gym, beneath light posts or at picnic tables. A few self-appointed monitors, like Gregory, who seemed not yet to have cooled off from the parking lot shoving match, and the junior class vice president, Daisy Montaine, who sported a fuzzy blue beret and a general air of self-righteousness, went around trying to break up the groups, imploring them to scatter into the darker recesses of the park so as not to attract the attention of the cops. “Put that down!” they would whisper-shout at the kids holding open containers in the lamplight. “Do you want us all to get busted?” They pointed to the houses lining the streets across from the park: “You think they won’t call 911?” This temporarily scattered a few of the most easily spooked. But mostly people stood their ground, this little dance with danger seeming to be part of the appeal of Croft’s, this doggie paddle toward the wrong side of the law.

  I drifted between amoebas of people, accepting more beer as it was offered, which turned out to be a fair amount. The novelty of my appearing at such events had not worn off; people still tended toward the generous when they saw me coming. Jerold was following me, but tentatively, some of the momentum from the car already dissipating. He eyed me from across groups, occasionally sidling up and putting a hand on my waist as if he were going to start ballroom dancing. “Hi there,” he kept saying, as if we were just running into each other.

  I waited for the alcohol to do its normal stupefying thing, though the bracing air seemed to keep me unpleasantly cogent and aware. I wandered to the duck pond, where a knot of boys were hurling icy snowballs at the frozen surface to see if they could crack it open.

  “Lydia,” one said, “you want to try?” He was offering me his packed snowball. These boys were sophomores. One of them was in trig with me. Still, I was surprised for them to know my name and to use it so easily.

  “Sure,” I told him and hurled it overhand. It made a dull thud, and the boys laughed.

  I found Bayard and Rochelle at a picnic table, drinking beer, talking quietly about people I didn’t know. They looked at me amiably enough—at least Rochelle did;
it was unclear if Bayard even remembered who I was—but made no effort to include me in the conversation. I thought about telling her it was okay about dropping her flag. When she burped a loud burp, Bayard crinkled his brow and she made a big display of blowing her burp into the air. I couldn’t think of anything to say. The night was off to a strange start. I wanted for it to gain just the right kind of traction that made the silly and stupid morph into actual fun.

  I stood gamely enough beside Jerold as he talked to some of his wrestling friends, even once nudging him with my hip, though he acted different now, a quick nod my way between stories of hemi engines and takedowns. When I whispered (why was I whispering?), “Hi there,” his smile was mostly polite. I wasn’t sure exactly how this was supposed to work, though I was pretty sure I was doing it almost entirely wrong.

  I continued to wander. Enough people kept offering me slugs from their drinks that the night slowly grew more enjoyable, the standing around, the listening in on snippets of conversations. At one point Dale Myerson handed me his cold metal flask. My eyes teared as I drank, the first sip burning my sinuses. Someone let out a low whoop. When I asked Dale, trying not to cough, what this was, he told me whiskey. A great deal of fanfare accompanied my continued sips, all sorts of whooping and encouragement until Dale finally took it from me and Lyle Walker called me a bruiser and spun me around like a ballerina. The park still twirled a little after he stopped.

  Eventually I made my way toward the far end of the park and the trails to nowhere. While a few dark outlines of people dotted the trees at the head of the trails, it was much quieter here. I chose a trail at random and for a long time just listened to the sound of my shoes crunching through the snow, which had not melted as much back beneath the canopy of branches. The day’s cloudless sky had held, and the moon hung above, a fat sickle. Even well past the nearest lamppost, it lit up the snowy limbs overhead, casting weird humanoid shadows onto the trail—there a rubbery pair of grasping arms, there an elongated leg, midstride.

  I walked and walked. The cold began to feel good as I grew clammy, almost sweating beneath my coat. I thought about taking my hat off, though it seemed like a lot of effort. Every once in a while I heard a shout or laugh from the partiers, but those sounded far-off and muffled now. The trails went, indeed, to nowhere. Repeatedly I passed the same benchmarks—a felled trunk with saplings growing out of the stump, a discarded two-liter bottle of Mountain Dew lying on its side, the remaining liquid a frozen, neon yellow block. But the forest seemed to be a forest in earnest, far less anemic than I’d remembered. Perhaps this was because I hadn’t been to Croft’s in years. Or perhaps the snow added girth to the trees.

  The drifts of snow, the shadows, the cracking sounds of wind through icy branches all managed to give the place a bit of an uncharted, otherworldly quality. I was Lewis and Clark on my way along the Oregon Trail. I was Cook in the Antarctic. For a short time I felt unbound, drifting through this blank space, absorbed in meaningless tasks like patterning my footprints into zigzags through the snow, breaking icicles off lower branches and suckingon them. By now the heat of the alcohol simmered low and constant at my center. I took to whispering to myself, feeling an urge for solemn, Jacques Cousteau–like narration: “So low hang the branches,” “Here, a mundane mountain of snow.” I amused myself with needless alliteration: “Whistling white wind.” I lay on my back to make a snow angel. I poked at icy clumps of foliage with a twig. Being the lost one, I thought for the first time with a certain envy, wouldn’t be so bad.

  At some point—it was easy to lose track of time back there—I thought I heard footsteps mimicking my own. But the snow and the trees made it dense and echoey, hard to tell where noises were coming from. The sound rose and faded without a clear pattern, until I convinced myself it was not there at all. Soon, though, the crunching persisted, and I whispered, “Crunching cracking cacophony,” though it didn’t seem as amusing now.

  “Hello?” I called, spooked for the first time about being alone in the dark.

  “Pasternak?” a voice called, and the footsteps grew more definite, louder and closer, and though he was shadowy and far away, the outline that appeared just before the farthest bend in the trail was so undeniably massive and He-Man like, it could be no one but Tip. I couldn’t believe how happy I was to see him. Company seemed suddenly like a great idea, in the seamless way alcohol had of accommodating any new variables into the equation.

  “Jesus Christ, Pasternak!” he called as I jogged toward him. “You want a fucking search party or what?” He looked like the Michelin Man in his puffy down jacket. “What are you doing out here? Your boyfriend’s totally looking for you. That kid’s freaking out.”

  “I was coming back,” I said when I got to him. The jog made me breathe harder, the exertion bringing a little rush. I worried that I’d just made it sound like I was going back for Jerold. “He’s not my boyfriend,” I said. Then, “You’re the Michelin Man,” and “It’s so beautiful back here.” I swung my arms in a wide arc, as if introducing Tip to the forest.

  “Jesus,” he said again. “You’re drunk.” He was staring down at me hard. I was trying not to pant. “You know something about Pasternaks?” he said, his voice a mix of light and stern, question and statement. “They like the drink.”

  I laughed. “I’m not drunk,” I said, though just having another body beside me made the loose, soggy center of my drunkenness feel more pronounced, as if it fed off the very idea of audience.

  “What are you even doing out here?” he said.

  “I don’t know. Walking and stuff. I did a snow angel. I poked things.” The last statement cracked me up. As I laughed, Tip watched me like he was still waiting for the joke. “What are you doing out there?” I said, pointing to the park.

  Tip told me about how Kent and Gregory had almost gotten in another fight but how a bunch of juniors had broken it up. Some girl, too, had mashed a snowball in Cindy Kahlen’s face and Cindy had almost started crying. “Was her makeup all messed up?” I asked, all this the sort of meaningless nothingness that made these events enjoyable.

  He said, “We should go,” and took my arm, not exactly roughly, but with a rough sort of confidence. His gloved hand fit almost all the way around my arm.

  “I swear, officer, I’m innocent.”

  “That’s what they always say.” He was smiling. “Let’s get you back before people think you’re dead.” He delivered this in the same stern-jokey tone he’d used since he found me, but as soon as the words were out, something of a low shudder went through him. I saw it: a strange twitch to his lip, a quiver in the thick cords of his neck. He stumbled all over himself, soon stammering. “Sorry. I was just talking crap. I didn’t mean—I don’t know. Fuck. Christ.”

  At first I didn’t understand what he was upset about. But as his forehead creased and his mouth wilted into a frown, this was the Tip who had sat in our living room those endless August days, the one who cupped his face in his hands for endless stretches of time, who looked up only to reveal red, wet cheeks and wet eyes, who kept repeating the same useless snippets to my parents about offering Danny a ride, Danny saying he wanted to run home, it still being light out, everything seeming fine.

  And then I got it, his stammering, his upset, but it seemed stupid and silly and I didn’t want to be all serious with Tip. I found serious Tip alarming, akin to when teachers dressed up during Spirit Week, Mrs. Bardazian in a bright green leprechaun outfit, Mr. Fontana with a spongy red clown nose glommed to the middle of his face. It was the alarm of incongruity.

  “It’s fine,” I said. “No big whoop.” I grinned, to display the no-big-whoopness of the situation. He smiled a little, but it was forced, and still we did not move, both of us just standing there in the middle of the trail.

  Finally I said, “Listen. He’s not dead.”

  “No. I know he’s not. He’s not.” He was still holding on to my arm. “He’s not.”

  “I know,” I said. “That’s what I
just said.” I meant it to come out less harshly than it did. I told him small bits about Tanda and Roy and the afternoon’s mug shots. I told him about Denis’s other leads—the rusty sedan, Akron, Windsor—all in the most general and hopeful of terms. I painted a picture of us as efficient, focused, and making real progress. It felt good to be talking about the investigation, like I was conjuring Denis here in this snowy netherworld, his smoky smell, his wrinkled brow, the Dias to my Da Gama, the Armstrong to my Aldrin. As usual, it barely felt like I was even talking about my brother.

  “Cool,” Tip kept saying, “very cool,” though his face hadn’t entirely righted itself, something still off-kilter. Maybe his nose. Or the way one eye was opened slightly wider than the other. It struck me then for the first time that maybe he was drunk too.

  A loud noise of cracking branches overhead made us both flinch. Quickly we laughed at ourselves for flinching.

  “Avalanche,” I said with fake alarm, relieved for the tone change.

  “Dangerous terrain,” he said.

  “We should go,” I was finally the one to say.

  As we walked, Tip braced his arm around my shoulder, guiding me down the path as if I weren’t capable myself. I let myself be moved along by the heft of him. Always, with Tip, there was that tree-trunk sensation. I thought of the deep-voiced tree in Wizard of Oz. That’s what Tip was. I told him something to that effect, though when he asked what I was talking about, I was too lazy to repeat myself. “I don’t want to make out with Jerold,” I said instead, with uncharacteristic candor.

  Tip laughed. “Who said you had to? The kid’s kind of a tool.”

  I laughed too. “Totally a tool,” though until that point I had only used that word to describe the likes of Danny and Tip.

  He told a story about a shoving match Jerold had supposedly gotten into with Horace Lingham in the guys’ shower after gym class last year. Horace insulted Jerold’s older sister (I hadn’t known Jerold had an older sister), and Jerold jammed Horace against a showerhead. “A fight,” Tip said, full of scorn, “in the showers?” as if Jerold had broken a cardinal rule in the jock code of honor. Then he said, “You can do better.”