The Boys of Summer

by Richard Cox

  It also reminded him that Todd Willis remained in the pit room.

  “Todd,” he said. “There’s something I need to ask you about the night we burned this place down. Something you told us that I can’t remember.”

  Beside him, on the ground, his father’s mouth opened, as if he wanted to say something, but instead he appeared to choke. He coughed out a mouthful of blood and then stopped breathing altogether. So that was done.

  Maybe he should have been sorry, but instead Bob wondered where the silver belt buckle had come from. He’d never seen his dad wear anything monogrammed before.

  And the initials, well, something about them wasn’t right. From here, instead of “KS,” they looked like the letters “FC.”

  Bob wondered again how his father could have gained so much weight in the past month. He’d been a strong, thin man his entire adult life. Now he looked like some random redneck with a beer gut.

  “Todd,” Bob said. “Can you come over here and look at my dad? Something isn’t right.”

  Again, no answer from Todd.

  Bob couldn’t sit here forever. He’d done a terrible thing and now he would have to figure out a way to cover his tracks. His truck had been parked in the restaurant lot for a while now and someone would eventually notice.

  With great effort of will, he shifted his gaze from his father’s midsection to his face.

  But it wasn’t Kenny Steele on the ground. It was Fred Clark, owner of the restaurant. Father of David Clark, Bobby’s childhood friend who was now an Internet billionaire.

  He thought maybe he had known the entire time. It should have been obvious to everyone watching the situation unfold what was really happening. Yet Bob had done it anyway, killed a man who was not his father.

  In a way it wasn’t really surprising. In a way this outcome had been written long ago.

  The night of the restaurant fire, when they were kids, Bob had learned something he could not fully remember now. But he did recall that something was wrong with the world, and his place within it was particularly wrong. His father was not in this pit room, and Bob couldn’t be completely sure Todd was here or if he had ever been here.

  I will never forget those nights. I wonder if it was a dream . . .

  Bob stood up. He walked out of the pit room and back to his truck. From the bed he grabbed the can of gasoline, and from the front seat he picked up the box of matches. He walked back toward the restaurant with purpose. When he reached the pit room, he shoved the matches into his back pocket and unscrewed the lid of the gasoline can. With casual strokes, as if he were an artist tossing paint onto a canvas, he began to coat the ground with gasoline. He splashed it liberally over the body of Fred Clark and moved gradually toward the building itself. The door was unlocked, and he splashed gasoline in the dishwashing room, the kitchen, and throughout the restaurant proper. He made a complete loop back to the exit and found himself in the pit room again. By now his feet were soaked with gasoline. It was probably on his clothes. Bob reached into his pocket anyway and retrieved the matches.

  This was it. Once he struck the match, once the fire was lit, everything would be over. All his failures would be erased by this one action. All he had to do was play his part.

  Bob opened the box and retrieved a single match. He held the match before his eyes and wondered if he possessed the nerve to actually go through with it.

  I can tell you my love for you will still be strong after the boys of summer have gone . . .

  The way he finally summoned the nerve to light the match was to imagine seeing his mother’s face after all this was done. He hoped she would understand. He hoped she would still love him.

  “You there!” someone yelled. “What the hell are you doing?”

  The voice had come from behind him, and for a moment Bob was sure it was his mother here to admonish him. But what he saw when he turned around was a man. A police officer stood in the doorway of the pit room, a portly fellow whose uncertain expression did not match the intensity of his voice.

  Bob pictured his mother’s face again, her caring, gentle face. He could not wait to see her, to feel her arms around him again.

  He held the matchbox up where the officer could see it. He presented the match.

  “Drop that! Hands out where I can see them!”

  The officer reached reluctantly for his gun. Bob could tell by the uncertainty in his eyes that the guy didn’t want to shoot him. He was afraid the way almost all humans were afraid. But he did point the gun in Bob’s direction.

  “Don’t do it!” the officer yelled. The gun shook violently in his hand, as if it were an animal struggling to get away from him.

  And then, at the last possible moment, Bob remembered what had happened in the pit room when they were children. He remembered exactly what Todd had told the four of them. The occasion of this memory infused him with an unexpected sense of accomplishment and humor so overwhelming that laughter began to roll inside of him, rumbling and rushing toward the surface of his mouth like a gusher of oil that was about to make someone a very wealthy man.

  “I’m sorry,” Bob said to the officer, and before he could stop himself, the laughter erupted from him, powerful gales that overwhelmed the quiet space of the pit room. The officer looked confused, even horrified, but Bob could not remember a happier moment in his entire life. After years of trailing in his father’s shadow, Bob Steele was about to step into the light and be recognized as the better man.

  “I’m sorry,” he said again. “Todd said it ends like this.”

  Bob lit the match and tossed it into the air. The tiny stick of wood seemed to float before him, turning over and over in slow motion, and when the first bullet hit his chest, Bob felt something like ecstasy.

  Flames appeared from nowhere, danced in front of him like a swirling vortex. Bob fell to the ground and was swallowed by fire.

  He died smiling.

  10

  David Clark’s home in Carmel was a two-story Spanish-style mansion floored with Macassar Ebony hardwoods and Pietra Firma tile. Large plate windows presented movie theater views of the bay and evening sunsets over the Pacific. Kitchen appliances were industrial quality. There was a chummy billiards room. A powerful and calibrated home theater. On the second floor were six bedrooms, including the master suite, which commanded a spectacular ocean view through a single, room-size window. The bed was a custom Hästens Vividus, six inches longer and five inches wider than a standard King, which had cost him $68,342.88, an unreasonable price by any standard except the exospheric.

  His golf playgrounds were Pebble Beach and Cypress Point, two of the most spectacular courses in the world. He dined regally. He owned twelve cars, including the newest addition, a Bugatti Veyron, having paid a thousand dollars for each of its 1,001 horses. And last year he’d purchased his newest and most extravagant vehicle yet—a Gulf Stream G550 personal jet for the rock bottom price of $48,350,000, which didn’t include a $27 million retrofit to further soundproof the interior.

  The opulence of his life wasn’t limited to the west coast. He played four rounds of golf each year at Augusta National in Georgia. He’d accidentally stepped on Jennifer Aniston’s foot at Rao’s in New York and—already three cocktails into the evening—convinced her to accept a drink in return. She found him funny. He found her sexy and accessible. They had dinner three times, but then she met an actor who was (presumably) funnier.

  His was new money and so it had limits, but David could do pretty much whatever he wanted. Go wherever he wanted. He had fled like an escaped convict from the incarceration of Wichita Falls, was as far away from that cultural hellhole as a man could be, had shed his Texas accent and sheath of Middle American fat and his antiquated social conservatism.

  But something was wrong. Something nearby yet invisible, something that followed him everywhere, something he could sense in his peripheral vision but could not see when he tried to look at it directly. It had come for him that day in the trees as a
storm of giant hailstones, and even now, at night, it haunted him as a ghostly sound he could hear beyond the ringing of his own ears, a distress signal he was sure, if amplified, would resemble a tornado siren.

  David had never admitted this feeling to anyone, but the people who knew him best seemed to sense it about him anyway. He played his part as a relaxed and carefree millionaire: perpetually tanned, impeccably groomed, dressed daily in custom-fit clothing, but he never spoke about his childhood in Texas, never mentioned his family. He ignored the questions until they stopped being asked, which inevitably created distance that made it difficult for him to maintain close relationships. Particularly of the romantic variety.

  It was easy to blame his discontent on the perfect cliché, that as a wealthy, single man David saw no satisfaction in a conventional life. For the typical American man it was time to marry, time to have children. Everything is different when you see that head pop out, says everyone on earth, when you hear that first cry. Priorities reorganize themselves. The existential fog lifts and life becomes clear. You’ll see, his friend, Jim Thain, told him once. Or rather a hundred times. Millions of fathers can’t be wrong.

  If David believed his anxiety could be silenced by fathering a child, if a storybook family life were the antidote to fear, he would have married long ago. Any one of his serious girlfriends would have made a decent wife and mother. But deep down David knew the problems with his life could only be exacerbated by allowing someone else to share them, which meant, no matter what her arguments, a woman who insisted upon settling down with him was asking for trouble.

  It was just after midnight, and he was in bed with his current girlfriend, Meredith. Her blonde hair was a starburst on the pillow beside him, the hair of a sleeping angel. David was sitting with his back to the headboard, reading through the New York Times on his laptop, trying to decide if he should break up with her.

  He’d met Meredith almost a year ago in the Pebble Beach pro shop. He was immediately drawn to her sharp eyes, to the pony tail that poked out of her white Nike golf cap. She was there by herself, she told a staff member, had just moved to the peninsula, and hoped to join a group that was already scheduled to play. The staff member looked dubious. He explained how tee times were hard to come by and suggested she try another time. David looked the girl over again and wondered if the guy behind the counter was gay.

  “I have a tee time in the morning,” he said to her, because it was almost ridiculous, this good-looking woman hoping to find a golf partner at a lavish course frequented by the richest, most eligible men.

  The girl turned and looked at him. Her eyebrows were naturally arched and her makeup was light. She wasn’t model gorgeous, but her athletic frame was a sight to behold, and David required great effort not to stare at it.

  “You can join me if you like,” he told her.

  “I would really appreciate that. Do we have a partner, or is it just the two of us?”

  “I did have a partner,” David said, “but he won’t be joining us.”

  In her smile he saw a relationship, and that’s exactly what happened. He took her to dinner, to stage plays, to Sundance in Park City. Soon she was staying at his house for days at a time, and eventually David began to hear the familiar ticking clock, the countdown to a confrontation about their prospects for a long-term relationship.

  The hour had grown late and he realized his eyes were closed. He could barely keep them open. At this point a normal person would set aside the laptop and turn in, but David was a poor sleeper. Even on nights like this, when his eyelids felt like there were fishing weights tied to them, his mind raced as soon as his head hit the pillow. When, he wondered, was this fictitious existence in California going to end?

  Six weeks ago, to prove he was not a prisoner to his former life, David impulsively purchased a 4-carat Neil Lane diamond engagement ring. But he had planned and failed to present the ring to Meredith no less than five times since, and now he wasn’t sure if he ever—

  Beside him, on the nightstand, his iPhone pulsed. David picked it up quickly, hoping the noise hadn’t awoken Meredith. He slid out of bed and padded into the hallway before he answered. The number, area code included, was unfamiliar to him.

  “David Clark.”

  “Mr. Clark?” said a voice that sounded both brusque and tired, like someone charged with an important task they’d grown weary of completing. “Mr. David Clark?”

  “Yes. Who is this?”

  “My name is Detective Jerry Gholson. I’m calling from Wichita Falls.”

  There was a hiccup in David’s consciousness where for a moment he thought he might have passed out. It seemed he could hear his name being called from some faraway place, the sound of it echoing and cavernous.

  “Mr. Clark, are you there?”

  “Yes,” David said. “I’m sorry. You’re calling from Wichita Falls?”

  “Yes, sir. I’m afraid I have some bad news. Your father, Fred Clark, was killed this evening.”

  David heard a sound nearby and realized his eyes were closed. He opened them to find Meredith standing next to him.

  “How?” he said into the phone. “What happened?”

  “It appears he was murdered, Mr. Clark. I’m sorry to say.”

  “What? How? Do you know who did it?”

  Meredith was tugging on his shirt. Her eyes were large and concerned.

  “Something’s happened to my dad,” David whispered to her.

  On the phone the detective said, “We’re pretty sure, yes. The primary suspect is Bob Steele. He seems to have broken into your father’s restaurant and engaged him in some kind of confrontation. Then he set fire to the building. Fire crews were on the scene quickly, but Steele apparently poured accelerant throughout the establishment. It’s pretty much gone.”

  David swallowed and turned away from Meredith. His eyes closed again, as if to blot out the world, but the darkness only made things worse. Now he could see smoke thick like fog. He could see fire dancing in Todd Willis’ faraway eyes.

  The idea of insulating himself with luxury in Carmel, that a wall of money could somehow shield him from the reality of his life . . . it was stupid. It had always been stupid. In 1983 he had walked into a house with four other boys, splashed gasoline into the bedrooms and bathrooms of someone’s home, and lit the entire place on fire. He had done this at the suggestion of Todd Willis, a confident kid who had suffered a strange injury during the tornado of 1979, who had influenced them in ways David still didn’t understand. But it was the memory of the second fire, the one at his father’s restaurant, that really worried him. Not because he intentionally burned down the building where his dad had built a business. The old man deserved that. What drove David’s anxiety was the memory of Todd’s eyes that night, the mystical and faraway look in them, and the extraordinary secret he had shared. A secret David could not remember but that troubled him deeply.

  “This obviously has caught me off guard,” he said. “I’m not sure what to do now. Does someone need to identify the body? Have you charged Bobby with a crime?”

  Saying his friend’s name aloud brought forth other memories from that time. The five of them—Todd, Bobby, Jonathan, Adam, and David himself—had been the only members of a club called The Boys of Summer. They’d played football and video games and explored the woods together. On the night of the house fire, a boy named Joe Henreid had somehow discovered what they were doing, had found them in the house even as flames were devouring its interior. Their response had been to run, to leave him in the house alone, and after that no one had ever seen or heard from him again.

  David had spent his adult life not thinking about Joe or Todd or basically his entire childhood, and now he felt like all of it had happened yesterday.

  “Identification will need to be ascertained formally with dental records. The fire was severe. And there will be no case against Bob Steele because he perished on the scene as well. But there are legal issues to take care of, and since yo
ur father listed you as his emergency contact, and since we don’t know any other family members or next-of-kin, it would be helpful if you could come to Wichita Falls sometime in the next few days. If that’s possible.”

  “Uh,” David said. “Yes, I can do that. I’ll arrange to be there in the next day or two.”

  “That would be fine. Let me give you my contact information, and you just call me up when you’re in town.”

  The two of them exchanged phone numbers and email addresses and David ended the call. He realized he had wandered into an adjacent bedroom, and when he turned around he nearly ran into Meredith again.

  “Honey,” she said, and put her arms around him. “I’m so sorry. So very sorry. Do you want to talk about it?”

  “I don’t know what there is to say. My dad’s dead. It seems he was murdered. I have to go take care of his affairs.”

  “Oh, my God!” Meredith cried. She grabbed him by the arms and pushed him out where she could see him. “Oh, my God! By who?”

  “By this guy I used to hang out with. He was the quarterback of our high school team. I hadn’t spoken to him in like twenty years.”

  “Oh, David. You must be devastated. I’m so sorry.”

  She embraced him again, and David let himself be held. But he didn’t know what to think or how to behave. His mind was a blank page, a white void waiting for someone to type how he should feel and what he should do.

  “I know you don’t like to talk about him,” Meredith said. “I know you guys weren’t close. But you’re allowed to feel sad, David. Or angry. You keep your emotions to yourself and maybe that works most of the time, but whenever you’re ready to talk, I’m here to listen. Okay?”

  He appreciated what she was saying. Really, he did. But in this case Meredith didn’t know what the fuck she was talking about.