The Boys of Summer

by Richard Cox

  “You’re saying it’s actually the same song?” Meredith asked. “You’re saying Todd played it before you ever heard it on the radio?”

  “Yes,” Jonathan blurted.

  “Okay, but who knows when the song was actually recorded?” Meredith asked. “Maybe the popular version is a remake.”

  “I looked it up,” Jonathan told her. “Don Henley wrote the song with a guitarist who played with Tom Petty. In 1984.”

  “There must be some kind of explanation. Maybe it was another song he played, and you guys remember it wrong. There are a lot of options more likely than a time warp, right?”

  “I know how it sounds,” Jonathan said. “But if there’s a better explanation, I can’t figure out what it is.”

  33

  Alicia understood a writer might want to find drama in everyday situations, but when you blamed the supernatural for faulty childhood memories, you were in the territory of alien abductions and Elvis sightings. She would have expected Jonathan to realize this about himself, considering his logical nature, but judging by the earnest look on his face he seemed to have already accepted his incredible conclusion as fact.

  When she was a little girl, psychic abilities like telepathy and second sight had seemed frighteningly possible, but her father’s regular and patient lessons about science helped her look at the world through more pragmatic eyes. Alicia still wanted to believe in the impossible, in something beyond the physical world, but by now she understood that extraordinary claims could only be supported by extraordinary proof.

  “I think Meredith is right,” she said to Jonathan. “There must be some kind of other explanation. Either you guys remember it wrong or he heard the song somewhere.”

  “I don’t see what difference it makes, anyway,” Meredith said. “Why are the fires and the song necessarily related?”

  “Whoever is sending emails to the detective must believe they’re related,” David pointed out.

  “Or at least they want you to think that.”

  “Both of us remember Todd playing this song when he shouldn’t have known about it,” Jonathan said. “Even if there were no fires and no emails, isn’t that pretty significant?”

  “It’s significant you guys believe it,” Meredith said. “But couldn’t Todd have known about the song in a more believable way?”

  “How?” asked Jonathan. “Wouldn’t someone have known if his family was friends with a famous singer?”

  “Probably,” Meredith said. “So maybe Todd wrote the song and he or his family sold it to Don Henley.”

  “Honestly,” Alicia said. “What would you guys think if the situation were reversed? Would you believe something like this if we didn’t have proof?”

  Jonathan opened his mouth, presumably to argue the point, but then said nothing.

  “I think it’s a whole lot more likely you guys have remembered it wrong,” Meredith added.

  “You know what?” Jonathan said. “I might be able to help with this.”

  He stood up and headed toward the kitchen.

  “Where are you going?” Alicia asked him.

  “Be right back.”

  As Alicia watched him go, she wondered if maybe Jonathan wasn’t as logical as she first believed. What could she realistically know about him so far, other than he was funny and a pretty good kisser? Also, since Alicia could still taste that kiss on her lips, why did she keep stealing glances at David and his hot, young girlfriend?

  “Jonathan seems nervous,” Meredith said. “He sucked down those first two glasses of wine pretty fast.”

  “I can understand why,” David said. “I only remembered about the song on the flight over, and the more I thought about it, the more I felt like I was nuts.”

  “You didn’t mention it to me,” Meredith said.

  “I thought maybe I was dreaming it up. If Jonathan hadn’t said something I don’t think I would have, either.”

  She looked at him skeptically, or so it seemed to Alicia.

  “So right now,” Meredith said, “the biggest problem is the emails. There haven’t been any more attacks since Bobby’s visit to the restaurant, right?”

  “Correct,” Alicia said. “But the emails have kept the case open, which doesn’t help me at all.”

  “Surely your insurance company will have to pay at some point,” Meredith said. “How can they deny the claim if there’s no reason to believe you set the fire yourself?”

  “The emails are not the only issue here,” David said. “Why are you so confident Jonathan and I are full of shit about the song?”

  “Because what you guys are asking us to believe isn’t possible.”

  It was amusing to watch them bicker. Alicia didn’t have to be proud of this for it to be true.

  Soon after, Jonathan reappeared carrying a worn cardboard box that must have come from his attic. Alicia could see the dust from across the room.

  “This box is pretty much all I have left from those years,” Jonathan said.

  From the corner of her eye, Alicia saw Meredith glance at her, as if the two of them were a team now, as if they had found solidarity defending the material world from supernatural intrusion. But Alicia wasn’t interested in sharing common ground with David’s girlfriend.

  “There are a bunch of record albums and cassettes in here. I used to record songs off the radio, just like Todd.”

  “It was the 80s,” David said.

  Jonathan sat down and pulled a pile of books out of the box, pushed aside a row of record albums, and rummaged in further. He retrieved a couple of cassettes with black shells and white labels. A few scraps of paper also fluttered out of the box, what looked like notebook paper someone had intentionally ripped to shreds.

  “But now I’m wondering if these . . . .” He held one of them up, and then stood again. “Let’s see what they are.”

  Jonathan popped the cassette into the stereo above his television. He hit a button and then another, and a song began to play. It was muffled and distorted and there was too much bass.

  “What music is that?” David asked.

  “Don’t pretend you don’t know,” Jonathan said, smiling.

  “It’s Midnight Star,” Alicia said. “And you guys are both Freak-A-Zoids for expecting us to believe this.”

  Jonathan stopped the tape and began playing it again. This time it was something that sounded like Kenny Loggins. He ejected the cassette and turned it over. The other side was a recording of The Rick Dees Weekly Top Forty.

  David pointed at the other cassettes on the carpet. “I think I know what you’re looking for. What about those?”

  Jonathan ejected the cassette and picked up another one. One of the scraps of shredded paper was stuck to it, and Alicia saw a momentary look of confusion on Jonathan’s face as he removed it. As if there were meaning associated with the paper, something he had just now remembered.

  Then he tossed the scrap aside, pushed the cassette into the stereo, and pressed a button.

  This time there was more than just music. There was also the muffled sound of someone talking.

  “Lot of tape hiss,” David noted.

  Jonathan turned up the volume and hit a button on the tape deck. The hiss disappeared, and Alicia could hear a quiet melody, as if someone were in fact playing an electronic keyboard. There was also a voice on the tape. A boy’s voice. The loudness of Jonathan’s stereo, the amplification of these ancient sounds, generated for Alicia a profound sensation of disembodiment, as if she had opened a window to the past and was poking her head through.

  “Who won at football?” the boy asked. A bit of silence followed. Then, “Bobby’s team, right?”

  “Fucking bullshit,” another voice said. A boy with a deeper voice.

  “Let it go, dude,” a third voice said. “You lost. Get over it.”

  Alicia looked from Jonathan to David. David was smiling.

  “That’s me,” he said.

  “You’ve got one hell of a southern accen
t,” Meredith remarked. Alicia looked back at Jonathan. “Rewind it. We’re missing stuff.”

  “Sorry,” said Meredith.

  As Jonathan rewound, Meredith asked, “Are you saying you have it on tape? This kid, Todd, singing the Don Henley song?”

  “Maybe. These tapes are from that summer.”

  “Come on.”

  Jonathan looked at David and said, “Do you remember the football game?”

  “Of course. We destroyed them. This is also the day we wrecked the house. I can’t believe you have this.”

  “Me, either,” Meredith deadpanned.

  Alicia didn’t expect the recording to deliver what Jonathan and David seemed to be hoping for, not at all, but now that the tape was playing she found it fascinating anyway. After all, she had known these boys in that time, and hearing their young voices signaled other memories from that summer to come forward: Jelly shoes, the smell of swimming pool chlorine, dancing with her friend Brandi to Michael Jackson and the Culture Club. But where memories were often exaggerated or left wanting for detail, the tape represented a version of the past that could be reproduced with exacting precision. The tape was reality, or the closest thing to it.

  But would anyone ever want their memories served up so perfectly? The most vivid image she could recall from that time was drawing a white slip of paper from a red wicker basket and discovering Jonathan’s name written on it. When she made eye contact with him, the way he grinned back at her, it was something that still made her smile after all these years. But if Alicia were able to access a video file of that scene, watch their encounter rendered in the merciless authenticity of pixels, how would reality compare to the moment she so fondly remembered?

  “Who else is talking?” she asked.

  “The first voice was Adam,” Jonathan said. “He was asking about the game because he didn’t play in it. Then Bobby, then David. You’ll probably hear Todd and me as well.”

  He pushed a button on the tape deck, and they picked up the conversation again.

  “Let it go, dude,” young David said. “You lost. Get over it.”

  “What?” Bobby said. “What did you say to me?”

  “You heard me. Stop whining like a little baby.”

  “If you don’t watch it, you’re gonna be the one whining like a baby.”

  “Whatever, Bobby,” David answered. “You’re not our boss, all right? You’re—”

  Alicia listened as the confrontation on the tape intensified, until threats were replaced by the sound of punches and grunts and swearing. Despite the yawning valley of years that had elapsed since the tape was recorded, she nonetheless was impressed with David for standing up to Bobby Steele, a brute of a kid who first became a football hero and later a cold-blooded killer. Alicia glanced over and noticed David watching her. She looked away and hoped she wasn’t blushing.

  On the tape, the fight didn’t last long. A period of silence followed, and then Bobby said, in a small voice, “Holy shit.”

  They all listened for what would come next, but the tape stopped.

  “That’s it?” Meredith asked.

  “It’s the end of this side of the tape,” Jonathan said. “Let me turn it over and see what’s on the other side.

  He did, and they listened for a while. But all they heard was silence.

  “Put it back on the first side again,” David said. “Rewind it all the way. We started near the end.”

  Jonathan turned the cassette over and rewound the tape until it stopped, then played it from the beginning. Alicia glanced at David again, but this time his attention was focused on the stereo and he was holding hands with Meredith.

  The first thing on the tape this time was a loud shuffling sound. Then a boy said, “We don’t do anything with the club. David had already built the fort, so we just called ourselves The Dragons and made it our headquarters.”

  “Is that Bobby again?” Alicia asked.

  Jonathan nodded. “This must be another day. Sometime before we burned down the house.”

  “We keep our secret stuff there,” David’s younger self said. “We’ve got some porno magazines and a couple of packs of cigarettes.”

  “Porn?” Meredith asked, smiling. “In junior high?”

  “See there,” someone on the tape said. “I knew you guys had a mean streak in you.”

  “Is that Todd?” Alicia asked.

  “It is,” Jonathan said.

  On the tape, Todd said, “Jonathan, you should totally bring Alicia here and make out with her.”

  “I would if I were you,” young David said. “That girl is so hot.”

  Alicia smiled. She couldn’t help herself. Even when they all looked at her, and she felt herself blushing, the smile didn’t go away.

  “I guess you were quite an item back in the day,” Meredith said.

  “She was,” David agreed. “All the guys in school were after her.”

  “Oh, whatever,” Alicia said. “I was not an item.”

  “You should rewind the tape,” Meredith said. “We’re missing stuff.”

  Jonathan rewound a bit and they listened again as the conversation evolved from porn magazines to masturbation. It was impossibly cute to hear how innocent the boys had been.

  “Wait a minute,” Meredith said.

  “What now?” David asked.

  Meredith turned to Jonathan. “Would you rewind the tape a bit? I must have heard that wrong.”

  Jonathan restarted the tape, and they listened to the last few seconds of it again.

  “He’s seen you at the fort by yourself,” young Bobby said. Adam said, “So what if I—”

  “More than once,” Bobby added.

  David looked at Meredith, as if ready to explain something, but she put her finger up to stop him.

  On the tape, Adam said, “Screw you guys. I’m going home.”

  And Todd said, “Sit down, Cartman.”

  “There,” Meredith interrupted. “What the hell is that?”

  “What is what?” David asked.

  “Cartman is the fat kid from ‘South Park.’ Tell me he didn’t just say that.”

  They all looked at each other.

  “I’ve never seen ‘South Park,’” David said.

  “It’s a cartoon on Comedy Central,” Meredith told him. “It was really popular a few years ago. And that’s one of Cartman’s signature phrases. ‘Screw you guys, I’m going home.’”

  Even if Alicia didn’t want much to do with Meredith, she nevertheless had been happy to enjoy another voice of reason in the room. Now her unlikely ally appeared to be wavering.

  “It doesn’t necessarily mean anything,” she said. “Anybody might say something like that.”

  “Sure,” Meredith answered. She took a drink of her wine and put her hand on David’s thigh. “But how many Cartmans do you know?”

  A few years back “South Park” had been one of Alicia’s favorite television shows. She’d never even heard the name Cartman before then. Not once.

  “Still,” she said. “That’s not . . . I mean, who would consider that certain proof?”

  Meredith shrugged. “I don’t want to believe it, either. So how do we explain it?”

  On the tape, Jonathan’s younger self said, “You’re pretty good with that thing. You know how to play any real songs?”

  A few seconds of silence went by, and then Todd played a melody on the keyboard.

  “This is the kid who was asleep for four years?” Meredith asked. “He woke up and could just play the keyboard that well?”

  “It sounds impossible,” David told her, “but it was national news at the time.”

  On the tape, young Jonathan said, “Have you tried writing songs of your own?”

  “Well . . . ”

  “Hey,” Bobby said. “Don’t tell me you’re embarrassed, Mister Badass.”

  “Let’s hear it,” Adam said.

  Alicia realized she was leaning forward, as if doing so would make it easier to hear
what would come next. And though her rational mind flatly rejected the idea of Todd’s impossible music, another part of her felt something like destiny, as if this tape had been recorded for the sole purpose of them listening to it now.

  “All right,” Todd said on the tape. “I’ve got two. The first one doesn’t have many words, though. It’s called ‘In the Name of Love.’”

  A simple melody followed, one Alicia recognized immediately, so her natural response was to feign ignorance. This was ridiculous. It was farcical.

  Jonathan and David looked at each other. Their eyes were wide, their brows raised.

  “I know that song,” Meredith said. “It’s from the 80s, right?”

  “It sounds like ‘Pour Some Sugar on Me,’” Alicia said. “But those aren’t exactly the right lyrics, are they?”

  “Maybe not,” David acknowledged. “But do you think he’s playing some other song?”

  “No,” Meredith answered. “There’s no question it’s the same song. The music is exactly the same.”

  The question floated in the air around them, waiting to be summoned, and Alicia could restrain herself no longer.

  “What year did that song come out?”

  “Hysteria was one of my favorite albums,” David said. “It came out the year I got my driver’s license and I played it in my car nonstop. That was 1987.”

  Alicia could not imagine how their conversation would proceed from this point. She knew what she heard could not be true, and yet who could argue with an actual recording? The only way to reconcile this conflict was to consider the tape a forgery.

  On the tape Todd was tapping out another melody. Alicia recognized it, they all did, and then the kid began to sing.

  Nobody on the road

  Nobody on the beach

  I feel it in the air

  The summer’s out of reach

  Empty lake, empty streets

  The sun goes down alone

  I’m driving by your house

  Though I know you’re not home

  But I can see you

  Your brown skin shining in the sun

  You got your hair combed back and your sunglasses on, baby

  And I can tell you my love for you will still be strong

  After the boys of summer have gone.