Captain Quad

by Sean Costello

  She examined each of them in turn.

  The torn halves of the tickets to last year's Sadie Hawkins dance. How surprised he'd been when she asked him, stammering like a kid, glancing over his shoulder to be sure it was him she was addressing. She had known even then that if she hadn't made the first move they might never have gotten together. The desire was there, all over his face, like a rash that surfaced only when their eyes met. . . but a mover he wasn't.

  A red rose, dried, pressed, and sleeved in waxed paper. He'd waited on line at the Dairy Queen, where Kelly had been working for the summer, for almost an hour on the hottest day of that August, one hand hidden behind his back, his sweat-dampened T-shirt plastered to his chest and that just-for-you smile spread bashfully over his face. And when he finally reached her window, he'd poked the rose through the slot and then pressed his lips to the glass. By the time she got it, the blossom had been limp and droopy with the heat. But she'd kept every petal.

  Pictures. . .

  And The Book, as they came to know it. A dog-eared copy of the Kama Sutra. She'd picked it up in the Health section at the Coles bookstore on Elm Street and had begun to leaf through it idly. . . and had felt herself flush as she scanned random passages, not out of embarrassment (though the descriptions of positions and techniques left little to the imagination), but out of excitement at the prospect of bringing such forbidden ecstasies to her lover. She'd taken it up to the cashier, clumsily camouflaged amid a stack of $1.99 specials from the grab tables—such edifying titles as Dogs, Lichens and Fungi of North America and Automotive Mechanics—and had almost slipped it through. . . but then the girl at the register, a plump redhead with mascara so thick it was peeling, had trilled, "Oh, you're gonna love this one, sweetie," and had flipped it open herself. "Here," she'd confided, winking and tapping a page near the middle. "Start right here. You'll give him a hernia."

  They'd had a ball with that book, she and her man. . . and she had given him everything but a hernia.

  She went through it all, item by item, memory by sweet loving memory.

  Then, almost dreamily, she scooped up a handful of pills.

  EIGHT

  On a Thursday evening in the middle of January, Rhett Kiley and Jerry Jeter sat stageside at the Coulson Hotel and watched a stripper listlessly peel off her outfit. When she cut her tits loose—fat, pendulous things with nipples the size of bullets—Jerry thumped the table with his fist, then grinned stupidly at Rhett.

  Stunned fucker, Rhett thought, not unkindly. He'd always had a tolerant, big-brotherly affection for Jerry, and the sentiment seemed to have doubled since Jerry's football accident the previous fall.

  "'Nother brew?" Rhett said, and Jerry nodded his bandaged head. Rhett hailed a waitress and ordered two cold ones. The quiff on the stage was down on her ass now, doing the old beaver shot for the pervs in the front row, and Rhett glanced at her disinterestedly.

  What a drag, he thought, a sour belch burbling up from his guts. Barely twenty-one and already his life was on the skids. He'd been sure, so fucking sure the college scouts were going to pick him up, he hadn't even considered his alternatives. There was nothing else he wanted to do anyway. For Rhett, it had always been a pro-ball career or bust.

  Well, it looked like a bust. Without a football scholarship, there had been little point in going on to college. What was he going to be? A lawyer? A fucking pharmacist like clever old Mike Gore? Right. If it hadn't been for his superstar status in high school, he never would have made it through. Even with the coach pulling strings for him, it had taken Rhett seven years to get his diploma.

  The waitress came back with their beers. Rhett paid her, then drained half his bottle at a pull. He glanced at Jerry, who had his eyes glued to the stripper's snatch, and felt a faint twinge of envy for the guy. Jerry was no Einstein either, but he'd always had a cheerful, fun-loving nature, and he could run like the proverbial wind. Michigan State had picked him up on a nice juicy scholarship, but his first game out, Jerry had taken it in the head in a ten-man pileup and had ended up under the knife. Epidural hematoma, they'd called it. He spent a month in the hospital after his transfer back from the States, and now, two months later. . . well, the poor little fucker was different. Maybe it'd wear off with time, Rhett thought halfheartedly, not really believing it. But since his surgery, Jerry seemed sort of. . . stunned. Yeah. That said it best. That bright, mischievous light was gone from his eyes, and instead of spouting wild ideas like he used to, he just sort of sat there, waiting for something to happen. He looked okay, maybe a little clumsy on his feet. . . but something was missing. Too bad. He could have been big. He could have made it to the pros.

  "I've been thinking," Rhett said now, having trouble diverting Jerry's attention from the stripper. "My old man's been talking about retiring this winter, and he wants me to take over the business." Gord Kiley owned a Texaco station on Frood Road. Rhett was no mechanic, but Jerry could fix just about anything, and Rhett's dad already had a Class A mechanic on the payroll. "I've been thinking I might take him up on his offer," Rhett said expansively. To this point he'd been doing little more than drawing unemployment insurance, cadging beers, and smoking cigarillos. He lit one now. "Want a job?"

  Jerry grinned. "Fuckin' A, Rhett, old buddy! I'm yer man!"

  Rhett puffed on his smoke and laughed. Fine fucking pair they'd turned out to be. Football jocks turned mechanics. Who'd've thought?

  "Is the fishing trip still on for this weekend?" Jerry said as the stripper strode bare-assed off the stage, her performance finished.

  "Shit, that's right," Rhett said into the sudden lull. He'd almost forgotten—every year, the third weekend in January. Gardner had dreamed up this gig back in seventy-nine, when the four of them had first started chumming around together. Maybe that was why Rhett had forgotten; there'd been a lot of water under the bridge in the seven months since Gardner's accident. It hadn't even occurred to him to keep up the tradition. Gardner had made it into an annual event: "Something we should try not to miss no matter where our lives take us," he'd said, "as a means of keeping our friendship alive." Gardner was like that. Sappy. They'd even built themselves a small hut back there in the woods, a condo for their own private lake. If they made the trip this year, it'd be the first time they did so without Peter.

  "Think you can make it with that rag on your head?" Rhett said agreeably, thinking, What the hell. We don't need Gardner anyway.

  "This shit?" Jerry said, fingering the soiled turbanlike bandage beneath his Michigan State cap. "It's comin' off tomorrow."

  "Then we're on. I'll phone old Mikey tonight. I'm sure we can drag his nose out of those books long enough to drill a few holes in the ice. Whaddya think?"

  Jerry thought that sounded just fine.

  Rhett took over his father's business in the spring of '84. The old man didn't retire; he died. Cancer of the prostate. They buried him three weeks after the diagnosis was made. The mechanic who had worked for Rhett's dad decided in short order that he didn't approve of the new management and took a job at a competing station. Unruffled, Rhett replaced him with an old lower school chum, a big, bearded Harley jockey who got off on boozing almost as much as his new boss. The station became a kind of late-night watering hole, and with each beer Rhett guzzled he watched his future grow dimmer and dimmer. Opportunity rarely knocked more than once, especially in a town like this, and Rhett cursed himself relentlessly for having missed his chance.

  As Rhett had silently predicted, Jerry never truly recovered. Rhett had read somewhere that when they opened your lid like that and stirred your brains, you generally came up a few marbles short. Jerry was a case in point. He still liked his booze well enough, and he was a hard worker and a faithful companion. . . but he reminded Rhett of a spayed pup. That natural friskiness was gone, and although he was still only nineteen, he seemed to prefer a snooze in the shade to a romp in a sunny field. Together they formed what Rhett's father would have called a motley crew, but between them they m
anaged to keep Kiley's Texaco above ground. Barely.

  They were sitting together one sunny Sunday that summer, drinking beer and feeling nostalgic, when Rhett decided they should pay Peter a visit. The idea came out of the blue, and he dragged Jerry into the company truck, gunned it over to the hospital, and parked in a ten-minute tow-away zone.

  But when they got to the big front doors, Rhett remembered how it had gone the last time they'd visited Peter, and said to hell with it.

  They never saw Peter Gardner again.

  NINE

  On June 28, 1984, a year to the day following her son's tragic accident, Leona Gardner at last understood what had happened. It came in a staggering flash—and it was so tragically simple, it astonished her that she hadn't grasped it before now. With this knowledge came an uneasy mingling of sorrow and relief. . . but for the first time in ages Leona Gardner knew exactly what she must do.

  An odd serenity suffused her. She lit a fresh Tareyton, chugged some more Jack, then flipped on the reel-to-reel. There was no hurry now. None at all.

  Sammy's final report card lay face down on the coffee table in front of her, and Leona reached out and flipped it open. He'd passed the tenth grade with flying colors, and despite herself Leona felt a faint glow of pride for the kid. He'd had to work hard at it, too, burning the midnight oil most nights. Poor Sammy, he was most definitely not a talented boy. He couldn't draw, couldn't use a hammer without blackening a thumbnail, couldn't even put out the garbage without busting the bag. The only thing he could do was play hockey, and Leona could see little of value in that. In spite of his gangly clumsiness, on skates the kid underwent a mysterious transformation, a change so striking that even Leona had to acknowledge it. The one time she'd gone out to watch him play—a Bantam game about two years ago—his coach had proudly informed her that her son was going to be the next Wayne Gretzky.

  Now there was a good one.

  No, Sammy was not like his brother. For Peter the grades had always come easily, like the music and everything else. But what Sammy lacked in brains he made up for in determination; she had to give him that. He was out there right now, slinging cold cuts at the Sandwich King restaurant.

  Gonna be a doctor. . .

  Leona chuckled ruefully. For a while she let her son's music lap soothingly over her. When the tape was done, she got up and changed clothes, after digging the appropriate garments out of mothballs. Then she called a cab.

  Dwindling finances, most of which Leona had guzzled in one form or another, had forced her and Sammy to give up their small house on Colby Street and move into a tenth-floor apartment in the rent-geared-to-income complex on Lorne. Thinking of it—that hypocritical term, "rent-geared-to-income"—tugged another bitter chuckle from Leona. A slum by any other name. Overrun with snot-nosed kids, their pets, and their fat single mothers, the place was a twenty-story embarrassment. But with the pittance she got from the government, it was all she could afford. She hadn't worked in over a year, and she had no intention of starting now. At least the money she'd gotten from the sale of the house had covered her debts, with a little left over for security.

  The buzzer sounded. It was the cabbie.

  Leona pulled on a sweater, locked the apartment door, and took the elevator to the lobby.

  "The Whipple Tree on Regent," she said as she climbed into the diesel Volvo. "And stop at the LCBO."

  A misty rain was falling, dragging down with it the sulfurous reek of the smokestacks. Sneezing, Leona eyed the stacks with vague disdain. No matter what your vantage in the city, you could always see the stacks, bristling on the horizon like enormous blunt quills. They were steadily spewing eyesores. . . but each time she saw them, like a hundred-hundred other things, they put her in mind of her boy. The way he was. He'd worked his summers at Nickel Ridge, earning money for college.

  Leona got out at the Liquor Control Board on Regent Street and came back with a forty-ouncer of Jack. At the Whipple Tree she bailed out again and disappeared into the shop. A few minutes later she was back, clutching her purchase to her chest. Seeing her coming, the driver climbed out to assist her. Whatever she'd bought, it was too bulky for the backseat, so he helped her stow it in the trunk.

  "University Hospital," Leona said once they were mobile again. "And step on it."

  The cabbie called in his destination, noticing a glassy flash in the rearview mirror as his fare raised a bottle to her lips.

  The gruel they'd fed him for supper lay in a clotted lump in Peter's gut. A full year here and still he couldn't stomach the grub. Thank God for Sam. Three or four times a week the kid brought him a sackful of real food—barbecued ribs from Casey's, buckets of Chinese from the Peking Gazebo, spicy pasta from the Vesta Café, and more recently, heaped roast beef sandwiches from the Sandwich King, where Sam had a job for the summer.

  Without Sam, Peter reflected, life would be twice the misery it already was. Relatives, friends—he never saw any of them anymore. Even his mother's visits had become sporadic. . . and when she did come in she was usually three sheets to the wind and still babbling about a cure. Sam was the only one who hardly ever missed a day, who made Peter feel as if he were still. . . okay.

  But he was not okay. In the year since the accident he'd been back to the OR eight times. Twice to reset a poorly healed fracture, three times to release the deforming contractures that doglegged his lower limbs, once to remove a chunk of inhaled food from his trachea—that one had almost killed him—and twice to skin-graft the bedsores that had formed on his keester. He got bladder infections at the drop of a hat, gobbled more pills than a busload of blue-rinsers, and regularly upchucked his meals. He had to have someone brush his teeth, trim his nails, and scrub his backside. And when he wasn't shitting his bed, a nurse had to slip on a glove and manually disimpact him.

  Humiliation? He could rewrite the book.

  But somehow, hope never wholly abandoned him. That made him a fool as well as a gimp; he knew that well enough. Still, it was hard to give up. Maybe someday researchers really would come up with a cure—maybe even old Sammy. The kid had made good on all of his promises so far. To give up hope was to court the blackest of depressions, blacker by far than anything Peter had previously thought possible. On the few occasions he'd let his hope slip, he had glimpsed that blackness and judged it to be worse than death.

  There was always hope. No matter how slim.

  His mother stamped into the room then, startling Peter from his grim reflections. She was dressed all in black, with one of those overturned-ashtray hats on her head, the kind with the black lace netting and the long shiny pin. A church hat. Her gait seemed more unsteady than usual, but Peter attributed this to the large, paper-wrapped package she was lugging. He could barely see her eyes over its broadly curved rim.

  As usual, the raw smell of booze preceded her. . . and something else. A green, piney odor that sparked formless, yet distinctly unsettling associations in Peter's mind.

  It was coming from that package. . .

  "Hi, Mom," Peter said, forcing a cheerful tone. "What'd you bring me?"

  Apparently unaware that he had spoken, Leona set her package on the floor below Peter's sight line, then kicked off the doorstop. When the door closed, she thumbed the latch, its soft snick shutting them in with the smell of cheap whiskey. . . and the cloying green reek of that package.

  "Mom?" Peter said, unable to disguise the fear in his voice. "What are you doing?"

  Leona made no reply, only glanced at him—but with such an expression of loss and bereavement that Peter almost cried out.

  Now she was unwrapping that package, her back to him.

  "Mom?" Peter said again, his voice breaking like a frightened child's. "What are you doing? Is Sam okay?" This thought slammed into him like a gun butt. "Is he, Mom? Why don't you answer me?"

  The crinkle of wrapping paper seemed impossibly loud. She tore it free, balled it up, and stuffed it into the wastebasket.

  Then, very deliberately, she swung
Peter's call button aside.

  That green smell was very big now, filling the room. . .

  "Mom! Look at me. Look at me."

  And she did. She looked at him. Gray eyes swimming in boozy tears, she regarded her son as she might—

  (an embalmed corpse)

  Leona hoisted the funeral wreath onto Peter's chest, allowing its prickly weight to settle there. Peter had to wrench back his chin to prevent the stiff leaves from scratching his face. The smell of it made his head spin.

  "Get it off me!" he shouted, horror scuttling over his unfeeling body like sewer rats. "Get it off!"

  Unheeding, Leona reached out a mourner's hand and stroked her son's brow. Peter jerked his head aside, but she seemed not to notice. A grimacelike grin quivered on her lips.

  "Why are you doing this?" Peter pleaded.

  While in his brain a battalion of remembered commands were instantly assembled. In a sweeping assault they descended the neural pathways of his brain stem, their urgent purpose to recruit the wasted muscles of his body, to draft them into service this one last time, to endow them with the needed machinery to raise an arm and fling that wreath off his chest. . . but the futile directives toppled to their death in the chasm of Peter's shattered spine.

  The wreath lay there under its immovable weight.

  "Stop it, Mom, please. Get this thing off me. I'm not dead. I am not dead!"

  Now she had a Bible open and she was reading from it, kneeling at his bedside, consigning him solemnly from this world to the next. Peter cried out to her, begging her to stop. The weight of the wreath was crushing him, stifling his breath—and suddenly it seemed that he really would die, right here at his own grotesque mock funeral. The mossy-sweet stench of the wreath swamped his nostrils like bilge water, and he was drowning in it.