by James Renner
“You still only see your pieces,” the Captain sighed as he dropped the rooks back in the Parker Brothers box. “Chess is about anticipating your opponent’s agenda. You have to play both sides.”
4 She wore a furry yellow-and-black costume and shook with excitement, the fat girl with the colorless hair. “Uzzzzzzzz,” said Paige, her eyes closed as she conjured her best bumblebee impression. She reminded Jack of that girl from the Blind Melon video.
Paige balanced on a red plastic stool so that Jean could make alterations to her costume—her first-grade class was staging an end-of-school “Backyard Zoo” pageant. Jean bent over, pins sticking out of her mouth as she tried to secure the stinger. “Hold still, sweetie,” she kept saying.
“I could sting you, Uncle Jack, but then I’d have to die,” Paige said, suddenly serious.
“Why would you die?” he asked.
“See this stinger,” she said, wiggling her backside, pulling it out of her mother’s hands. “It’s full of barbs. If I sting you, it sticks and then rips off my butt and my belly goes spilling out the hole.”
“Paige! Jesus,” said Jean.
“It’s a fact,” she said. “Also, I’m a queen bee. I’d be a worker bee but they musta fed me royal jelly.”
In the dining room Jack was helping the Captain with a bowl of chicken dumpling soup that had passed through the blender. It was a hot mess of meat and dough and broth. The Captain watched a nine-inch portable TV propped up on the table. Above the Fox News scrawl, helicopter footage showed a charred black crater burning silently a mile from downtown Ferguson. A drone strike had killed a dozen domestic terrorists. Free Will Baptists. They’d packed a U-Haul with explosives and were planning on taking down the St. Louis arch.
“I’m glad you’re here, Butch,” the Captain said, patting Jack’s hand. “Glad you’re home.”
Butch was his father’s brother. But Butch had never come home. He had died inside Tan Son Nhut Air Base during the Tet Offensive.
“You’re welcome,” said Jack.
“Uzzzzzz,” said Paige. He concentrated on her voice and fed the Captain another spoonful of soup.
5 There was only one bar in Franklin Mills, down by the traffic light at the center of town. The Driftwood was a dimly lit workaday pub with a paint-chipped juke and one pool table, a ten-minute drive from the house. Along the way Jack scanned the shadowed country roads, drawing down memories like a different sort of draft.
There was the redbrick cheese store where a bully named Chris once lived. One night when they were fourteen, he and Tony rode their Huffy Pro Thunder two-speeds out here at three in the morning and lit a nest of firecrackers under Chris’s bedroom window. A large, hairy-chested man in white briefs had come crashing out of the front door, swinging an antique scythe. I git you motherfuckers! he screamed.
There was the spot where he’d hit a patch of black ice on his way to pick up Sam one morning, sending his Subaru into a spin that had deposited him in the wrong lane moments behind a semi bound for Youngstown.
And there, slipping out of the darkness: a giant stone church attached to a squat brick building—St. Joe’s. Jack went to school there until seventh grade. It was where the local Boy Scout troop met on Tuesday nights. It was where he met Tony.
He fell in love with Tony before he fell in love with Sam. And it happened the same way it did with women: all at once.
* * *
In 1992, Troop 558 met inside the pole barn behind the church. It was a den of boys and a museum dedicated to their wayward adventures. On the back wall hung framed photographs of Boy Scouts in khaki uniforms at Camp Manatoc (in the winter) and Camp Algonkin (in the summertime). In the center was a panoramic: a contingent of older scouts grouped on a plateau at Philmont. On another wall hung wooden shingles in tidy rows, arranged by patrol unit. On each shingle was the name of a boy. An American flag was tied to a wobbly pole in the corner by the space heater. Wide shelves displayed awesome relics, like an Indian chief’s peacock-feather headdress and a pair of wooden Bigfoot feet that could be tied around your shoes. There was also a stuffed and mounted bird that looked sort of like a dodo, provenance unknown. In winter, the two space heaters made it so hot inside that it felt like you were wrapped in a woolen blanket. It was winter when Jack noticed Tony sitting below the dodo, reading a textbook.
Tony was an eighth-grader at John F. Kennedy public. He was a skinny kid with poky knees and a sharp jawline. He wore wire glasses and his hair was spiky, a strange yellow-orange from cheap spray lightener. Jack unfolded a wooden chair and dragged it over to him.
“Christ,” said Jack. “Is that for one of your classes?”
Tony adjusted his specs and bit at a nail. “It’s my mom’s. She’s taking a class at Kent. Nights. It’s psychology.”
“You wanna be a shrink?”
“No. I’m going to own a bunch of batting cages. Make some real money. I’m going to drive a bimmer. That’s a BMW. My first car’s going to be a BMW. Bet me.”
“I believe you.”
Tony looked up then. “I’ve seen you before. We were at Claytor Lake one summer before it closed. Your mother knows my mother.”
“I don’t remember.”
“Yeah, you were playing with the Rizzi twins on the barrels.”
Jack nodded. “So what’s in the book?”
Tony closed the text. On the cover was a bright green aspen leaf sectioned into a jigsaw puzzle. “There’s some freaky shit in here. Like scary, freaky stuff.”
“Like what?”
“Stuff about memory. Like you can’t trust anything you remember. For instance, there’s this experiment they did with a bunch of college students? On video, they showed this crime take place. Guy steals some stuff out of a woman’s bedroom. Then they hand everyone a test, ask questions about the crime. What they remembered. Except the way they worded the questions made them remember it different. One question was, ‘How many earrings did the burglar take?’ All the students had different answers. But here’s the scary part.”
“What?”
“The burglar never took any earrings. He took necklaces and panties and stuff. But no earrings. The questions made them remember it different. Even after they showed the students the video again, some of them still believed they had seen the burglar take the earrings. They were convinced the teacher had switched tapes.”
“Weird.”
“I know. It makes you wonder.”
“Wonder what?”
“Well, if anything we remember is real. We. Us. Our parents. Their parents. I mean, if memory can be screwed up just by asking questions a certain way, how can we be sure anything we remember is true?”
“You lost me.”
Tony looked off, over Jack’s shoulder. “Sometimes I get the feeling none of this is right.”
“None of what is right?”
He leaned in closer to Jack and whispered, “Haven’t you ever noticed how old Berlin Reservoir seems to be?”
“What?”
“Berlin Reservoir. All those stone walls. It looks ancient. But it was supposedly built in the fifties. Doesn’t everything seem so much older than it’s supposed to be?”
“I don’t know.”
Tony shrugged. “It’s always creeped me out, that reservoir. Whatever. The thing is, memory is about trust. We have to trust that what we remember is fact. And we have to trust what other people remember for things we never saw. Like when Berlin Reservoir was built. It’s creepy when you think about it.”
It was creepy when you thought about it, Jack realized. That night he thought about it a lot. It was a disturbing and thrilling realization, that our grasp of the truth is dependent on the honesty of older generations, on the companies who write history books. To Jack, it felt like the first Big Idea, the first adult thought he’d ever had. He felt a gratitude for Tony. For sharing such a grown-up thought and thinking he was worthy of such sharing.
From that night on they spoke of Big Ideas before every
scout meeting. They exchanged numbers—back then all of Franklin Mills had the same prefix, so you had to remember only four—and talked about their Big Ideas on the phone. It was a different friendship. This wasn’t kid stuff. This wasn’t about getting together and playing baseball. This was important. And Tony had found him worthy. And for that, yes, he loved him right away.
6 The juke was playing “Gimme Three Steps” when Jack walked into the Driftwood, Skynyrd thrumming from tinny speakers that made the band sound older than they were. The cagey air smelled of stale popcorn and yeast, the beginnings of a party that promised to go nowhere. At the back, a lanky guy in a frayed Indians cap leaned over the pool table. A younger man stood by him, arm propped on a cue. Next to the bar was a row of lacquered booths nudged out of alignment. A middle-aged couple sat on the same side of a table, nursing bottles of Red Stripe. A gargantuan fellow in bib overalls perched on a stool at the bar, watching a flatscreen. Jack took a seat at the other end and set his wallet on the counter. A young woman slid out of the kitchen and ambled over. She had dark hair pulled back in a tight ponytail. Under her left eye was a wide scar and she did nothing to hide it.
“Hiya,” she said.
“Dortmunder?” he asked.
“Tall?”
He nodded and handed her his credit card. He felt a little shiver in his chest, his body anticipating the hoppy beer. It had been a long drought. Hard to drink when you have 180 students to keep tabs on. Had been for him, anyway. Some teachers all they could do was drink to get through a day.
The young woman returned with his beer. Jack sipped it and watched the television across from him, which showed images of the smoking crater outside St. Louis.
“Where the fuck are you, Leroy? I’m at the rookery, numbnuts. I’m not going to fight these whelps alone!”
The loud voice startled Jack. For a second he thought the large man at the bar was speaking to him. But the man was staring at the other TV. It showed a computer-generated hillside and a character in Viking armor waiting outside tall wooden doors set into a mountainside. The man playing the video game looked strikingly similar to his on-screen avatar, down to the curly red beard that reached to his chest. He wore a Bluetooth and held a gray controller in his hand.
When another character (this one a spindly wizard) appeared on-screen, the man sighed with relief. “I see you. I don’t care what you had in the microwave. You gotta tell me when you walk away.” Suddenly the Viking character rushed inside the cave, where he and Leroy were quickly consumed by a swarm of flying baby dragons. “Fuckers!” the man shouted at the screen. He pulled out his Bluetooth and tossed it onto the bar. “Maiden!” he called. “More mead!”
The lady with the scar returned and poured the man a Miller Lite. “Nils. Don’t shout. Okay?”
“Sorry.”
“And I’m not your fuckin’ maid.”
“Maiden.”
“Whatever.”
Now that he got a good look, Jack recognized this man. “It’s Nils like thrills,” he used to say when they were kids. “Hey, Nils,” he said.
The Viking looked over. “Jack Felter! What in the actual fuck?” Nils—full name Nils May—smiled. Nils’s old man owned an excavating business that operated out of a tin garage off the highway. Drinking wells, mostly. The large man slid off his seat and skipped down to Jack, wrapping him in a bear hug. He smelled of brisket. “I haven’t seen you since the reunion, man! Northfield Park. We bet on some ponies. You got the trifecta, son of a bitch. How the fuck are you?”
“Good,” he said, climbing out of the squeeze. “Back for a bit. Helping with my dad.”
“I heard. Alzheimer’s?”
“Something like that.”
“My mother had MS. That’s some tough shit, man.” Nils sat next to Jack. “I come down here on Wednesday nights to play Warcraft. Tell my wife I’m playing poker. She hates, hates WOW. Calls it Warcrack. Shelly lets me hook it up here if I order a few drinks. Gotta spend at least ten dollars, though. Yeah. Working down at Georgio’s. The pizza place? Delivering. Good money.” Nils nodded and sipped his beer, waiting for Jack to say something.
“I always, I don’t know why, but I always wanted to open a pizza shop,” Jack said. He thought he could get real good at making pizza, make it so each pie came out same as all the others—same sauce, same texture, same meat-to-cheese ratio. No surprises.
“Maybe that’s why you’re here,” said Nils.
Jack laughed. It was the first time he’d smiled since coming home. Nils was a good guy.
“Hey,” Nils started, “you heard about Tony Sanders, right?”
And the smile was gone. “Yeah,” he said.
“What happened there do you think?”
Jack didn’t say anything. He looked to the moose head on the wall between the TVs, antlers dressed in purple Mardi Gras beads. There were no moose around here. Not anymore.
“Just…” Nils waved his hands in the air like a magician. “Poof! Ta-da! Gone. Vanished without a trace.”
“They were about to arrest him for kiting checks out at that hospital,” said Jack. “He didn’t want to go to prison. Probably in a cabin in Kentucky somewhere waiting for the end of the world.”
“I don’t know, man. I heard he had some problems right before it happened. Shelly said he come in here once wearing a helmet made out of a spaghetti colander.”
This was new information to Jack, who had followed the story about the missing doctor on the Akron Beacon Journal’s website with a detached curiosity. “Hadn’t heard that.”
“He was acting weird,” said Nils.
“I knew him better than just about anybody. He was weird. But never suicidal.” That was a lie. But Nils didn’t need to know otherwise.
They sat in silence, finishing their beers and pretending to watch the news. Then Nils put a dollar under his empty glass, stood, and began to gather his gadgets, which he put in a manpurse slung low over one shoulder.
“Whatever happened, it’s shitty. I guess I shouldn’t be blabbing about it. It’s just so … bizarre. I know you two were close back in the day. Used to watch you two pal around at camp. Didn’t mean nothing.”
“No worries, Nils. Long time ago.”
The redheaded giant slapped him on the shoulder a couple of times and then walked away, back to a wife who did not understand his longing for alien worlds.
Jack ordered another tall one and watched the crater burn. A crew of firemen were spraying the edge with jets of water, as if that could solve anything.
“Hello, Jack.” A familiar voice, that husky, low rattle he used to love. “A little birdie told me you were back in town.”
7 Samantha took the stool Nils had warmed and regarded Jack with a hesitant smile.
Her hair was not quite red and not quite brown. Copper, she called it, though that wasn’t quite right. Cinnamon? Rust? It was uniquely Sam, like so many things. It was cut differently. Bangs. And straight. Not layered, like before. It made her look older. Time had marched on in his absence—a rude sonofabitch. He remembered her with chubby childish cheeks that made her eyes small. Those cheeks were gone now, and her eyes were wider. She wore a thin plaid shirt opened to the third houndstooth button, her neck and nose awash in a galaxy of spring freckles. He used to count them as he lay beside her, naked, while she dozed away an afternoon. Once, he had gotten as far as 141.
“You look old,” she said, that half smile twisting up.
“Yeah,” he said, touching the silver hairs at his temples. “It’s the kids.”
She knew he taught history to high schoolers the same way she knew he was here. “Jean called me.”
“I figured.”
Shelly marched out to ask if Sam wanted a beer. “No thanks. I just stopped in for a second.”
“I don’t know what to say,” said Jack when they were alone again.
“I know.”
“I’m sorry.”
“For what?”
“I’m sorry Tony ra
n away, left you behind to deal with all his shit.”
She looked at him closely. “Oh,” she said. “You really think he ran away.”
“Why … what do you think?”
“Tony killed himself, Jack. I watched him go crazy. It was quick. At the beginning of June, he was fine. By the first of July, he was out of his mind. I think he drowned himself in Claytor Lake. Filled his pockets with rocks and walked into the water like Virginia Woolf.”
“What?”
“He was fighting depression, maybe schizophrenia. If you really think about it, all the symptoms were there, all the way back to when we were kids. Remember that night out at the lake?”
Jack flinched.
“Of course you do. The day before he disappeared, he went back there. I know he was there because he tracked sand all through the kitchen when he came home.”
Jack looked around, but the couple in the booth behind them were oblivious to their conversation. “Didn’t you tell anybody?”
“Not then,” she said. “Life insurance won’t pay out on suicide. I thought if he stayed missing long enough, I could just declare him dead. But then the cops found out about the money he was stealing from the hospital and it looked like he was running. I tried to get a judge to issue a death certificate just last month, but the prosecutor filed a motion to block it, because of their open investigation. It’s fucked. I know I sound like a heartless bitch for just caring about the money…”
“Sam…,” he started.
“But he shut me out completely in the end. It was hell. And, well, fuck him for doing it, you know? Leaving me like that. So selfish.” She sighed, shaking her head. “Your visit couldn’t have come at a better time, you know?”
“What do you mean?”
“I need some help. Do you feel like helping me, Jack?”
He didn’t, actually. But Virginia, for all her faults, had raised him better. “What do you need?”