by Ty Roth
“What exactly did Shelly tell you? Have you told me everything?” I asked.
Gordon hesitated, stupidly (or so I thought) still weighing whether it was time to include me in Shelly’s full confidence. “All she said was that if anything happened to her, you’d have the disc. ‘Bring the boom box and Keats. He’ll have the disc.’ That was all.”
I allowed a few moments for it all to soak in. “If anything happened to her?” I said. “What does that mean? Why would she have thought that something was going to happen to her? Why would she have made all these plans for us? Unless …”
“Unless what, Keats?”
“Unless she …”
“She what?”
“She …”
“Go on. Say it. Unless she knew that she was going to die.”
“You mean … Shelly killed herself?”
Once more I got the look of utter indignation regarding my apparent thickheadedness. “Don’t be an idiot, Keats.”
That said, Gordon closed his eyes and the door on any further discussion.
Alone with my thoughts, I turned my attention to the stars and searched for clues.
10
I remember that I blamed Shelly’s sadness during that November and December on Hogg’s expulsion; on Gordon’s aloofness; on the coming of winter, which also marked the end of sailing season; on her difficulty adjusting to her new extended family (remember, her father had hastily remarried in early December); and, obviously, on her abortion. It wouldn’t be until the near fulfillment of our pledge to Shelly that I would learn from Gordon the true motivation for her melancholy.
Shelly’s piece for the Beacon that semester, which she began in earnest shortly after the night of the Halloween dance, reflected her atypical darkness of that period. It was a short tale titled “Since He …” It tells the story of a wealthy family unanimously considered exemplary as a model of Christian piety. That is, until the father is discovered with his throat slit ear to ear, on the floor of his study beneath the emptied wall safe, the apparent victim of an interrupted home invasion. The police quickly determine that there had been no break-in at all and that the killer had to have been a family member. Lacking in duplicity, the daughter, under interrogatory duress, admits to the killing, committed with the aid of her mother. Their plea that the murder had been precipitated by the daughter’s victimization at her father’s incestuous hands falls upon the disbelieving ears of the townspeople, and the jury summarily sentences both mother and daughter to death.
“Since He …” was a huge success both for the Beacon, which sold more copies of that particular issue than of any other in its fifty-year publishing history, and for Shelly. Her emergence as a talented writer helped to transform her weirdness into quirkiness and lubricated for her the hallways of Trinity for the remainder of her time there. Her schoolmates, if not exactly inviting her to join in their reindeer games, at least turned their attention to finding fresher meat to skewer. Mr. Robbins encouraged Shelly to enter the story in various contests or to offer it to publications catering to young writers, but, to my disbelief, she refused.
It was that same fall semester of their junior year, and for the same issue, when Gordon, at the last minute, finally submitted something to be printed in the Beacon. He’d been reading Shelly’s story and knew it was good. He could have let her have the day, but he went ahead and stole it, for, in all honesty, it was most likely his story that caused the spike in sales, but as perhaps only Mr. Robbins and myself knew, Shelly’s was the work of greater literary depth and quality. Gordon’s was a masturbatory piece of self-aggrandizement, but the irregularly reading public of Trinity was incapable of discerning the difference between artistry and sensationalism.
“Asmodeus” is the title of Gordon’s story. The title refers to the Judeo-Christian demon of lust. The narrative was a condensed version of what would become his second Manfred novel under the same title. The original, published in the Beacon, is a simple morality tale set in the near future at St. Jude’s, a coed Catholic high school similar to Trinity. The protagonist is a Goody Two-shoes senior named Toby who vies for the affection of the homecoming queen and class salutatorian, the virginal Rachel. His archrival for Rachel’s affection is a recent transfer student named Con, short for Conrad.
Con is nothing like Toby and Rachel, who are both academically gifted rich kids from traditional homes; both very likely to succeed. Con is the only child of an immigrant Scottish widow; she sleeps all day and works nights as a cashier at Wal-Mart in between getting high and sleeping with any number of low-life losers that she escorts to their tiny thin-walled two-bedroom apartment. (In case you haven’t figured it out, Con is Manfred’s son, his mother a vampire turned by Manfred. The losers she picks up? Dinner. Consider the stake through Manfred’s heart at the end of the first novel solved and a series born.)
Initially, Rachel finds Con repulsive. In fact, she finds all of the boys who have attempted to woo her repulsive. Including her senior homecoming dance, she has attended seven different formal dances with seven different boys, each of whom went home with bluer balls than the blue of Con’s piercing eyes. Toby has waited patiently, but he is goaded to act when he recognizes a look in Rachel’s eyes as she watches Con ride out of the student parking lot on his Indian brand motorcycle, a look identical to the way Toby looks at her.
Over time, and in juxtaposition to all of the other boys she has ever known, Con’s moody bad-boy demeanor and hard-luck life begin to appeal to Rachel. Through his feigned lack of interest, Con ignites a longing that she didn’t think she’d ever feel. Ashamed, during confession she reveals her lust to Father Raphael and emerges armed with an arsenal of Hail Marys, Our Fathers, and Glory Bes to combat her sexual urgings, but her prayers prove inadequate to quell her primal lust for Con.
With Father Raphael’s urging, Toby finally reveals his love to Rachel and reclaims her through a nostalgic recounting of their twelve years of parallel paths to the present and by imaginatively portraying her likely future of ruin and ultimate damnation.
In an act of altruistic self-sacrifice, unwilling to burden her with his own torturous curse, Con surrenders his impossible love for Rachel, leaves St. Jude’s in a bilious puff of motorcycle exhaust, and rides off into a Midwest midnight. (Motorcycle fatalities have risen by nearly 7 percent in the past five years.)
The sarcasm-proof morons at Trinity loved it. Even the faculty swallowed it hook, line, and sinker, but Gordon knew that, even though his dull-witted, God-fearing readers would never have admitted it, if they could have traded lives with or fucked any one of the characters, they would have unanimously chosen Con.
11
“Keats.”
I vaguely heard my name, but it failed to stimulate any kind of synaptic reaction or verbal response from inside the syrupy morass of my muted consciousness.
“Keats.”
There it was again. This time a little more forceful and accompanied by something poking at my rib cage, a poking that chased what had been my temporarily unfettered thoughts and reconnected them to the weighty and disappointing reality of a body that was scrunched, fetal position, on a cold, hard, and momentarily unidentifiable surface.
“Keats! Wake up. We’ve got to go.”
Gordon. It was Gordon. Somehow, at some point in the night, I’d managed to fall asleep on the dock with a moldy-smelling life preserver under my head for a pillow.
“What time is it?” I asked for no relevant reason other than to delay my ascent to the surface of awareness and to prevent a crippling case of the psychic bends.
“Time to get the fuck out of here. Let’s go. Undo that spring line and hop in,” Gordon directed.
I had no clue what a spring line was (I was picturing a Paris fashion show), but since there was only one rope still tied to the cleat on the dock, I figured that was it. I undid the simple knot and slid on board.
“Here,” he said, and handed me the urn. “Hold Shelly.”
The su
rface of the urn was warm. Gordon must have slept with Shelly snug to his body. I smiled at him.
“What?” Gordon asked defensively.
“Nothing,” I said, but he knew that I knew.
A quiet pall had descended on the early morning that would have seemed impossible during the raucous hours just prior. It evoked a stillness unlike any I had ever experienced growing up on my busy, well-lit Ogontz street, where cars whizzed past at all hours no more than fifty feet from my bedroom window, and sirens seemed to blare constantly. In my neighborhood, one learned early to discern the sympathetic wail of an ambulance from the angry command of a police car from the abject terror of a fire engine. Here, there was only the primordial quiet of an inland sea. The sole sounds were the occasional lapping of current against the dock pilings and the groaning of a too taut line being stretched to its excruciatingly painful extreme like an accused heretic on the rack.
Gordon gently turned the ignition switch as if his delicate handling would somehow convince the engines to understand our need for stealth. Unlike my rousing, theirs was immediate and enthusiastic, like two puppies at play, but even their boisterous barking wasn’t shrill enough to penetrate the depths of drunkenness into which most of our neighbors had descended. Gordon’s goal was to limit as severely as possible any record or awareness of our coming or going, so we idled out of our slip and out of the docks, into the harbor, leaving a barely discernible and untraceable wake writ on the water’s surface.
As we inched out into the narrow latitudinal channel separating South from Middle Bass Island, Gordon turned on the running lights and eased the throttles forward. “It’ll be a short run,” he said.
Since the sun was still a good hour from peeking its nose over the eastern horizon, Gordon reconfigured the GPS settings and navigated according to the phosphorescent images splashed on the radar screen, rather than trusting his eyesight alone.
Our course sent us skirting around the west coast of Middle Bass. Between it and farther to the west lies what the screen identified as Rattlesnake Island. It was a diminutive privately owned island that Gordon tried to convince me was owned by members of a Cleveland Mafia family and was used alternatively as a hideout, as a sort of sit-down center for the bosses of Midwest mob families, and as a summertime getaway.
“During Prohibition, it was used as a way station for whiskey runners smuggling booze from Canada,” Gordon explained. “You know, a bunch of the boats they used were the original wooden-hulled Byron speedboats that my family made. Rattlesnake has a private airstrip, a helipad, a par three golf course, and a fully staffed clubhouse with a whole herd of chefs flown in from the home country as demanded.”
It may have been Gordon’s bullshit imagination, but in the spirit of our own romantic quest, I bought every bit of it.
On course, we made a dogleg right around the even smaller, uninhabited freckle of earth known as Sugar Island off the northwest coast of Middle Bass. The Corsair was headed directly for the state park marina on the southeast corner of North Bass. The sky had begun to turn the gray of fired charcoal, and the lake had begun to show its morning green complexion, occasionally washed over by the whitecaps that had begun to transform our heretofore smooth run into a speed-bump-lined strip of nautical highway.
“What’s yours?” Gordon half-yelled, apropos of nothing, over the roar of the outboards and the splash of the fiberglass hull. With one hand, he breakfasted on what remained of the pretzels, as he steered with the other.
But I knew what he was asking; he wanted to know which R.E.M. song Shelly had assigned to me. “ ‘Try Not to Breathe,’ ” I said. “It’s pretty depressing.”
“I’ve never heard of it.”
“It isn’t one of their most popular songs. It’s an old one and wasn’t on the radio much, even when it was released. She’d play it for me sometimes while we worked on the Beacon.”
“How’s it go?”
“I’m not singing it,” I said, fully aware of my tone deafness.
“What about the lyrics? I mean, why did she pick it?”
I said, “There’s a line in the song that I think spoke to her somehow. I think it made her think of me.”
“So, how’s it go?” Gordon demanded.
I recited, “ ‘I have lived a full life / And these are the eyes that I want you to remember.’ ”
There was a moment of dead air between us.
“That’s fucked up,” Gordon finally said.
“You don’t know the half of it.”
“That was Shelly’s problem,” Gordon continued in his half-shout. “She started to take everything way too seriously. She became a drama queen. She wasn’t like that when we were kids, but somewhere along the way she became superfragile. Almost to the point where I didn’t want to hang around her, you know?”
I didn’t have the nerve to tell him that it was him, as much as anything else, that had created her brittle self-image.
“There it is,” Gordon pronounced, as he pointed toward a strobe flashing intermittently in the distance to our right. “Off the starboard bow. That’s a channel marker. A red buoy. ‘Red, right, return.’ ” He recited what he informed me was the mariner’s mantra for orienting one’s craft upon return to port, and he situated the Corsair so that we passed the buoy on the starboard side. With the throttles pulled back, we slunk into the unoccupied marina, which provided fewer than twenty slips.
“Why are we stopping here?” I asked. “I thought we were going to the north side.”
“We are. But there’s no dock there anymore. The state dismantled it to keep trespassers away.”
North Bass offered none of the advantages that the majority of the high-spending boating crowd desired, namely alcohol and breast-flashing women. Fewer than a dozen residents lived year-round on the state-owned nature preserve (that’s the island’s official designation), and if near-total neglect was the means by which to establish and maintain such a preserve, then the Ohio Department of Natural Resources was doing an enviable job.
It was no secret, however, that many at the statehouse viewed the island’s offshore location as ideal for the construction of a mini Vegas, so they did as little as possible to encourage the productive usage of North Bass. In the lawmakers’ wildest and wettest dreams, ferry services (transportation tax), hotels (bed tax), souvenir stores and stands (sales tax), and fully staffed bars and gambling houses (income tax, sin tax, and property tax) would one day transform a budget deficit in the millions of dollars into a budget surplus.
Not knowing when the ranger’s shift and patrol would start, we hurried to begin our approximately one-mile hike to the north shore, with Shelly, her discs, and the boom box in hand.
12
As I’ve already made clear, Gordon flat-out hated Shelly’s stepsister Claire. He thought her pathetic, but in late March of his junior year, after having returned to Ogontz giddy with his second individual and another team state swimming championship, Gordon relented. That night, when he arrived home from the team party at Coach Mancini’s and parked the H3 half on the circular driveway, half on the front lawn, Claire was waiting on his porch with a homemade banner of “Congratulations!” draped diagonally across her chest and splitting her impressive boobs. She was holding an already quarter-empty bottle of top-shelf vodka, which she had pilfered from her stepdad’s liquor cabinet.
Well inebriated himself from the gin-laced water bottle he’d been sipping at the party, and as horny as hell, he was able to overcome his antipathy for his psycho-stalker. Gordon flashed his high beams to signal her into the Hummer, which she entered with her jaws already flapping. “Blah, blah, blah, blah, blah” was all he made of Claire’s prattle as he took several swigs from the long smoked-glass bottle of France’s finest vodka.
A little bit of making out preceded a thirty-second screw in the back of the Hummer. Gordon’s uniform khakis never passed his ankles, nor did his school-issue blazer or tie come off, while Claire’s skinny-legged jeans and black with
white polka dots boy shorts clung to her right foot like a bear trap. (In a typical year, there are only three deaths by bear attack in North America.) Her royal-blue flyaway cashmere cardigan was opened wide to reveal a white cami and a lace bra pushed up and over her breasts.
When he awoke in his bed the next morning, hungover and confused, he prayed that the tryst inside his Hummer had been a dream. But when Claire’s onslaught began only moments later, he knew there to be no such luck. He ignored phone message after phone message; he deleted unread text after text. The very second Gordon stepped onto his front porch or activated the garage door, Claire came running. If he snuck out back to hop on a Jet Ski or into one of the water crafts, she was waiting onshore when he returned. At school those last two months of his junior year, she haunted him to the point that he frequently just stayed home. Worst of all and despite his protestations, many were beginning to think them a couple.
It wouldn’t be until August, however, that she’d begin to show.
* * *
On a Friday afternoon in early May, five months after her abortion, Shelly finally brushed the remaining surface layer of dirt from her shallow grave of depression, climbed out, and reclaimed her space among us living.
It had been a harsh winter.
Shelly had played host briefly during her leechlike stepsister’s introduction to Trinity. Soon, however, Claire had found Gordon and ditched Shelly. Prior to the Key Club’s Christmas toy drive, Shelly quit as president, and she stopped volunteering at Planned Parenthood. Not once did she perform an act of civil disobedience, and she carried out her duties at the Beacon with halfhearted indifference and didn’t provide a single submission. By spring’s arrival, Shelly had been reduced to a faded shade of her former self.
Lost in the self-pity caused by my own increasingly shitty reality, I wasn’t much of a friend to her. The paltry funeral we’d provided my father had drained dry the shallow pool of our family finances. His disability checks stopped coming; and the government aid we did receive was quickly eaten up by utilities and grocery bills. Sometimes—and I know being poor is no excuse, but having money gives you no right to judge either—my irregularly washed and re-worn school clothes were less than fresh, so I avoided contact with everybody at school and rarely showed up to help Shelly with the Beacon. Like her, I offered nothing for inclusion, and also like her, if for different reasons, I was disappearing.