“Just sit down and shut up, Hester, and hear me out.”
Hester was almost in a panic. Whoever said it was a good thing to lay all the cards on the table must’ve been nuts. When all the cards are on the table, there’s still only one winner. Reluctantly Hester put the chicken back on the table and started to sit down.
“Wait!” Al said it way too loud. “Grab me another beer first.”
Damn it, Al, Hester wanted to scream at him, can’t you just leave well enough alone?
Forty-Three
So much had changed since the end of the last school year. One day Hester was teaching English, the next day she was a retiree. The sound of that word, retiree, didn’t make her happy. She was too young to be a retiree, but when Al got it in his head to do something, there was no changing it. And he was ready to move on from the old Victorian too.
“Al, I really don’t want to sell this house. I love this house,” Hester argued.
“You’ll love our next place just as much.”
“How do you know what I’ll love?”
“You love me, don’t you? You’ll love anything I love, right?” Al smiled.
“I’m not completely sure about that.”
“About loving me?” Al’s face turned serious.
“Come on, Al, you know better than that.”
“Then if you love me, trust me.”
When the real estate agent came over, Hester signed the papers. A month later the Victorian was sold, and the Lambertville condo purchased. Al threatened to hire an auctioneer and auction off all of Hester’s stuff, all of the Victoriana she’d spent decades collecting and that had given the house such an air of authenticity, and all of the souvenirs she’d spent a fortune on, if she didn’t get rid of the stuff herself. Promptly and secretly, she rented a storage container in Frenchtown and hired a moving company to clear everything out of the house while Al was away on a golfing trip.
“I don’t care what you did with it. I’m just glad it’s gone,” he said when he returned.
After the Moretown closing, Al took Hester to Split Rock Lodge in the Poconos for a couple of days. It was late August, the hot and humid dog days of summer. The small Appalachian range was primarily a winter skiing destination; and the old resort, a bit past its prime, was nearly empty.
Hester and Al sat in the lounge chairs on the deck in the afternoon sun. A skin of algae grew on the stagnant surface of the lake. Al had surprised Hester by renting the honeymoon suite. It came with champagne and chocolates. Last night when they arrived, Al popped the cork and proposed a toast.
“To you, Hester, my loyal and true wife. To our future together as two old lovers and friends.”
Now, Hester thought as she raised her glass toward Al, how could anyone not love a guy like this? She took a sip and the cold bubbles made her lips tingled.
The champagne gone, Al helped Hester out of her clothes and insisted she lie on her back on the bed. He placed the chocolates in a row down the middle of her torso. He undressed, knelt on the bed next to her, and worked his way south, eating and kissing…
The memory still fresh in her mind, Hester reached over and entwined her fingers in her husband’s. “Do you know, Al, how happy you made me last night?”
“How happy?” He’d been resting with his head back and his eyes closed. He didn’t open them.
“Well, happier than I am about moving out of Moretown.”
“Hester, please, you’re not going to start with that again, are you?” He turned his head, opened one eye, and squinted at her.
“It was home. It was convenient to school. What if I wanted be a substitute teacher and go in a couple of days a week.”
“You don’t need to, Hester.”
“But I might want to.”
Al opened both eyes and looked at her squarely. “You’re not going back to that school,” he said sharply.
“Al!”
“Don’t argue, Hester. We’ve got plenty of money. You don’t need to work anymore.” He put his head back and shut his eyes again.
“Alright.” Hester didn’t want to argue. “But I just want to say one more thing.”
Al sighed, “One more thing, then I’m taking a nap.”
“The real reason I didn’t want to leave Moretown was because of Nina.”
“What’s Nina got to do with Moretown?”
“She could walk to our house from her aunt’s house whenever she wanted. Now that we’ll be so far away, we might never see her. She doesn’t have a car. She’ll never be able to get to Lambertville.”
“I’ll pick her up and drop her off, okay?”
“That’s a lot for you to do, Al, but you understand, don’t you? I want to keep her in my life.”
“You don’t have to worry about that, honey. I can guarantee she’ll be in your life. Now are we done with this topic?”
“Yes, if you can guarantee Nina will be in my life.” Hester leaned back, closed her eyes, and began imagining what Al might to do to her when they got back in their room.
Forty-Four
Hester brought out another beer for her husband and sat down across from him. She was tired and impatient.
Al opened the beer and said, “I want to tell you something I never told anyone, something that happened in college.”
College? Hester was relieved. College was decades ago. Whatever happened then, couldn’t possibly matter now—not unless he murdered someone. The statutes of limitations never run out on murder. But Al’s no murderer…again she shoved the whole terrible incident almost completely under the carpet.
Hester could tell Al was totally drunk, and, therefore, he would be impossible to shut up. She did the only thing she could do, other than run away. She sat back and listened.
“I went to this party one night and left early. I can still hear that twang of Hendrix’s guitar blaring from the stereo in the apartment where everyone was still partying. The sound followed me all the way out to Pitman Road, where, when I turned into the wind to head back to campus, thank God, I stopped hearing it.”
Right then and there, Hester wanted to butt in. She was confused because he’d said Pitman Road, and Pitman Road was in Glassboro, where she’d gone to college. Al always bragged about going to Trenton State College, the best state college, according to him, in the state. She’d have to ask him about it later because he was staring into the flame of the candle and talking like he was in some kind of trance.
“It was 1969,” he said, “and if you didn’t dig Hendrix and Joplin and Cream, you weren’t with it.”
He wasn’t very ‘with it’ and didn’t care if that meant he didn’t fit in. Why he went to the stupid party, he didn’t know, but he was having a lousy time, so despite the fact that it was a bitter cold December night and he didn’t have a ride, he left the party around midnight. Summit Ridge Apartments was a mile and a half from his dorm, and this wasn’t the first time he’d made the trip on foot back to the Glassboro campus.
Glassboro! The second revelation, thought Hester. We did go to the same college, at the same time. How she wanted to say something smart-assed about who was he to look down his nose at her all these years, but Al kept talking. His eyes wandered from the flame to the darkness beyond her.
That night at Summit Ridge he got drunk and stoned, but he still had enough sense to walk through the dry weeds that grew along the macadam because the road was narrow with no shoulder. There were no streetlights; the moon must’ve been behind the clouds, because he couldn’t see his hand when he put it out in front of him. He had on his black leather jacket, dark jeans so it would’ve been damn-near impossible for anyone driving a car to see him. He could end up like road kill, smashed, flattened, gone. People hit things, heard the thud, kept driving. He’d seen lots of dead animals left on roads to rot. He’d seen maniacs speed up on purpose, swerve directly toward some confused animal, bang. All that was left were guts and fur scattered all over the place. Things like that disgusted him. He had to admit ba
ck then pretty much everything disgusted him. For the past couple of days before the party, getting high wasn’t even working for him. He got a buzz for a few minutes and then whatever he smoked or snorted or ingested only brought him further down than he already was.
Snow began falling in small flakes that melted as soon as they hit the ground, but before long thicker flakes mixed with ice were coming down fast. The wind whipped the cold mess into his face. He lowered his head, pulled his collar up, tried not to think about how his face stung or how thin and insubstantial his stupid leather jacket was. He should’ve put in the zip-in liner. The storm was the beginning of a front pushing through; behind it was an Arctic blast. The velocity of the wind increased steadily, moving through the fields of dry cornstalks on either side of him. The frantic rattling crescendoed in the gusts, reminded him of crashing ocean waves.
He started humming Mascagni’s Cavalleria Rusticana, just like his grandfather Bruno Petrelli, taught him. Every summer until his mother’s father died, he went with Pop Bruno to Long Beach Island. They stayed in his old dilapidated Nomad in Holgate’s trailer park. For two weeks they’d fish all day and fall asleep at night to the sound of waves pounding the shore like a throbbing heart.
Humming the tune brought back these good memories and made him feel almost warm inside, almost okay. He got to the end of the fields. He stopped humming because even that wasn’t helping. He was frigid, his face burned from the cold, his hands were numb. It was the worst he ever felt.
Ahead he could see the lights of the Sunoco station. He’d stop there to use the john. A good excuse to go inside and warm up. He walked from the road into the circle of light cast by the florescent tubes. He hurried into the office to ask for the key. The men’s room was as cold as a meat locker, colder than it was outside. He wasted no time, and when he returned the key, he looked around for something to do so he could stay in the office near the hot radiator. The man behind the counter hung the key back on its hook, then turned and buried his nose in the drawer of the cash register. There were two oak chairs by the window, and parts of the newspaper were scattered across the top of a low table. He sat down in the chair closest to the sizzling radiator, picked up the paper, and pretended to read it.
He didn’t have to look at the headlines to know what they were about. The same thing was splashed across the front of every newspaper from Key West to Anchorage. It was what was weighing heavily on his mind, and the minds of all healthy young American men, that night. They were all in the same boat, and while passing the bong around at the party, Jake, the genius English major, kept up a droning monologue about the perfect antanaclasis. He hadn’t a clue what the term meant, but he didn’t have any trouble understanding the gist of what Jake was saying: “Tonight we hang together, for assuredly, tomorrow we shall all hang separately.”
Yeah, all the pot in the world couldn’t dull the fact that at noon on that coming day, he and every other American male born between 1944 and 1950 would be relying on the fickle finger of fate to save them from destruction.
He put the paper down, stared at the man’s back, and thought about how the man looked old enough to be his father. The man’s back was broad, but his shoulders were rounded where muscle had turned to fat and he had poor posture. He had on a gray work shirt, and beneath the collar a lump of flesh bulged. Up along his hairline, several red pimples festered. He wore a peaked knit cap that sat on top of his brindled hair like a large blue breast with a twisted nipple. If the man had a son, the son would probably be Al’s age, and the man would probably be worried about his son and what might happen to him, if he was one of the unlucky ones. Some would be safe, but not all. Then again, maybe the man had a daughter, in which case he wouldn’t give a rat’s ass about what would happen in just a few hours or what might happen to a kid like Al.
How could he think of himself as a kid? He was over twenty years old. He was almost through college. All right, he wasn’t a kid, but tonight he didn’t feel like a man either. So what the hell was he? A big baby. He pushed the thought away.
He would’ve talked to the guy, if he knew he had a son, but on the off chance the man didn’t, he decided not to. He didn’t want to hear about how lucky the guy felt about having a daughter, and all that sort of shit. Girls get away with murder. He leaned forward in the chair to stand up. When he did, he felt dizzy. He’d lost track of how much he’d drunk from the keg, and God knows how much from the punch bowl that was a mixture of Boone’s Farm Strawberry Wine and Colt 45. He must have taken a dozen or so hits from the bong. He remembered tossing a nugget of hashish from his own stash into its bowl and bogarting the pipe for a while because he knew just how good his own stuff was.
The air in the small waiting area seemed too hot now, and some steam from the radiator set the small valve quaking as it escaped. He didn’t want to vomit where he was, so he turned quickly toward the door. Once outside he bolted beyond into the dark and clung to a fence post, where he threw up several times before he got the dry heaves. Eventually, when he felt slightly better, he edged his way along the fence until his hand clamped down on some barbed wire. It hurt in a dull, distant way as though to someone else, yet it made him feel better. It made no sense to him, but he did feel better.
A car approached, moving slowly through what had become an even heavier snowfall. The lights swept across the whiteness in front of him. He raised his arm and lowered his head in anticipation of the glare, and in the flash of light he saw how bloody his hand was. He rubbed it on his jacket, but before he could check it again, he was in the dark.
His mouth tasted like sour beer and throw-up. If only he had a Lifesaver. He felt around in the pockets of his jacket. The blood from his hand was getting all over the inside of one pocket. Damn it, they were both empty. He ran his tongue around his teeth and spit. He passed the diner and headed down Main Street. He entered campus through the Holly Bush parking lot and crossed over the commons to Evergreen Dormitory. No one was at the desk. He signed in and went to the lounge. No one was there either.
They’re all out getting blasted. Who could blame them? Even the guys who were against getting high would be in town trying to pick up one of the high school girls. Tonight anybody could get lucky. The girls would be doing it out of sympathy, though, and that would make it sickening and just plain damn disgusting in the end.
Janet, his girlfriend at the time, would be royally pissed at him. He knew this for sure. She’d gotten tickets to see Santana at the Spectrum to celebrate, possibly, his last night of not knowing. Ignorance was bliss for someone like Janet. She’d left him a slew of messages. He didn’t call her back. He didn’t want to see her. He was getting tired of her. She wanted too much from him, always holding hands, always kissing, always calling each other to talk about absolutely nothing. He’d been sleeping with her for three months, and already it was just a fucking routine. He thought Santana was a decently talented band, but not cool enough to get him over his latent dislike for Janet.
He dragged himself up the stairs to the third floor, all the while keeping his bleeding hand in his pocket so it didn’t drip all over the place. When he got to his room, because of his injured hand, he had to reach into the right pocket of his bell-bottoms with his left hand. He had a hell of a time getting his key out, because his jeans were tight, too tight, but he liked them tight. They looked goddamn good on him, and he knew it. He had the kind of body girls liked to look at, why shouldn’t he show it off?
As he left-handedly fumbled to unlock the door, he thought about his body, about the way it could kick a ball, throw a ball, hit a ball, about the way it moved to music, about the way it felt when he was with a girl, on top of her, and she looked so small and, well, helpless beneath him. He could see the way his biceps flexed when he held himself up above her, and if he dropped his head a bit and looked, he could see his pectoral muscles bulging and his nipples hardening and beyond that, his healthy penis swelling. They all liked the way his body felt—he didn’t want to brag,
but since he was fifteen, he’d never gone more than two weeks without sex.
Yeah, he had a great body. In church sometimes he would thank God for such a gift, especially if he was sitting around someone who was too thin or too fat or a little deformed. He’d think about how lucky he was to have what he had, and he tried, really he did, to take care of it. He didn’t smoke regular cigarettes, he didn’t eat a lot of junk food, he even took vitamins. So he drank a little, smoked a little dope, popped a few pills, so what? He’d stop all that once he graduated. Even though he’d majored in history and education, he could’ve been a great athlete or phys ed teacher or coach. He’d always been physically fit, and he knew he always would be. That is, if he his luck held out.
He hadn’t joined the Student Democratic Society because he hadn’t wanted to jeopardize his teaching career—everybody knew the FBI was keeping records on all of those freaks—but deep inside he sympathized with their cause. He hated the war; he just couldn’t let anybody know how much. He hated Nixon and all the fucking hawks, and in about ten hours, his whole life could be in their hands. It would all come down to the luck of the draw, whether he would live out his life as planned or be sent off to some dumb-ass war that he knew—he had studied it—was unnecessary and illegal. But he had to keep these thoughts to himself. After all, he planned on being a high school principal or even a district superintendent one day, and he couldn’t get his name involved with any of those hippy radicals.
When he finally got inside his room, he was glad Steve, his roommate, had gone home for the weekend. Living with Steve was like living with an extra piece of furniture. Steve was quiet to a fault, unable to muster any kind of defensive response despite Al’s repeated and ruthless offensive mocking. Steve took turning the other cheek to a whole new level, and Al eventually grew to ignore him just as much as he did the brown water spots on the ceiling or the thick black scuff marks on the floor. He was so used to Steve, though, that he felt sorry for him, for his overwhelming and awkward passivity. What would happen to someone like Steve in a war? He almost felt sick just thinking about it and considered for a second that he’d volunteer to go in Steve’s place if he had to. Better Steve wasn’t around; this way he wouldn’t feel like he’d have to.
On the Edge of Dangerous Things (Dangerous Things Trilogy Book 1) Page 22