by Tariq Shah
“You did. Our exit was back there. We need to go north on 94.”
“We’re taking a quick field trip. Have to run an errand.”
“Traffic’s gonna hit any minute.”
“Just pipe down, will you? Giving me a headache.”
He pulls up to a drab McMansion with a high stone archway and a roller hockey net knocked over in the yard. There’s a pair of dark-tipped steer horns mounted in leatherette above a big glass door with a bright brass knob.
“Stay here,” Vince says, getting out. From the rearview I see him pop the trunk, hear the heavy equipment—more power tools, most likely—hit the ground. The lid thuds shut, making the car bounce a little bit. Then it’s even quieter than before.
I crane my neck to look around: not a single soul, no one around. Two minutes become five. I light a cigarette and get out to stretch my legs and escape the car’s reek of old fries and strawberry air freshener. Five minutes become ten and I stroll to the end of the driveway, where I can see, just beyond the T-intersection that we turned into, a street sign that reads “Evergreen Lane,” so bent it points to the pothole beneath it.
I look back at the house: not a creature stirring. I’m halfway down the block before I realize it, my feet like those of an old horse returning to stable.
I knew it was probably a lousy idea, going back to my old house. Until the idea came into my head, I hadn’t thought about my old place at all. It was a corny idea. I had no idea what to expect it to do. It was an ugly house, just like all the houses surrounding it. It was drafty in the winter and a sweat lodge in the summer. It slouched on one side, drooped, as if it had once suffered a stroke. Barely any backyard, no real front lawn. Hard water, orange water from the taps, unless you plunked a 25-pound block of salt in the softener a couple times a month. A basement that flooded every year when the pipes froze and burst. An attic overrun with yellow jackets. And the only thing shabbier than the aesthetics were the memories I still had of living there. But anyway, when would I be back here again?
I take a right at the corner, go up Evergreen Lane, even though I know Evergreen Lane, and Evergreen Lane never looked much at all like this. Though the land is the same—a soft rise just before the plummet that leads to the river and the concrete bridge leaping it that transforms into bland, interstate high-way—almost everything on top of it has changed. My feet keep going. I’m losing light, but feel it’s close. I search the stores and little homes for their numbers. I walk past an unlit credit union, a bargain store with guitars hung in the windows, and I worry I might have passed it, or forgotten the way, but that’s impossible. I go by a dialysis center, a seafood place, some kids trudging home with their sleds. I knew this place backward and forward.
Soon, there is a bowling alley, its sign of neon red pins already searing through the new evening dark. I slow to a stop. I’m standing in the parking lot of Holy Roller Lanes & Arcade. Looking around me, I see, one street over behind a break in some spindly, wind-bothered trees, the crooked house of an old neighbor, whose face resists my mind’s conjuring. Someone I didn’t like, or didn’t really know, or who was more a friend of Mom’s than of mine.
It dawns on me then—I’m standing in my living room.
Behind me, a car horn sounds, and there’s Vince, watching me, smoking out the window. “They made your street a cul-de-sac. Guess your old man sold the place when the alley opened up. Had to make room.”
“What was the hold up back at that house?”
“Needed to return some gear, borrow some good shoes.” He shrugs. Classic Vince, really, but still.
“Oh, a real emergency then.”
He snorts, gestures at the empty lot. “And this? Some kind of five-alarm fire?”
An ambulance screams by, making us dizzying blue and red until that recedes as the sound goes flat. I kick a hunk of asphalt into the middle of the lot.
“Expect the world to stand still for you? You need a hug?”
“Ah,” I say, “to hell with it.”
I bite my lip. One pain muffles another, and who cares. Then with a quick little tick, we’re the off yellow of the street lamp overhead. For that moment, we’re lit up, then we keep going.
*
Once we’re into a bit of open road, I say, “How’d that hand happen?”
Vince holds it up like he’s surprised to find it braced and bandaged. “Work accident. Hammered myself,” he says. “Stupid of me. There was a babe walking by. It’s not bad. Tingles more than anything.”
“You should get your balls zapped again. Maybe they didn’t finish the job.”
He coughs. “That was a joint decision. Me and Caroline are fine.” Vince adds, “It’s Marcy and Dan in rough shape…”
He fingers around in the change holder for his pack of Pall Malls. When he finds them he lights up, steering with his knee. We drift from the left lane to old tawdry snow—a running scab of gray snot where the road’s shoulder was. He rolls down the window. Cold air gushes in. The guy behind us beeps and Vince corrects course. I light one too.
He shouts over the roar, “They couldn’t identify the body. So I did.”
“How’d he look?”
“How you think he looked?”
“It was just a question, okay?”
“He looked like everything else Bullets ever got at.”
It’s so easy for me to forget things about people I used to know. Just hearing that name.
I remember trying to teach Bullets tricks when he was a pup. Shake hands, I’d command, tapping his outsized paw. I got bit one day doing that. Just a nip, but that’s when lessons ended, maybe a month before I moved away.
He was our friendly neighborhood dirtbag pervert Gavin Kwasneski’s dog. Even as a kid, Gavin was pretty foul, prone to peeping, cornering girls, lifting skirts, that kind of thing, but that was all one heard about back then. Still, the lore gave us all the creeps and whenever something new happened, we would look askance at him right before looking the other way, preferring thoughts less vile. Years passed.
One afternoon he knocked on my door. He began explaining to me the sex violations that landed him nine months in Joliet Correctional, from which he was freshly released—rehabilitated, a new man, he claimed, with a very off-putting kindness in his voice.
I never knew any of the people Gavin hurt, and aside from these encounters he barely registered in my or Vince’s life at all. He was just one of those things people bury as well as they can. Because that works for a while. One day though, as you’re going about your business, you end up tripping on a tiny little itty-bitty rock in the ground, the rock turns out to be a bone, and you can’t help it—you start digging.
Gavin had a puppy with him. He gathered it up in his arms.
“This is my new doggy,” he said, and held out a vanilla-white pup, its nose pink as a piglet’s.
“Hi, doggy.”
I remember the pup gave a yawn. Gavin dropped him; it hit the ground hard. Then they shuffled over to the next house.
*
“They’re shutting down the high school,” Vince says. He feeds his cigarette through the window slit but it flies back in, onto the backseat.
“Nice. I loved snow days.”
“Not for the weather—for the mourning, you dummy. They’re having some sort of memorial for him on Monday.”
Vince goes to swat out the burning filter with his free hand but he can’t reach. We swerve hard this time.
“Not even two feet of snow on the ground,” he says, “and it’s like twenty out. They won’t even think about closing unless it’s below zero.”
I tell him to just focus on not killing us. Keep a window cracked.
*
I love that funeral parlors are like fake living rooms. How they appear to be equal parts resort hotel lobby and sitcom set for the bereaved. The knockoff Turners and Titians proudly hung in the foyer, the bowl of Starlight Mints, the chandelier around which the staircase dovetails. The ashtrays, all at the ready, inside every desk and
coffee table drawer. The raw wood aroma you get opening up the cabinets, of sawdust; the unvacuumed carpeting strangers trample with their dress shoes on, the film of spilt coffee burning on the gummy hotplate.
I love that it could almost be someone’s home, nondescript save the marquee in the drive, the brass plaque beside the doorbell. They try so hard, and yet the further one pokes around, the more abnormal it becomes—the bare cupboards, hollow clocks, empty closets, the absence of cohesion a family brings to a household, with their framed photos, dog-eared Sports Illustrated issues, their toothbrush cups by the sink and the general disorder of socks, muddy sneakers, dishes, junk mail that enlivens the places we inhabit. That there are no watercolor paintings, softball schedules, shopping lists, bright silly magnets—nothing is ever stuck to the door of the fridge.
The whole show—the bouquets and black-out drapes, the living room chapels, the organs droning out dirges to drum-machine beats, the discount casket coupons thumbtacked by the phone, padlocked basement door—none of it is morbid, to me, anymore.
I love the hearse, the motorcade following behind it, and the little paper tickets you put in the windshield, and running red lights, headlights on in the daytime. The little plastic hooks by which the living hang potted flowers beside the graves, like lanterns. I love the giant register everyone must sign. I love the bad lemon tea on offer, the stale cookies in their plastic tray, how there’s never milk, only powdered sugar-free creamer. I love that it’s all a terrible party thrown midday, midweek, at a house with never enough parking, nothing at all to do, that no one can stand to be in for more than an hour. Except me.
*
The problem was little Ray had Dan’s .22 revolver pointed right up his own nose when Vince and I got back from our emergency beer run. He was in the TV room, watching Bert and Ernie, just as he’d been when we left ten minutes before. He beamed our way as we walked in and kicked off our shoes.
“Hi, Vin. Hey, Ant,” Ray said, waving hello with the pistol.
Vince froze. “Where the hell you get that? Put that down.”
Ray hugged the gun to his chest.
“That is not a toy, leave it be. I got a surprise for you.”
“A surprise?” He jumped for joy.
“Ray, stop. Listen now: please place that gun on the carpet— nicely. Right now.”
“Why?”
“Just do it, please.”
Ray took a tentative step toward us, then a step back, as he thought it over. “It’s mine. I found it.”
“Goddamn,” said Vince, and he looked at me. I set down the bag of beer.
“Ray,” I said, “what about a trade, yeah? You give me the gun, I’ll give you—these…” I dangled the car keys before him. Ray pointed the handgun at me.
“Cars are better, bud. How about it?” I said, giving them a jingle.
“I’ll even throw in this king-size Snickers,” Vin said. “That seal the deal?”
Ray’s attention reeled back to the TV, to Bert and Ernie counting sheep.
“Ray. The gun…” I said.
“Fine…”
And then the thing went off. Startled, Ray’s hands went to his ears as he started crying and ran off to his room. Vince got the .22.
I started calling him “Ray the Gun” after that. Then that turned into just “Raygun.” He was “Raymond” before all this, a dweeby little spazz born with coke-bottle glasses and an overbite.
Vince likes to dispute this fact. He claims we both came up with the nickname. If being in the same room as someone who thinks of something means you think up the thing too, then yes, Vince helped. But he knows the truth.
I wasn’t close to Ray like Vince was. But I did contribute.
Ray loved it. It made him feel tough and dangerous. And then you have all the variations: Death Ray, Gay Run, Stun Gunner, and so on.
I suppose I felt good about making him feel cool like that. A nickname lends personality to the bearer, indicates a reputation, prior achievements of note, that there are people on your side—a tribe, however dwindling. Says, I have done things, I have friends. But all the nicknames turned out pretty useless in the end.
*
As Vince drives, I say, “Ray the Gun. Remember that day?”
He glances my way. “Dan broke a broom handle on me that night, that’s what I remember.”
“Dan’s the one to blame—you keep a loaded handgun in a shoebox under the bed with kids in the house, you’re asking for it. He ought to know better. Under the bed’s the first place they look.”
“You should have let me handle it.”
“Like you’re some hostage negotiator. It was not the smartest tactic in the world—fine. Did anyone get shot?”
He frowns at the window, changes lanes again.
“What use is there arguing about it anyway? Look where we are now,” I say.
He lets out a long, slow breath. “I remember us posting up on the couch after all that, just in time to catch The Undertaker tombstone Mr. Perfect. Not missing a beat.”
“No use letting all that beer get warm…” I say.
“Marcy kicked both Ray’s and Dan’s asses that night, actually.”
“And you beat mine. Nearly broke my nose. Don’t think I forgot.”
Vince wags his head. “Raygun. Damn…”
Remembering the bullet hole, like a shark’s vacant eye staring at me, lodged in the wall just inches wide of my left ear. The one and only slug ever shot off in my presence, that for the longest time I was convinced had my name on it. But the world had different plans for me, didn’t it. I put on my everything’s-fine grin. The world is screaming past my shoulder in a humming blur of frozen sludge and rail.
*
And then there was later that summer, the summer I left, and the heat wave that claimed over 200 lives across the county. The power grid couldn’t handle the strain and failed on the second night; everyone was plunged in a smothering dark that left everything tacky, damp, and smudged. All of us slightly addlebrained and reluctant to get the mail.
Leaving the front and back doors open only invited breezes that came in and swept through the house like the trapped air of a hot parked car. Playing the piano left it slippery and glistening with so much sweat I worried it would somehow warp the action on the keys. I didn’t play for days.
Vince was turning a little bitter, a little weird about me leaving, but we still hung out pretty much every day, drinking Schlitz or clowning around or griping about not having money, or planning Vince’s wedding, or having nothing to do at all, really. That summer sucked, for everybody.
We were all fooling around out in back, playing with the hose, trying to get a water war started against some of the neighborhood gang. The afternoon humidity made everyone too slow to choose sides, set ground rules, so it never really materialized. We mostly ended up sprawled on the porch, telling each other what we wished we had to eat—even though the fridge was probably full of stuff, it never looked good to us and even if that were not the case, the heat left us with little motivation to do much but moan and groan.
I wished for a foot-long barbecue beef and cheese submarine sandwich, butter garlic fries from the Lemon Tree diner up the road, a gallon of raspberry iced tea. Vince wished for thick wedges of cold pizza, a strong bloody Mary.
All Ray wished he had was popsicles, so we took a walk down to Bad’s General Store because they sold bomb pops. We were too lazy to find our shoes, so we just cut through spiky yellowed lawns and searing back lots in bare feet and towels ’round our swim trunks. Rudy Tomczak wouldn’t care about selling to shoeless kids on a burning day. We bought the last box.
We passed by Gavin’s on the way back, and there was Bullets tied up in the sun. His leash was looped in the tires of Gavin’s pickup parked in the bed of gravel outside his house.
The dog was pinned in that punishing midday blast of light and couldn’t get to the Tupperware bowl of old gross water that a couple pill bugs thought was a swimming pool. He wa
s mangy and hyperventilating, letting the green flies roaming his belly and face have their way.
Ray started wandering over, wanting to get a better look. Ray was curious. He maybe thought Bullets was already a goner and wanted to check it out. We trailed him, brushing stones and twigs off of our heels, while the alien frequency of the cicadas droning rose and fell and made the stillness that followed somehow deeper and sort of blue to me.
Ray, shielding his eyes from the sunlight shafting through those elms, walked over. When Bullets growled, it was more like a purr of annoyance, seeing as he didn’t bother to move.
Nearing up until he was about within arm’s reach, Ray offered Bullets a lick of his orange popsicle. Like it was a microphone, he pointed it toward Bullets’ slack mouth, grew closer until the cold blunt nose of it landed on the dog’s tongue. I neared too, as Ray gently ran it back and forth like he was applying chapstick, letting it melt until Bullets tasted it, smacked his lips, and suddenly snapped to life and began lapping at it desperately.
Vince and I watched for a while as Bullets licked down Ray’s bomb pop and even took the popsicle stick. Ray rubbed his belly, shooed the flies. Well, I thought, Ray made a pal today.
Then Vince went back to the road to smoke in the shade there.
“Yo,” I said, tapping Ray’s bony shoulder, “time to go.”
“He’ll fry.”
“We’re gonna get in trouble. Come on.”
Ray frowned. “Would you wanna dry up like a worm in the road?”
“You’re a little puke, Ray. I swear.”
So, I get to freeing the stupid leash from the front tire it had gotten wound around when the dog must have tried hiding underneath the truck to escape the heat. The growl Bullets gave me was this gurgling in his throat. When he bared his teeth I clapped his mouth shut, held him by the muzzle, held it closed, and getting nose-to-snout, told him to be nice, I was helping him.
His growling unraveled as I shushed him and got him to chill out, but still, those blank eyes stared right into me, black as tar bubbles.
I said to Ray to give him some room, and unhooked the leash from Bullets’ collar. Then I stood and let go. Bullets immediately galloped over to the water bowl and drank it dry, bugs and all. Then he started bouncing around, all giddy to be free, and leapt into the trash cans, knocked one over, and started disemboweling the garbage bags inside. What anything chained up too long would do.