The Duration Read online

  It was nice to have kids in the neighborhood again, frolicking like when we were young. Made me happy. Not really. Neighborhoods have life cycles, right? I wondered if they climbed the sugar maple in the back, where the treehouse had been, or if they’d found the coffee tin full of Hulk action figures and the Kris Kross mixtape I buried in the side lawn in 1992. I wondered if they followed the trail that went all the way through the woods out back, a couple of miles to the Magic Meadow, to the rear flank of the Fleur-de-Lys property. Our places. The doorjambs were full of our pencil marks, the briars were full of our blood. Chick’s dad had left when Chick was tiny and his mom had moved to Florida, to a golf course near a lake. Their house, a small ranch that used to be across the street from mine, was gone, subsumed by a barn-like home built by a barn-like man whose late-model SUV sat next to a boat and a lacrosse net in the driveway.

  The barn-like man stood on his porch, staring at me.

  It was five o’clock. I’d wanted a reason to get a beer for a while, and now I had one.

  Our high school was 3 miles from the abandoned mini-golf. The fish swayed and pivoted but stayed in the truck. We passed two cars going the opposite way, each of which we were sure was a cruiser, and when we got to the parking lot, it was lit up like a football field.

  “Ready?” asked Unsie.

  There was no cover in the lot, and we’d have to get in and out fast.

  Unsie pulled in and raced to the school’s main entrance. The truck jumped up over the curb by the doorways, and we scrambled out and pulled on the fish with all our might. It wouldn’t budge. We were fully exposed.

  Unsie was pushing from the back, whispering “Shit, shit, shit!” Jimmer had a crazy look on his face. Chick and I were pulling and twisting as the truck’s exhaust heated up my pant leg. Then the dorsal fin cracked, and the fish tumbled out onto the walkway. There was no time to do anything aesthetic. Chick and I dove into the open back of the truck, and Unsie peeled out onto the road. Behind us, the fish stared balefully into the parking lot.

  “Oh shit!” Chickie yelled, smiling ear to ear.

  I couldn’t believe it had worked. Jimmer started to giggle, and it was left to me and Unsie to be the serious ones.

  “We can’t say a word,” Unsie said eventually. “Nobody can say a word.”

  We each nodded. Unsie drove to the all-night carwash, and we got out and hosed the grass and mud out of the trunk. It seemed prudent. Could they dust for mud? It was past midnight, and my shirt was smeared with pink. Events were irreversible.

  “Look,” Unsie said, pointing at the ground. A big toad, the biggest ever, had washed out of the trunk and sat on the carwash floor, staring at us. He’d been inside the fish. Like Jonah. He croaked his thanks and hopped off.

  We dropped Jimmer off at his corner, then Unsie drove me and Chick to the bottom of Scrimshaw. We had to pass the high school. The fish swam in the glow of the parking lot lights. Our humanities teacher liked to remind us that Melville wrote Moby-Dick while sitting at his cottage right up the road, imagining the great whale breaching beneath the white winter curves of the distant mountains. We looked quickly over at the fish—ahoy, Tashtego! Thar she blows!—and then quickly away.

  I sat on a stool at the Heirloom and tried to catch Ginny Archey’s eye. She was bartending. We’d dated for the length of a party once, near the end of junior year. Her dad owned the bar, a proud testament to tradition and Keno in a rapidly gentrifying downtown, and she’d been working there since she was fourteen.

  “Hey,” she said when she saw me, with a smile that turned quickly into a scowl. She slid a bowl of peanuts toward me. “Still allergic?”

  “Only to you, peanut,” I said. I wasn’t allergic to either of them.

  She laughed, said “I’m just kidding, Petey,” and ambled down the bar toward me. Her belly was round and heavy. First Sara, now Ginny. Everybody was pregnant but me.

  “Well, look at you,” I said. “If you’d looked like that back in 2001, we might have had something.”

  She blushed. “You wish, pal.”

  “I do wish,” I said, and meant it.

  “Hah,” she said. “No you don’t.”

  I leaned across the bar to kiss her cheek and made a point of looking around the room at the collection of flannel and early drinkers.

  “Just tell me whose it is,” I said. “I’ll make him make an honest woman out of you.”

  She kissed me back and extended her left hand.

  “Pull my finger,” she said, showing off a dainty rock on a silver band. “If I wasn’t swollen like a whale, I’d let you try it on.”

  I’d done some preliminary rock shopping over the course of the past year, and hers looked to be about a half-carat, and if the ring was platinum it wasn’t a bad little buy.

  “Who are you marrying?” I asked, trying to sound like I was trying to sound incredulous. Had to be careful with pregnant women, or so I’ve been told.

  “You don’t want to know,” she said, looking at me pointedly.

  I thought about that for a second. Who was she marrying? Me? Nope. Chick? Too soon, though I wouldn’t put it past him. Then it hit me. She was marrying Tim-Rick Golack.

  “You’ve got to be kidding me,” I said, this time trying to sound like I was trying to sound like I was joking.

  “I’m not kidding you,” she said, “and don’t make me regret that kiss. What are you drinking?”

  I ordered a beer and let both it and the conversation sit for a minute. Ginny moved with cetacean grace inside the bar, no bumping, no wobble, her belly like the central star of the system. I remembered that I’d heard, in the way you hear things on social media, that she’d been dating Tim-Rick Golack, who had emerged in recent years as a local businessman and, according to Unsie, a regular at Sunday Mass. But a ring and a baby I did not know. There were some chicken-egg questions that I didn’t ask.

  I sipped my beer, which tasted watery and vaguely funky, like the taps needed to be changed. A novice Heirloomer might have sent it back, but they’d just find out that all the beers tasted like that. It was almost a source of pride.

  In the corner, some girl was setting up a karaoke booth.

  “I saw your boy,” Ginny said, having rotated back over to me. She was still smiling but her eyes were subdued.

  “Has he been coming in here much?”

  She shook her head. “No, just the once. You know, the stuff with T-R.”

  I nodded. I knew the stuff with T-R.

  “It’s so stupid,” she said. “That was high school. Time to grow up.”

  I looked at my beer and raised my eyebrows. “Tell me something I don’t know.”

  Ginny put a hand on her belly.

  “Petey, tell him he can come in. Or better yet, you bring him in with you. There’ll be no trouble.”

  I sipped my beer and shrugged.

  “I can’t find him,” I said. “Dude called me out from Boston and stood me up.”

  Ginny put both her hands on the bar and leaned forward so that her belly canted toward the floor.

  “I hear he’s spending a lot of time in Sink City,” she said. “Back and forth.”

  She sighed heavily. I gave my beer more attention.

  “That’s what I hear.”

  “That’s what you hear, huh,” I said. “In your condition?”

  She gestured with one hand around the bar. “I’m in no condition to be in my condition. But I hear a lot.”

  I finished my beer, stood up, nodded to no one in particular. Ginny swept the bar with a wet cloth.

  I pulled $5 from my wallet. She tried to wave it away, so I stuffed it into the tip jar next to the cash register.

  “When are you due?” I asked.

  “Easterish,” she said, rapping her knuckles on the bar. “When things warm up a bit.”

  “Well, there you go,” I said. “Something to look forward to.”

  It was dark when I left the Heirloom. The streetlights were coming on, bright l
ozenges wrapped in gauze. Gable wasn’t much for neon, but I could see farther down on Church Street an orange smear glowing through the windows of the tapas restaurant, formerly a hardware store. The Foodtown was closed, but the lights in The Bookstore—“Serving the community since last Tuesday”—burned on.

  What did I know?

  I knew the thing with T-R. The thing with T-R was a series of fights during our senior year of high school, two during basketball games and one shortly after graduation, each progressively bloodier and more serious than the last.

  It was a weird thing. Chick was neither a lover nor a fighter, his notoriety creating a sort of buffer around him. His friends were loyal. His enemies, if he had any, kept quiet. He did some dumb things to property, but never had problems with anyone.

  Except Tim-Rick Golack. Those two were like oil and water. Hoop-wise, Misconic was our main rival, a tough city school from the west side of the Knots, and Tim-Rick was one of those overmatched hustlers that people called either scrappy or thuggish, depending on their biases. The first fight had been mainly pushing, some language, as we pulled away in the fourth quarter. The second fight had ended both Chick’s and my basketball careers, which were probably ending anyway but might have carried on at some midlevel college for a bit, and the third one had left Tim-Rick with a scar from his ear to his chin and Chick with a suspended sentence of a year in jail, pled down to simple battery from assault with a deadly weapon. With the third, they’d just crossed paths at the Berkshire Mall on the wrong day, Tim-Rick with his brothers and Chick with a hard plastic frost scraper in his back pocket. Why he was walking around with a hard plastic frost scraper I don’t know—it was July—but mall security had to call the state police and a hazmat team to deal with the blood.

  As for Sink City, I knew that too. It was a reference to the faded factories and coarse canals of a town forty-five minutes to the east, the Venice of Western Massachusetts, where they used to fit porcelain to pipes and, more recently, where one went to bargain-hunt for anything harder than weed.

  The Horse Head Motel advertised free Wi-Fi and a hot tub but both were suspect, and the tired dude at the front desk gave me a key to Chickie’s room even though I wasn’t Chickie. I didn’t even say I was Chickie. I just said “Benecik, and I don’t have a key.” Dude had never seen me before, but he had an Italian sub and an issue of American Sportsman behind him, and he just did not give a fuck.

  I’d never known anyone to stay at the Horse Head, which was distinguishable from the Comfort Inn and the Pine Ranch next door only by the big red horse head next to its empty pool. You could walk to the Price Chopper and to an all-night gas station, and those were just about the only advantages I could see to staying there. The key had a plastic diamond attached to it that said “15.” I walked across the parking lot and knocked.

  Nobody answered.

  I knocked again. It felt like the beginning of an episode of Law & Order, normal things happening and then a body.

  I put the key in and turned it. The door opened.

  “Chick?” I said through the gap.

  No answer.

  I pushed the door open wider. The room was tiny. There were two twin beds, one rumpled and one still made, dusty sheets at right angles. Papers were spread out across the made one.

  I checked the bathroom. A toothbrush. A towel over the shower bar, slightly damp. Trash in the bin. A plastic grocery bag full of underwear hanging on the interior doorknob.

  Back in the main room, I moved some papers aside on the made bed and sat down. There was a backpack, one of those serious ones, leaning in the corner, all zippers and ties and mesh. A pair of snowshoes, probably several hundred dollars at Asgard, but I doubted that Chickie had paid that much. It was nearing nine and I was beat. The outside temperature was already into the low 30s and descending. I wasn’t driving back to Boston, that’s for sure. Two hours on the cold road and then a night in a cold apartment, thanks but no thanks.

  The papers on the made bed seemed to be a mix of maps and brochures and copies of microfiche. I scanned them quickly with determined disinterest. Whatever it was Chickie was getting into, it was not my problem. I was a workingman now, an adult with my own life to lead, my own crosses to bear. The sentiment felt about 70 percent true.

  I flipped on the remote and checked the TV. The Horse Head’s cable was a joke, and if you weren’t going to watch grainy porn or hockey, there wasn’t much to watch. I considered ordering the porn and sticking Chick with the bill for wasting so much of my time, but couldn’t bring myself to do it after such a stupid day.

  The morning after we emancipated the fish, I slept late. Seniors weren’t required to check in until 9:30, when the buses left for graduation rehearsal. I drove to school, wondering if the fish would already be gone—indeed, if it had ever really been there at all—and parked near the back of the lot. Even from there I could see a crowd around the entry. I began to sweat. Walking across the lot, I passed Denton, our grizzled custodian. He seemed grouchy.

  “What’s going on?” I asked.

  “You should know,” he said angrily, and for a split second I almost shat my pants.

  “Seniors,” he said. “Somebody thinks they’re real funny.”

  I kept walking and tried to catch my breath.

  That was one big-ass fish. A bunch of my classmates surrounded it.

  “Had to be eight or nine guys,” someone said.

  “The Lesters have a trailer,” another said, invoking the previous year’s ne’er-do-wells. “Coulda been them.”

  We got onto the buses to head to rehearsal and I slid into a row next to Jimmer. When we were all seated, Ms. J. appeared at our bus’s open door and stepped up into the well. She was a wide woman, with a white helmet of hair.

  The bus fell silent. Halfway back, I focused on my sneakers.

  “I just want to say,” she said, gesturing with her hand. “To whoever put that fish there . . . ”

  Ms. J. paused. For a moment, she looked like she might cry. I could feel my nuts retract into my stomach.

  “To whoever put that fish there, thank you. I love it. I’ll be taking it with me when I leave.”

  Then she smiled, for the first time in our collective memories, and stepped back off the bus. The seats filled with whispers. Jimmer stared at me. I couldn’t look at him. Two rows in front of us, the back of Unsie’s head quivered. Through the window, I saw Chickie. He was over by the fish, wasn’t even on the bus yet.

  In the morning, I opened my eyes and he was in the bed across the room, pale and thin, asleep. Mouth open a crack, chin turned toward the ceiling. In repose he looked as young as the last time I saw him, shortly after high school. I watched him until I felt confident that his chest was moving and then closed my eyes again.

  An hour later, I woke back up. I’d been having a dream about canoes, like the kind the natives would make from saplings and birch bark. First guy who made one of those must have been a genius. This time Chick was sitting across from me, on the edge of the other twin. He was wearing a full suit of long underwear, the fabric pocked like soundproofing. He had a beard I hadn’t noticed before—had it been there before?—and looked a little brittle, but his eyes were smiling.

  “Guy,” he said, in this fucking saccharine way that combined “it’s great to see you” with “don’t be mad.” But sometimes it’s still sweet even when you know it’s saccharine, you know?

  I rolled over toward the wall, still clothed, still on top of the sheets.

  “Be that way,” he fake-huffed. Then he bounded over and jumped on me, holding on the way a koala holds a bamboo spear, his arms around my chest, his legs thrown over mine. What you call spooning when you’re trying to get a girl to trust you.

  “Shhh,” he said. “Let it happen.”

  I felt his beard on the back of my neck.

  “Dude,” I said, my mouth full of cobwebs. “Get the fuck off me.”

  I should have been mad, but instead I felt like I imagine a
soldier feels when he’s reunited with his unit after leave. Kind of sad, but also kind of relieved. It was the feeling I always got with Chick. Got it again, even after our long estrangement.

  He rolled onto his back and lay beside me. I could almost hear him smiling.

  “Guy,” he said again, both the beginning and the end of a sentence. Then: “What are you doing here?”

  I lifted my head. Wan sunlight filtered in through the high window. I snorted.

  “Don’t even,” I said. “Asshole.”

  “You’re the asshole, asshole,” he said. “Breaking into someone’s room and sleeping here. Who do you think you are? Goldilocks?”

  He threw his arm back around me.

  “It’s a good thing you’re so handsome.”

  I shrugged free again.

  “Off,” I said.

  Chickie put his head on my cheek. His breath smelled burnt, sleepy. Then he stood up, over me. I opened one eye and braced myself. This was the kind of situation where, back in the day, you’d get an elbow-drop to the ribs just because. A friendship equal parts tender and macho, landing in the middle most of the time. It probably sounds weird. I don’t know what to tell you.

  I levered his leg away from the wall and sent him off balance. He leapt across the short gulf to the other bed. I could hear the springs buckle. The sunbeams registered the turbulence.

  “You got my message?”

  “Fuck I got your message,” I said, rolling onto my back and rubbing my eyes. “What do you think I’m doing here?”

  He was lying down now, on his side, looking at me as if we were at a sleepover.

  “Horse Head. I thought you came, you know, for the Horse Head.”

  I closed my eyes. So it was going to be like this.

  “Where were you yesterday?”

  I could hear him bouncing, but at least the question shut him up for a second.