Sleep on the plane.
Dream of the ancient ocean I am leaving and a farewell glance at the tops of mountains I have not climbed.
O’Hare, then, changed in an unsayable way, but changed alongside the grays and whites and moving walkways, people drifting with their rolling bags, the smell of the Cinnabon, and the wedge-shaped line at the corner McDonald’s.
A disembodied voice compels the sea of walkers to part from behind; we watch as his beeping white cart crawls through the gap we’ve created, and he nods his chill thanks, chewing his gum and wearing his three-piece United Airlines suit like a tuxedo. An elderly couple is aboard his vessel, seated on the back puff seats, facing stern, facing us, eyes sleepy as heads rock left, right, absorbing buffets. They get to ride because they are so old.
Bubblers.
Children run the wrong way on the moving walkway and therefore have no motion.
A girl asleep with her back against a white pillar in an empty gate, and she’s in her pajamas, as though she knew that it would come to this.
Planes like toys I used to fly with arm-power, drifting down to land, parking on the tarmac. I see them through the windows.
Shoeshine guys have a station against the wall.
And then the Quiznos, and I know that I am closer.
We’d heard about the vandalism from the cops, but even so, neither of my parents had been able to drive up to see the fallout for themselves. Since Denny was the last of our relatives to be living in Wisconsin, no one else had been up to see either, and all we knew about the Fourth of July party came down to a phone call, a county sheriff’s PDF, and the phrase significant damage scribbled in a few pieces of mail. You never knew what a cop might label as significant, though; it could be understatement or overstatement. Most cops I’d known saw the world through the wrong end of a broken telescope.
On the way into St. Helens proper I considered stopping at Golden’s to pick up cleaning supplies, but I hesitated at the turnoff, then drifted by the entrance to the store, foot up over the brake. Too soon for any of that, I decided. I figured I’d survey the damage first and see what needed to be done. I was tired and not used to driving, and I wanted to take a shower. At this point I was also three steps past disgusting.
I went by, kept straight, and a few minutes later I was halfway up the hill, and a few minutes after that, I was there. The turn into Denny’s driveway came back to me like I’d done it the week before.
Looking at the garage door, I killed the engine and rolled my neck in a stretch, marveled (as far as I could marvel) at how far a person could go in one day, especially if he put his mind to it and was wired enough dollars from his parents.
I’d flown from Seattle to Chicago on an early flight and taken a cab out to Peregrine Park, where I’d had to stop to pick up the car—which, according to my father, was now my car, registered in my name. It was a Nissan Maxima with a sewing machine for an engine. I had ignored my parents’ request that I spend a night at their place and instead headed directly to Denny’s, fearing that an evening in their home would begin with an unrelenting assault on my decision-making skills and conclude with the usual half-drunk sales pitch about permanently moving back to the Midwest. I did not want to hear it.
I played with the moon roof. I looked at the clouds. I looked back at the house.
I was thirty-two now, absurdly, and as far as I could remember, the last time I had been here was twelve years ago, when I was halfway through college and drove out from Madison for a weekend visit. It was a two-story cottage-style home made of what I thought might be limestone; I’d never really noticed how nice—how strong? sturdy?—it was when I was a kid. Now it struck me as a small keep, really. Not in perfect shape by any means, but a keep nonetheless.
I glanced over my shoulder at Jeremy’s computer, still snug down behind the passenger seat. I needed a monitor to do anything with it. I probably needed to talk to Jeremy too, as I had stolen it on my way out of Washington.
I started the engine again, turned up the air conditioner, and called my sister.
“I’m here,” I said. “I’ve made it to Constantinople.”
“Welcome home,” she said. “I’m there.” Which meant Boston. “Does St. Helens look the same?” she asked. “I always wonder. Are there Moors?”
“When I think about St. Helens.”
“I don’t know,” I said. “Yes? I didn’t actually go into town. I did just go past Golden’s, though. Totally weird.”
She had worked at the grocery store too, but she and I intersected as employees for only a couple of months. She was the object of desire for many of the other bagboys, who never did much to hide their attraction to her when I was around. One kid, with whom I often faced the shelves at night, once turned to me to whisper, with grave seriousness, that he would give me upwards of fifty dollars if I brought him a pair of my sister’s panties. This kid was named Will Normal. One hundred if they were used, he said, which to me, at that age—and still, actually—made no erotic sense.
Back then there was a rumor circulating—these were the last months Haley lived in town, before she left to go to Choate—that she’d gotten involved with one of the managers, a man named Rick Hagan, who was married and in his early forties. People gave me shit about Haley and her looks all the time. I hated it. Will Normal, who I think ended up a semitruck driver in Canada, was the worst of them. His teeth had been like almonds.
When I confronted her about the Rick rumor a few nights before she left town, Haley laughed and said, “Um, no.”
“So it’s not true,” I said, watching her pack, because I wanted to know, and a part of me felt as though my sister was capable of it. I had already slashed Will Normal’s tires, but that hadn’t been about revenge so much as it was just to feel better.
“You’re asking me if I’m banging Rick, the four-hundred-year-old night manager at Golden’s, the grocery store where we work? Because some bagboy said so?”
“Yes.”
“No, Ben. I’m not having sex with Rick.” She dropped an INXS T-shirt into the suitcase. “And this is why I am leaving,” she said. “Exactly this.”
“What?”
“This,” she said, making two circles with her hands, Miyagi-like, I suppose to indicate the whole world around us and everything that was wrong with it.
Remembering this, thirty-two-year-old me leaned back into the seat and laid a hand on the wheel. “I’m sure the town is the same,” I said. “Time stands still here, like it does in a postcard. Or something. Right?”
“Or in hell.”
I guessed Haley would add some withering condemnation of the people here next, something along the lines of St. Helens being populated by the modern cultural equivalent of fourteenth-century peasantry, her usual attitude about Wisconsin, but she said nothing. I looked at a cloud of bugs floating in front of Denny’s garage, and then to the right, at the frame of an unfinished fence. It occurred to me that Denny had been the one who’d been working on it. And I knew my uncle. I knew how annoyed he would have been, had he still existed, that he’d left something partially finished.
We lingered in the silence.
“So?” I said eventually. “Anything new?”
“With John?”
“Yeah.”
“He’s back in Winchester at his parents’ house, living in the room where he grew up, masturbating into his socks.”
“That’s nice.”
“The maid’s doing his laundry and he’s golfing with his father in the afternoons. He’s finally figured out how to crawl back into his own adolescence. It turned out to be easy.”
“John masturbates into his socks?” I asked. I frowned at the garage door. It seemed so uncomfortable.
“That’s his way.”
The situation regarding John Carraway, my sister’s husband, was simple on the surface, but the whole thing became a little more complicated if you’d spent any time with him and knew him, as I did, as a pretty decent fellow. Beyond the adultery. He was a soft-spoken, sensitive, balding Episcopalian from Connecticut who enjoyed birding and had studied classics at Yale, where he and Haley first met. (He liked watching squirrels too, although it’s possible this was just a deeply weird joke Haley liked to tell that I’d never understood.) He was an industrial-machinery executive—sinecure—who traveled a great deal, and a few months before, on some Tuesday night in St. Louis, idling in his rental car on a street corner in the Landing, he had managed to get himself arrested by a police officer who was posing as a hooker.
This had happened on a bleak night in March, and for weeks afterward John tried to conceal his arrest from my sister and from his employers. I found there to be great disharmony to it all. I didn’t know what to think and I was doing my best to stay out of it. Maybe it was a one-time thing. Maybe not. It was very hard to tell. For all I knew John had been doing this for years and years, possibly even running around with his penis out while chasing unsuspecting female bird enthusiasts through the woods of New England. The point is that it’s hard to know a person.
In the end it was just a piece of mail about his trial date that came while he was out of town that got him caught. Haley opened it; that’s it. She found his mug shot online and e-mailed me the link a few days after she kicked him out of the house, but his company still didn’t know, and so far my sister had stopped herself from telling John’s bosses, who were all a part of their social circle. She’d admitted to me that she’d been tempted more than once. Our parents didn’t know. They just knew about the separation.
John and Haley had three kids, two girls and a boy, and that made things, according to Haley, complicated.
I was trying to have no opinion.
“Things will be better when school starts again and it’s just me and the baby,” Haley said. “I’ll have more time to kill myself.”
“I think you should come up here for a visit.”
I did want to see her. How had she aged; how did it seem in the flesh? What had the middle of her thirties done to her? What might Haley look like walking through the downtown streets of St. Helens, where she hadn’t been in almost twenty years? Where she had once been a kind of queen? Time-related questions abounded. I had not seen her in almost five years. There were different explanations for this, but most of it was my fault.
“We’ll see.”
Denny had a couple of flower beds dappled across the front yard, and I couldn’t remember whether they’d been there before. They were just the kinds of things Denny would have insisted on putting in himself, and I imagined him at work, hauling rocks in a wheelbarrow on a Sunday morning.
From the look of the woods at the end of the yard and Denny’s brown lawn, it had been a dry summer here. I would need to put sprinklers out for the grass. Nothing alive in the flower beds anymore—instead of color, just patches of vertical twigs.
“So how are you?” said my sister.
Which meant: Now let’s talk about your fucked-up life instead.
“Good,” I said. “I made it. I guess that’s it.”
“Is it feeling like the right decision?”
“I don’t know yet.”
Which was totally true, I wasn’t just avoiding. There was more to the story than my sister needed to know, though; a lot of it had to do with Jeremy and Allie, and the game, and not feeling comfortable in my own skin out west since my release, where I had been walking the streets of Southeast like a zombie, doing very little. How do I say it without putting people off? We’ve only just met. For some time I’d been feeling as though my whole self were coated in Novocain.
In the silence, I could hear her trying to figure out what could have gone so wrong for me in Portland, post-Chestik, that I would actually agree to my father’s recent proposal. Then I heard the clinks of her pouring wine.
Haley and John lived in some part of Boston the name of which I could never recall—something that sounded like an English fiefdom—and from what I could gather, the place was large, expensive, and sterile. John’s family was already rich, and Haley still had her trust fund, and between the two of them and all that wealth, they’d made themselves even wealthier. Unlike me, my sister inherited our father’s gift for understanding the flow of money in the river of the American economy, and I suspected she and he engaged in late-night chats, both of them drinking sixteen-year Glenlivet, discussing aspects of the day’s stock exchange action that made little sense to anyone but the 1 percent. The 1 percent of the 1 percent.
On top of this intuitive savvy, Haley worked too—she did IT consulting, usually from home, under the aegis of a company she’d created. Her clients were multinational corporations I had never heard of. Sinetco, based in Singapore. Lorent. One-word corporations, the kind with no function in the eyes of a regular person, the kind that did not pay taxes, the kind that spent money bulldozing the bodies of indigenous peoples into tremendous holes in order to make room for resource exploitation. (Or so I cynically imagined. In truth, I just knew nothing. At this moment in my life, my only real areas of expertise concerned ultra-obscure strains of genetically enhanced marijuana and backgammon strategy; it made me defensive to think that my sister knew so much more than I did about the world.) What I did know: her hourly consulting rate was more than I had ever legitimately earned in a week.
“Have you found a meeting yet?” she asked.
“I got here ten minutes ago,” I said.
“And?”
“And leave me alone.”
“Why?”
“Do you think Denny has internet?”
“I think so,” she said. “We used to e-mail. Has anyone been paying his bills?”
“Mom has.”
“You have it then.”
“You and Denny used to e-mail?”
“Why do you say it like that?”
“I didn’t know he even had an e-mail address.”
“Of course he did,” she said. “It’s not 1996, Benjy.”
“I thought he only used Pony Express.”
“I think we’ve moved into a time in history when all people have e-mail addresses.”
“You actually think that?”
“The Luddite thing is not as compelling as you think it is.”
“As though most of the world isn’t poor and without plumbing, let alone internet?”
“Oh my God,” she said. “I mean among people who matter.”
“Do you know how much you sometimes sound like our father?”
“It’s gross.”
“It’s totally on purpose.”
“You should not be proud of that.”
“Denny had a Facebook account too,” she said, ignoring this. “Didn’t you know that? When he died I put something up on his wall, just a little RIP note. It turned into a memorial. People all posted things, remembrances. You know. E-funeral. That’s what happens now. We may as well not even have bodies. We are the cloud.”
“I’ve never understood Facebook,” I said.
“I’ve been trying to e-mail them about Denny’s account. And tell them that he’s, you know… not alive.”
“What a bizarre thing to have to do.”
“But yesterday I was thinking—don’t you think it would make sense for them to give us his password and just let us into his account?”
“How come?”
“I think it would be nice to set up a kind of permanent memorial. Or so we can take the page down, eventually. Otherwise he’s going to be up there forever. It creeps me out.”
“I have no idea what that even means,” I said.
“Of course you don’t.”
“You can handle all of that. I’ll handle his house.”
I looked at his fence.
“I’ll finish the fence.”
The good news was that it turned out significant damage was not that significant. The house was not trashed—not according to my understanding of trashed, anyway, which was essentially unlimited. Yes, there were small signs. There was a coffee can full of cigarettes sitting on the kitchen table (I found that to be thoughtful, actually), a couple of broken glasses in the sink, lots of bottles, and the smell of stagnant alcohol about the place. However, but for a half-empty bottle of Colt 45 on the coffee table, on a coaster, Denny’s living room had been untouched. It really wasn’t so bad. The kids who’d had the party had kept themselves confined to the kitchen and the back porch, and I spent a few moments imagining the scene, imagining all of them around the table, laughing and drinking, not in the least bit disturbed by their surroundings, a dead man’s home, just glad to have found a place where they were safe—or so they thought. An insomniac jogger had been the one to do them in; at 3:00 a.m., he’d seen the cars in the driveway. And that’s all it ever takes, isn’t it? An intercepted e-mail, an unexpected jogger. A lost number. A rock in the wrong place. A man who can’t sleep who happens to be somewhere he usually isn’t.
I found that the sheets were a little messed up in Denny’s bedroom, but who knew whether that had been the work of the kids or just the remnants of Denny’s last morning on Earth. There could very well have been teenager sex here, I thought, surveying. Some lines I would not cross. I couldn’t decide, though, thinking about my uncle, whether he was the type to make the bed right away.
In the end I stripped it and took the heap of sheets downstairs and stuffed everything into the washing machine.
Upstairs, in the living room, I sat on the couch for a few minutes, sniffing at the air, trying to judge whether I was going to have to steam-clean the carpet, then just trying not to nod off. If I did now, there would be no chance of sleep tonight. So, lids heavy, I spied Denny’s record player in the built-in bookshelf across the room and got up to browse.
I found the CSNY right away.
I got some water, sat back down.
Stared at the wall.
“Suite: Judy Blue Eyes.”
A little background as the song plays:
My sinecure was to guard the house. It was my job to clean it up, fix it up, and do whatever needed to be done in order to usher it onto the market and get it sold. For my services as flipper and resident, per insane agreement with my father, I was to receive 25 percent on the sale, which was a stupid percentage for the work I would be doing, but my father was aware that my whole trust was shot, and he had to have suspicions about the extent of my debt too. He knew for sure that I had nothing, is what I’m saying, and he had found a way to give me, at the very least, ground upon which I might potentially stand. Again.
They’d inherited Denny’s house, but my parents wanted nothing to do with the place. My dad thought it was haunted by his brother’s ghost; I think the whole thing just made my mother sad beyond words and that she couldn’t bear to think of Denny dying alone in the basement sanding a table, like he had. She never wanted to see the house again, she said.
That was all well and good and would have been no trouble in 2002, but now, because the real estate market had tanked—especially for old, unusual homes in little Wisconsin towns, and ones that needed work, to boot—there was no telling how long it would take to sell. After the Independence Day fiesta, the pressure had gone up. Now my parents thought of the house as more of a liability than an asset. What if those kids had burned it down and fried themselves during their party? What if snakes took over the basement? You know all the nightmares. What if “hoboes” began to squat? The risks were intolerable.
My dad called Portland in July.
“I have an alternative to your reprehensible plan to travel around the world, Ben. You might call it a favor.”
I had happened upon a copy of Eat, Pray, Love at the bookstore and had sent my parents a postcard telling them that I was going to do it too.
“I’m not traveling around the world,” I said. “That was a joke.”
“We have an alternative.”
He explained his fears about Denny’s house.
“Why don’t you just sell it for half of what it’s worth,” I said, “and just be done with it? It’s not like you need the money. And there’s no mortgage anymore.”
He laughed.
This was a nice July day out west. I was sitting on my front porch in Portland with a cup of coffee resting on my stomach, my feet up, crossed over the white paint chips of my railing, book (Vonnegut, Galápagos) hugging the arm of the chair, glad we had the sun. It was July 13, I think, a Sunday, and I hadn’t seen my mother or father since May, when they’d come to visit after my release and we’d spent three uncomfortable days going out to meal after meal in the nicest Portland restaurants, only to sit in an awkward triangle around the different tables as I said nothing about my time in Chestik and my mother attempted to keep things lively by flirting with the sommeliers. We’d talked when Denny died too, but I hadn’t come home for the funeral, nor had I wanted to—not because I didn’t think what had happened to him was sad, but because I guessed it would have been impossible for me to stay sober at the wake, and I had been doing well. Word to the wise and to those who will one day follow in my footsteps: it’s a hell of a lot easier to reinvent yourself when your family’s not there.
I explained my nonappearance away—they seemed to accept it. I’d gotten a new copywriting job in June, even after checking the I AM A FELON box on the application (hilarious), and I told my parents that my employer, a pharmaceutical company called Krieg Industries, wouldn’t give me the days off. In truth, I didn’t even ask. The day after Denny had his heart attack and died, I got laid off anyway, right along with every other employee at Krieg. They’d tanked—the FDA had pulled the plug during the phase II trials of what the company had hoped would be its flagship drug. It was called Hezonica, and it was supposed to help men stop snoring. Which it did. But it also decreased the circumference of their testicles.
“That sort of solution,” said my father, responding to my idea of selling Denny’s house cheap, “is how you started with money and now have nothing. And why your sister started with the same amount and now has quite a lot.”
“Isn’t it all profit anyway?” I said. “And besides,” I added, “isn’t there a value to having the inconvenience gone?”
“There is, yes,” he said, “but just because that’s the case, it doesn’t mean you have to immediately make a rash decision. I have a different idea. Let me run it by you.”
“Okay.”
“What exactly is your current employment situation? Are they still wearing you out at the drug shop? Krieg?”
“No.”
“Oh, no?”
“The snore pills shrunk everyone’s balls.”
“What?” he said.
“It turned out that the drug, along with being the cure for snoring, shrunk everyone’s testicles.”
“The company’s dead, Dad. I got laid off last week. That’s the whole story.”
“Entirely dead?”
“Dead. Gone.”
“It’s an amazing time in the American economy,” he mused, and I imagined him grin-squinting like Theodore Roosevelt, shaking his head, because of course he was insulated from it all; as an executive at Hedley, he would continue to get richer as the realities of our failing economy became more and more apparent in the coming years. As payback for moments of smugness such as this one, for a long time it had given me great satisfaction to imply to members of my family, by way of well-placed hints here and there, that I believed in Soviet-style communism. The simple truth, though, was that I didn’t understand money. I just didn’t. I didn’t want to. I still don’t want to. And while I was aware, then, that this was a paradoxical privilege of the wealthy, to be able to choose to not understand it, I hadn’t yet come close to realizing how cowardly it was to detach oneself completely from the past.
“Have you heard about the current state of Lehman?” my father continued. “I suppose you don’t follow that kind of thing. But more important. This means you’re currently unemployed?”
“Yes.”
That was what he needed.
I unpacked in Denny’s room. I hesitated in the hallway, wondering if it might be better to sleep in the living room on the couch, or in Wayne’s room, but Denny’s bed was the best, and I didn’t want to start my exile on a superstitious note. For all my father’s and sister’s realpolitiking about money and life and their cynicism about people and the way things were, for all their realism, the belief in ghosts and spirits was part of their shared ethos, another way in which they were the same. How does that happen? It’s as though all worldviews need escape valves of insanity. My mother—who was the principal of an elementary school and who spent a large part of her days talking to people who could barely count or tie their shoes, let alone tell the difference between fantasy and reality—found anything supernatural, whether it was God, pixies, vampires, zombies, werewolves, ghosts, or krakens, silly. So did I.
I went out to the garage and got Denny’s empty blue recycling bin and started cleaning the kitchen, which stank of alcohol. The linoleum underfoot was sticky with spilled beer, but I discovered a half a bottle of Mr. Clean under the sink and mopped the floor. Then I gathered up the bottles and the cans. I found Denny’s liquor cabinet and poured everything he had down the sink.
After four or five bottles, the smell was strong enough to push me into the other room. I took a break and put on side two of the CSNY and then went and looked at the photos on the mantel—there were some pictures of Denny and my father as boys; a few of the whole family; and single shots of me, Haley, and Wayne, all from our high school years. We were the three of this generation. My picture was one I had seen a thousand times in my parents’ house. My hair was longer then, my face skinnier, but I had the same raised-eyebrow dipshit smirk I always wore when someone told me to smile.
I looked at Wayne. He was smiling a big-toothed smile, as though the person taking the picture had caught him in the act of laughing a genuine laugh, the opposite of mine. The guy had probably only said, “Say cheese,” in a lifeless monotone. I remembered that about my cousin. As long as he detected a try at humor, he would give up a good yelp. His hair was bushy and curly, and in the picture he wore a white button-down and a tie even though he’d gone to St. Helens High, just like me, and we had no uniforms. There was something about Wayne, though, in that era of his life—informal, but I could see him dressing up on picture day on principle, when most of his peers would have been wearing the same T-shirts they always wore. He cared about stuff like that; he always had. He looked neither dark nor depressed. He looked happy. This was taken before college.
It was past eight o’clock, deep into dusk, when I finally hauled the full recycling bin to the end of the driveway. There were too many bottles for the one bin, so I ended up using Denny’s wheelbarrow for the second load. I had worked up a sweat cleaning, and my white T-shirt was wet at the chest and under my arms.
Out at the end of the driveway, I saw some headlights. Unlike the county highways that crisscrossed Wisconsin and made the state into a grid of boxes, Beau Pointe Road, Denny’s road, wound up through the woods and the hills like a deer path, connecting maybe twenty homes to Highway 121, which led to St. Helens’s downtown and eventually became Main Street. Denny’s house wasn’t really in a neighborhood, and there wasn’t all that much traffic on the road.
I stood and watched, one hand on the wheelbarrow and one hand on my hip. I watched as a pickup truck towing a horse trailer wound up the hill.
The truck eased around the bend. I don’t think the driver looked at me, and the light was not good at all, but as it passed I was surprised to realize that the woman driving looked familiar.
My parents waited until I graduated high school before they moved to Chicago and left St. Helens, my father’s hometown, behind. For all those years in St. Helens, my father slowly climbed into and then upward through the ranks at Astronautics Corporation of America, a large company outside Milwaukee that for decades had been making technical instruments for the aeronautics field. His own father had worked there as an engineer for forty years, designing the gyroscopic gizmos that went into the cockpits of fighter jets.
My father did well. But the money—the big money—was all on my mother’s side. Her family name was Weltz, and the fortune was linked to a chemical company called Hedley. The money was old, diverse, and enormous. Even so, my father, after meeting my mother in Hyde Park at U of C in the late sixties, had insisted on coming back to St. Helens to work in his own way and raise his family like he’d been raised. Not in New York, where her parents were. Not “aristocratic.” Rather, with family nearby. With real people nearby. To prevent his children from “becoming psychopaths.” He and Denny had been closer in the seventies, right after the war, and St. Helens was a safer place to be than Chicago. The schools were good. It was his home, he’d grown up there, and he could vouch for the quality of life. So the complex argument went. My mother, who—to him, then—seemed to have grown up drinking tea in various Connecticut gazebos, surprised him by liking the idea.
Twenty years later, fully aware of my father’s weakness for the wholesome, or at least the appearance of the wholesome, my sister came up with the ingenious idea of working at Golden’s Grocery and Supply, something my mother didn’t understand—it meant the end of both of Haley’s careers, as ballerina and opera singer—but that my father loved, as he had been a bagboy there back in his school days. Bagboys: true labor. He liked to talk about good character and work ethic, how minimum wage could teach you some things about life. How customer service at that intimate a level would put good business sense in your bones. In other words: my sister worked my father’s class guilt until he let her apply for the job. He was a fundamentalist when it came to the narrative of the Midwest, and in this way he was vulnerable. Add to that that he could never say no to my sister, and the lessons in ruling-class activities were dropped; Haley learned to work the cash register instead.
I started working there when I was old enough, but only because Haley told me it was an unguarded portal to cigarettes, alcohol, and any drug I could possibly need.
It was 9:30 p.m., a half hour before closing time, and the store was now lit up like a Christmas tree. I’d come down because there was no food in the house.
After a moment of simply looking, remembering, I walked through the sliding doors.
The first thing I noticed was that they’d expanded and moved the checkout lanes. But the smell from the bakery was the same, and so were the yellow T-shirts of the girls working the registers. Only two right now, the hour being what it was. Mr. Golden had a strict policy: girls at the registers, boys at the bags.
I saw an old man bent over some ledgers at the customer-service kiosk. Muzak overhead. Not many customers around. Over at the end of the produce aisle, a skinny kid lazily pushed a gray parallelogram-shaped floor cleaner.
I filled a handbasket with some staples—for me, this meant saltine crackers and smooth peanut butter, two products of the modern era that can sustain the life of a vegetarian indefinitely and with great efficiency—and then wandered the aisles until I found the tea. I was impressed; the selection was more substantial than it had been in my time. I was reading the back of a box of something fancy when I felt somebody amble up to me on my left.
I stepped to the side to let the other shopper pass, not looking up, and heard a man’s voice say, “That’s not Benjy Hanson, is it?”
I glanced over. It was the same old man who’d been at the ledgers. He smiled, hands in pockets. He looked embarrassed.
“It is,” I said, trying to put face to name, still holding the box of tea near my eyes. I was about to say Do I know you? when I saw his name tag.
His face manufactured a new smile, some relief at being recognized, as I held out my hand, and we shook. It was Rick Hagan, the same manager I’d long ago asked Haley about and who’d come to mind when I’d driven by the first time. He looked like he’d aged 3,750 years.
“What’s it been?” he said. “Fifteen years?”
“At least that,” I said.
“Listen, I’m down a guy tonight,” he said. He cocked his thumb. “What say you throw on an apron and go face up aisle three for me?”
“I’m still wearing my apron under these clothes.”
This, for a moment, stopped Rick’s jokey smile in its tracks as he recomputed the new vector of humor, and his eyes ticked down to my chest for a moment as he solved the equation, then hammed up some fake investigating, squinting and looking closely at my T-shirt. Not the greatest timing in the world.
“I’m not seeing an apron under there,” he said. “Whoa!”
He laughed loudly now.
“It’s really good to see you,” I said.
“What gives us the pleasure?”
“I’m staying up at my uncle’s place,” I said, thumb over my shoulder in what I thought might be the right direction. “It’s empty now. There was a break-in, so I’m back to watch over it for a little bit. Just kind of passing through and helping out my parents. You know.”
“Oh, sure, sure,” he said. “Dennis.” He shook his head. “That was sad news,” he said. “Dennis. Always the nicest guy. Back then and now. He was always in here chatting up the girls.”
“What? The high school girls?”
“Oh God, no, not like that,” Rick said, performing a small, crisp version of an umpire’s safe signal with hands and forearms, shaking his head at the same time. Safe… from small-town pedophilia! “Harmless, harmless. Denny was just a big showoff. They all loved him. You know how he was.”
“I do.”
“He really was a character.”
“He was.”
“Really too bad.”
“It is.”
“It really is.”
“And you?” I said. “How are you?”
“Fine, good, yup,” he said, nodding deeply. “May’s doing well. Still at Prevea. The girls both went to Milwaukee for school and they’re still over there.”
“Remind me of their names?”
“Christy and Jennifer. You probably remember them, I bet. Am I right? We had ’em down here all the time.”
I did remember them, actually. They’d been tiny then, both under ten. In the summers they would come for ice cream from the dairy cooler and ride their scooters in the parking lot. You would sometimes see them shoot past the front windows. Wheeled nymphs.
“How long you staying around?” he asked. “This’ll just be a temporary thing, then, I’m guessing? Have you got a permanent setup somewhere else? Somewhere out west, is it?”
“I’ll probably just stick around until we can get Denny’s house sold.”
“You have a family with you?”
“No.”
“You have a career out there?”
“Nope.”
“You been doing anything interesting?”
“Not at all.”
“But you’ll head back after this, then.”
“Probably,” I said. “Either that or travel around the world. Like in Eat, Pray, Love.”
Rick nodded at this as though I had told him I had throat cancer.
It occurred to me that he was being kind by not asking about it, though, and that he probably knew that I’d gone to pansy prison and didn’t have much to show for myself as an adult, that I was a fairly pathetic case and that there was very little explanation, and that it was right for him to be showing me great pity, all things considered. And he knew that I was as reliably full of shit as I had been years ago. And that it was a stupid joke, actually, this joke of mine which I’d now double-used, and that it didn’t really mean anything and was even a little condescending. But I didn’t see anything like judgment in his eyes. Just that I was not anonymous, that he felt I was probably lost and, because of this, an object of curiosity.
“Well,” he said. “Okay then. I’ll let you get your shopping done. Just wanted to say hello.” He held out a hand to shake again. “If you don’t have too much stuff, come by customer service and I’ll check you out with the discount.”
He turned and walked away down the aisle.
He didn’t look that old, actually, now that I saw him walking. He looked healthy. It was only that now, today, I was nearly as old as he’d been back then. At least that’s how it felt.
I was outside putting my groceries in the trunk when I glanced over toward the dumpsters and saw another specter. This one was sitting on the concrete stoop smoking a cigarette.
I closed the trunk and wandered over in that direction, hands in my pockets.
“Do you have any extra meat you could spare?” I said. “Sir?”
He barely looked over.
When I took a few more steps, he finally glanced up to appraise me sidelong, but after a few seconds his expression changed, and he snorted and smiled and said, “Jesus. Fucking Benjamin. The prodigal son. What’s up, dude? Welcome back to the S-H.”
“Hey,” I said, walking over to him as he stood. We hugged. Grant was bigger than me, height and girth both. “You smell like pork chops,” I said. “Let go of me.”
He was smiling wide when he leaned away to take me in. His hair was long, like it had been years ago, but it was pulled back in a little knot and tucked up under a hairnet. He’d put on a little weight but he actually looked pretty good, I thought. Pretty close to how I remembered him. He’d never been my closest friend, but we’d always had a thing, me and him. (Besides, I thought right then, had I even had a closest friend?) We’d always connected well, and back when I first started at Golden’s, he’d taken me under his wing, taught me how to steal beer by putting it in the dumpster.
He’d been a good football player, I recalled, but not quite good enough for college. He’d stuck around in town after he graduated, and he had an apartment where I often went to drink, play video games, hang around when I was skipping school or didn’t feel like being at home. His apartment was where I stayed, too, those times I would come back to St. Helens during college. He never went.
We drifted apart, though, and I came back less often my junior and senior years, then never. I guess Grant was the kind of friend with whom you always had fun but with whom you did not keep in touch.
“I gotta say it, dude,” he said. “What happened to you out there?”
“What?” I said. “In Oregon?”
“Uh, yeah, out in Oregon. Prison? Were you not in prison?”
“I got out a few months ago.”
“How much time’d you do?”
“Fourteen months,” I said. “Most of it was in minimum security.”
“That’s intense.”
“You’d be surprised.” I considered my groceries. Chestik was the prison for people who ate baby arugula when they weren’t in prison.
“And what’d you do again? Burn something down?”
“Not really,” I said. Then: “Kind of. It’s really very boring.”
He let it go after a few more vague questions. After, Grant and I sat for a while. I told him what I was doing back, told him some of my stories from Denver, told him about blowing out my ankle at Breckenridge. I didn’t tell him about the arson and he didn’t ask again. He told me how he’d gotten married to a girl from Mishicot and had a kid, but they were divorced now, and he only ever saw his daughter on the weekends.
“Which is the worst, man. I had a couple OWIs and that was it. Hell no, custody. It took me two years just to get a few days.” He took a drag from his cigarette. “If you don’t want pain, don’t have kids.”
“I’m not planning on it.”
We chatted for a little while longer, then I gave him my cell and stood up.
“I gotta go eat,” I said. “But, hey, before I go, let me ask you something.”
“What’s up?”
“So tonight I was there at my uncle’s place and I swear, I swear, that I saw Lauren Sheehan drive by in a pickup truck. Is that possible? Is she around? Do you remember her?”
“Yeah, she’s around. I think she does drive a truck. For work.”
“Why’s she here?”
“What, in town?”
“Yeah.”
“She came back maybe three or four years ago,” he said. “I honestly don’t even know why. Her brother says she had some crazy husband go psycho on her.”
“Psycho how?”
“I don’t know. Just snapped, I guess? I don’t know,” he said. “But that whole family’s all secretive about it. And Bobby’s so fucked up I don’t trust anything he says anyway.”
“So she’s not married?”
“Look at you,” he said, smiling.
“Answer the question.”
I woke up at around two thirty. Insomnia since Chestik. Something to do with the size of the world.
I got out of bed and got dressed, went downstairs, and looked for a moment at Jeremy’s computer, still not hooked up to anything. Instead of booting it up, I rooted around in Denny’s kitchen drawers until I found a flashlight and then I got my keys.
Outside, the stars were bright, the houses on either side were dark. I went down the middle of the road, and after ten minutes of walking I came to the T I remembered from the times I’d walked this way in search of my cousin. Go right, pass the quarry and a half a mile of cornfields, and you could wind your way back down into town; go left and you could ascend the steeper part of Beau Pointe Hill. It was no more than five hundred feet high, but it was a mountain when I was young.
I went left, up. I walked past a half dozen driveways, the nearby houses hidden by the woods, the road still empty, silent. Being up here reminded me of Wayne. He used to make me answer riddles each time I came to see him. His riddles weren’t very good—they were just the ones you always heard, the who-am-Is. You’ve heard them. I think he had a book. But back then, I found them to be a kind of magic, and I have to say that looking at them again now, it’s difficult not to see them as inadvertently profound, no matter the answers. I make you weak at the worst of all times, I keep you safe, I keep you fine. I make your hands sweat and your heart grow cold, I visit the weak but seldom the bold. Who am I? You are fear. I am like day, you can find me near the river any day, and you can make almost anything out of me. Who am I? You are clay. The rich eat me, the poor have me, if you eat me you will die. Who am I? You are nothing.
This was Wayne, though, and so, mixed in with questions from his book, every fourth or fifth, there would also come from the Keeper of the Tree House—he yelled them down in a spooky voice—totally practical questions: How do you remember how to tighten and untighten screws, Benjamin? Lefty loosey, righty tighty. And what’s the best way to ensure that your car battery won’t die in cold weather, Benjamin? I mean, if you’re really serious about it not dying? You have to take the battery out. What is the exact temperature right now? Seventy-two. That is incorrect, according to my thermometer. What do you say to that? You don’t have a thermometer. You are banished!
Those times were all gone.
I came to the place I’d been looking for, a path that led off from the road, marked by a brown wooden sign, small-cap letters engraved and painted gold. I hadn’t turned on the flashlight and I didn’t need to do it now. I knew what the sign said. BEAU POINTE OVERLOOK. Discovered (white-man discovered) and named by a Jesuit explorer, Pierre Bettencourt, who’d come south from the river system in the Fox Valley at the end of the 1600s, making a slow trip inland while the more pragmatic of his fellow explorers stuck to Lake Michigan or the Fox or the Wisconsin, many of them still in search of a Northwest Passage. I liked to think of old Pierre as the black sheep of the Jesuits, either lost here in this place or completely impractical—or maybe just a wanderer—because there was no good reason to come here, fifty-five miles west of the big lake, or to climb a hill that overlooked nothing. Other than just to come.
I strolled across the empty parking lot and looked down at St. Helens.
The streetlights made a yellow grid, and the black line meandering through the center was the river, dark enough to be the river Styx. A few homes were lit up, a few spirits squaring off against the vacuum, like me. I watched toy-size cars crawl down Main. But there was no sound coming up. No sound of the city. Just what I could see. Just my breath. Just the trees. Just me, and beside me, the ghost of old Pierre.
I tried to guess what might have gone through his mind when he first looked down in this manner. What does a Jesuit consider? Most likely he was exhausted, starving. There was no town. His feet hurt. I have no idea if it was night.
I thought: All that we are given shall be taken in the end.
And I don’t know why these particular words came into my head, as they don’t strike me as appropriate even now, but those were the words I heard.
I took them as a greeting.