Blades
Steve Weddle
He was on his fifth Tequila Sunrise when his head hit the table.
“Everything, guys. Everything.”
We’d talked Nick into coming for drinks because he hadn’t been out of his apartment since twenty-nine days back when he and Laura had called it off. We had to get him out. Even without the wedding, the three of us considered ourselves his groomsmen. Until death do us all part, it seemed. Though another few drinks might take care of that.
The Thursday night crowd at Wingin’ It was worried more about the Cowboys-Eagles game than about the four of us concussing ourselves on a table.
Raphael slid the emptied tumblers away from Nick’s head. “She didn’t take everything, man.” Raph was the jokester among us, the one we sent in to cause a scene if we needed it, the one thinking he was just one prank away from going viral. When we’d go to games, he was the one who would sneak us in a diaper bag full of White Russians in baby bottles “You’ve still got your health,” he told Nick, pulling a coaster from the side of Nick’s face. “And that nasty cold sore.”
Truth be told, Nick was a bit of a late bloomer. We were all in our late thirties, but he hadn’t even gotten through his first marriage, yet. And with Laura dumping him a month before the wedding, he was even further behind us.
“Look,” Sam said, “if it wasn’t meant to be, it’s best you know now. The two of you can move on, find new people. It’s good news to find out now.”
“We’re still registered,” he said.
Raph, Sam, and I looked at each other, then back to Nick.
“Sure,” Sam said, “I’m sure she didn’t even think about it. Probably moved on. You should too, man.”
“At Target,” Nick continued, ignoring Sam. “I checked. Target still thinks the wedding is going to happen. On the nineteenth. That’s next weekend.” He’d raised his head, apparently just he could drop it, rattling on the table again. “Next weekend.”
Sam said he’d get the next round, then walked across the room to the bar.
“You have to stop doing this to yourself, Nick.” I looked to Raph. “Right, man? Tell him.”
Raph shook his head. “I’ve told him enough. I got to take a leak.”
When Raph left, Nick’s head hit the table again, just as Sam was about to make it back with a couple beers and a tray of muay thai wings. Sam set the wings on the table, then turned around and introduced himself to two women at a neighboring table.
“Even Blades. She even took the damn dog.”
The dog. This was maybe the forty-second time he’d mentioned the dog in the last few hours. They’d gone out together to pick a pound dog, and ended up with rat terrier, because Laura thought he was cute and because Nick appreciated that it was Terrier Tuesday at the pound and they only had to pay half-price. He’d chosen the name after his favorite jazz drummer and his third favorite vampire movie—Underworld: Awakening.
Also, of course, the rat terrier has some serious fangs. And toe nails that were only trimmed when Nick took him for a walk on the road, which was twice. Blades was the kind of dog that gets his feet snared in afghans, then rolls off the couch like a bag of potatoes off the kitchen counter.
When Raph came back he joined Sam at the other table, and a minute later, my phone buzzed.
Standing two feet away, Raph was texting that we needed to drop Nick at his house. They’d been invited back to the apartment of his table mates, for drinks and “stuff,” he said.
Five minutes later, after the Eagles had gone up three scores, we were loading Nick into the back of Raph’s car.
With Raph driving and Sam shotgun, I was in the back, with Nick’s head in my lap like some dream gone wrong when the car started, and the speakers thumped out some punk rock song about making marks in time, feeling the coldness, feeling nothing, which sounded right, if way too loud.
I smacked Sam on the back of the head, told him to turn it down, which he did.
We turned a corner and I used the momentum to lean Nick upright against the door so he wouldn’t be lying down and Jimi Hendrix himself if he puked.
By the time we got to his place, he was alright to walk up the steps, open the door, and fall out on the den couch, where we left him with a damp washcloth on his face, the kitchen trash can to puke into, and the TV set to “Chopped,” with the volume down low.
“Should we stop for liquor and rubbers?” Raph asked as he pulled away from Nick’s.
Sam said maybe we just call it a night.
“You’re going to see that chick again,” Raph said. “When you bringing her out with us? Jealous I’ll steal her off your arm?”
Sam said he wasn’t worried about that.
“You won’t even tell us her name? Where does she work?”
“Look, it doesn’t matter where she works. Who cares? Just drop me off at my place and you and doofus back there can hit the party without me holding you back.”
“Professor Doofus,” I said.
“Oh, sweet. You got the gig at the college?”
I said I did.
“My apologies,” Sam said. “Dump me and then you and Adjunct Instructor Doofus here can party with those chicks from the wings place.”
I said I had a better idea. “Guys,” I pulled myself up, hung my arms over the front seat. “We got to help Nick out. He’s in a bad way.”
“I’m not bringing him with us, no way,” Raph said.
“He doesn’t want to party. He wants what he’s lost, what was taken from him.”
“Laura wasn’t taken from him,” Sam said. “These things just happen.”
“I don’t mean Laura. I mean Blades.”
“His dog?” Sam asked.
“It has to be tonight,” I said. “Next week, Laura moves to the day shift.”
“How do you even know that?” Sam asked, turning back to look me in the eye.
“That was the whole reason of when they were getting married. When her job settled down and she moved to days,” I said. “Don’t you remember? That starts next week. This is the last night she’s out of their house for her shift.”
“Her house,” Sam said. “It’s her house.”
“So what?” Raph asked. “So, what do we care if she’s working at night. How can we get her to give us the dog if she’s not there?”
“He means break in, dillhole,” Sam said. “Like a common criminal.”
I was waiting for the next round of objections, but Raph said, “I’m in,” turned left on Merganser to cut across Ruddy Duck Road, then we were a couple blocks from the house on Bufflehead. He asked Sam if he wanted off at the corner.
“In for a penny,” Sam said, “in for a pounding.” Sam took off his jacket, tossed it into the backseat.
Raph parked on the street, two houses down from the house Laura had kicked Nick out of a few weeks back. Raph offered to stay in the car and honk if he saw anything suspicious.
“You mean like two idiots breaking into a house?” Sam asked, as we eased shut the doors.
We walked along the drainage ditch until we got to the garage door, then up the side of the house and to the back of the place, the unlit basement door where Nick had hidden a key back when he was allowed into the house he’d bought.
The key was still tied onto the underside of the drain guard, so we opened the door, replaced the key, and eased inside. I pulled out my keys, turned on the penlight, and we walked quietly through the storage room, the basement game room, and up the stairs to the kitchen.
“Why are we being quiet?” Sam asked.
I said because we were breaking into a house.
“We’ve already broken in. She’s gone to work. We don’t have to sneak.”
“Sure, man. You’re the boss.”
“You should get used to saying that in your life.”
“Something crawl up your butt?”
“You tell me. This was your dumb idea.”
“Nick’s hurting, Sam.”
“That’s not my fault.”
“I didn’t say it was.”
“What are you saying?”
“I’m saying let’s get Blades and get out of here.”
“Fine, up here on the right.”
“No, the main bedroom is on the left.”
“She moved the dog crate into the guest room.”
“What?”
“Come on,” Sam said, stepping into the guest room.
“How did you know that?” I asked as he knelt by the crate, petting an excited Blades on the nose. The rat terrier was trying to nuzzle through the crate openings. I reached past Sam and opened the door to the crate. “How did you know she’d moved the crate?”
“What? I don’t know. What’s it matter?”
“Nick kept the dog in the bedroom. How did you know Laura moved the crate?”
“What’s it matter?” he asked, standing up. “Let’s just get the dog and go.”
I picked up Blades from the crate. I stopped in the hallway, asked Sam if he needed to take a peek in the master bedroom to see if Laura still had Nick’s picture on the dresser.
He said he didn’t.
I said I figured he didn’t, walked out the back door onto the deck, then around the house and down the road to the car. Somewhere, someone was shooting off firecrackers, and Blades nudged further under my armpit with each pop, pop, pop. The noise continued as we walked alongside the house, but like everything lately, the sound was too far away to matter.
I got to the car, passed the driver’s side window, and tapped it with the wedding ring I now wore on my right hand, woke up Raph, opened the door, and slid into the backseat, with Blades on my lap.
Raph took Teal to get back to the four-lane, and Blades started grumbling the way my cat did when he was about to be sick. I pushed Sam’s jacket from the seat into the floorboard, lowered Blades into the heap to give him a target for whatever he was about to throw up.
The thump, thump of the punk music was still rumbling quietly in the speakers behind me, the fireworks that had been off in the distance reflecting now off the car’s windows, though I couldn’t tell which were real and which were reflections. The streaks of light blazed across the side windows, silently exploding into pieces of glitter, then falling away invisible. I stretched out in the back seat, my head against the door’s armrest, and watched the sky in the back-window light up in flickers and flashes until the shimmers faded like dust, kept my hand rubbing Blades’s back, feeling the quick spasm each time he threw up something new.