Bittler had rejoined us. I glanced at him to see if it’d be kosher to talk about something this dark and personal out loud, but we might as well have been invisible to Boss-man and his frat minion.
Bittler stood there swaying awhile, then stuck his hands in his pants pockets and tried to sit down at the same time. Not a great plan: He managed to knock over his chair, simultaneously dropping his keys and a bunch of change to the floor.
Frat puppy kept him from falling.
I knelt down, scooped the contents of his pockets off the floor, and put everything on the table next to his pâté.
Bittler had a Playboy Bunny key ring. Ewwww.
The shrimpy little bastard didn’t thank me, either. Again.
I turned back toward Cary.
“My father was the youngest of nine children,” I began, “and this happened when he was seven years old, sometime in 1945. His father and the six older brothers who’d served were just home from the war, I guess.”
“Where did they live?” asked Cary.
“Purchase, New York. About an hour north of Manhattan. Dad went to school in the city—a place called Buckley—so he probably didn’t have a lot of friends to play with when he got home. The kid he hung out with most was called Hazy.”
“Your grandparents drove him an hour each way to school?”
“Not exactly,” I said, taking the last sip of my third martini.
“How’d he get there, then, train?”
“Chauffeur.”
Cary looked skeptical.
“And Hazy was the son of one of the gardeners,” I said.
“So you’re totally fucking rich,” he said.
“Actually, no. I’m what you’d call nouveau broke.”
“Seriously?”
“Have you ever heard the expression ‘shirtsleeves to shirtsleeves in three’?”
“No.”
I sighed. “Okay, it means that you can pretty much guarantee that a family will go through a fortune in three generations, no matter how big it was.”
“So that’s, like, by the third generation they’re not wearing suits and ties anymore?”
“Exactly.”
“And you’re the third generation?”
“Fourth. My generation mostly sits on the front stoops of Section Eight apartment buildings in our undershirts with a pack of Kools and a scratch ticket. When we’re not screaming at our feral offspring in Laundromats.”
“Wearing real pearls, though, I notice,” he said.
“Damn right. I’m trying to claw my way back into the middle class.”
“Sure,” he said, chuckling, “like that would be a huge leap.”
I sighed anew. “My father’s lived in a VW van since 1976, and my mother just married her death-row pen pal. That would be husband number five.”
Cary stopped chuckling, his eyes gentle again. “That’s pretty, um…. Wow.”
The waiter arrived with our elk medallions in port-wine-shiitake reduction with roasted balsamic baby root vegetables. Somehow, both these foodstuffs had been teased into utterly phallic twinned towers: cockstand comestibles, Leggo-My-Lingams, a priapic plat du jour.
Cary was still mulling over what I’d said.
This is always kind of the tricky point of opening up to anyone I hope will become a bona-fide friend.
We get to the actual personal-history stuff and some just decide I’m a pathological liar, or otherwise nuts—at which point they move right the fuck along.
And maybe those were the healthy people.
I mean, hey, there was a ton of crap in my personal record that required a willing suspension of disbelief—right up until you saw more of it raining down on my head in real time.
Let’s just say I’ve never bonded with anyone over a shared love of sparkly unicorns or anything. It’s virtually always the dark shit. The damage.
A more accomplished conversationalist might be able to tap-dance around all that. Or maybe I’d just never seen the point of trying. I figure land mines have a habit of making themselves known, no matter how many hours you invest in blathering about needlepoint or curtains or housebreaking new puppies beforehand.
I just cross my fingers and come out of the cave with my hands up. Life is short and shallow sparkly-unicorn people have always bored the shit out of me, so why prolong the agony?
I started in on my elk, which was actually pretty damn good.
“Madeline…, ” Cary began.
But Bittler interrupted, guffawing at something beside me with his mouth full before snapping his fingers at the waiter for more Scotch.
“Hey you,” he yelled, “Pedro!”
Frat boy chimed in with, “How ’bout some damn refills over here?”
I turned to Cary. “You were about to say something?”
“Your father and Hazy,” he said. “Tell me the rest.”
“We should probably eat first.”
I toppled both food phalli with the edge of my fork, then mashed them into vulva-shapes for good measure.
Fuck Freud. Georgia O’Keeffe rides again.
“Granddaddy Dare bought an autogyro before the war,” I began, once we’d plowed through the rest of the elk. “He’d had a hangar built for it on the property—big steel warehouse kind of thing on a concrete pad. Dad always called it a ‘Butler Building.’ ”
“What’s an autogyro?” asked Cary.
“Kind of a helicopter-airplane hybrid, before helicopters were invented. It had stubby wings with a propeller and a big overhead rotor, so you didn’t need a lot of ground run to take off and land.”
He nodded.
It was nearing the end of the school year, I explained, and Grandmama and Granddaddy had planned a trip to Canada to fish for salmon on the Restigouche River, taking Dad’s twelve-year-old sister with them.
My father was to have stayed home with his nurse, in order to finish out the academic year. I don’t know whether my aunt’s vacation at Spence started earlier, or whether their parents just didn’t think it was problematic to interrupt a daughter’s education.
My mother presumes this all took place on a Friday afternoon, when Dad had finished his week of school in the city.
It would’ve been a day lengthening into summer, the fine old trees on the family place lush and verdant, the acres of close-napped lawn sweet with clover.
“Hazy and Dad sneaked into the hangar, one day after school,” I continued. Something they’d done before.
The boys were armed with slingshots, their pockets crammed with wooden matches.
“Not the safety kind,” I said. “The strike-anywhere kind.”
Cary blanched, hearing that part, knowing this wouldn’t end well.
My stories tend not to.
Somehow they’d learned the trick of shooting a match at the concrete floor sulfured head down so it’d burst into flame on contact before bouncing back into the air, like a stone that skipped once when skimmed across the surface of a pond.
Maybe Hazy’s older brother had passed along this trick, maybe Dad had learned it from a fellow student at Buckley. Hard to say.
“One of those lit matches bounced into a forty-gallon barrel of varnish,” I said. “I don’t know if the thing was just open at the top, or there was a little cap or something that had been left off, but the shit ignited and blew up. All over Hazy.”
Cary grabbed my wrist.
“You okay?” I asked.
He nodded.
“So,” I continued, “Dad told him to roll on the ground to extinguish the flames, but Hazy’s older sister—”
“Jesus,” said Cary. “His sister?”
“It’s never been clear to me when she arrived at the scene—she’s just suddenly there in every rendition of this I’ve ever been told—but anyway, she screamed at Hazy to get up and run to the brook, a hundred yards away.”
Cary gripped my wrist tighter, but he didn’t ask me to stop.
“Yeah, so… Hazy didn’t make it to the brook.”
Dad’s parents took him away to the Restigouche the following afternoon. They didn’t talk to him about what had happened—or even mention it, ever again. They just told him he’d be coming with them for the salmon fishing.
“That’s appalling,” said Cary.
“No shit. My mother says that for months afterward, whenever my father heard a siren he presumed it was the police, coming to put him in jail for killing his best friend.”
“But at least he talked to her about it. That must have helped.”
“Right before they got married. He took her to visit Hazy’s grave.”
I think that loss was the basis for everything, really. As though Hazy’s death were the first black rectangle tipped in an elaborate paisley arrangement of dominoes—if dominoes could somehow be made of anti-matter.
My family is defined by the absences, the negative space.
There’d been a dad-shaped void in my life for as long as I could remember, always bleeding just a little bit, around the edges.
“Anyway,” I said. “I don’t know how you could come out of something like that undamaged. Especially to be left alone with it, as a seven-year-old kid.”
“I’m terrified of fire,” said Cary. “Always have been.”
“Me too.”
He gave me one of those wonderful crinkly-eyed empathy smiles.
Tribal identification.
“Your turn,” I said.
Cary took his hand off my wrist, drew in a deep breath. “This kid on my street—his house burned down when we were ten.”
“I’m so sorry.”
“Everyone else made it out, the whole rest of his family. He died.”
“You guys were close?”
“Best friends. We were born a week apart. I still have pictures of us in a playpen together.”
I put my hand on his wrist.
“The worst part was…” He hesitated.
“What?”
“Well, you could smell it for weeks afterward. The whole neighborhood—even upwind. Rain didn’t help. I couldn’t sleep.”
I shuddered.
“I kept badgering my parents to buy rope ladders for all the windows, in case it happened to us. My father thought it was pretty funny. Teased me about it mercilessly.”
“No offense,” I said, “but I think that’s a total dick move on your father’s part.”
“He had a point.”
“You were a little kid, Cary. And you’d just lost your best friend…?”
“Yeah, but Madeline.” Cary shook his head, grinning at me. “We lived in a one-story house.”
I smiled at that. “Well…”
Before I could finish the thought, Bittler passed out. Face-first into his plate of elk.
“Kanpai,” whispered Cary, whereupon I had to pretend I’d been overtaken by a sudden coughing fit to cover my laughter.