by S. E. Hinton
The boat was gone. They took it.
The truck was in Mike’s name.
“It’s not your fault,” Aunt Jelly said suddenly, fiercely. She put her hand on his arm. “Terry knew what he was doing. He knew the risks.”
“Yes,” Mike said. After all, it was the truth.
“And it’s not your fault you’re not in there with him.”
“Just a little while longer?” the little kids whined.
They could not tell it was cold.
WINTER 1999
Mike walked along the shoreline. He should have brought his fishing tackle, he thought.
But he hadn’t planned where he’d go today, just got in his old truck and drove.
He took the stick Amos brought back, and threw it as hard as he could. Then sat down on a log and stared at the water.
Forever wasn’t over yet. It still had years to go.
Amos came back with the stick, dropped it. Put his head on Mike’s knee and whined. He was a real quiet dog. It wasn’t often he whined.
Mike stood up, zipped his jacket. It was too cold to stay. It was getting dark; he needed to go to work.
Something was his fault. He was sure about that.
The Will
“You didn’t need to get all dressed up for this,” the step-father said.
Mike looked at him but said nothing. He had come from work; he would go back to work from here. You didn’t get all dressed up to work on a street crew.
His cousin Terry winked at him. Terry was dressed fine, but he was between jobs as usual and had nothing better to do.
Aunt Julie smiled at Mike. He had come to the reading of the will because she asked him to. She wouldn’t care if he didn’t dress up.
I hope it says something about Dad’s guns, Mike thought. Because I am taking them one way or the other.
The woman who was Aunt Julie’s sister, his step-father’s wife, had just died.
To Mike it seemed like his mother had died a long time ago.
He was glad he went to see her in the hospital, though. Glad Terry had made him.
“You will be so sorry if you don’t, man,” Terry had said, and Mike was glad he had listened. He could see it meant a lot to his mother.
He held the step-father’s eyes again.
I am twenty-three, not seventeen, Mike thought. Your yelling would not make me nervous now, and if you make one move to take off your belt I will strangle you with it.
Mike had thought his life was ruined when he was ten years old and Dad’s car went off that icy bridge. Then two years later his mother had married this man, and Mike found out what ruined was.
The lawyer was saying something about the jewelry going to Aunt Julie. It wasn’t much, but Mike was still glad she would get it and not the step-father.
He could tell Terry was trying not to laugh. He always saw the comical side to things, and this lawyer, he sounded just so damn … lawyery.
(But after the funeral, Terry had sat in Mike’s truck with him and hugged him while they both bawled like babies.)
The lawyer was talking about the house now, the house he had grown up in, Mike heard the address. Then heard, “… to my son, Michael Timothy” and looked up to make sure he was hearing right.
One look at the step-father’s face told him.
Of course the guy started fussing and protesting, and dimly Mike heard the lawyer saying the house had originally been Mike’s father’s, left to his wife and son, and yes maybe the terms could have been changed—but they weren’t. In fact, she had seen the lawyer about a year ago to make sure Mike got the house.
I’ll paint it back white like it is supposed to be, and Terry can get off his lazy butt and help me if he wants to move in, Mike thought. And yank up that god-awful carpet…
He’d get a dog, not like Bingo, who was sent to the pound for biting the step-father, but another … Yeah, he would get one from the pound, that was a good idea.
He stood up. So did the step-father.
“I have to go back to work.”
He had grown a lot since he was seventeen; the other man had to look up to meet his eyes.
“She told me she changed that will,” the step-father said.
“She once told me she married you because she loved you,” Mike said. “Guess she lied to us both.” He paused. “You got twenty-four hours to get your stuff out of my house.”
Those were the exact same words he’d heard six years before, when he thought he had left that house forever.
Mike hoped the step-father remembered saying that.
“Fuck you,” he started to add, but then realized Mom had said it for him.
What’s Your Poison?
Mike had the draft in the mug before the customer sat down. He didn’t know the guy’s name, but he knew what he wanted. Bud draft, a package of chips. And to tell the story about the UFO.
It would take three beers, but the story would come out.
How he was driving down the highway. No drugs. No booze. No one else in the truck. The white light. The engine dying. The three things in the road. Yeah, they looked like the pictures—small, gray, a slit for a mouth, big eyes … He’d passed out or something, came to on the road with a splitting headache and four hours behind schedule.
Mike would nod, listen. Give the guy what he was thirsty for.
“Yeah, that is spooky man. It would freak anyone out. Nobody could go on driving a truck after something like that. No, I never seen one, don’t want to. Sounds like hell. Sure, nobody wants to go on disability, especially mental…”
On the third beer the guy quit shaking, on the fourth he was talking sports.
Four beers in an evening never hurt anybody, and it was easy for Mike to do his job.
He’d worked here for three years now, since he was twenty-five and needed a steady job. It didn’t pay much, but right then he didn’t want much. Just something steady. He was the bouncer, too. Mike would rather keep a fight from happening than try to end one, and he was good at that. He had an eye for spotting the ones who were thirsty for a fight.
He had gotten real good at knowing what people wanted.
There was one woman, just a few years older, though sometimes, the way she carried on, you’d think she could be his mother. She didn’t have any kids. Maybe that was it.
She stopped in on her way home from work. It was quiet then. Sit at the bar and order a rum and Coke.
Mike could tell which days she needed more rum than Coke.
Her arms were bruised sometimes; once or twice she had a split lip. From work, she said. She worked in an old-folks’ home. It would surprise you how strong they could be. Violent.
Mike would set her drink down and hear about the old people, the mean ones, the sweet ones, the families who visited, the ones who didn’t.
Then she’d say she had to get home, hubby would be worried, mad, haha, you know how men are.
Mike knew how some men were, so he would nod.
One weekend when he visited his aunt, he got the name of some agency, some place you could call when hubby got mad like that. His aunt had a friend who had been in trouble.
“What’d ya give me this for?” the customer spat at him when he gave her the number. “I don’t need that.”
She gulped down her drink and left. Mike felt bad. He wasn’t a damn social worker. That wasn’t his job.
So next time, when she came in, he acted like nothing had happened. Poured the rum and Coke.
And when she asked for a third, he said, “Maybe you better get on home. Your husband might be worried. Men lose their tempers quick, sometimes, when they get worried.”
She brightened up at that.
“Yeah, it’s funny, the way it takes you sometimes. Lov
e.”
Mike nodded, and she left happy. That was his job. Give them what they were thirsty for.
The guy who had fits about his daughter. Seeing the frigging therapist. They hypnotized you these days, made you say whatever they wanted. You couldn’t believe the garbage, the filth—and they had the poor kid believing she really remembered…
It just broke his heart.
His wife’s, too.
Mike said, “It’s a shame the way people can mess with your mind.”
Gave him another Jack Daniel’s. His money was as green as anyone else’s, even if he did give Mike the creeps.
Ed, the other bartender, never said much while they worked. Ed was a lot older. There wasn’t much in common outside of the job. Once, half-kidding, Mike told him, “My name is not Fool Kid.”
And Ed said, “You seem to think it is your job description.” And he wasn’t kidding a bit.
But after the bar was closed, when they were cleaning up, Ed would say a few things. Women. How rotten they were. He ought to know; he was married four times. They just made your life hell.
Mike said, “If you quit marrying them, maybe you would like them better. Nothing wrong with a lady friend.”
And Ed would scowl, mumble. Then mention, there was this gal he’d seen at church … She did seem nice…
Mike said everyone could use a friend.
Mike wasn’t any talker. But he could listen good. It was like he could hear a whole other conversation under the words they said. The stories—the wife, the boss, the brother-in-law, the goddamn cops…
Sometimes, late Saturday nights, when he worked till 2:00, Mike would take a few tips, buy himself a couple of shots of whiskey. He could still work fine—watched out for fights, ladies who needed an escort to their cars, glasses needing to be refilled, cleaned.
Which words they wanted to hear.
Three years here.
It didn’t seem that long. Saturday nights, late, the bar was so full of smoke it was like a heavy fog; the music and noise had melted together where you couldn’t tell which was which, it was like being in a dream.
It was a good job, far away from that mess he and Terry got in. The paycheck didn’t bounce.
Besides, he didn’t know what else to do.
But he couldn’t help thinking how this place would look twenty years from now…
His mind went strange places that late at night. He’d have another whiskey. But it wasn’t what he was thirsty for.
The Girl Who Loved Movies
It wasn’t the first thing he thought of when he remembered her, but it had to be the second.
How much she loved movies.
Not the new ones, the ones you saw on the big screen, at least not often. Most of the new ones she scorned.
“That is so clichéd,” she’d say, yawning while the rest gasped in horror, laughing when others wept.
These were the only times he ever heard her say anything harsh. She was unnaturally kind.
But she loved the old ones.
They went in together to buy a VCR, rented movies instead. Neither one of them had any money, it was cheaper.
Stretched out on the couch, Sunday afternoons in particular, they’d watch for hours.
She knew all of the actors.
“You’ll never believe who was up for this part,” she’d tell him. “It would have ruined the whole thing. Casting is really important.”
He’d nod, not paying attention, thinking it odd how one girl’s head on your shoulder, one girl’s arm on your chest, one girl’s leg wrapped around your leg was just a better fit than any other’s.
She loved black and white.
“Look at the shadows,” she said. “Color would spoil it.”
He liked colors, so instead he’d look at the top of her head, the twenty shades of gold and brown it took to come up with her hair, the natural pink of her nails … notice that when she wore one of his T-shirts it was always the green one…
“They did such a good job on lighting.”
And he’d see how the sunlight lit the hairs on her arms into silver; he’d just have to stroke them … How rain brought out the depth of her eyes.
“Listen to this,” she said. “This line is classic.”
“So what’s the difference,” he’d ask, not really caring, “between classic and cliché?”
“Cliché is just the same old way to say something. Anyone can mouth a cliché. Classic is taking something everyone feels and putting it so true, so different, so right, it’s the best way anyone could say it.”
So he learned some classic lines:
“Here’s looking at you, kid.”
“We’ll always have Paris.”
“You know how to whistle don’t you? Just put your lips together and blow.”
She knew how movies were made, which ones were adapted, which were written from scratch. She talked about conferences, backstory, and improv. The most important part of a movie, she told him, was story. Most of the new ones didn’t have story.
He would think of their story, how they had met.
He worked on a street crew; they were repairing a neighborhood road. It was a hundred degrees, and the men were surly and mean.
And she came out of a house with a pitcher of lemonade and real glasses—like she wasn’t afraid of their germs.
And she passed it around, with thanks for their work. It was the first time that happened.
You could tell she wasn’t afraid they’d say rough things, get nasty. And nobody did.
When she looked at them, she looked under grime and saw people. She had those kind of eyes.
And when he went back later, clean, nervous, cursing himself for a fool, and knocked on the door—she was the babysitter, he found out—she could still see him. She didn’t mistake shy for sullen or take lack of words for no thought. It was the first time anyone had seen him that clearly.
Women usually saw what he could be; this was the first who loved what he was.
It surprised him, much later, to find out how much he knew about movies. Who Alan Smithee was and what POV stood for, the difference between a medium and a long shot. It made him think about other things he’d learned from her: how to start trusting again, what a useless thing a grudge was, how to see people when you look at them. To look for the backstory.
No, she didn’t mind the sad endings, though they did make her sad. It happened, she said. That was why good movies were real life…
So that was always the second thing he thought of when he remembered her. How much she loved movies…
But the first … the first was always:
I miss you.
I need you.
I love you.
I should have never let you go.
It was cliché, he knew. But he meant it classic.
Sentenced
“He looks good,” Aunt Jelly said. “Better than you’d think. Too thin, maybe, but he says the food’s not great.”
Mike hadn’t supposed the food was great.
“He wants to know if you’re getting his letters. He says he hasn’t heard from you.”
“Yeah I get them. But you know I’m not much on letter-writing.”
What was he supposed to say? “Dear Terry, how are you? Having fun in that place? I am walking around free as a bird while you have years to go”?
But he’d get mail from Terry anyway. Every week or so.
“Dear Mike,” he wrote once, “too bad you’re not in here with me. We young guys are real popular.”
Mike never showed his letters to Aunt Jelly. They were different from the ones she got.
“There’s good things about this place, cuz,” he wrote once. “After a couple of weeks you c
an smuggle watermelons”.
Mike had crumpled that one up and slammed it into the trash. And the last one. Full of sick jokes and fake cheerfulness. Then one line, after his signature, so different and shaky you wouldn’t know it for Terry’s handwriting: “I am not going to make it, Mike.”
And he’d spilled something on it. Or cried.
Oh God.
“I told him you’d come up to visit with me sometime.” Aunt Jelly made that drive every Saturday. Four hours there, four back.
“I work late Fridays and Saturdays,” Mike said. “Sometimes I don’t get home till four or five.”
He didn’t want to know what that place looked like. He didn’t want to set foot inside the doors. He’d never be able to forget the smell, he knew it.
Aunt Jelly put the bacon-and-tomato sandwich in front of him. She had lathered on the mayonnaise the way he liked it. But no onions. Terry was the one who liked onions.
Then she got the ice teas and sat across from him.
Mike looked away. Her eyes were the same color as Terry’s. Kind of brown and green mixed up.
Through the back screen door he could see the tomato plants straining at the stakes, full of green and light tan fruit.
He and Terry always bitched about that when they were kids, having to dig up that garden every spring. Funny, they didn’t mind it so much when they were older. Probably because they could think about the sandwiches they’d be getting, instead of how they could be playing ball.
Last spring, and this spring, Mike had done it alone, and set the plants out, too.
“Well, maybe sometime when you get a night off.”
“Sure,” Mike said. He took a bite. Terry loved these things, with the tomatoes right off the vine. He’d eat a half-dozen easy, if Aunt Jelly would keep frying bacon.
The bite stuck in his throat, and he washed it down with tea. He could get through one sandwich this way, but she had left the bacon out, expecting him to eat three at least.
