The Cellar

by Peter Fugazzotto

  Maps, characters sheets, campaign notes from Dungeons and Dragons. I laughed. We were such nerds back then. Hours and hours in our basements and bedrooms, rolling dice, arguing and laughing through adventures that Lipsky had created for us. He had kept us entertained. Once it was so clear what we could be.

  I slipped out one of the character sheets. Bodomir, 34th level Paladin. Lawful Good.

  This is who I was back then. The white knight in the gold armor with the two-handed bastard sword. I would descend with my companions into dank dungeons, dusty cities, and the cave complexes of orcs. We were the light against the darkness. We fought the worst the world had to throw at us and we won.

  I wondered if Lipsky still had the playing pieces. I had spent hours painting my piece. I remember how it felt to gild the armor, careful not to let the brush touch the blue pants. I had to work so slowly to lay the small strokes for my beard and the dots of my eyes. Tug had wanted me to paint streaks of blood on my sword to show that we were fierce and experienced. But I kept my sword silver, not a spot of blood, because I wanted to show how pure my character, the Bodomir me, was. He killed only because he had to. He had slain demons to serve the greater cause, to save the lives of his companions. He could not be corrupted.

  Life was so much simpler then. But those times were gone.

  I woke late the next morning, called in to the office to tell them to push things, and took a long hot shower. It was only the coffee that cut through the haze.

  I was sitting in the kitchen staring out the back windows at the garden wondering where the hell I was supposed to live now when my phone vibrated on the counter top. I jerked back, spilling my coffee.

  "Need me to bail you out again?"

  Tug laughed. "I just do that to keep you on your toes. So what do you think?"

  "I think we've got a promise to keep. Back to the lake. We'll keep our promise to Dave."

  13

  A week later, I sat behind the steering wheel of my Range Rover in the parking lot for the airport shuttle. Lipsky had texted. The bus was turning off the highway. He'd be there in a few minutes.

  I glanced again at my phone. No text from Jay. He had insisted on driving up from Los Angeles. He said with his Prius, it would be cheaper than flying, especially on such short notice. I doubted that.

  I squeezed the steering wheel. We were going to be together again. The four of us together again. And the ashes.

  I glanced in the rear view mirror trying to see the urn wedged in among the luggage. Maybe we should have put it in the back seat where it would not get jostled.

  "Stop moving around," said Tug. He sat next to me, dressed in camouflage pants and matching shirt. Even his luggage, a duffle bag, was camo as well. "Acting like this is your first time going to the party."

  "You know were just going to the lake," I said. "No need to act like it's a return to the sandbox."

  He flashed his teeth at me. "It's all I got to wear, Mr. L. L. Bean." He reached over and pinched my flannel shirt. "You took the price tag off that thing, right? Or did you keep it on so you can return it after our trip?"

  "It'll be good. To go back there. With you guys. I need this."

  Tug fiddled with his shoes laces. "I know shit's been hard for you. Maybe Liz'll turn around by the time you get back. But then again maybe not. Neither of my wives did. But I survived. Not the end of the fucking world. Not by a long shot."

  "Liz, Bridget, and now losing Dave. Seems like it's all hit me at once."

  "Brother, you don't even know. It ain't that bad. Not like you're pinned down in a warehouse at the far end of a rebel town, unfriendlies closing in, your teammates bleeding out at your feet, air support minutes away. This shit you're looking at ain't terminal. Just uncomfortable."

  I pointed a finger past Tug. "There he is. Old Lipshit."

  "The Dungeon Master."

  Lipsky struggled beneath bags looped over each shoulder. He looked the same as always had – gangly, greasy-haired, even the same bottle-lensed glasses – only older, face sallow and wrinkled, hair thin. But somehow he had an element of youth still about him. Red Chuck Taylors, faded blue jeans, and a black t-shirt with a twenty-sided dice on it with the words, "This is how I roll."

  We both jumped out of the car to greet him. Tug pulled him into a big embrace and I nodded a hello and pumped his hand.

  "The adventurers gather," said Lipsky. He prodded his glasses up the bridge of his nose.

  Tug grabbed both bags and heaved them into the back of the car. "All this luggage. You planning on moving in?"

  "Gotta be ready for anything. Especially with you guys." He stared at his feet and then looked up. "Good to see you guys again. I always wondered if we'd ever see each other again."

  "Of course we would you fool," said Tug.

  "Thanks for covering the airfare," said Lipsky.

  "No worries," I said. "One thing I got plenty of is money."

  "Always knew you were going to be the one to make it," he said. "The guy who made it big."

  I wanted to say something funny back but the words caught in my throat. Everything was falling apart, the facade, the charade. I doubted I was really better off than Lipsky who had never married, never had a career. I had zeroed out again.

  "I'm the one who made it," said Tug making his fingers into a rifle. "Made it out alive."

  "So where's Jay?" asked Lipsky.

  That was the question that hung with us for the next hour and a half. The question that burned beneath the surface as we made conversation. As the sun stretched across the sky.

  Finally the Prius pulled up, dust covered, the front fender dented.

  I did not feel the need to rush out to greet him. I watched through the window as Tug and Lipsky hurried to his car. Bastard was an hour and a half late. A sharp needle of pain ran behind my eyes. My legs were sticky from sitting in the car for so long.

  First thing I noticed about him was the mustache, a drooping thing that hung along either side of his mouth. It made him look more like a pervert than a high school teacher. I fought back laughter. I wondered if that was the same thing.

  Jay looked worn out. Scuffed loafers, once creased jeans tattered at the heels, and pale blue dress shirt that had an obvious stain on his chest.

  Jay pulled open the back door and looked in at me. "Well, hello to you too." He tossed his bags over the seat into the rear cargo area.

  "You get lost?"

  "Bay Area traffic is worse than L.A. You guys have made a mess of things up here."

  "Text next time. Don't make us wait in a parking lot."

  Jay slid into the back seat and slammed the door hard. "Sorry to inconvenience you after my six-hour drive."

  "I would have flown you up."

  "Waste of money."

  Tug paused outside the car with one hand on the door. "Boys ... You aren't going to bicker the whole way up there are you? Cause it's going to make for an unpleasant drive. Really."

  "Sorry, Jay. I'm letting things get to me." I stuck out a hand. "Welcome back home. Good to see you. Good to have all of us back together."

  Jay took my hand and shook it, and to Tug and Lipsky, it must have looked like everything was smoothed over, but Jay squeezed my hand, hard enough that you'd almost think he was trying to crush the bones.

  The weekend was going to be longer than I expected.

  14

  In stories, heroes walk into the maw of death.

  That's what makes them heroes.

  When I think of heroes, especially groups of heroes, I always think of the three hundred Spartans that held the Thermopylae against the Persian army.

  I remember when we first learned about this battle in high school. Jay had been the one who found book after book on the subject. Lipsky had planned a DnD campaign based on it but he never rolled it out. For a short while, Tug tried to construct a wooden sword in his garage. We were all infected by the heroism.

  But something else appealed to me about what happened.
r />   The Greeks knew the odds were against them. From the very beginning, they were outnumbered. Seven thousands soldiers against one hundred and fifty thousand Persians. The Greeks fought to defend their home against invaders.

  That was the stuff of war, of soldiers doing their job.

  That was never what struck me.

  Instead I dreamed about the rear guard, the legendary three hundred who stayed.

  I know it was more than three hundred.

  I know they stretched the numbers to tell a story.

  But these were men who did not walk into a battlefield suddenly outnumbered.

  These were men who knew that to stay was to die.

  They stayed while their comrades retreated.

  The three hundred made the choice to sacrifice themselves. They knew that the Persians, Xerxes' grand army, would slaughter them.

  But still they rooted their feet, shouldered their shields, and hefted their swords.

  They faced the evil in front of them.

  I think about the four of us heading towards the Sandman.

  I want to think that we were as brave as the Spartans, that we were the ancestors of the three hundred.

  But the thing is we did not know what we were headed towards.

  And if we did, I can only imagine that we would have run away as fast as we could.

  So how could we have been heroes?

  15

  Even before we had left the Bay Area, the skies had darkened. Clouds filled the horizon, a gray impenetrable sheet stretching to the edges. As we drove further east, along the highway and up the mountain roads, the clouds consumed more until the sun had been swallowed and we traveled in a surreal twilight in the early afternoon.

  "Think it's going to rain?" asked Lipsky leaning forward in his seat, his head poked between me and Tug.

  "You should be used to that up in Seattle," I said. "It's Jay from sunny L.A. that's going to suffer."

  "L.A. is not all sun and surf." He had barely spoken the entire drive up, head against the glass, staring out the window.

  "They really just gave you the ashes?" asked Lipsky.

  Tug had a first aid kit in his lap that he was reorganizing. "What the hell were they going to do with the ashes? Anna, she wanted closure on this thing. I think she was a little put off when she found out he wanted to be cremated. Something about Dave straying from the will of God."

  "He strayed went he fell into that trap," I said.

  "How can you say that?" asked Jay. His knee jolted into the back of my seat.

  "Anna was a crazy religious fiend," I said. "You ever talk to her. Burn in hell shit. That was not Dave."

  "You can say that, but what do you know? How many years has it really been since you hung out with him? He was married to her for twenty years. If he wasn't alright with it, he would have left her long ago."

  "Maybe he wanted to but couldn't."

  "What do you know? When was the last time you visited him?"

  "I talked to him around the holidays."

  Jay pshawed. "I was there in the spring. In Colorado. He loved his family. He had a life for himself. He had reached a peace."

  "And that's why he drunk himself to death?"

  "You really never went there?"

  "And you did nothing while you were out there? How bad was it? He had to have been drunk the whole time you were out there? And you did nothing."

  "Come on, guys," said Lipsky pulling himself forward in his seat so that he blocked the two of us. "This weekend we're supposed to be together again. Honoring Dave. Not at each others' throats."

  "Let them get it out of their systems," said Tug. "This has been building up for years."

  I swallowed my words and tightened my grip on the steering wheel. Only an hour or two together and already Jay was getting on my nerves. Tug was right. It had been building for years. Jay somehow blamed me for the bad choices he made in life. He held it against me that I had become successful while he had made every wrong turn. That was his problem. I'd let him work that out himself.

  I cranked up the music, blocking out any chance for conversation, and focused on the road.

  Eventually, we exited the main highway, leaving the incessant stream of truckers and cars behind, to a lesser two-lane highway edged with a lost city of strip malls that gave away to groves of almond trees. From there, we eased through one more city of desolate malls and processing plants. I tailgated a truck of hogs, their pink snouts poking out of cages, unaware of their fate ahead. Finally we turned up on a small winding country road that climbed towards the mountains.

  Despite the passing of the decades, the road came back to me with familiarity. I remembered a dilapidated barn, a sharp turn in the road, a lumber building in the distance indicating a historic Chinese camp.

  Eventually we reached Weed, last bit of so-called civilization before the lake and the cabin. I slowed down through the several block town. A general store, the distant iron skeleton of the old lumber mill, the bar where we had been thrown out the moment we stepped in. The video store was abandoned, its windows replaced by sheets of plywood. The Black Bear Diner displayed a tattered real estate sign. I wonder if anyone had made an offer in years. The grass in front on the church was a shocking green, tightly manicured, a contrast to the desiccated hills that had lined the side of the road for the last hour.

  I eased into the gas station. Tug and Jay covered the gas and came back laughing with cases of beer and bags that clinked with whiskey bottles.

  We continued on, turning again, onto a buckled asphalt road that eventually gave way to a dirt road. I slowed to navigate the ruts and jutting stones. In the rear view mirror, Jay and Lipsky, beers in hand, bounced in their seats. I wanted to warn them not spill on my leather seats but knew it would be better to keep my lips shut.

  Tug unscrewed the top of a whiskey bottle, took a long slug, wiped the top with his sleeve, and then handed the bottle to me. The liquid burned my throat, unfurling in my mouth and the back of my nose, but I fought back the need to gag.

  After some careful driving, we reached the bridge. The water, black and impenetrable, lapped a few feet below the platform.

  "Stop in the middle," said Tug. His eyes were already bloodshot. "Pull over."

  I didn't want to stop. The bridge was old and rickety and it looked like it had not been kept up in the thirty years since we had last driven over it together. The support pillars were covered in a thick coat of rust. The wooden boards creaked and settled as we drove across them. I felt as if at any moment, the wood would crack with the weight of the car and we would plunge through into the cold river.

  "Pull over, man." Tug clamped my wrist.

  "One lane bridge. Nowhere to pull over."

  "Just stop!" That wild look inhabited his eyes. I didn't know what he had in mind but I knew well enough to stop.

  Even before I could bring the car fully to a stop, he leapt out of the passenger side and marched to the very edge of the bridge, one hand grabbing a rusted cable and the other quickly unzipping his pants.

  "You gotta be kidding me," muttered Jay from the back.

  "Been waiting thirty years to piss in this river again," Tug called over his shoulder.

  "Any more rain," said Lipsky," and the bridge is going to be underwater."

  I couldn't help but glance at the sky, at the clouds, towards the swallowed sun, and I shivered at the feeling of the coming of an unstoppable darkness.

  We should have turned back then.

  But Tug climbed back into the car, and we crossed that bridge.

  16

  We sat in the car staring at the cabin.

  "Not how I remember it," said Lipsky. He took off his glasses and cleaned the lens with the corner of his shirt. "Not at all."

  "Dave's family still owns it?" asked Jay. "Man, it looks like no one's been here in the past twenty years."

  The rutted dirt road and the overgrown turnoff to the house, which I actually drove by before Tug told me to back
up, should have been an indication to us that the condition of the cabin would be no better.

  Where to start with the cabin?

  The roof, mossed covered, sagged and buckled. Ivy blanketed the right side of the house and strangled the stone chimney. What little remained of the pale yellow paint unfurled in long strips down the walls and had exploded like star bursts on the ground. In some places, the exposed wood was dark with moisture and I could only imagine the rank smell of mildew in the house and a wall of mushrooms climbing the walls. The windows thankfully had not been broken, but they were curtained in grime.

  I wonder who had last set foot in the house. Could it have been Dave coming back on one of those trips that he told me about afterwards? Years ago, he had told me that he had been in the Bay Area, and I had berated him for not letting me know, not stopping by so we could grab dinner, catch up. He had always phoned me when he was back in Colorado and he always told me he had needed solitude. He said sometimes a man had to do by himself. Sometimes a man needed to retreating himself to see more clearly. I never knew exactly where he had gone, but now I imagined that he had come here.

  Maybe he had returned to dwell in memory, not so much to reset time, but to bring himself back to a place where opportunity still lay before him. Maybe he thought he could return to a position of neutral from which he could move forward. I don't know. Likely he came up here to drink by himself.

  The clouds finally broke. Small, hard drops of rain cracked against the windshield. I kept expecting the heavens to open and water to pour. Instead, drops fell sporadically, hard, as if marking time, as if holding back for some greater deluge.

  "It was never a shining gem," said Tug. "A roof over our heads, walls to keep out the unfriendlies. I've spent weeks in worse conditions. As long as we got enough booze to last us the weekend, we're fine."

  "What about water?" asked Jay.

  "Come on, boys. A return to our youth," said Tug slipping out of his seat and slamming the door behind him so hard that the car shuddered.