by Brad Barkley
“Missed me,” Sugar says. His voice echoes around the parking lot, disappears up into the dark with the red and green mist behind us. He grins. “Strike one,” he says. Lyndsey smiles at him, lifts another from the cardboard pack, and wings it out spinning into the dark, wind whistling at its neck. Sugar backs up, eyeing it, then snaps his neck so the welding mask swings down and he lets the bottle hit him full in the face, the glass shattering off the hard angles of the mask and spilling shards into his clothes.
“Man, oh man,” Sugar says, voice muffled. “Again.”
Lyndsey lifts, tosses, and Sugar leans back, letting the bottle hit and smash over him, a tiny popping sound, the pieces falling away from him as he moves.
“Reed, I kid you not,” he says, “you have to try this.”
I look at Lyndsey. “Go on, if you want to,” she says.
I stand, jump, take the shock in my frozen legs. Sugar slips the mask over my head. It smells like copper pennies and sweat. I tip up the mask, look at Lyndsey framed in the red and green mist. “Don’t kill me,” I tell her, and close the mask.
She smiles. “Make sure it hits the mask, not your head.” She flings another bottle out against the sky and I watch it as far as I can and then at the last second close my eyes and hear it glance off the left side of the mask, skitter on the pavement.
“Good try,” Sugar says.
“Not good,” I say. “I cheated, blinked.” I look at Lyndsey. “Again.”
She takes careful aim on me, and the glint of the glass, her halo of fine hair, the mist behind her are all filtered blue, like I have found my own deep end. A brief knife glint of bottle in the night sky, a wave of indigo, then the pop against the faceplate and bits of light splintering around me like I am falling away from the world or being launched from it. Lyndsey waves in my vision, arm raised, and then she lets fly again in a line drive and I keep my eyes open, move my legs, let another bottle smash against the metal over my face and explode into stars, and behind me I hear Sugar cheering me, and Lyndsey stands at the edge of the wall with another bottle in hand, a girl who loves me, who wants to make her insides a fist, and as she flings and misses she bobbles, half a second, at the edge of that wall, and throws her arms up and out to catch back her balance and holds there, framed in a blue-white mist like some Orion or Cassiopeia seen through fog, and I know how much this girl needs us, as much as she wants only me. In Lyndsey’s way of wanting, there will be no room for Sugar or bad parents, no accidental trips or falls, no mystery or blowing things apart—only a life as predictable as gravity.
This is not ancient history, not the days of chasing clothes along curb and gutter or the days of the logging leg and the nights of weary bones and the red button I could never quite push enough. This is Lyndsey, this is love blasted into shards that filter down through me. I lift the mask away and it squeaks and the cold pushes in behind it. I look up at her and she raises the next pony bottle and promises it will hurt plenty without the mask, swears at herself for almost falling, and I stop her cold.
“You want to get married?” The words bounce around the asphalt.
She looks. Blinks. Shrugs. “Do you?”
Sugar stands beside me, pulling glass out of my clothes. I nod at Lyndsey and slip the helmet off completely, back in this world. “Yeah,” I tell her, “it sounds like a plan.”
She sets the last empty in the carton, wraps her arms around herself. “Okay then.”
Sugar takes back his helmet. “If you give the present,” he says, “you create the event.”
falling
That night we both fall into bed drunk and tired and cold, sleep arriving like some narcotic, and the last thing I hear before I give over to it is Sugar out in the backyard in twenty-degree weather, spraying the garden hose again.
By the next evening Lyndsey is freaked out because her eyes look like they should after the night we had, like they have been through a golfball washer, and she has the Wall Street Wrap-up at 11:17, right after Stu Nelson with weather. But she mixes in enough excitement about rings and dresses and honeymoon to let me know that last night has not been filed under “Too Many Ponies.”
She kisses me and heads out. I sit watching TV, downing the odd aspirin or two. A little while later, Sugar walks out of the kitchen eating a powdered donut, his mouth ringed white. He hands me a shoebox, the ends duct taped. All day he has been in the carport hammering and welding, his face, even in this cold night, streaked with sweat. I open the box and find what look like two pairs of roller skates, the old skate-key type meant to tighten to your sneakers. Sugar lifts them from the box, the worn leather straps tangled, and turns them over to show me where he has removed the metal wheels and welded in a pair of thin, iron blades running parallel. Ice skates.
“Your wedding present,” he says. “And that’s not all. C’mon.” He leads me to the backyard, where the tiny rink he has fashioned from the boards and plastic tarp lies shining under a half moon, the ice uneven and puckered along its surface.
He pulls a skate key from his jeans pocket and we sit in the frosted grass to try on the skates. The eleven o’clock news has started, and soon it will be time to go inside, sit on the couch, and watch for that little twitch of a smile from Lyndsey. But for now we take to the ice. The rink is only about ten feet square, and we push around in small circles like we are chasing each other, the iron blades scrapping up white ribbons of ice. Then Sugar grips my hand and we begin to whip each other around, turning faster, nearly falling, the whole table of ice rocking slightly on the uneven ground. The wind blows an eddy of old snow off the roof of the house. We skate around in the moonlight, breathing the cold air, hands slippery and damp, the silhouettes of all of Sugar’s perfect catastrophes around us.
“I have to go soon,” I tell him, out of breath. He nods, his face sweaty. Beneath us, the ice begins to crack from our weight, the underside shot through like shattered windshield glass. I think of breaking through into cold water, into the rush and press of a river, of how it would feel falling into all that blackness, the way it must have felt to Sugar in that moment when he knew that the log was no longer under his foot. But of course there is no river, no black water beneath us. The TV flickers blue against the curtains. Soon enough I will head inside to watch it, to warm up, to wait for her signal. The ice rink splinters, pieces of it sliding across the surface, the larger chunks tripping us. The boards are loose, pulling apart. We keep skating as long as we can, the dead grass of winter pushed flat underneath us, the black November sky above us. All around the moon, a pale ring of ice glows, promising more snow.
The Atomic Age
By eleven o’clock, almost all of the fluted glasses had been removed from the upper tiers of the champagne fountain and several from the lower, a trail of spills leading away from the garland-draped table. Jeremy Barseleau sat in a folding chair and watched the women in their heels and sequined dresses choose the amber glasses, silently urging them to take the lower ones, waiting for the removal of the one that would cause the whole thing to collapse. He’d earlier contributed to this effort himself, downing his sixth drink as the deputy mayor handed Jeremy’s wife, Jean, an award from the museum for volunteer of the year. Applause had echoed off walls hung with enlarged photographs of microscopic animal life: tiny dust mites, deer ticks, and the mouth parts of fleas.
An elderly, overly rouged woman in pearls sat next to Jeremy, talking on and on about the battle of Fort Fisher and what heathens the Yankees were to attack on Christmas Day. He half listened, watching the pool of grease congeal around the meatball on his plate. At the front of the room, a man in a tuxedo and a light-up bow tie played requests on his portable keyboard. A large, plastic banner hung in the corner exhibiting his name, DON WEST, spelled out in fluid, Day-Glo letters. He passed around a cordless mike and asked everyone to help him out with “Jingle Bells,” the crowd singing in noisy, off-key unison.
The woman touched Jeremy’s wrist. “And your plans for the holidays?” she ask
ed. Her mouth puckered downward at the corners, as though cinched. Jeremy glanced at her nametag, smeared by some food or drink she’d spilled. It looked as though her name were Kate—or had been, at least, earlier in the evening.
“Well, Kate,” he said, “the usual, I suppose. I don’t plan to attack anyone.”
“Oh, heavens, let’s hope not,” she said, raising her hand to her thin chest. “You and your missus are traveling?” She glanced down at his wedding band. He looked at his own fingers as they twirled a fancy toothpick, the kind with the little colored plastic ribbon atop it. Somewhere, someone was making money selling plastic-topped toothpicks. The microphone passed him by.
“My wife wants to visit family in Florida,” he said. “That’s her, right over there.” He pointed to where Jean stood, laughing and holding her Lucite statuette, the deputy mayor’s hand perched inside the V of her backless dress. She looked gorgeous, as she had for as long as he could remember. Sometimes he saw her from a distance, for a moment not realizing it was she, and would catch himself checking out the roundness of her breasts or the angle of her hips.
“Your wife is Jean?” Kate said. “Volunteer of the year? Heavens, you must be proud as anything.” She smiled, her dentures uniform and white.
“I am, Kate.” He smiled back. “I’m proud of her.” He told himself that this was what he felt now, pride, which somehow had learned to mock all the symptoms of boredom and fatigue. He loosened his tie and worked to undo the top button, which popped off and landed in his plate, a tiny satellite for the meatball. He listened as Don West segued from “Jingle Bell Rock” into “I Saw Mommy Kissing Santa Claus.” These occasions seemed so easy for Jean, effortless. He supposed what he really felt was jealousy. The idea was silly—jealous of his wife for escorting preschoolers through the hydraulic dinosaur exhibit. Jealous of her donated time. Jeremy shook his head, poked at the meatball, pushed the button around in a helical orbit, drained the last of his wine. This was her third banquet in two months. She’d been named volunteer of the year here, and at the hospital as part of the Sunshine Patrol, and at the Red Cross as coordinator of their annual blood drive. The list stretched back over years. Jean did everything well for no money. He was mediocre and made enough to put them in a three-bedroom house with a detached garage and a pool. Aboveground, which he always felt didn’t really count.
Jean moved toward him now, reaching out to friends as they passed by. He watched the sway of her spangled minidress, her smile as she approached. Kate had vacated her spot and edged over toward the dessert table, fragile in her heels. Jean placed the statuette in front of him.
“So what do you think?” she said. The Lucite was shaped like a flame, with her name etched into a brass plate at the base. The statuette was covered with the fingerprints of those who had passed it around to admire it. Jeremy picked it up and added his own prints.
“Nice award,” he told her. She leaned against his table, her legs crossed at the ankle.
“How much could we get at a garage sale, you think?” Jean said. She waved at someone across his shoulder. Her mastery, he thought, extended even to her self-effacement.
“Well, there’s not much market in used accolades,” he said. “Congratulations anyway.” He smiled and leaned up to kiss her cheek. She squeezed his hand and crouched next to his chair.
“You look like one of my dinosaur exhibits sitting here,” she said, her voice quieter. “Boredasaurus once roamed the earth in a wool-blend suit.”
“That’s all right,” he said. “At least if I’m extinct, I don’t have to stick around for the macarena.” He did a little dance in his chair. Above him, some microscopic parasite extended its pinchers in grainy black and white.
“I always thought you were a sucker for dance fads.” She laughed, then lifted her hand to cover the tiny chip in her front tooth. She had gotten it in 1982, when a laundry delivery truck had edged out in front of them and Jeremy jammed on his brakes. The seat belts held them, but Jean’s necklace, a large, silver seahorse on a chain, flew up and nicked her tooth. Sometimes it occurred to him that their whole collection of years was marked down in chips and tiny scars, the ghost lines of a few stitches.
He smiled and rubbed her arm. It pained him that he could not act better for these events, that he had lost over the years first his interest in her accomplishments and then his ability to feign interest. From various podiums, she always called him her greatest accomplishment, their twenty-one years together, and then as if it were scripted, the audience would smile and lean past their centerpieces to see him, and he would stand and wave to them as they applauded his existence. When the lights came up they would move toward him, toward Jean, in a steady parade of congratulations, as if their years were something else Jean had volunteered for, something else she’d managed well. And she had managed well, he knew. He thought of the Monday nights in spring and summer when they would sit outside on the deck so he could gaze through his binoculars at the night sky, watch lunar eclipses or the Perseid meteor shower, this ritual the last scrap of his boyhood interest in science. Not once had she ever revealed her own boredom with these nights, though she would always sit in the chaise lounge, her knees drawn up, trying to read by the glow of a book light.
They walked holding hands toward the anteroom for sheet cake and more champagne. Jeremy wobbled a little, startled as loud piano chords launched into “The Twelve Days of Christmas.” Don West introduced the song by telling the crowd that the items in the twelve days added together would cost over eleven thousand dollars, assuming the rental fee for leaping lords. Everyone laughed.
Behind the long serving table stretched a display hall in dim light, featuring an exhibit on the history of flight in North Carolina. An oak propeller, slightly swaying, was suspended by fish line from the ceiling. In the back, a full-size single-engine airplane had been wedged next to the wall beside the water fountain, looking out of place on the orange carpet. Glass cases were filled with papers and drawings and photos, with the leather caps of flying aces. Two of the red letters were burned out on the EXIT sign above the stairway, so that the sign just read IT. Jeremy laughed.
“What’s so funny?” Jean asked.
“First you’re an it, then you’re an ex-it,” he said.
She squeezed his hand. “We’re cutting you off right now. Drink water, mister.”
“Ah, you better be nice to me,” he whispered, slipping his arm around her waist. “One day you’ll be an ex-it, too.”
She looked up at him and half smiled, started to speak, and didn’t.
“Have you seen this stuff?” he said, stepping around the table toward the aviation display.
“Honey, that area is closed for the night,” Jean whispered.
“I’m just looking,” he said. “Not going to hurt a thing.” The only guard in the entire building was a small, plump blonde woman in an ill-fitting blue uniform, whom he’d seen standing on the first floor eating popcorn from a bag and watching the sparse traffic out the front windows.
“You are so bad,” Jean said, but followed him.
They walked together past the display cases, looking at signed bicycle shop bills of the Wright brothers, old airline uniforms, grainy photos of long-buried heroes. When they reached the plane, Jeremy peered into the cramped cockpit, disappointed to see that the controls were only fakes, stickers mounted on black plywood. The left wing had been removed so the plane would fit up next to the wall. Jeremy snapped open the door, bent inside, and sat in the pilot’s seat, straddling the stick.
“Where are you flying off to?” Jean said.
“I wish I had a good airplane story,” he said. “Everybody I know has one. Like, the landing gear wouldn’t come down, or somebody got drunk and had to be restrained. Slid off the runway in the ice. One of those.”
“I hope we don’t have to restrain you before the night is over,” Jean said.
“You have your airplane story,” he told her. “The four-hour wait in Denver? Everyone t
raded ghost stories?”
She nodded and smiled. “I’d forgotten about that.”
“Every flight I’ve ever had has been boring,” he said. “I might as well have lived before they invented the damn thing.” She leaned her arms on the windowsill, her face close to his. He looked at her, feeling almost cozy in this cramped space, wishing he had some reason to kiss her.
“Most people would consider a lifetime of boring flights lucky,” she said.
“Then they don’t appreciate the value of having something to tell. A little interesting noise to fill up the quiet.”
She patted his arm. “This can be your airplane story.”
“Doesn’t count. We’re not flying.” He wrapped his fingers around the stick. “What did people talk about before we had traffic jams or airplane crashes or computer viruses or all this stuff in the world?”
She laughed a little and looked at him. “I don’t know. You have other kinds of stories, don’t you? Tell me one of those.”
He held the stick and pulled hard right, as if banking into a steep turn, an evasive maneuver. Anything he could think of seemed redundant by its everydayness, as if the whole history of their years together amounted to no more than a shopping list or a weekend at the beach. Anything he could remember had been recounted again and again at reunions and in the shoebox of faded slides they kept beneath the bed. All the stories were birthdays and vacations and promotions and parties. They could have been written for anyone. He banked left.
“How about the time you got drunk at the museum and thought you were Snoopy?” She laughed again. “That will be your story.”
He grinned at her and gave her a double thumbs-up to make her laugh more. This would be one of her stories, about him. Over the years, without meaning to, she had made him into her prop, a symbol of her stability. He heard her, at receptions and banquets, through the low hum of PA systems, chiseling him by her careful words into some kind of statue to her perseverance. Already, he knew, this story was hardening in some part of her mind. A few onlookers behind us, his silly thumbs-up, he was drunk, acting like Snoopy. No, not drunk; tipsy was a better word. She didn’t want anyone to think he had problems. His legs started to ache. He pressed the rudder pedals and found they were welded into place. From the other room, Don West played a fanfare over the sound of champagne corks popping. He heard Jean’s name called out. She looked over her shoulder.
