Every Moment After

by Joseph Moldover

  “Here’s the thing,” I tell him. “I was kind of counting on some extra hours this summer. Some overtime hours.”

  “For what?”

  “For money, genius.” It comes out harsher than I intended.

  “All right, calm down.”

  I sigh and finish my own beer, reaching for a second. “It’s just that I’m thinking about something in the fall. A plane ticket. Out to California.”

  “Yeah?”

  “Yeah.” It’s been a little more than a week, but I haven’t told Matt about giving Viola the book. I guess I’ve just wanted to tell him in person, and he was working, and then I was working. I talked to him on the phone once, but he seemed out of it. “So, I . . . went by her house.”

  “Yeah? And?”

  “And I gave her the book.”

  “The J.R.R. Eliot thing?”

  “No, it’s . . . yeah. That one.”

  “And? Did she fucking love it?”

  I grin in spite of myself. Matt can always make me grin like no one else can. “She loved it.”

  He throws back his head and laughs, slams his beer down so that it foams over the top, vaults off the hull, and does a standing backflip in the sand. I’ve only ever seen him do that after turning a double play. Now I’m laughing too, helplessly, like an idiot.

  “And you’re going out to the West Coast to see her this fall?”

  “Well, if she wants me to . . . I mean, she’s going to be busy starting college and everything, but . . . I might ask her, eventually. We’re seeing each other. Day after tomorrow. We’re, um, getting lunch at the diner.”

  Matt laughs again, cackling up at the moon. “You son of a bitch!”

  “It’s nothing definite—”

  “Motherfucker, I will personally drive you to California if you can pull this off.” He pulls himself back up on the boat, claps me hard on the shoulder, and drains the last of his beer.

  Sometimes I wonder if Matt and I would be friends if we met for the first time today, and of course we wouldn’t be. What do we have in common? He’s a jock; he’s a good baseball player. A great player. People like him; girls like him. When he walks down the hall or comes into a room, he’s not really paying attention, in the sense that he doesn’t need to, in the sense that he’s fine on his own and doesn’t need anybody else’s approval. Even when we were little, it seemed like he and Andy were closer, and I was always chasing along behind.

  Matt burps, wipes his mouth with the back of his hand, and asks me how my mom is. I tell him that someone called the house about an overdue bill the other day, looking for “Mr. Hewitt,” and I pretended to be him and told the person that they’d get the check ASAP.

  “I saw her the other day,” he says.

  “Where?”

  “At the store. She came in. She looked pretty good. She was joking around with Finn. And she asked me about college and stuff. I think she feels bad that you’re not going, maybe.”

  I shrug. That doesn’t sound right. She does have her better days, but not that good.

  We let it go quiet. I like that we don’t have to talk when we’re around each other. And even when we do, we don’t totally have to listen. I’ll talk about my poetry sometimes and know for a fact that he’s not listening, and he’ll go on and on about baseball and I’ll process maybe twenty percent of it.

  I want to ask him about graduation. About sitting in that chair. Everyone saw it, but no one’s talked about it. “How are you doing?” I ask him.

  He lets out a slow, loud belch. “Good. I’m all good.”

  “Yeah. But, I mean, you’re doing all right?”

  “Yeah. I’m good, dude.”

  “Because, I was just wondering. About graduation and all. The chair.”

  He’s quiet for a moment. “I don’t know,” he finally replies.

  “You don’t know why you did it?”

  “I didn’t even know I was going to do it until it happened.”

  “Are you thinking about it? The shooting?”

  He shakes his head. “No. I’m not. What’s there to think about? I wasn’t there.”

  It’s true, but it never used to stop him. He’d ask me questions endlessly, never seeming to really understand that it was all a blank. It’s like a missing chapter from a book, I told him once. I can read right up to it, and then it picks up after.

  We sit and finish our second beers. There are only two left now, and he hands one to me. I weigh saying something more, decide not to, and we both pop our cans open at once, the sound preceding by two heartbeats the blast of gunshots from the right side of the lake. Then there’s a silence when neither one of us moves or speaks, and then another shot.

  We both slide down off the boat and stand frozen on the sand. “What do you think that was?” I ask, which is stupid. There’s no mistaking gunshots.

  He shakes his head.

  “It’s probably just some kids screwing around,” I say. “We can get out of here. I guess we should probably call the police, maybe?”

  Matt shakes his head again. “Let’s go see.” He throws the beer can hard into the sand and starts walking in the direction the shots came from. Usually, the best way to get Matt to do something is to imply that he shouldn’t. I follow him. We’re leaving the beach and heading toward the Monument.

  We enter the woods and follow the path alongside the water. It’s quiet. Matt’s leading the way, and I can feel my heart beating and realize that I have to pee. I’m still holding the can in one hand. I tell myself it’s just some stupid kids screwing around in the woods.

  In the dark, tripping over tree roots and dead branches, it takes us about five minutes to get to the spot where the white birch tree breaks the path in two. We pause there, and I think about taking a leak, but then we hear laughter and someone shouting. Matt looks at me and then sets off down the path to our right, and I follow him.

  It takes us another few moments to come out into the clearing. There are three people there, and a garden gnome who’s about to be executed. They have a blindfold on it and everything. There’s another one, alongside it, and the shattered pieces of a third on the ground. Matt and I stand in the shadows at the foot of the path, watching. I take a sip of my beer, and that’s when they spot us.

  The first guy is named Tom something. Higgins, maybe. I can’t remember. He was in our class but didn’t graduate with us. I think he went off to a different school freshman or sophomore year. The second is Mike Antonucci, who played football and never seemed too smart, but I never had a hard time with him either. The only class we had together was math, because I’m not very good at math. I don’t know the third guy at all, and he’s the one with the gun. He’s tall and has black hair tied back in a ponytail, and when he looks at me, I have to do a double take because his eyes don’t focus on the same spot. His right eye looks at me, but the left one looks off to the side. I think that’s what cockeyed means, though I’m not sure if that’s something people say anymore.

  We all say hi to each other, and Mike comes over and shakes Matt’s and my hands like we’re friends and like it’s been a long time since we’ve seen each other, neither of which is true. Tom asks if we have any more beer, and I tell him we finished it off back at the beach and that we came out because we heard the shots, and they all start laughing, and Matt and I laugh too, even though I’m not sure what’s funny.

  There’s more moonlight making its way down through the branches now, or maybe my eyes are just continuing to get better in the dark, or maybe I can’t really see it that well at all but I remember it and my memory is filling in the blanks on the side of the rock: FUCK SAM KEELEY. Matt’s talking to the other three, but I’m not really paying attention. The one with the ponytail and the gun has a bottle of something in his other hand, and he takes a drink and turns from the group, raising the gun and sighting along it.

  “I’m gonna do it this time, faggots,” he calls out, and everyone turns to look at him, and he does. He pulls the trigger, and
there’s that unmistakable, unapologetic bark of a gunshot, and we all flinch a little bit while the garden gnome, having apparently been previously spared by this guy’s poor aim, explodes into shards. Mike and Tom cheer. The guy slowly lowers the gun, admiring his handiwork, and Tom, laughing, is hanging off his shoulder and slapping him on the back and trying to grab the bottle from him all at once. The acrid smell of gunpowder reaches me, and I wince, immediately nauseated.

  My bladder is going to burst, so I say something about taking a leak, turn, and walk off into the woods until I’m a respectful distance away from the Monument and behind some trees, and I set the now-empty can down among the roots. Those guys are idiots. I know exactly where the gnomes came from and just how stupid it was to steal them. Sam Keeley hasn’t lived in that house for twenty years; it isn’t his, and it isn’t his family’s. People still talk about the place over on Pine Street as “Sam Keeley’s house” even though it’s just where he lived for one year, two decades ago, when his family was passing through town and he was a little kid.

  No one actually remembers him from back then. He went to school for a year, and then they moved on, went out West, moved a bunch more times, and no one ever knew why this was the place he came back to. Different families have lived there over the years. They probably don’t even know the history when they buy it. The current owner has a bunch of stupid ceramic gnomes in the yard, and apparently these losers decided to steal a few and bring them out here and shoot them as though that were fun but also meant something. And I don’t think the guy with the gun is even from East Ridge.

  It takes me a while to relax enough to start peeing. I’m still sick to my stomach from the gunpowder. I just want to get out of here. Out of these woods, away from these guys. Even away from Matt. I zip back up and take a few more steps farther into the trees. It’s quiet out ahead of me, and dark. I shiver. I wish I was the kind of guy who would go off hiking and camping by himself at night. Climb up a mountain somewhere and build a fire, dance around and jump over it and find a way to get out of this skin. Maybe everyone wants to be someone they’re not.

  I’m standing here just thinking about this stuff when I realize that the voices behind me have changed. One of them—​it sounds like the kid with the ponytail—​sounds angry, and then I hear Matt shout something. I turn back toward the rock and start walking. I’ve come a little bit farther than I thought. The voices are all in a tangle now, arguing about something, with someone—​not Matt—​saying to calm down and chill out. I start to jog, stepping around trees and over roots, hands balled up into fists, and I want to be back there with my friend, but I’m scared because there are three of those guys and one of them has a gun. I’m thinking that it will work itself out if I give it a minute; they’ll just settle down, and I’ll walk out into the clearing by the Monument and we’ll all stand there for a few minutes and talk about some bullshit or other and then Matt and I will head back to the beach.

  I get there. I step into the clearing, and everyone is standing really still. Matt is face-to-face, nose-to-nose with the guy with the ponytail. The other two are off to one side. The guy still has the gun in his hand. I want to say something, at least step up to Matt’s side, but I freeze for a moment. One thought takes over my mind: Matt is going to get shot here.

  I see everything in front of me. The little names in red paint on the side of the rock, rising up into the darkness, dominated by the massive block letters of their killer. That’s not the way it should be, though. I’ve seen it a hundred times, but this is the first time I’ve realized it. His name shouldn’t be there. It should just be them, the ones we lost, their names, and the rock should be beautiful; it should be painted and decorated by new first-graders every single year; they should be brought out here on the last day of school, on the last day of first grade, a day the kids in my class never got to see; and they should paint all the things they love on this rock so that by now there would be eleven years’ worth of flowers and baseballs and dogs and cats and who-knows-what-else sloppily painted here by little kids instead of what we have: a monument put up by our class, announcing its hate, announcing that it will never forgive or forget or understand and that, no matter how much we try to remember the ones who were killed, we will always remember their killer more.

  In that moment, before I can speak or move or find out if I have the courage to do either, Matt brings his left hand around in a wide, perfect swing. His fist arcs through the air, and in the moment before it strikes Ponytail’s face, I see the kid’s expression: surprise, and fear, like a little boy’s. He’s a guy I’ve never met before, acting like an ass out in the woods by a monument that isn’t even his, and he’s holding a gun and I’m scared to death of him, but in this moment I feel sorry for him too, because he’s about to get hurt and there’s nothing he can do about it.

  And then there’s a smack; I should be able to come up with a better way to describe the sound, but that’s exactly what it is, a loud smack of flesh-on-flesh, of Matt’s fist driving into the side of the guy’s face, and the gun goes flying and the kid goes down and for another moment everyone’s quiet, and then everyone’s yelling, and I run a few steps toward them and then stop again. Matt is still standing there, not saying anything, and the other two guys, Tom and Mike, have shut up too, and everyone is looking at the kid on the ground who has rolled over onto his knees and is halfway up. Everyone is waiting to see what he’s going to do.

  He doesn’t do anything. After another one second, two seconds, three seconds, the spell is broken and I can move again, and I find that I don’t turn and run out of the clearing; instead I walk over to Matt and grab him by the arm and start to pull on him. The kid on the ground is muttering something, cursing, pissed off, but he’s not getting back onto his feet, and neither one of the other two guys is doing anything either.

  I pull on Matt’s arm some more and he finally takes a step backwards, watching the others, and then another, and then turns, and we walk to the edge of the clearing, and then I stop, because I’m leaving something behind. I walk back, the three guys staring at me, Ponytail still down, his gun lying only a bit out of his reach, and I pick up the third, surviving gnome from where he’s standing in the ceramic shards of the first two. I look at Ponytail, then at his friends, one at a time, and then I walk back over to Matt, holding the gnome on my shoulder like it was a baby, and we leave the clearing together.

  We walk silently through the woods, Matt leading the way, me holding the gnome, back to the birch tree and down the path toward the beach. I’m trying not to think about the fact that there’s a kid back there with a gun who’s probably on his feet by now. I glance over my shoulder.

  Matt reads my mind and laughs. “Relax, Cole. That asshole isn’t coming after us.”

  God, I hate him sometimes. I wish that just once he would be scared and lost and wrong.

  “What were you doing?” I ask. “That was crazy. What the fuck were you doing?”

  We’re walking along by the lake now, the water glimmering in the moonlight off to our right, and we’ll be back at the beach soon. I’m trying not to listen, but I am, and I don’t hear any footsteps or voices behind us. There’s another spot to park, off the road about two hundred yards through the woods back behind the Monument, and that’s probably where the other three left their cars. Hopefully they’re walking in that direction right now.

  Matt doesn’t answer my question right away. “He was just being a dick,” he says. “He was talking shit and then he wouldn’t back down. I can’t even remember what he said.”

  We arrive at the end of the path and look out at the beach. I can see the inverted hull of the lifeguard boat silhouetted against the sand, and beyond that, the dark shape of the Snack Shack, and beyond that, the lit parking lot and our cars. There’s still no one here. Matt turns to me. “Cole,” he says, “just what are you doing with that thing?”

  I look at the gnome. It’s about two feet tall. It’s a little grinning guy with a
stocking cap and a beard. It’s hideous.

  “I don’t know,” I say. “It just wasn’t his. It wasn’t his gnome.”

  Matt starts to laugh. “It wasn’t his gnome?”

  I look at it, then look at him, and then I burst out laughing myself. “It wasn’t his fucking gnome.”

  “It wasn’t his fucking gnome!” We’re both laughing now, me so hard that I have to bend over and put my hands on my knees, tucking the figure under my arm like a football. We’re laughing at the gnome, and laughing at what just happened, but also laughing at each other laughing. It’s been this way since we were little kids. I remember this from sleepovers in his basement, or in a tent in my backyard.

  After we catch our breath and I sneak one last look down the dark, empty path, Matt puts his arm around my shoulder and we make our way to our cars, two friends for whatever reason, friends even though it doesn’t make any sense, the brother I never had, my co-defender of lawn gnomes. Just because, for as long as either one of us can remember, that is the way it always has been.

  * * *

  Pine Street is on the far edge of town, a fifteen-minute drive from the lake. We didn’t talk about coming here, but we both knew where we were going. I pull up behind Matt’s truck and turn off my engine, sitting in the dark for a moment before getting out and joining him on the sidewalk.

  “So, we’re just going to put it back?” I ask.

  “I guess so.”

  I go around to the other side of my car and open the door. I have the gnome belted into the passenger seat. I get him out and carry him back around.

  “I don’t know where he was,” I say. In the glow of the streetlight, we can see that there are gnomes all across the lawn, some as big as the one I’m holding, some smaller, a few bigger. They’re arranged in all sorts of scenes. Some are in groups; some are on their own. There’s a little gnome family playing on a miniature swing set. I can just see, in the shade of a bush, a gnome squatting with his pants down, a plastic bird perched on his ass.