by Mike Wehner
Charlie is short, all his nerves and feelings are twice as close together as the rest of us so his reactions are fast and ill-thought. He has the disposition of a dog that fits in a purse, the world is taller than him so he has to pretend he isn’t scared of anything. Charlie is loyal like a dog too, he even brought me a guy’s shoe once after an altercation outside a bar. I didn’t ask. Charlie was the kind of guy who’d grab everyone’s menus and use them as kindling to set the restaurant on fire.
Hank is more measured and sadistic. If you upset Hank he’d send our group a picture of a wrinkled old lady being violated by a dog from behind and edit the head with a smiling photo of your mom. His kind of fire wouldn’t be a hissy fit in the middle of the dining room, he’d call it a night back at the hotel then chuck a flaming brick through the front window. At breakfast he’d say he slept great.
John sat at 5155’s bar on weeknights and sent us photos of Erin’s creations. Each picture had a caption about the dish and the science behind it. This was un-fucking-believable because until he dated that girl I never saw him eat anything but hamburgers. Bread, meat, mustard. If it had tomato he’d send it back; mayonnaise and he’d lose his mind and address the server with words only he thought were insults like public-schooled.
He called Erin’s mozzarella soufflé with thirty year balsamic, to die for. I wanted to know if he was right, so after everyone left I stayed an extra day and ate there. The food didn’t help me understand her any better and the restaurant enraged me. Fancy eateries get away with the most loathsome shit like using single words to encapsulate dishes. I wasn’t sure what I ordered because the more food costs the fewer words they use to describe it. I ordered something called scallops, which tasted great but didn’t have any scallops—they were mushrooms instead. Why isn’t that illegal? Probably because the law doesn’t give a shit about people who pay two hundred dollars for dinner. Probably because the law shouldn’t.
When the three of us arrived at Alt Bar they tried to seat us at a low table in the middle of the fray, but I demanded a booth along the wall. It’s uncomfortable to have a waiter snaking around the table while he balances a tray of dirty plates over your head. In its former life Alt Bar was a charming haunt for locals where kids ate pizza and carved their names into the thick planks that lined the back of the banquettes. The good old days when you could give a kid a knife in public. Now it was a gastropub, the owners kept the yesteryear shtick but the aromas were futuristic. Acidity, burnt spice and resin swirled through the air and I wondered how many of the people carved into our booth were still with us, and did NM still heart CG?
“It’s good to see you guys,” Hank said and then after a pause, “you know what I mean, cheers.” He clinked his beer glass to mine.
Hank was handsome, like a plastic action hero. That was what he brought to our group. You never see a bunch of absurdly handsome guys together, but every binding of brothers gets at least one. They create opportunities in a way that normal people can’t. Good looking people don’t have to suffer the true nature of others, so their optimism and wonder is never eroded.
“I’ve missed you guys,” Charlie said and brought in his pint.
“To John,” I joined, “we miss you and we love you.” The realization of why we were there pulled our heads down together in a sweet/sad moment of silence.
“Did we ever meet this girl, the chef?” Hank asked.
Up to his last moments you needed to qualify which girl you were talking about with John. The one with who thinks gluten is the devil. The one who came to the ballpark. The one who doesn’t believe in aspirin. He wasn’t a conquistador or anything like that. John would’ve married at seventeen if he’d found a girl with the perfect teeth and perfect mind and family and school and whatever else. He was convinced the one was out there, so he kept looking, trying out this one or that for a bit and then always ending up disappointed over some inane detail.
Some of the stuff he said about girls over the years was so funny:
She said literally five times at dinner Alex. Five. How could I possibly see her again?
She and I aren’t going to work. She wore opened toed shoes and there was something wrong with her second toe, it was crooked and just as long as the big toe. Extrapolate that genetically, I’ll wait.
“I never met her,” I said, “John sent us more pictures of food than the girl.” I read through the appetizers again.
“It was nice to see him eating vegetables,” Hank said.
“Alex, he only sent the food pics because you’d freak out every goddamn time,” Charlie said.
“I hate to see someone go down that road, treating goat cheese like divinity,” I said. Charlie slapped the drink menu out of my hands. The gorilla silk screen on his T-shirt leered at me while bending a barbell, I dared not ask him which fitness-religion it was the mascot of.
I ordered the Kobe beef pad see ew even though I knew it wasn’t going to be real Kobe beef.
“This is so fucking tragic,” Hank said, egg yolk dripped off the edges of his delicious looking brisket sandwich.
“Your food?” Charlie said.
“The circumstance. I don’t think we are grieving the right way with a feast.”
“It’s hard to make sense of something that doesn’t make any sense,” I said.
“The judge denied that bitch’s request for a bond reduction yesterday,” Charlie said, “at least she isn’t getting out before they put her away for life.” Charlie got a hanger steak and zucchini. It was dipped in some kind of volcanic pepper puree that made me wish I’d ordered it too, but Charlie went first and two people can’t order the same thing.
“They can’t be buying this self-defense bullshit,” Hank said once he figured out how to bite a sandwich with egg on it.
None of the shots to John were fatal on their own but Erin let him flop around in the living room for a while until he bled out and then called the cops. He flapped and flapped his arms to try and fly away from the madness and I regret seeing the crime scene photo of the tilted maroon angel he’d left in the carpet. Twenty-seven minutes, that’s how long she waited to call the police. One for each year he was alive.
“John was the only guy I’ve ever known to never throw a punch,” I said and looked back at Charlie’s hanger steak like it was the prettiest girl in the bar. It was hard to accept that John’s tense had changed. This realization sent an uncomfortable bubble of grief up my throat which fermented the water on my tongue.
“The Duke had us do his punching,” Charlie said with chipotle lips.
“He could do more damage with words than fists,” Hank said, “that might be worse.”
That was John’s nickname, The Duke. The Duke didn’t live in a house, he lived on an estate. He demanded that everyone use the proper words for everything, even the plastic tips on the end of shoelaces (aglets). It would have been annoying but when he corrected you it felt like he was trying to make you a better person.
“What would you do,” I said to everyone, “if she got off?” It was a for-the-sake-of-conversation supposition, morbid curiosity about the impossible.
Charlie sat up straight. “Got out on bond? Or do you mean let go?” Hank looked over to me for confirmation.
“Found not guilty and loosed,” I said. She did it, she said she did it, it was open and shut. This was wild speculation.
The liquid around Charlie’s eyes shook like he was being electrocuted. I turned my gaze towards Hank.
“She’d have to go,” Hank said eyes dead-locked with mine. ”I could help plan it, fund it even, but I couldn’t do it.”
“Fuck, you don’t think that’s possible do you, Alex? That they let her go?” Charlie said, his voice creaking.
“No Charles, she isn’t getting out.”
“You know I’d do it,” he said, “I’d snap her fucking neck.”
Right then Charlie became my new best friend.
We drank the place closed, our butts and backs planted on tilted Kil
roys and carved hearts. Hiccuping laughter followed rage followed introspection. Hank made friends with a nice young lady at the hotel who gave us a few rocks glasses from behind the closed bar and we sat in a lobby alcove drinking the blended scotch Hank stowed in his suitcase. I was too drunk or sad to tell them how stupid scotch was. There was a pewter-rimmed chessboard on the coffee table between us and we took turns accidentally knocking over the stone pieces, chipping at them bit by bit. When the slate king cracked in half I left him on his side so he could rest. The same as every other day the sun rose in the east, but today I was awake to bear witness.
With the sunrise came a black car to deliver us to evil so I could bid farewell to my best friend. Charlie made it six steps into the church before he was overcome, snot and spit rained from his face as he fought for balance. Hank and I went with the family to view the body, when we came out Charlie was gone.
I helped push the casket out to the front of the church, between the front pews for a receiving line. Hundreds of people were outside in a late summer rain waiting to come in and say goodbye, maybe it was a thousand. They snaked through the seats where kitschy poster board collages were peppered in, homemade pit stops to practice mourning before the main stage. Nine-year-old John took a proud knee in his red and white striped youth baseball uniform. His first bluegill snatched out of a sun-washed lake in the Adirondacks. Graduation day.
The sobs echoed into the church from outside, doors propped open by the crowd gently fighting to get out of the rain and coil through the aisles like at an amusement park, eager for their turn to go on the worst ride of all time. Tears relented if someone saw themselves in a photo with John and they pointed to show anyone nearby. At the end of the pews was the casket. Some gave prayers, a few spoke to John, but most stood there and wept then moved on.
John’s grandparents were first to greet people leaving the coffin. They didn’t look like a matched set, I thought they might be sole-survivors from opposite sides of the family stuck together by age. Their warmth and calm wasn’t enough to settle the thousand hearts that had to face John’s younger siblings, two boys and a girl. So beautiful and so broken. Marionettes of grief, they each moved in jerks, one more than the others. They didn’t want to be there consoling strangers, they were the ones who needed consolation. The oldest, Lily, a perfect reflection of her mother at nineteen. The youngest boy, Steven, a taller version of his father and the middle child, Jeffery, a fitting composite. Their will to survive the day inverse to their age. Lily was motionless, huddled with her brothers in a black mass. It was Lily that told me and now I wondered how they’d divided up the chore.
Mom and dad were next in line. Mr. Bray said a quiet thanks under his breath and shook the hand of every man with a firm right hook and then brought his left hand over the top to squeeze both together in a way that made you feel a little bit better for yourself and worse for him. His tie was pulled to the side to hide a coffee stain. He stood there all afternoon tipped slightly to one o’clock and trying his best to hold himself up on quivering knees that needed to sit down.
Mrs. Bray was a gale wind of tenacity and dignity. She wore the perfect black dress that acknowledged part of her was dead but had the right lace accents to say what was left would live on. She cried softly, yet happily as she embraced every person that walked by. If she knew you she would throw her arms around your waist so hard that her hands would clap together in the middle of your back. If she didn't, she would clamp your shoulders, forcing you to stand up straight and ask you your name. Then she would look into your heart through your eyes and tell you how much she loved you for being a part of her son’s life. Then in a giant swoop she’d bring you to her chest and wrap you up in the kind of hug you had forgotten could exist—a hug you only remember in watercolors when you fell off your bike, hard, for the first time and your mom washed it all away with an enormous scoop of her arms. She did this for hours without once wavering in her sincerity. I wanted so badly to run to the back of the line, time and again, so I could cry like all the others. I wished I had gotten the chance for John’s mom to wrap me up and wring me dry. Maybe then I wouldn’t feel so empty.
Six
DAY 956
The phone ding-donged messages at me from somewhere below my bed. Blind, I swatted at it with a top sheet twisted around my face and only one sock on. The paisley curtains above the headboard were the exact size of the window, morning sun leaked in every edge trying to burrow into my head and set it on fire.
I spent a good while ignoring the beeps and contemplated the cost of a new mattress if I pissed myself. The thought of being covered in urine, even my own, was enough to stir me upright.
The bedside lamp was a cane to get halfway to standing. My breath left a sticky soot on my lips when I yawned. Ding-dong, another message hit the phone while I was in the bathroom.
I’d gone out to “celebrate” the job Erin offered me after a follow-up interview. I save whiskey for very happy or very sad occasions. This was both and I drank accordingly. Bourbon mornings feel like organ rejection.
I’d tried to sit well-postured and mysterious at the end of a nice bar with three fingers and hoped a pretty girl might ask what ailed me. I’d buy her a Riesling and ask her to tell me everything about herself then try and listen long enough to get laid. Girls sense that kind of desperation, nobody but the bartender made eye contact with me. The worst thing a man can be is lonely, the second worst thing is unavailable. Miraculously, I was both.
I spent the entire night drunk-slumped in a dark corner reading texts from Charlie about how to avoid being eaten by a bear, when to lay down and cover your head, when to stand your ground. He went on and on and then told me it had been a hundred years since anyone had seen a grizzly bear in this state. So he changed the subject to sharks.
Charlie was the son of a cop and the grandson of a cop but some metric at the academy said he wasn’t stable enough to manage people—so he managed wildlife instead. Charlie was better off with the badgers as a game warden or whatever up in Oregon. He yapped to me from the middle of the least important stake-out ever, hiding in riverside bushes trying to catch salmon poachers. I guess rogue fisherman don’t concern themselves with glowing shrubbery.
Eggs sizzled in a pan as I dug through the bottom the refrigerator for a can of fizzy water. Eggs do a nice job quelling a hangover if you cook them like steak. Fry them ten seconds on each side in a screeching pan then drown them in hot sauce. Eggs are the only food you can put a condiment on or can be the condiment. Flat iron steak slathered with egg yolk and paprika is one of the best meals ever. You’ll never see that on a menu. No fad garnishes or complicated techniques to market.
Charlie’s yammering scrolled by while I ate breakfast.
Charlie: Got my ticket this morning, c u in a few weeks broheim!
I was lonelier drunk than sober and had begged him to visit. I didn’t need to lie about my location to friends or family. I did computer stuff for a living as far as they were concerned and Northern California was the land of computer stuff. If Erin had hidden herself in Paducah, Kentucky then it would have been harder to explain why I was there.
When someone asked me what I did at work I’d suck my teeth and think how my nested life was easier to explain with code. I designed the machines that made the machines that replaced people willing to trade time for money.
How meta.
Then I’d tell them, “I work with computers.”
Alcohol is a compression drug, it turns you into the old-timey-photo version of yourself. All the complexity and fine-detail you use to hide vanishes. I told Charlie I couldn’t wait. It was nice to have something to look forward to rather than something to avoid. His visit was a solid object in the distance I could focus on and walk towards in the wasteland of my life. It felt great to open up my calendar and block off a bit of time that I knew was going be good, fill the digital void that made me feel so empty. Charlie was coming in a month, so until then I’d investigate, note he
r weaknesses. The discovery period, every day for one month. I typed it in, then Charlie would come and I’d get a break.
Erin messaged me too.
Erin: It is Sunday Supper Showdown (dun dun dun) and you’re invited. Text me back for the details.
She was so likable. So was Ted Bundy. I messaged her back:
Alex: I don’t know what that means, sounds weird. When?
The texting-me-back bubbles instantly appeared on the bottom of the screen.
Erin: right now, we need ingredients...we need a menu...I will explain on the way—where do I pick you up
I threw my phone on the table, annoyed at the lack of punctuation. My heart beat in my throat. I threw on a dirty shirt from the hamper and went outside to let the dog pee.
It wasn’t quite noon but Annie already had a scotch and soda tilt. Her eye shadow was the exact same color as the flowers she was watering.
“Don’t let him go on the hydrangeas,” Annie said. Her knuckles were knotted with oversize chunks of gold that gleamed in the morning light.
“I know, I know.”
“How’s that job search coming? Hate to see a man in his undies in the middle of the day.”
“I think I may have found something, but don’t worry you’ll get your rent either way.” I smiled and went back down into my hole.
Seven
Erin pulled up a while later in a dirty red Jeep with no doors. Her hair was twisted up and a No. 2 pencil was shoved through the knot. Her face no longer startled me, but thankfully I only had to look at it when she was making noise.
“I hope you like meaningless cooking competitions,” Erin said when I got in.
“Only if we bet fingers.”
“What about jobs?” she said. “I always wanted to fight prospective cooks like chickens in the old country, but I’m too afraid I’ll get sued.” The rag top was stuffed on the floor of the back seat. The breeze squeegeed water from my showered head down my neck.
