by Richard Cox
“Sure. Of course I worry about it. But I think you’re going to pull through, and I’m going to focus on that until something changes.”
Todd smiled and hugged his dad.
“You going to be okay, son? Think you can fall back asleep?”
“Yeah, Dad. I think so.”
“Not going to think about that dream?”
“I’ll try not to. But I do have a question.”
“Oh, yeah? What’s that?”
“What do you think it would mean if you saw a Deadhead sticker on a Cadillac?”
PART FOUR
May 29–30, 2008
ZONE FORECAST PRODUCT
NATIONAL WEATHER SERVICE NORMAN OK
TXZ086-301000-
WICHITA-
INCLUDING THE CITIES OF ... WICHITA FALLS
839 PM CDT THU MAY 29 2008
.TONIGHT ... CLEAR. LOW NEAR 75. WINDS S 10-15 MPH.
.FRIDAY ... MOSTLY SUNNY. INCREASING TEMPS WITH A HIGH AROUND 102. SOUTH WIND 15-25 MPH.
.FRIDAY NIGHT ... PARTLY CLOUDY. LOW IN THE LOW 80S. SOUTH WINDS AROUND 10 MPH.
.SATURDAY ... SUNNY. HIGH AROUND 104. SOUTH WINDS 15-30 MPH.
.SUNDAY ... SUNNY AND WINDY. HIGH NEAR 108. STRONG SOUTHWESTERLY WINDS.
.MONDAY ... TURNING CLOUDY AND SHARPLY COOLER WITH A CHANCE OF THUNDERSTORMS. HIGH IN THE UPPER 80S.
23
After the detectives left, Jonathan stood in his kitchen for a while contemplating the bottle of Jameson and also what exactly he expected from the world.
Last night’s dream, already a mystery, now seemed supercharged with meaning. Dissonant music playing against a surreal, slow-motion backdrop of his hometown—this was the sort of scene you expected to find at the beginning of a Hollywood thriller to set the mood for outlandish or extraordinary events to come. And today had indeed produced some remarkable developments, first the news of Bobby’s death at the restaurant, and then a visit from detectives who asked difficult-to-answer questions and who seemed to believe (rightfully so) that Jonathan possessed relevant information he was not willing to share. But what had shaken him so badly, what had left him staring stupidly at the bottle of Jameson with no clear idea of what to do next, was neither of these tangible events. It was a memory that had come to him while speaking to the detectives, a crystal clear recollection of Todd playing music on his little keyboard, a song that had sounded impressive when first performed and now seemed impossible.
Still moderately buzzed, Jonathan poured himself a smallish drink and went back to his computer. Into Google he typed The Boys of Summer. The second result was the Wikipedia entry for the original Don Henley hit, and a quick perusal of the text revealed the song was no remake of some older version. On another site he learned Henley had written the lyrics after hearing a track composed by guitarist Mike Campbell, and from what Jonathan could tell this had happened sometime in 1984. Since the song was released in October of that year, the timing made sense.
What made no sense at all was Todd playing the same song for them the previous year.
If someone else had told such a story to Jonathan, his immediate and only reaction would be the teller of the tale had remembered it wrong. Either the timing of the events was inaccurate or some other song had been played. Another possible explanation for Todd knowing the song in 1983 was that his parents were friends with Don Henley himself, and during some prior social occasion the song had been discussed or performed. But Jonathan had just read about the song’s genesis in 1984, and anyway, what was the likelihood Todd’s parents were friends with a famous musician and not one person in town knew about it? Not very, but for Jonathan it was the only explanation he would have been willing to accept from anyone other than himself.
Why he had not realized any of this until today, Jonathan could not say. The memory of Todd’s performance would have been much stronger in 1984, when Don Henley’s single was released, than it was now. Yet none of them had said a word about the song when it showed up on the radio, a glaring omission that somehow seemed more implausible than the music itself.
Jonathan sipped on his drink and considered his options. One possible next step was to contact the others and ask if they remembered Todd’s music, if anything about it seemed strange to them. But who could he call? Bobby was gone. Adam had distanced himself from them after that summer and found new friends at church. David had moved to California years ago, and Todd’s family had left Wichita Falls shortly after Lone Star burned down. When Jonathan explained to Gholson how the events of that summer were ancient history, he hadn’t been exaggerating. Before today, he couldn’t remember having thought about his friends from junior high in years. In decades.
Well, that wasn’t entirely true. From time to time he had wondered about Alicia. Was she married? Had she moved away? Was she still as beautiful as he remembered? These questions remained unanswered for years because there didn’t seem to be any point in reexamining an old, painful wound. But now Alicia’s house lay in ruins, Jonathan had just been interviewed by the police, and there seemed to be something very strange going on that connected them in a way he didn’t yet understand. As if someone had generously handed him the perfect excuse to reach out to her.
The difficulty, assuming he could get Alicia on the phone, was what he might say. He wouldn’t lead with the impossible song from the past, that was for sure.
To solve the first problem, Jonathan used Google to find the only two phone numbers in town listed under the Ulbrecht surname: one for Alicia and one for a Sean and Sarah. He assumed the latter number belonged to her parents, because the listed address was Shady Lane in Tanglewood, and that’s just where they had lived when he first met Alicia. It also seemed likely, with her house destroyed, Alicia would stay with her parents until she found another place to live. So if she didn’t answer her own number, he would try the second one.
The next problem was summoning the nerve to actually place the call.
Even after all this time it was frustrating to remember how Alicia had betrayed him for David, how difficult it had been to ignore her the following school year. In high school, avoiding her had been somewhat easier, since the halls were longer and the classrooms more numerous, and you could go a whole day, even a whole week, without seeing another particular person. By then she was a teenage starlet, and he was a taller and pimplier version of his scrawny junior high self. At football games they sat in different sections of the stadium bleachers. At school dances they stood in different areas of the dark gymnasium. He could still picture Alicia leaning against her boyfriend at half court, disco lights playing against her sweater and jeans, while Jonathan and his dorky friends loitered near one of the free throw lines. The football boyfriend had been huge—not just tall, but stout, adult-like, with thick wrists and a wide jaw and coarse facial hair. Jonathan’s own beard hadn’t matured until he was twenty-three, but this football guy had been shaving seriously at age sixteen. How could you compete for a girl’s attention when you looked thirteen and some other guy looked thirty?
Jonathan took a sip of his drink and picked up his cell phone. He could call her from anywhere in the house if he wanted, could take the phone outside and walk halfway up the street. But with no Mom or Bobby or anyone to overhear his conversation, that sort of thing wasn’t necessary anymore.
He punched in the digits to Alicia’s home number and heard the familiar fast busy signal. You’ve dialed a number that is disconnected or no longer in service. So now he was left with the second number, and it seemed almost comical how he had arrived at this place again, calling Alicia’s parents, hoping to speak to their daughter. This was the sort of scene he might place in a novel to demonstrate how history had a tendency to repeat, how life often circled back on itself.
He dialed slowly. 5-5-5-1-2-0 . . . 8.
The phone rang once, twice. A voice answered. The voice of an older woman.
“Hello?”
“Hi, is Alicia there?”
“Why, yes. As a matter of fact, s
he is. May I tell her who’s calling?”
“It’s Jonathan Crane. An old friend.”
“Oh. Well, that’s great. Jonathan Crane. I think I may know your mother. Is her name Carolyn?”
“It is.”
“Well, okay. Let me get Alicia for you.”
Mrs. Ulbrecht put her hand over the mouthpiece. Jonathan heard muffled voices and what he thought might have been laughter. Then the audio became clear again and someone else was on the line.
“Hello?”
Hearing this voice was like traveling back in time, like the intervening twenty-five years had been deleted, like he had spoken to Alicia only yesterday. Only this time his mother wasn’t sitting around the corner, waiting to fuck up everything.
“Alicia? It’s Jonathan Crane.”
“Jonathan, oh, my God! I thought my mom had lost her mind. How in the hell are you?”
“I’m okay. I’m sorry to call out of the blue like this, but I just heard about your house and I wondered if you were all right.”
“I’m okay, I guess. It’s pretty surreal to come home and find your house in flames. It looked like something in a movie, just an inferno. I lost almost everything.”
“I’m so sorry.”
“Well, it could have been worse. It was only stuff. Nobody got hurt. The weird thing is these other fires that have happened since. Did you hear about Bobby Steele?”
“I did,” Jonathan said. “It’s part of the reason I’m calling you.”
“Are you okay? I know you guys were close.”
“We used to be, but in the past few years we fell out of contact.”
“Well, I’m sorry, anyway. All these fires are very strange. Have you talked to anyone else?”
“Like who?”
“Like David Clark? Since Bobby killed his dad?”
She used his last name, Jonathan noted, as if to clarify which David she meant.
“So far I haven’t spoken to anyone but you.”
“I can’t believe we’re talking after all these years,” Alicia said. “You must be married, have kids, the whole nine yards.”
“I was married. We were divorced last year.”
“Oh, I’m sorry.”
“No kids, so it could have been worse. What about you?”
“Never married. No kids. Old maid.”
“Hey, these days lots of women are—”
“Not in Wichita Falls, they aren’t,” Alicia said. “Around here I might as well be fifty.”
“Did you ever think of moving somewhere else?”
“Yeah, I’d love to. But my mom . . . she . . . ”
“Is she all right?”
“She’s okay. It’s just . . . do you really want to do this on the phone?”
“Uh—”
“What I mean to say,” Alicia continued, “is do you want to meet for a drink somewhere?”
“Oh,” Jonathan said. “Sure. Do you have work tomorrow?”
“Yeah, but it’ll be fine. Is Toby’s okay with you?”
“Toby’s sounds perfect.”
“Great. Give me a minute to get ready and I’ll meet you over there.”
24
The last time Jonathan had spoken to Alicia, before tonight, was during their one and only phone conversation twenty-five years prior. His mother had commanded him to never call her again, never to see her, and Jonathan had stupidly put up no fight. The incident injured him so thoroughly that he had failed to ask out another girl until he was nineteen, and even in adulthood he’d found it impossibly difficult to approach women. For a while Jonathan had blamed his mother for his struggles with the opposite sex, but eventually he’d come to understand the problem was really his own. Thirteen years old or not, he should have stuck up for himself, should have told his sadistic mother to stay the hell out of his business. When he hadn’t, David had used the opportunity to move in on Alicia, and Jonathan had spent years trying to rebuild his confidence.
By now all this should have been ancient history, but as he stepped out of his car and approached the bar, Jonathan could hear Alicia describing Jupiter’s moons, could viscerally remember the elation he felt when she agreed to be his girl . . . the click of his heels on concrete could have even been the rhythmic ticking of his mother’s rocking chair. His recollection seemed like a digital recording of the event instead of human, chemical memories that were decades old, and Jonathan wondered how Alicia remembered that time, if she would be curious about why he had never called her again. But it seemed just as likely she had forgotten their phone call completely.
When he opened the door and stepped into Toby’s, it was ten minutes before nine o’clock. The bar was mostly full, today being Thursday, but Jonathan was fortunate enough to grab a booth against the wall. He ordered a drink and faced the door, anticipating the moment when Alicia would walk through it. How different would she look? Would he recognize her? His heart thudded with anticipation.
Then the door did open, and a woman in a light blue blouse walked into the bar. If this was Alicia, she was taller than he expected, her hair darker than he remembered, and his legs tingled as he stood up to wave her over. By any standard she was an attractive woman, but her smile seemed strained somehow, the lines around her eyes deeper than he might have expected. It was easy to forget she was nearly forty years old, the same as he was.
“Alicia?” he said, and the receptive look in her eyes eased his uncertainty. “Wow. You look great.”
She reached for him and they hugged. He thought how foreign this was, how familiar.
Alicia stepped back and considered him. “Jonathan,” she said. “You’re so much . . . bigger than I remember.”
“They call that fat.”
“You’re not fat,” she said, and laughed. “Your body has just matured. You were so skinny as a kid.”
They sat down and the waitress appeared with his drink. Alicia ordered a beer.
“This is so weird,” she said. “Just seeing you here. Have you lived in Wichita since high school? Or did you leave for college?”
“I stayed here. Went to Midwestern, got an Education degree. I teach over at McNiel Junior High now. I figured a job with easy hours and three months off in the summer would make it easier to write. I thought I would be publishing bestsellers by the time I was twenty-five.”
The waitress appeared with her beer, and Jonathan charged it to his tab.
“Thanks,” Alicia said, and together they toasted this unexpected encounter. “So you’re still writing? How’s that going?”
“It’s tough. You need a literary agent to sell your work, and I haven’t found one yet who will give me the time of day. I keep thinking I’m close, but agents are so selective. I guess they have to be.”
“It must be nearly impossible. I mean, of all the people who want to publish books, and the few who actually get to . . . So what do you write? Short stories? Novels?”
“Both, but mostly novels now. Well, I’ve written three. They suck.”
Alicia laughed again. “I’m sure they don’t suck. You let people read them?”
“Sure. I mean, if they want to, of course they can read them.”
“Can I read one?”
Jonathan smiled in spite of himself. He couldn’t believe he was sitting here having this conversation. The whole situation seemed almost too perfect to be real.
“Well, yeah. Sure you can. So what have you been doing all this time? If you’ve been in town, I don’t know how we’ve never seen each other in all these years.”
She told him about Texas A&M, about her doomed relationship with a business major, Kyle. She told him about Brandon, her last boyfriend, who had worked at the particle accelerator in Olney. Brandon moved away after it was destroyed and didn’t ask her to come with him.
“He was from Philadelphia. He hated Wichita. Called it the asshole of Texas.”
“Sounds like a real jerk,” Jonathan said.
“I know, but I loved him a lot. And sometimes I th
ink he was right about this place. Did you ever notice how nothing ever changes? How the city doesn’t grow? I swear it’s like all the clocks stopped ticking sometime in the 80s.”
The waitress came around again, and he was about to order another round when Alicia beat him to the punch.
“Hi,” she said, and Jonathan noticed Alicia’s eyes had a certain glint in them, as if she were keeping a secret that only she knew. “Could you bring us two more drinks and two shots of tequila, please? No salt on mine.”
Jonathan blinked. “Or mine.”
The waitress left, and Alicia turned back to him, her eyes still glinting, her smile wide and bright.
“We should shift into a higher gear, don’t you think?”
“I like your style.”
“I feel like I need a buzz to talk about this,” she said, “because I don’t know why anyone would want to burn down my house. I assume Bobby Steele had to have been involved somehow. It can’t be a coincidence what he did to the restaurant only two nights after my house was burned down. And for David’s dad to die? It’s just so brutal.”
Jonathan didn’t know what the detectives had shared with Alicia, but from the sound of it, maybe not much. Once she learned about the cryptic email, that there was still at least one suspect at large, would she believe the suspect was him? Would honesty ruin his chance to get to know her again?
“It’s not a coincidence.”
Her eyes grew wide as he said this, and Alicia was about to respond when their drinks arrived. Jonathan picked up his shot glass and waited for her to follow.
“To old friends,” he said.
“And new beginnings,” Alicia added. She knocked back her tequila and switched to the lime in a single, fluid motion. During his entire marriage Jonathan had never seen Karen take a shot of liquor, nor drink anything with such finesse.
“So you were saying?” Alicia asked. “You don’t think it’s a coincidence?”
“I know it isn’t.”
“You look like you know something you’re not telling me.”
