Little Reef and Other Stories

by Michael Carroll

  I said, “I told him you and I would come together one time. You know what he told me?”

  I didn’t tell her about when Phil had said of Candace, “I kept wishing the bitch’d go.”

  Cindy and I were sitting on the deck of the top floor I’d rented of a beach house, which had fallen into my lap at the last minute, and it felt propitious. We were drinking riesling.

  “So what did Phil say?”

  “Well, that his mom was an alcoholic. That it was all over the family, all of his brothers, his mom, and that it was what killed his dad. That and the Kents. And then just before I left, he was mixing his rice around and dropped this bomb. Maybe it’s not a bomb. You never left; you were the one who always gave me the updates. He had hepatitis twice, from using needles.”

  “Habitually? Like a lot?”

  “I didn’t ask. See, I made a vow never to ask him questions like that ever again.”

  Phil had mentioned trying everything once and, according to the Oscar Wilde dictum or whatever, giving it a second try just to be sure. Smoked crack, injected things. My puritanism I’d had to push into the back of my mind. Maybe it was Mae West who’d said that.

  She fretted her brow and the frets stayed up there a bit. I smiled at her and lit a cigarette.

  She said, “God, can I have one of those? I could get myself into so much trouble.”

  She did an imitation of her daughters mewling judgmentally, “Mom, Mom! God, Mom!”

  I slid the pack her way across the glass of the little outdoor table, its wicker frame starting to rot and wobble on the deck. None of our families had come from here, we’d all migrated from different cities, hers from Atlanta. This was a clear, windy March day. The owner had rented the three floors to people planning to go to the races at Daytona, but those weren’t happening, they’d been violently stormed-out. The bad weather had passed, but I was alone and spent the evenings when I wasn’t running to the pharmacy or grocery for Phil driving back down the coast, stopping at Publix for supplies, then heading home and out to the deck to see the moon squat on the ocean.

  My father had called Phil and me the Gruesome Twosome, and when Cindy came into the picture, the Gleesome Threesome, then more and more the Three Caballeros. It was Phil who not long after Cindy and I started dating in tenth grade told her that I’d already confessed to him that I thought I was gay—but that I was in love with her and another guy I hadn’t specified. Now she was a mother who was probably grateful that she didn’t have to pretend not to be glad she didn’t have boys. In time, she’d learned everything. We weren’t the Three Caballeros for nothing. She had asked me, around graduation, just before we all went our separate ways, if I thought Phil was jealous of her and me, and I’d acted angry and asked her why in the hell he should be, Jesus.

  I’d told her, “It’s all right if you want to date him instead of me, I’ll be fine. Honest.”

  “I like him but I don’t want to be with him,” she’d said. “I like being with you.”

  “I like it, too.”

  “But who are you more in love with, Phil or me?”

  “Neither. I love you both the same,” I said.

  And she’d made a fart sound with her mouth and looked evenly at me, saying, “Bullshit!”

  Which was one of the reasons I’d loved her. This and the fact that she had liked being a virgin and never had any qualms about not having sex. I’d told her I wasn’t great at it, anyway.

  It was agreed that next time, a Saturday, she’d pull a shift with Phil at his apartment then drive him down to the beach and we’d sit out on the deck and I’d cook. Then she’d drive him home.

  “Only it pisses me off,” she said, “that we shouldn’t drink in front of him. You have no idea, how good you have to be as a mom! It’s bullshit, acting the role model. It’s restricting. It’s like a slow suffocation. Since you told me that about Candace, I’ve thought a lot, good for her.”

  I thought not wholly tragically about the aging of our childish generation—gone youths.

  “I can refrain,” I said. “I can tie one on while I’m cooking then chew breath mints. I can smoke, can’t I? I mean, I’ll shower before you guys get here, then sneak one surreptitiously …”

  Cindy was an OR nurse and she said, “Not such a hot idea, actually. Not the secondhand smoke part, but what if he gets tempted and begs us? There’s liver portal hypertension and Phil’s vulnerable to a sudden complete organ shutdown. We’ll just have to be good little bunnies.”

  “Then I guess I can wait until after y’all go,” I said, “and all the good bunnies are in bed.”

  We held hands watching the moon that was partially melted down tonight. I was glad she and I had this time together. I thought we’d never have it again, though we said we would.

  “Now that the kids are in middle school and junior high, thank God,” Cindy said, “I can swing it so I’ve got afternoons and evenings while they’re doing all their extracurricular junk.”

  She and Todd had considered getting a divorce, but recently he’d gotten promoted and his workload eased up. He was good about taking turns with her watching the kids on weekends.

  “This is just so nice,” she added, a little slurry on only her second glass, and I nodded.

  I said, “You know, it won’t ever be often enough, me coming. I’m just way too poor.”

  “Where’d you get the money this time?”

  “I told my parents, and they’d always loved Phil, always loved the sight of the three of us together actually, so they fronted me. But I hated taking it, even though now they have more.”

  My parents had retired comfortably and had no debts, no mortgage, but I’d been raised to be independent once I’d gotten through college. I had a problem with debts. But at least I didn’t have a family to bankroll. Secretly I had my first book on contract to edit: stories of growing up. The debts I’d incurred to people for providing me with my material for it bristled uncomfortably all through me.

  Cindy said, “If I got sick, would you do the same and ask your folks for the money?”

  “Absolutely and unequivocally yes,” I said and hated myself for sounding so literary.

  She didn’t say anything, and I was proud of her for that, too. We had to deal with this, I thought, as honestly as possible. By my next trip Phil would be long gone. She expected me to take off before Saturday, the way I’d run from my “bisexuality”—the issue less important at the time than how much you loved someone, or what your HIV status was, back when the virus was raging uncheckable. There was one question I’d previously evaded over the years, but Cindy had asked it of me over and over: “Did you ever think you were really bisexual?” Inevitably it was followed by, “Did you ever want to sleep with me? I mean, did you ever want to, out of sheer physical lust?”

  She’d put that last part different ways, sometimes drolly, during a bunch of long-distance calls and with a hint of falsely shared conspiracy, of queasy complicity.

  You didn’t ask those questions then, not when you were eighteen, nineteen, twenty. But I was still evading them when I was thirty-five. She’d stopped asking around my fortieth birthday.

  She said now, “My mom told me to tell you hi, and that she’d like to see you.”

  “Why don’t you invite her out on Saturday,” I said. “Is she doing anything Saturday?”

  She was trying to finish her cigarette without gagging or coughing. She tamped it out in a way that reminded me of noir movies, those films we’d gone to see sometimes with Phil in the museum’s vintage movie series. She said, “But wouldn’t Candace say she was being excluded?”

  Her voice was squeaky and I nodded and we laughed, and I said, “Good point.”

  I lifted her hand and kissed it. She’d always been so real to me, the way my mom had.

  “There’s never enough time,” she said, and I knew she needed to get ready to motor out.

  My parents had hoped I would marry her, and she knew this. She’d married the guy who
in college had gotten her pregnant and derailed her education for a while. They’d stayed together and she’d gone to night school, then she’d started her career and now they had this nice family. I couldn’t fathom it but I’d started to see the point of it while knowing I didn’t have the stuff for it.

  She mashed the butt out in the crock ashtray, extinguishing just some evidence of her sin.

  Later that evening, when I was comfortably tipsy reading Stevenson, my New York friend Drew called having returned from the Caribbean and said, “How’s tricks, sweetness, you good?”

  “Sure.”

  “You don’t sound that all right. That would make two of us, bloody fucking hell!”

  He liked to make fun of Brits while co-opting their idioms.

  I said, “If you want to know the truth, I’d like to be life-flighted out of this entire deal.”

  “Your buddy Phil, if he wants to get better—and look, I’m not saying he doesn’t want to get better—but if he wants to, he needs to get off those meds. His liver qi’s in a rage. That’s the story on his liver. It’s shot. The drugs and pharmaceuticals, they’re only making things worse.”

  He sounded like he was well into the malbec, like he was giving his own liver qi a zap.

  I waited and then said, “How was St. Martin? All tropical paradise and great splendor?”

  “Oh you know,” he said, “those freaking airlines, they have us where they want us in this corporate-hostage country. All the corporations have us. Listen, I know of some herbals …”

  Drew was a coddled, welfare-aided brat, I flattered myself, but right now I was a victim.

  I listened, lying in my bed, holding my book open and pages down on my chest.

  “You need to get him to an acupuncturist, get him some Chinese herbs. The acupuncture is one thing, the Chinese herbalist another. But go online and look, you might be surprised …”

  We hung up finally, leaving the topic at nothing, and I went back to Treasure Island.

  I can’t do this,” Cindy called and said into the phone on Saturday morning.

  I was just having my coffee on the deck and steeling myself up. I couldn’t do it, either.

  She said, “Todd thinks I’ve gotten obsessed, and the girls all have colds. It’s cold and flu season and they’re all sick and Todd has to go into work all of a sudden. But I called Phil.”

  “Uh-huh?”

  “He got it. He just hopes you’ll come up and see him.”

  “Obviously. Hey sweetie, no problem. It’ll be all right. Double-pinky promise, okay?”

  She said, “My mom’s mad.”

  “At whom?”

  “I couldn’t tell.”

  “Will you tell her I miss her, and that I’ll see her, like, really soon? Promise?”

  “Are you mad at me, Mike?”

  “Not in the least. I couldn’t possibly love you more. I never could.”

  I drove up. I’d been up too late the night before on the deck drinking and smoking and thinking. Adolescence had been just an embarrassment and it locked you into making too many romantic, silly statements you lived with forever if you thought about it. You couldn’t overthink it. That way you’d go crazy. You’d had no idea you’d live to feel tired and defeated all the time.

  He came to the door and seemed energetic. He said, “Man, all I can think about’s pussy.”

  “I get it,” I said, stepping past him. He was wild-eyed from the meds, I guessed.

  “I’m supposed to be sick and I’m not supposed to last, but that’s all I can think of. All I ever think about is hard, horny sex, doing nasty things with girls mostly. I never did it with her.”

  “You didn’t?”

  “Because of you, asshole, and because she was never in love with me.”

  “But she was. Cindy was always in love with you.”

  “But not like she was with you, man. You were my best fucking friend for a long time.”

  They had him on mood elevators, and maybe they counteracted the opioid dosages.

  He said, “And it’s not your fault that I’m dying. Obviously. No fucking shit there, too.”

  “I didn’t say that. I hate this. I hate knowing it. I loved you more than I did myself.”

  “We were a team,” he said.

  I nodded and said, “We were.”

  After a while, sitting there with him, thinking about the sex, and thinking tenderly of him in bed with Cindy, should that have ever happened, I said, “Who says you can’t beat this, man?”

  He’d been crying but now he got quiet, smiling, then said, “And I thought I’d lost my mind.”

  There were only so many extra livers, so many motorcycle casualties to provide livers.

  Finally, no laughing, no crying, just faint, twitchy smiles between us.

  I said, “And I always loved you.”

  Then he wouldn’t look at me, though after a time he gave me the thumbs-up.

  “I hear you,” he said.

  Later, after he’d been moved to hospice and I learned he’d passed after a botched excision, I had some more things to say, but he was gone finally, and there was no reason to say them, and no one to say them to.

  PART TWO

  *

  AFTER MEMPHIS

  first responder

  My brother Jeff called. I’m not even sure why I answered, seeing on the landline’s display who it was, or at least recognizing the area code and the prefix of the number, though of course I was expecting him to call any day, any week, since I had heard from our mother that he’d broken up with his new girlfriend, after getting cold feet about divorcing his wife Deanne. I had not met the new girlfriend, Terri, now the new ex-girlfriend. Jeff still had a touch of the guilt, I could hear in his voice, but I could also discern a gratifying exasperation with Deanne. She had taken thirty hard years out of Jeff, bankrupted him, and was now daring him to follow through by hiring a second, more aggressive lawyer—whose services he was paying for. To top it off, the case was complicated by the fact that before he could finally be cut loose, my brother first had to settle up with the banks. I didn’t know much else except that he wasn’t expected to pay every cent of debt she’d rung up on the credit cards, just a big chunk of it. No doubt, Deanne’s pride had been hurt, because after all she was the one being left. Oh yes, Jeff said, Deanne was now officially pissed.

  “But after the hundred and ten thousand,” he said, “how the fuck could she question it?”

  That was new, the f-word. I hadn’t heard that or any other cussing out of Jeff’s mouth in thirty years. Of course I sympathized, but I couldn’t let on too strongly, not yet. I’d been highly supportive of their union then the shotgun wedding when we were in high school. But Deanne, really, over time she’d taken the cake. She’d raised and homeschooled three kids, but when you don’t work and your husband’s a firefighter, you really had to rein in the indulgences, and she had been quite indulgent, denying those kids nothing in the way of clothes and gadgets and meals out at Wagon Wheel and TGI Friday’s. I was finishing the cold coffee left in my Grumpy mug from Disneyland Paris and feeling seized upon and getting low on blood sugar as he dived right into all this and told me something none of us had ever known: that he’d always put Deanne in charge of the monthly bill paying. He was still getting to the bottom of how many cards were involved.

  “But this,” he said, “I take partial, no, the lion’s share of responsibility for. I was an idiot, so I guess that’s what I get for my willful ignorance. Having to work three jobs to get untangled from responsibilities I take very seriously. I’ll be under the fucking water for a long-ass time.”

  “Uh-huh,” I said, allowing myself a chuckle.

  “The woman thinks money happens magically,” he said, his voice cracking incredulously.

  He was driving around Jacksonville in the Jeep he was about to lose, doing errands.

  “Well, that’s horrible,” I warbled. Myself, I was only about five thousand in debt.

  Barely d
rawing a breath, he traced the pattern back to their earliest born-again days, when he and Deanne would respond to Jimmy Swaggart’s TV appeals to donate money in order to help spread the Gospel to Africa and help feed the hearts and souls and stomachs of the poor children.

  “Yep, before, I was in on it,” he said. “The woman had me convinced that any gifts we’d send in, and let me tell you, bro, we sent in a shit-load, would come back to us as blessings, and I wanted to believe this. I wasn’t starving. We had the house. We had the family safe and secure. I felt a responsibility, a guilt for not having it hard enough—and there were those African kids.”

  Guilt wasn’t a blood thing, it came to me. Ours was a family-borne infection.

  Perry was giving a lucrative talk in Minneapolis. I was alone in New York, trying not to think about Jeff or anybody but myself, loving my privacy. It was two in the afternoon and I was going to open a bottle of red and sip it covertly to get through this in style. I hated talking on the phone, and already I was moving about the apartment finger-dusting the bookshelf edges, sponge-wiping the kitchen counters, opening the bottle of wine and letting it breathe ten minutes, lowering the toilet seat in a darkened bathroom and quietly sitting down to urinate. In the dark, I somehow recalled Sugar Pie, the beagle mutt we’d basically neglected as kids. Jeff took his time, which was fine except that we hardly knew how to talk, for decades having barely been brothers.

  “But you’re doing it,” I said, “you’re going through with it.”

  “Yes. Shit!” he said, and it was as though I’d thrown cold water on him from a thousand miles away. “I guess you hadn’t heard. That just started to happen again. I don’t know if you’ve talked to Mom and Dad. I guess you haven’t. But I’m just so angry. I go in every week for these weekly arbitrations, negotiations really is what they are, and all over again I’m just so fucked-up about the sums. Target alone, twenty-three thousand. She had a Target card I didn’t even know about, but again that’s a great deal my fault. Visa, MasterCard … I wouldn’t let her take out an American Express, and hell I’m not even sure they would’ve given us one, given how much debt we had that, again, I knew nothing about. But see, half that plastic, I was none the wiser—”