by Brian Hodge
In fact, it had barely begun.
2
Jason started feeling better almost as soon as he began the ritual of running.
The day was the hottest of the year so far, one of those days the weatherman seemed to get a particular thrill out of being able to call gruesome. And wouldn’t you know it…it seemed like every obnoxious asshole with a few bucks and a yen for something new to wear had picked today to come out of the woodwork.
A half-hour ago, Jason had left work after a day of pushing casual and dress on a steady trickle of customers at Kelly’s Men’s Wear. He’d walked the three blocks to his apartment in brain-searing heat, giving himself a quiet but efficient cursing for not having driven. He spent the blocks scanning the streets for familiar cars and familiar faces, and found none. Kind of evocative of the way his whole summer was going.
Jason Hart hated admitting it, even to himself, but the town he’d called home for twenty-one years was turning alien on him. Small hometowns seemed prone to do that sometimes, the faces changing as the familiar ones disappeared in search of greener pastures. As they left behind those who wondered, and watched, and waited. Human nature, he guessed. Why should the southern Illinois town of Mt. Vernon be any different?
He finished stretching in the grass by the city park’s largest asphalt lot, pulling calves, thighs, hamstrings, Achilles tendons. He tied a bandanna around his head to keep his hair from slapping his eyes. A few deep breaths and he was moving, setting a steady rhythm of arms, legs, and lungs.
Alien…
What should have been one hell of a summer was going down the tubes. A few weeks before, mid-May had seen him wrap up his spring semester at the University of Illinois. All he had to do was enjoy the summer as much as humanly possible, then return for his senior year, graduation, and diploma…that grail-like ticket to the Real World.
But the only person who really gave a damn that he was back was John Kelly, and Jason turned to him only after it looked like there wasn’t going to be much else to do. He didn’t need the job, but a guy could only take so much beer and cable TV. Jason took his old on-again, off-again summer job back at Kelly’s Men’s Wear, settling into a summer of complacency and routine, wondering if middle age hadn’t crept up a whole lot sooner than it should’ve.
His friends were gone, the group fragmented as far as Arizona, and regardless of anyone’s best intentions, nobody kept in touch as much as they’d promised. Letters take time, phone calls mean money. Promises are cheap. The cost lies in keeping them.
Jason picked up the pace a little; streams of sweat became rivers.
He’d spent most of the summer thus far by himself, a solitary figure going through the motions of what he’d done in an earlier time. He went to movies, and went swimming at the lakes, and sometimes just drove aimlessly, a six- or twelve-pack of beer in the other seat for company. He often caught himself watching girls he knew had to still be in high school, walking that narrow limbo between adolescence and womanhood that he found incredibly appealing.
And then there was the apartment, a summer sublet that seemed bigger with every passing day. It was more than he needed, with a small bar, walnut paneling, a balcony, all the appliances, within walking distance of the downtown area…but what the hell. It wasn’t like he couldn’t afford it now.
Jason circled the park’s pond, high-stepping over the roots of trees that brooded over the water like sentinels. Ducks and a few geese paddled in lazy paths across the water, toward the shore or the little islands where they nested.
It was here that he’d first taken up running, years ago. He’d grown up here, and remembered it from a time when the trees seemed a lot taller and the pond seemed a lot wider. The days of innocence, before the future loomed ahead like a vengeful god. Before he found out that death was real, and final.
Seven years…that’s how long he figured this steady diet of running had lasted. Jason let it slide only in cases of sickness and the occasional hangover that was too awful to combat anywhere else but in bed. It had kept him in good shape; he was still boyishly lean, almost too much so for his height. He had a thin face, too, with a thin mouth, but his eyes were wide and round. He kept his hair shaggier than what current fashion allowed, but he liked it that way. He retained it partly in defiance of the other yuppies-in-training swarming the campus, with their interchangeable clothes and interchangeable smiles and interchangeable hair. Interchangeable personalities.
Jason pounded along until he neared the southwest corner of the park, then slowed to catch his breath. He spat and paused to gaze at the house across the drive rounding the corner. On the front lawn, a boy and girl sat playing with toys. They were no more than five or six. The front door opened and a woman poked her head out. They left their toys and disappeared inside the house. Suppertime.
He began to run again.
The house had been his home once. He’d lived there with his parents since he was nine years old. He still didn’t like to see other people living there. Irrational, sure. Made about as much sense as blaming them as the direct cause…
He ran harder.
His parents…and what a stupid way they’d picked to bow out of this life, too. Last summer they’d been on their annual two-week jaunt that had become as inevitable as the Fourth of July. This time they were out West, driving through the Rockies. Except his dad had gotten careless on a curve, maybe (the truth would never be known), and they slipped over an edge. A short roll down a slope and into a ravine, and all of a sudden Jason was your basic class-A orphan. Easy as falling off a cliff.
“Marry an orphan,” his mother had often told him, her only child. “We don’t want to have to share you with in-laws on holidays.”
They’d usually laugh about it. Funny how cruelly the tables could be turned.
It had happened on a Friday afternoon, and Jason had gotten word of it early the next morning. The rest of the weekend was a meaningless blur, half-remembered fragments that may or may not have happened. He was finally discovered by Kelly, who grew both worried and perturbed when Jason didn’t show up the next Monday morning. After a half-dozen unanswered phone calls, Kelly drove to their house. He beat on the door and thumbed the bell and, when he found the front door unlocked, let himself in. He found Jason sitting in a hallway, clutching an unused frying pan, his clothes wrinkled, his hair tangled, three days of stubble on his face. His pants had that pissed-in look common to winos and imbeciles. Jason looked up at him with dark-ringed eyes, a vacant stare that chilled Kelly to the core. It looked like nothing whatsoever lived behind those eyes.
Kelly turned out to be a godsend. He got Jason cleaned up, fed, pulled him out of the shell he’d retreated into. He helped him arrange to have the bodies flown back and had Jason stay with himself and his wife until relatives could arrive. Later, he helped get Jason’s finances straightened out—the will, the insurance policies, the bank accounts, listing the house with a realtor, selling the land in the country earmarked for that retirement home, getting the investments signed over into Jason’s name. Jason came out of it not rich, but decidedly well-to-do for a twenty-year-old.
For nearly a week after Kelly found him, Jason was surrounded by family and friends who helped share the burden. But eventually they all returned to tend their own lives, leaving him with that inevitable cliché, “If there’s anything we can do…” He rambled about the newly empty house with a curious restlessness. Never before had the house seemed so imposing, with memories lurking around every corner. And he realized he was beginning to think of it as a house and a house alone…no longer a home. Moving out and heading back to school a few weeks later was a relief.
Jason began to feel light-headed with the heat, and slowed to walk again. Sweat rolled down his face. He decided to leave that house behind without a second look. Because what had made it a home had been gone a long, long time.
* *
Jas
on paid for the first round of beers, then grinned as Kelly eyed the waitress’s backside. A wistful little smile played over the older man’s lips.
“Now that makes me long for younger days,” Kelly said. “Right after I just aced puberty.”
“You’d go through acne again?”
Kelly rubbed his shiny scalp, bordered by little more than a monk’s fringe. “There are worse things.”
Grabbing a few after work had been Kelly’s idea, and they’d driven to a dive called The Night Life Lounge. The “Lounge” label didn’t add much class. It was a comfortable bar where you came to get plowed without any pretensions. The decor was tacky, the jukebox alternately thumped hard rock and country and western, and the clientele was a melting pot of redneck blue collars, folks who looked like drifters that had forgotten to move on, and underage kids with fake IDs. There were nicer bars around, but neither of them felt up to one.
“Lemme ask you something personal,” Kelly said. “Okay?”
Jason looked up from his frosted glass. “Fire away.”
“You haven’t been a very happy camper this summer, have you?”
“It’s had its moments.”
“But in general, I mean.” His tone was gentle, not probing.
“In general? No. Not really.”
Kelly nodded. “I didn’t think so. After as long as I’ve known you, I can read you pretty good. And Jay…you don’t have that same old spark in you anymore.”
Jason shrugged, watched tiny bubbles shoot up through his beer.
“Anything you want to talk about?”
Jason took a drink, swirled his glass, stared at the plastic Peterbilt truck on the wall that was somebody’s idea of decoration.
“I’m not sure how to put it myself. It’s like…like I feel let down by this summer. Cheated out of something. I just keep plodding along with the same old crap, no changes. Like I’m on some kind of treadmill.” His voice trailed away and he finally concluded with a helpless shrug, as if in surrender.
Kelly nodded slowly, deliberately, mulled it over. Took a couple thoughtful swallows of beer. Finally looked back up. “Listen, and bear in mind I’m no therapist, but did you ever think that maybe you were expecting too much from this summer? Something it couldn’t deliver?”
“Like what?”
“Oh, say…the past.”
Jason pondered this a moment or two. “Bull’s-eye.”
Kelly flashed a look of false modesty. “It’s plain enough. With the exception of last summer, you’ve had it pretty good around here. I wouldn’t expect you to give it up and turn loose that easily. But there comes a time when you just plain don’t have a choice anymore.” He emphasized his last few words by pecking at the scarred tabletop with blunt, stubby fingers. “And if you still refuse to give it up, you could end up like them.” He rolled his eyes to his left, toward the guys a couple tables over. “Nobody wants to end up like them.”
Jason glanced sideways. A half-dozen of them sat crowded around the round table, all looking like variations from the same basic mold: dirty jeans and work shirts, hobnail boots, several days’ growth of beard, oily hair. And if you looked close enough, eyes of quiet desperation. No…he didn’t want to end up like them.
Kelly killed his beer, motioned Jason to do the same, waved for another round, paid for it. “So your summer’s turned into a real shitter. Look upon it as a learning experience. You can’t live in the past.”
“Oooh,” Jason said. “You make that up all by yourself?”
Kelly made an obscene gesture, then grinned and stretched and leaned back in his chair. “Hey. Remember when you started taking all those business courses up there, and how I used to accuse you of plotting to kill me and take over the store?”
“You’ll recall I never denied it.”
“I know! I know! And was I ever sorry I brought it up! I never will forget the night you came creeping in when I was all alone, doing the books. You had a shotgun!” Kelly started to roar with laughter, his stout body quivering, and he pounded the tabletop. “And you had a blank shell in it, and fired that thing! I about pissed my pants and died, right there.”
Jason was beaming with perverse pride. “And you about fired me, as I recall.”
“Well hell, after the way it stunk the place up.” He wiped his teary eyes with a shirtsleeve, then looked Jason straight on, warm, smiling faintly. “Don’t ever lose that. I’ve watched too many people go as bland as cottage cheese over the years.”
“No worries there.” Jason lifted his glass and touched it to Kelly’s. “Thanks, John. In your own pudgy little way, you’ve helped make some rough times a lot more bearable.”
“No charge,” he said quietly. “But you get the next round.”
And so they stayed for another round or two or three; they lost track. And then they left, each to his own car. Jason was very glad that Kelly had worked up a thirst. And he felt that maybe, just maybe, the summer wouldn’t turn out to be a total loss after all.
It was only mid-June. Lots of time left. Something interesting was bound to turn up sooner or later.
3
Punks, Travis thought. Little assholes.
Travis Lane wrestled with his lawn mower in his back yard. Its engine put out a good vibrating roar, but damn it, he could still hear them and their loud music two doors down. They were lying out on blankets and lounge chairs, soaking up the sun and listening to a ghetto blaster the size of a steamer trunk. Five of them, students, he thought, all longhaired and worthless, and Travis cursed the day they’d settled there. It had been a decent neighborhood in the south side of St. Louis, everyone taking care of their own business, but their coming did nothing to help matters any.
There oughta be a law against their kind. They let their house peel (they rented) until mottled spots of faded gray peeked through the white; several of the window screens were ripped top to bottom; their lawn hadn’t been cut yet this year. It would hit you mid-shin if the grass hadn’t keeled over from the weight. Hiding in that jungle was a ton of garbage, a good portion of it bottles and cans labeled Hamm’s. Hamm’s!
“Yeah, I saw how they make Hamm’s one time,” Travis was fond of saying. Or it could’ve been Old Milwaukee, or Pabst, or whatever else he wasn’t fond of at the moment. “Six bottles, a horse, and a funnel.”
Travis felt a breeze picking up, blowing past him in their direction. He grinned and veered madly off-course to sit the mower on a bare patch of ground. The past couple of weeks had been drought-dry. Travis joggled the mower back and forth, bouncing it on hard plastic wheels. An immense cloud of dust churned up like a fog bank to drift over to them, settling on their skin, shiny and slick with tanning oil. Two of them suddenly started fanning the air, one coughed fitfully, one broke into a sneezing attack (allergies, he hoped), and the other merely raised an arm with an extended middle finger. Travis barely heard them crying out in protest, but thought he could read the lips of one boy turned his way…son of a bitch I’ll pound his ass for that.
“Just you try it, cocksucker,” Travis said with a tight smile.
He throttled the mower, its vibrations kicking up through the pushbar like a jackhammer, and went on with his mowing. He laughed and smirked with no little satisfaction when he noticed them packing it up and heading back inside their rattrap house. He felt their eyes on him, cold and hard and angry. All that, sure, but a little afraid, too. And that was just what the doctor ordered.
Travis was a broad man, not what you’d call tall, and at forty-one he still had precious little in the way of body fat. A good workout program with his weights in the basement saw to that. Ropes of thick muscle bunched over his upper body and arms and legs, and so long as there was breath in his body he was going to keep it that way.
Those little shits two doors down had good reason to be afraid. He worked as a supervisor building airplanes, he pa
id his taxes, and he didn’t vote because nobody worth a squat had come along in quite some time. But he didn’t have to put up with the longhairs two doors down, or their loud stereos, or their late hours.
Travis finished his lawn and rolled the mower around front and into the garage. He had a lot more room in there since Sheila had left, loading her silly little Toyota and cutting out for parts unknown. Overall, he was glad he didn’t know where she’d ended up. He was saving a lot in alimony, but he had to admit that every now and then it crossed his mind that it might be a kick to phone her up or cruise by, remind her just what a spineless little cunt she was and always would be.
He scowled at himself in the cracked mirror tacked up in the garage. His thick black hair curled in sweaty tangles. His face was shiny red, his T-shirt soaked. He breathed deeply of his odor; that tight smile again. It did a man good to get dirty, to sweat. The fruits of honest labor.
Inside the house, he took an endless leak and grabbed a beer (a Bud, a real beer), downing a good third of it in a gulp. He settled onto the living room floor; sunlight streamed in with a gentle touch, dappled here and there by spots on the windows. Yesterday’s Post-Dispatch lay spread and tented by his chair. He briefly considered it, then ignored it. Old news, anyway. Anything important going on, he’d catch it on the tube.
As he tugged a pillow from the couch to shove behind his head, Travis caught a familiar scent. After six months, there were still lingering traces of Sheila scattered around the house like little land mines…perfume, body powder, the very essence of her. They were all waiting to be stirred into life, to remind him. In a weird way, they were like her final victory over him, because there was nothing he could do other than wait them out.
After the divorce, he’d tried to evict everything about her. Pictures went into the trash, as did her collection of decorative plates (he’d had a jolly time smashing them, you bet), those absurd little soaps in the bathroom that were never meant to be used, the kitchen canisters with a blue gingham pattern…everything. He rearranged the furniture to suit his tastes, even purged the contents of his wallet. He’d pitched it all…except for those hidden pockets of scent. They’d fade in time, of course they would, but until then he was at their mercy.
