by Joe Clifford
“Jesus?”
“I wanted to hear the radio, man,” Brian said, “but nothing would come in. I had some mp3s in my backpack that my friend Jon gave me. But the backpack was crammed with textbooks and pens and earbuds. I couldn’t find anything. I took my eye off the road for a second—not even a second, I swear. I hit the telephone pole.”
I didn’t know what to say.
“I called my mom. Her friend from work drove her over. When the cops showed up, my mom said she was driving. Am I going to get in trouble?”
I shrugged.
“I don’t care.” Brian Olisky let go a terrific sigh, and a big smile crept over his face, like he’d heard a dirty joke in church and was fighting to suppress the giggles.
“Thanks,” he said.
“For what?”
“I don’t like lying. It was bothering the hell out of me.”
My attention returned to the wrestling photographs on the mantel.
What’s harder? Competing with a superstar? Or carrying the burden of being the last man standing?
CHAPTER TWO
DRIVING THOSE COUNTRY roads home, the bright, clean moonlight illuminating a path back to my wife so she could tear me a new one for being late and forgetting my cell phone, again, I couldn’t help but think about my brother.
Once upon a time Chris had been bound for greatness. A shot at the Olympics. Representing America. Who knew how far he could’ve gone? Or maybe it was all revisionist, pipe dreaming. Even before our parents died in that car accident, Chris was a mess. Short fuse. Screws loose. A socket wrench short of a toolbox. Once he got hooked on dope, all bets were off, all hope abandoned. A bottom-feeding parasite, he lived a hard existence that stole whatever remained of the brother I’d known growing up. Small-town gossip tarnished his legacy, vicious rumors that refused to go away. I never bought into any of that garbage. Not even when Chris claimed those rumors were true. By that point he couldn’t tell the difference between fantasy and reality. Which made sorting out the last few weeks of his life so difficult.
Last December, my brother and a scumbag pal, Pete, had been rooting around on a discarded computer, trying to secure personal information. They were running a credit card scam, check fraud, identity theft, whatever people like him did to cheat the system. They’d uncovered dirty laundry on this family up here, the Lombardis. Incriminating pictures of the father, Gerry. It was hard to trust Chris, especially where the Lombardis were concerned. Long before the drugs, my brother was obsessed with that family, animosity stemming from his days wrestling for Gerry Lombardi in high school. Gerry’s sons, Adam and Michael, so successful with their respective construction and political careers, didn’t help matters; jealousy ate away at my brother. I saw the pictures. Hard to tell one way or the other, but after my brother got his hands on that computer, weird things began to happen. I spotted cars following me. My apartment was broken into. They found Pete’s naked body behind the old Travel Center Truck Stop. Chris lost what was left of his mind attempting to implicate Gerry, his sons, the whole town of Ashton in one big conspiratorial cover-up. And I’ll admit it. I followed him down that rabbit hole. I was so desperate to believe in my big brother again. I ended up on my knees right there with him, scouring the dingy floor for clues, another crackhead searching for crumbs in the carpet. Once Chris died, I knew I’d never get definitive answers. When so much remains open-ended, you can’t shut lids or get any closure. I’d grown to hate the Lombardi family, too.
I popped another piece of gum, chomping to suck every drop of precious nicotine, going at it so hard I was in danger of ripping out a filling. I could feel it again, the pressure in my chest, rib cage seizing up, organs and lungs on lockdown, the inability to catch my breath. I’d been having these attacks for the past year, and the pills the shrink gave me ran out a while ago.
Fuck it. I dug around my glove compartment for my stashed pack of Marlboros. The cigarette was stale as shit, like breathing cinder ash and dry rot, but damn it tasted good.
By the time I pulled into my driveway, I’d burned through my last five emergency butts, but at least the shortness of breath had subsided. I fished the wintergreen mints from my center console and ground my molars, searching for the spark. A quick brush with my finger, hot breath in my palm, and I was good to go.
I hopped down from the cab, staring at soft soles on hard ice, missing the sound my old boots made crunching snow.
“Where have you been?” Jenny asked soon as I walked in the door. Our fat cat, Beatrice, rubbed her girth against my pant leg, leaving behind tufts of white fur, mewling for more.
“Work.” I shook Beatrice off.
Jenny deadpanned, unsatisfied with my answer. I could feel her frustration bore a hole through the back of my head as I stepped around her for a beer. When I turned, she had her arms folded in a fighting stance, giving me the death stare.
“I had to sign off on a claim in the sticks.” I bent in the fridge and snagged the lone beer from the top shelf.
“This is why you can’t forget your cell. What’s the point of having a cell phone if you aren’t going to remember to take it with you?”
I slammed the door shut. “What’s the point of a cell, period? Jesus, Jenny. Does someone need to be accessible twenty-four hours a day?”
“When someone’s a father and a husband? Yes!” She wrinkled her nose. “Have you been smoking?”
I didn’t bother to deny it. Even with these last six months of patches and gum, I knew I was still impervious to the smell of cigarettes. To a nonsmoker like Jenny, I’m sure I stank like a skunk in the cabbage patch.
“I thought you decided you were going to quit.”
“I decided? Y’know, I’m a grown man, and if I want to have a cigarette after a shit day of work—”
“Keep your voice down. You’re going to wake Aiden.”
I popped the top from my brew and took a slug. “Where is my son?”
“Sleeping!”
We stood in the middle of the kitchen, staring each other down, high noon at eight thirty on a Friday night. Seemed all we ever did these days was fight. If we were talking at all.
Jenny blinked first. “What’s going on, Jay?”
I exhaled and dropped in a chair, guzzling half the beer in a single swig. I’d been geared up to go the moment I stuck my key in the hole. “DeSouza had me check on an accident. Sixteen-year-old kid cracked up his mom’s car. I saw some high school wrestling pics at their house. Turns out his brother died.”
“In the accident?”
“No, just . . . died.” I took another pull. “Drugs.”
I didn’t need to make the connection for her. My wife came behind my chair and slung her arms over me, hugging me tight.
“Maybe you should see Dr. Shapiro-Weiss again.”
“Insurance won’t cover any more visits, you know that.” Our HMO’s mental health policy was a joke.
“Then we pay out of pocket.”
“Yeah? With what money?” Even with the steady paycheck of NorthEastern Insurance, we weren’t exactly killing it financially. “We’ll find a way. We always do.”
I hopped up and went to the fridge for another beer. I swung open the door. All out. I checked the pantry, top shelf, bottom, everywhere in between. “Where’s the beer?”
“How should I know? You’re the one who drinks it. You need to talk to someone. You can’t keep this stuff bottled up. You have to find a way to deal with it.”
“It?” I spun around. “And where does ‘it’ go after I’m done dealing with ‘it,’ huh?”
“You know what I mean.”
“Yeah. I do. And there is no ‘it.’ ‘It’ is my watching my brother die in front of my eyes. ‘It’ is never getting to say goodbye or I’m sorry your life turned out to be such shit and that I couldn’t do more to fix it when there was still time. Therapy, sharing, all that self-help garbage is hippy bullshit. No reconciliation. No peace. No justice.” I grit my jaw. “That smug mutherfucke
r Lombardi might as well have pulled the trigger himself.”
“Lombardi? Gerry Lombardi is dead. He’s been dead almost as long as your brother. I wish he’d gone to prison too for what he did to those kids. But God took care of that—”
“I’m not talking about just Gerry. I mean Adam. Michael. That whole goddamn family—”
“That whole family? Jay, you sound like—” She pulled up short.
“Say it.”
Jenny shook her head. “What are you so angry for? You act like you’ve got it so bad. You don’t. You have a wife and son who love you, a steady job—”
“Steady job?”
“It’s nothing to sneeze at. In this economy? Marjorie’s husband Bob—”
“Bob? Who the hell is Bob? Who the hell is Marjorie?”
“The woman I work with at the bar? Do you listen when I talk? Marjorie’s husband Bob has been out of work since last October.”
“Why do I give a shit about some woman at a bar or her husband?”
“I work at a bar.”
“My point! Same lousy job you had when I got this one. What’s changed? Nothing!”
“I’m sorry you hate your job so much. I never told you—”
“What? To take it? Bullshit.”
“I never said you had to take that job.”
“No, you never did. Just like you never said I had to quit smoking cigarettes.”
“You want to get lung cancer? Talk out a hole in your throat? Keep smoking! If you don’t care enough to want to see your son—”
I stabbed a finger at her. “See! That!”
“What?”
“That. What you did there. ‘If I want to see my son.’ No, you didn’t say I had to take the job. But I still had to do what you wanted all the same—”
“That’s not fair.”
“You made it clear that if I wanted us to be a family, I had to do the things you decided were best.”
“I never once said that.”
“You didn’t have to. You threatened to move to Rutland. You threatened to take my son away because I wasn’t making enough money—”
“It was never about the money!”
“Whenever someone says ‘it’s not about the money,’ it’s always about the money.”
“Not true. I just thought you could be doing so much more than clearing out junk from dead people’s houses.”
“It’s called ‘estate clearing.’ It’s a legitimate career. Lots of people do it.”
Jenny tilted her head, a card player’s tell that I was pushing logic to its limit.
“Doesn’t matter what it’s called. I was happy.”
“When have you ever been happy, Jay?”
“Thanks for telling me how I feel.”
“Don’t play that game. Like I’m some shrew of a wife, harping about what you can and can’t do. You make me sound like one of those women who trapped you into getting married.”
I returned a blank stare.
“Fuck you, Jay. You asked. You practically begged!”
“I wanted to get married! I love you. I want to be with you and Aiden. But this?” I tugged at the tie, freeing myself from the noose, and chucked it to the ground.
“I can’t do this anymore,” she said. “Watching you skulk around, refusing to talk or get help. Even when you’re here, you’re not here. You’re emotionally unavailable—”
“‘Emotionally unavailable’? Where do you come up with this shit? What’s that even mean? Emotionally unavailable.”
“It means when you are married to someone, you don’t get to hoist burdens on your shoulders and act like carrying them around alone is heroic. Needing help doesn’t make you weak—”
“Actually, that’s the very definition of—”
“It makes you human.”
“You sound like one of those posters DeSouza has hanging in the office. Fucking Teamwork. Fucking Inspiration. Fucking birds flying together because they believe in themselves and not because flight is the result of millions of years of evolution—”
“If you hate it so much—leave!”
“Just the job?”
That was the big blow I had in my bag, the one I’d been waiting to use. Leveling it now was a cheap shot, but I’d take it. Let the possibility serve as warning to back the fuck off. I never intended to leave, and, Christ, I felt like an asshole when I saw Jenny’s eyes tear up. I knew I had gone too far. Even as I’d been throwing my tie to the ground, pitching a fit like a toddler who wasn’t getting his way, I felt ridiculous. But I couldn’t stop.
And that remorse only grew worse when I looked over and saw Aiden standing there in his PJ bottoms, little boy potbelly, wide-eyed and terrified. He ran to his mother’s side, like his father was some monster. My son didn’t even look at me. Neither would my wife. I couldn’t talk my way out of this now.
CHAPTER THREE
WHEN I LANDED the job at NEI, I got health insurance for the first time in my adult life. Which included mental health visits. I didn’t go for that touchy-feely crap, but I’d been having these fits, shortness of breath, vertigo, like my heart was about to seize up. I went to the clinic for a checkup, but everything checked out. The doctor said they were panic attacks, even though I’d never been accused of that before. Jenny urged me to see a psychiatrist. Even without her prodding, I knew Chris’ death had messed me up enough that I could use professional help. So I signed on. Three trips to a shrink. That’s all our HMO covered. Who the hell can sort out the shit I’d endured with my brother in three fifty-minute sessions?
Chris’ death last winter had officially been ruled “suicide by cop” after he ran out of an old farmhouse, waving a gun around, leaving the police no other choice. But everyone knew the real reason he died: drugs. My brother had been an addict most of his life. His reason for living. And, in the end, his reason for dying.
Last spring I’d met with Dr. Louise Shapiro-Weiss over in Longmont. For three weeks, I spilled my guts in that tiny office, serenaded by gurgling waterfalls and raindrops dribbling over smooth stones, the calming, tranquil soundtrack designed to quell my looney tunes. The longer I listened to myself drone on, the more I wanted to rip that babbling brook from the socket and smash it against the wall.
I knew I sounded as nutty as my brother, outlining secret backroom meetings, collusion to conceal true agendas. When I got to the part about the hit man pretending to be a detective in order to bury my brother beneath the ice of Echo Lake, our time was up. And not a moment too soon. I was surprised the doctor didn’t recommend I be committed. Instead, she wrote me a script for a sedative and wished me luck.
Some secrets are better left undisturbed. After Chris died, old man Lombardi kicked it. Heart attack fetching the morning paper. So what difference did it make now? Maybe my wife was right and I needed to suck it up, pay out of pocket, and see the doctor again. Desperate times and measures. I had to try something because what I was doing sure wasn’t working.
I needed a drink. I didn’t feel like driving in circles or sitting at a roadside bar alone. My buddy Charlie still lived in Ashton. Outside of Charlie, I didn’t have many friends. I knew where I’d find him. Same place he was every night. Glued to a stool, getting soused at the Dubliner. My old hometown pub was over an hour away because of the long detour around Lamentation Mountain, which wasn’t actually a single mountain but an entire range of them. What else could I do? A man without a country, I hit the 135 and headed east.
Couples fight, I told myself. She’ll put Aiden back to bed, make herself some tea. We’ll both take time to calm down. I’ll call her later and apologize for being a jerk. Wouldn’t be the first time. Sure as hell wouldn’t be the last.
I felt for my cell, cursing when I realized I’d forgotten it. Again.
* * *
“Look what the canary dragged in,” Charlie said, sizing up the target on the dartboard.
“You mean cat, you stupid fuck.” The man standing beside him drained the dregs of a beer a
nd set the empty pint glass down on a half wall.
A group huddled around my friend, anxiously awaiting the outcome of the next throw.
“Cat. Canary,” Charlie said. “Who gives a shit? When I nail this bullseye, Danny Boy, you are going to owe me a beer.”
On the television set above the bar, a newscaster reported on the Sox down in Fort Myers. Winter ball wrapping up, spring training around the corner, hope springs eternal.
Charlie lobbed a wobbly dart. A brief cheer erupted, drowned out by a chorus of boos when the fluttering shot missed its mark by six inches. Charlie dropped his head in exaggerated defeat. Another buddy clapped his back, whispering condolence, as someone else plucked the trio of darts from the board.
“I’m out,” Charlie said, fetching his empty pint off the half wall. He slung an arm around my shoulder, pulling me across the floor toward the tiki smoking porch outside.
Liam, the owner of the Dubliner, was setting up his guitar and mic stand at the dark end of the bar. Liam’s band, The January Men, used to play here on weekends. They’d broken up. Now he took the stage to sing his sad Irish songs alone, brushing strings, whispering lyrics. No one seemed to notice. I’d always thought his band sucked—they were too loud, never in sync, and you couldn’t hear what anyone was saying when they were bleating away—but it still beat this sad bastard music. At least when the band was together, everyone bashing on his instrument, it could be a good time. By the end of the night, the crowd would join in, whole bar screaming along, wasted. Sometimes a girl would take her shirt off. There’s comfort in numbers. Or maybe being with a group of other maniacs just hides the crazy.
“Hey!” Danny Boy called after Charlie. “Where’s my beer?”
“Put it on my tab,” Charlie hollered back. “Rita!” He held up his empty glass and pointed outside. “And one for my good friend, Jay Porter, hotshot investigator up from the big city.”
Rita, the barmaid and Liam’s wife, rolled her eyes.
“Don’t be an asshole,” I said.
