Chances Are . . .

by Richard Russo

  * * *

  —

  MICKEY GIRARDI WAS FROM a rough, working-class neighborhood in West Haven, Connecticut, famous for bodybuilders, Harleys and ethnic block parties. His parents were Irish and Italian, his old man a construction worker, his mother a secretary at an insurance agency, both deeply committed to assimilation. They flew the flag and not just on the Fourth. A veteran of the Second World War, his father could’ve taken advantage of the G.I. Bill but knew a guy who could get him into the pipefitters union, which he figured was better. Mickey was the youngest of eight, the other seven all girls, and he was spoiled rotten in so many respects—clothes bought especially for him, his own room right from the start. Okay, it was about the size of a closet, but so what? The family’s house was large, as it needed to be, but modest, only three blocks from the beach, great in the summer when cool breezes came in off the water. When the wind changed direction, though, you felt like you were living under the nearby interstate, the traffic noise was so loud. Sunday dinners, you were home and no excuses. Spaghetti with sausage and meatballs and pork shoulder braising in tomato sauce. Michael Sr.’s mother’s recipe, handed down reluctantly to her Irish daughter-in-law, with one or two key ingredients left out for the sake of contrast. Family first, America second—or maybe vice versa these days, with so many grubby longhairs always flashing their imbecilic peace signs—everything else a distant third.

  For Mickey, music came first. His first job was sweeping up the mall music store where he’d seen a Fender Stratocaster in the window and fallen in love. After the guitar came an amp. In a band at age thirteen. By sixteen, sneaking into raunchy New Haven bars and sitting in with older guys whose girlfriends didn’t wear bras and seemed to enjoy revealing this fact by bending over in front of Mickey, who would later joke with Lincoln and Teddy that he had a hard-on for all of 1965. “I catch you doing drugs with those guys,” his father warned, “you’re gonna be the first kid in America ever beaten to death with a Fenson guitar.”

  “Fender,” Mickey corrected him.

  “Bring it here then, smart-ass. We’ll do it right now. Save time.”

  About the last thing in the world Mickey wanted to do was go to college. In school he’d always hovered between mediocre and piss-poor, but all his sisters had gone or were going, and college was what his mother wanted. Community college, live at home, was the plan. Mr. Easy, his mother called him. Always the path of least resistance. Mickey supposed she was right. He wasn’t terribly ambitious. But he failed to see what was so wrong with staying in West Haven. With his sisters gone, there was plenty of room, except on Sundays and holidays.

  Unfortunately, even to go to the community college, you had to take the SAT, so one Saturday morning Mickey did. Not wanting to disappoint his mother by being the only kid ever rejected by a community college because of his SATs, he’d declined a gig the night before and actually gotten a good night’s sleep. He figured it wouldn’t kill him to try for once. Tuition was cheap, and if he did well enough to snag a few bucks to help with books and expenses, it’d put him in good with the old man.

  When the results came back, his mother met his father at the door. “Have a look at this,” she said, pointing to their son’s score, which was in the top two percent. “The kid’s brilliant.”

  Since Mickey was the only kid in the room, his father looked around to make sure another wasn’t hiding somewhere. “Which kid?”

  “This one,” his mother said. “Your son.”

  His father scratched his head. “This one right here?”

  “Yes. Our Michael.”

  His father studied the SAT results, then his wife, then Mickey, then his wife again. “Okay,” he said finally. “Who’s the father? I’ve always wondered.”

  The next day, Michael Sr. was still trying to work it out. “Take a walk with me,” he said, grabbing Mickey’s shoulder with a meaty paw. When they were down the block and out of earshot, he said, “All right, come clean and I promise I won’t be mad. Who’d you get to take that test for you?”

  Mickey felt his left eye twitch. “You know what, Pop?” he began.

  “Don’t say it,” his father warned.

  “Fuck you,” Mickey said, completing his thought.

  Senior stopped walking and threw up his hands. “You said it.” Then he cuffed his son on the back of the head, hard enough to make his eyes water. “Help me out here, because I want to understand. You’re saying this test is on the up-and-up?”

  Mickey nodded.

  “You’re telling me you’re smart.”

  “I’m not telling you anything,” Mickey said.

  “You’re telling me that all this time you could’ve done good in school and made your mother proud?”

  Mickey felt that seeing things in this light took some of the luster off the near-perfect SAT. He shrugged.

  “What were we thinking?” his father said, more to himself than his son. “We were doing so good with girls.”

  “Sorry,” Mickey said.

  “Okay, listen up, ’cause this is what’s gonna happen. You’re gonna go to college and you’re gonna do good. No discussion. You either make your mother proud or you don’t come home.”

  Mickey started to object, only to discover he wasn’t sure he wanted to. He himself was still processing the remarkable SAT results and had begun thinking beyond community college. At West Haven High, when word got around about his SATs, several of his former teachers stopped him in the hall. “Hey, what’ve we been telling you?” was what they all wanted to know. So instead of objecting to his old man’s command, he said, “Can I major in music?”

  His father looked at the sky, then at him. “Why do you always have to push your luck?”

  “So I can major in music?”

  “Fine,” Senior said. “Major in Fenson guitars for all I care.”

  Mickey thought about correcting him, but his father did have a point. He was always pushing his luck.

  * * *

  —

  WHAT WERE THE ODDS these three would end up assigned to the same freshman-dorm suite at Minerva College on the Connecticut coast? Because yank out one thread from the fabric of human destiny, and everything unravels. Though it could also be said that things have a tendency to unravel regardless.

  Lincoln

  September was the best month on the island. The crowds were gone, the beaches empty, the ocean still warm. No need for restaurant reservations. After Labor Day, the politicians had all returned to D.C., the left-wing Hollywood/media types to L.A. and New York. Also gone were the smug, privileged frat boys, many of whom imagined themselves Democrats but who in the fullness of time would become mainstream Republicans. Half of Lincoln’s Las Vegas agency—or what was left of it after the Great Recession—was made up of Sigma Chis who’d been long-haired pot smokers and war protesters in the sixties and seventies. Now they were hard-line conservatives, or anyway harder than Lincoln. These days, a lifelong Republican himself, Lincoln had a difficult time finding comfort anywhere on the political spectrum. Voting for Hillary was out of the question, but if not her, then who? A baker’s dozen of GOP candidates were still in the race—some legitimately stupid, others acting like it—at least through Iowa. So Kasich, maybe. Bland wouldn’t be so bad. Think Eisenhower.

  Anyway, a relief to shelve politics for a few days. Lincoln had little doubt that Teddy, who would arrive tomorrow, was still a raging lib, though there was no way of telling whether he’d be in the Clinton or the Sanders camp. Mickey? Did he even vote? Probably not a bad idea to give Vietnam a conversational miss, as well. The war had been over for decades, except not really, not for men their age. It had been their war, whether or not they’d served. Though his memory was increasingly porous these days, Lincoln still remembered that evening back in 1969 when all the hashers had gathered in the back room of the Theta house to watch the draft lottery on a tiny bl
ack-and-white TV someone had brought in for the occasion. Had they asked permission to watch on the big TV in the front room? Probably not. The social boundaries of sororities, like so much else in the culture, had started eroding, as evidenced by their regular Friday afternoon hasher parties, but they could still crop up unexpectedly. Hashers still entered the house through the rear. Anyway, the draft wasn’t about the Thetas, it was about Lincoln and Teddy and Mickey and the others. Eight young men whose fortunes that night hung in the balance. A couple were dating Thetas, as Lincoln would the following year with Anita, and planned to see them later in the evening, but they’d watch the lottery on the crappy little set in the back room, not the big color one in the front room, because they belonged there, as did the war itself.

  They’d made a party of it, everybody chipping in for a case of beer—strictly against the rules, but Cook wouldn’t squeal, not that night. The rule was that you couldn’t start drinking until your birthday had been drawn and you knew your fate. Mickey’s came first, shockingly early. Number 9. How was it that Lincoln could recall this detail, when time had relegated so much else to memory’s dustbin? He remembered, too, how his friend had risen to his feet, his arms raised like a victorious boxer, as if he’d been hoping for precisely this eventuality. Going over to the aluminum tub, he’d pulled a beer out of the ice, popped the top and chugged half of it. Then, wiping his mouth on his sleeve, he’d grinned and said, “You boys must be feeling pretty dry in the mouth right about now.” The other thing Lincoln recalled was glancing over at Teddy and seeing that all the blood had drained out of his face.

  Absent from these vivid memories, though, was how he’d comported himself. Had he joined the others in serenading Mickey with the Canadian national anthem? Had he laughed at the god-awful jokes (“Been nice knowin’ ya, Mick”)? He had a dim, perhaps false, memory of taking Mickey aside at some point and saying, “Hey, man, it’s a long way off.” Because even those who’d drawn low numbers probably wouldn’t hear from their draft boards for months, and college students were allowed to finish that academic year. Most juniors in good standing—as Lincoln, Teddy and Mickey were—would get one-year deferments to complete their degrees before reporting for duty. Maybe by then the war would be over or, failing that, winding down.

  Later that evening Lincoln called home, hoping his mother would answer, though naturally it was his father who picked up. “We watched,” he said, his nasal, high-pitched voice exaggerated by the tinny, long-distance connection. “Like I told your mother, they won’t go beyond one-fifty.” As with all his father’s opinions, this one was expressed as fact.

  “Unless you’re wrong and they do,” Lincoln said, emboldened, perhaps, by being three thousand miles away.

  “But I’m not and they won’t,” Dub-Yay had assured him, probably to allay Lincoln’s fear, though he sometimes wondered if his father’s pronouncements served some other, more obscure purpose. Ever since his mother let him in on the truth about their family finances, his father’s declarations had begun to tick him off. “How did the other Stooges make out?” Dub-Yay wanted to know. (Lincoln had told his parents that he and Teddy and Mickey, so unlike the preppy Minerva boys with rich parents, had come to think of themselves as the Three Musketeers, to which his father had immediately responded, “Three Stooges would be more like it.”)

  Lincoln swallowed hard. “Mickey got nailed. Number nine.”

  “It’s a foolish war,” his father conceded. “But you don’t get to hold out for a just one.”

  Lincoln supposed he agreed, but it still annoyed him that his father would be so cavalier where his friends were concerned. “What would you say if I went to Canada?” Lincoln ventured.

  “Not one blessed thing.” This statement was delivered without hesitation, as if Dub-Yay had been anticipating the question, given it some serious thought and was anxious, as always, to share his conclusions. “The moment you did that, you would no longer be my son, and we wouldn’t be speaking. I didn’t name you after Abraham Lincoln so you could become a draft dodger. How fared Brother Edward?”

  That was his nickname for Teddy, who’d visited them in Dunbar that summer. Lincoln’s mother had liked him immediately, but Dub-Yay hadn’t been impressed. It was W. A. Moser’s deeply held conviction that a single round of golf would reveal everything you needed to know about a man’s character, and he had made up his mind about Teddy on the first tee when he failed to remove his wristwatch. Nothing pleased Wolfgang Amadeus more than to extrapolate the world from a grain of sand. In retrospect, though, Lincoln doubted the wristwatch incident had anything to do with his misgivings about his friend. More likely Teddy had said something provocative about the war or remarked that all the members of the Dunbar Country Club were white and the staff Latino.

  “Teddy’s safe,” Lincoln said. “Three hundred–something.”

  “Just as well. I can’t imagine what earthly use that boy would be in combat.” Or anything else, he seemed to be saying.

  Had Lincoln even spoken to his mother that evening? Here again, memory, like a conscientious objector, refused to serve.

  What was etched vividly in Lincoln’s brain, however, was the moment when all three Musketeers emerged from the Theta house and found their beautiful d’Artagnan shivering in the December cold out back. Just as he remembered the shameful thought that had entered his head unbidden—You lucky dog!—when she took a surprised Mickey in her arms and hugged him tight. You had only to glance at Teddy to know he was thinking the same thing.

  Jacy. Vanished from this very island. Memorial Day weekend, 1971.

  * * *

  —

  IT WAS STILL EARLY when the ferry docked in Vineyard Haven on Friday. Lincoln was supposed to have gotten there the night before, but thunderstorms at O’Hare had put him into Boston late; by the time he’d picked up his rental car and driven to Woods Hole he’d missed the last boat. He thought about calling Mickey, who lived somewhere nearby, but he’d mentioned his band had a gig that night, so there was nothing to do but check into a motel near the ferry landing. After e-mailing Anita to let her know he’d arrived safely, he considered walking into town to see if there was someplace still open for dinner, but he was exhausted, and his lower back was stiff with travel, so he decided instead to go to bed hungry. More weary than sleepy, he lay awake in the musty room, wondering what further ravages merciless time had wrought upon his friends and, sure, how he’d look to them. It’d been—what, a decade since he’d last seen them? No, not quite, because everybody at the Minerva reunion had been discussing the astonishing fact that America had elected a black president. Thank God for name tags, he remembered thinking. And for Anita, who never had any trouble recognizing people across eternities, though it was possible she’d followed them on Facebook or Googled them in advance. Every time she introduced Lincoln to one of her Theta sorority sisters, it was all he could do not to say, You’re kidding. Really? The men seemed to have fared better, though the years had punished them, too. The athletes in particular had gone to seed. At the last sighting Teddy was still trim, his face unlined except for crow’s-feet at the corners of his eyes, but his hair had thinned and his face appeared gaunt after an illness he seemed reluctant to name. No surprise there. He’d always been protective of his privacy. Mickey still had a head full of dark, curly hair that was only just starting to fleck with salt, and he still wore it relatively long, but he was working a beer gut that would’ve been his defining physical characteristic if he hadn’t been nearly six foot six. His good looks had always been of the rugged variety, but to Lincoln it looked like he’d been in a series of bar fights. And maybe he had been. Though usually the gentlest of giants, his temper would inexplicably flare up, and when it did, watch out.

  Like that time they’d gone over to the SAE house. What, junior year? Three SAE pledges, as part of some initiation ritual, had crashed their hasher party with the Thetas that Friday afternoon
, and in gratitude for not being tossed out they’d invited the whole crew to a bash at their frat that evening. Mickey had advised against going. “If we do,” he warned, “there’ll be trouble.” Which made no sense. The SAEs hadn’t caused any problems that afternoon, and their invitation had sounded genuine enough. But Mickey, who’d already drunk so much beer that he kept dropping soapy pots on the kitchen floor, would not be talked out of his mark-my-words prophecy. In the end, despite his dark misgivings, the others had convinced him to go along, just in case he was right and there was trouble. If things headed south, it would be smart to have Mickey on hand.

  To screw up their courage Lincoln, Teddy, Mickey and the other hashers had returned to their apartment and drained the rest of the keg before heading over, en masse, to the frat. Only Teddy had stayed behind, claiming that Cook’s disgusting beef Stroganoff had set his stomach roiling, though Lincoln suspected a more likely cause was the possibility of a brawl. The SAE’s front door was flanked by two large stone lions, and Mickey, swaying on his feet, had set an empty beer can on the head of the nearest one. They could hear loud music pumping inside and wondered how anyone would be able to hear the bell when they rang it. Someone did, though—happily a pledge who’d been at the party that afternoon. He was a big kid, almost Mickey’s size, and looked like he’d been drinking ever since. It took him an inebriated moment to place them, but then he flung the door wide open and cried, “Gentlemen! Enter!” At which point Mickey stepped forward and punched him in the face. Unless Lincoln was misremembering, they’d all just stood there in the entryway, staring stupidly down at the coldcocked kid, until finally one of the other hashers put a hand on Mickey’s shoulder and said, “Well, you did warn us.”

  By the following morning everyone at the Theta house had heard about the incident, and there was talk of firing the lot of them. Jacy, herself furious, arrived at their apartment midmorning and commenced pounding on the door. Lincoln and Teddy, groggy and hungover, had only just gotten up, but the sight of a livid Jacy brought them fully awake. “Where is he?” she said, pushing past them, and then, when they didn’t answer quickly enough, “Never mind. I’ll find him myself.”