A Hard and Heavy Thing (3 page)

“I'm not just going to—”

“Nick. Trust me. Just wait for me outside. Find a pay phone. Call someone for a ride. Just go outside.”

Nick hesitated.

Eris opened her eyes again. Levi put his hands on her shoulders and bent down to look at her face. “Hey, hey. You doing all right?”

She pushed his face away and staggered up out of the wheelchair. “Outta my face,” she said. She took a step and stumbled into the wall in front of her before turning to face him.

“What the—” Levi could not believe what he was seeing.

She made like she was going to slap him across the face, but she was slow and her fingers just grazed his cheeks. It felt like flirting. “You just gonna leave me, asshole?”

“What did you take? Did you take anything? Are you just drunk? Are you faking?” Levi turned and paced back and forth in the hallway before stopping in front of her again. “Have you been faking this entire time?”

Nick's eyes went wide. “Oh thank God, thank God, thank God. Thank. God.”

“He's got nothing to do with this.” Eris smiled and winked at him. A drunk, wide, sarcastic smile. She swayed on her feet like a tired boxer.

“Are you—” Nick stopped. Scratched his head. “Are you okay then?”

“Of course she's okay,” Levi said. “This whole thing here is just her sick idea of a good time. Some sort of cry for help. Isn't it, Eris?”

Eris swaggered up to Nick, leaned against him, looked up into his innocent and confused face, and said, “You saved me.”

[I would have done anything to have heard those words myself. You didn't even notice.]

Through the double glass doors of the emergency room, Levi could see two women talking in the hallway. They glanced up at him. He stormed outside and left Nick and Eris, each in the arms of the other. Once he made it to the fresh air, he put a palm against the stone enclosure that held the trashcan. Anxiety and adrenaline washed over him when he left Eris there, fine, but not fine. The ordeal left him lightheaded and weak and furious. He took a deep breath and exhaled through quivering lips.

Nick helped Eris out the double glass doors of the hospital. She giggled. He walked her over to a bench near an ashtray.

The entire time Levi had known her, Eris's crass confidence, tie-dyed Phish shirts, and frayed jeans had all marked her as a girl apart. She was fun. She was dangerous. She was beautiful. She did not fit into the Abercrombie/American Eagle/GAP hierarchy like the private school girls Levi knew. He couldn't help but steal glances at her constantly, to the point where it wasn't stealing glances; it was leering. Yet, he found he couldn't even talk to her. Nick, on the other hand, had developed a theretofore alien aplomb in her presence, and he had no problem talking to her. In fact, here she was now, hanging all over him.

Levi started across the parking lot.

He heard Nick running after him. “Where are you going?”

Levi kept walking away, across the parking lot, and away from whatever cruel joke was going on.

“Dude, relax. She's been worse.”

Nick caught up to him. They walked side by side for a while. The night air felt cooler. It felt better now that the girl was gone and they weren't dragging dead weight between them.

At Perkins, Levi used the phone at the cashier's counter while Nick waited outside.

When Levi returned, Nick said, “Wish you wouldn't have done that. We could have walked back.”

Levi sat on the bench in front of the restaurant.

“We should go get Eris.”

Levi lit a cigarette and stared at the drifting smoke. He waved it in front of his face and watched the trails behind the cherry-comets streaming through the maples beyond the parking lot.

Nick paced.

They were quiet a moment. Then Nick stopped and said, “So when are you going to call your mom back? You know, about your grandpa?”

Levi looked up at the sky, which was black, cloudless, and full of stars. All the memories of the man came flooding back to him. The slimy blood from the inside of a rainbow trout. The heavy panting of a young boy trying to keep up. Copper pennies underneath starched white pillowcases and the tonguing of empty sockets where baby teeth once grew. Holding a hand covered in rough scabs and burn scars from long days welding boilers.
Gunsmoke,
John Wayne, and
Bonanza.

He stood up. “I don't know.” He stepped on his cigarette butt. “Can you believe the way my mother broke the news? I mean, it's my grandpa, not some random person. It hath pleased Almighty God? Really?”

“I don't know.” Nick stepped on his own cigarette butt. “I mean look at all this.” He spread his arms out to demonstrate the expanse of the night sky. “None of it is an accident. I mean, like, he was sick anyway, right? And was probably going to die anyway.”

“Just stop,” Levi said. “I know where you're going, and don't. Just stop.”

“But just listen for a second. If he didn't die when he did, then your mom wouldn't have called when she did, and if she didn't call when she did, we may never have heard Eris making noises in the bathtub.” He looked at the ground and started moving again. He waved his hands and spoke more rapidly, as if he were having a revelation. As if his visions were divine and not neurological misfires manifested from chemical reactions to the acid-molly cocktail he had dropped earlier in the night. “If we never heard Eris making noises in the bathtub, we'd still be dinking around in the living room. Who knows when we would have found her? I mean, probably not until we took a shower. If we didn't find her when we did, we couldn't have brought her to the hospital, and who knows what would have happened? She could have choked on her own vomit, died in her sleep, or who knows what. I mean—” He stopped and rubbed his big meaty hand over his fuzzy hair again. “I mean isn't it possible that God took your grandpa at just the right time? For your own good?” Nick stopped pacing and looked at his friend. A hopeful smile played at the corners of his mouth. He lifted his light eyebrows in query above his big, dark, tripping-black, deep-space eyeballs.

Nick had been so focused on his revelation that he couldn't have seen Levi's demeanor grow dim. He couldn't have seen Levi clench his fists. And when he looked up hopefully, he couldn't have had time to register the right jab coming at his face.

Levi's fist connected with Nick's nose as soon as he looked up from the ground. He felt Nick's nose crack under his knuckles.

[This was anger.]

His much-larger friend fell to the ground without even drawing his hands to his face or dropping them to the ground to brace his fall. Nick looked up from the ground with his forehead folded in confusion. Blood streamed from his nose, over his mouth, and down his chin.

Nick put his hand up to his chin, touched the blood, and apologized.

“I'm sorry, Levi,” he said as he looked at the blood on his fingers. Nick wiped his palm across his mouth and chin. He wiped his bloody hand across his jeans.

Levi wanted to scream down at Nick that he was naïve, he didn't understand, didn't know how Levi felt. But he couldn't say any of those things because they weren't true. If anyone knew the pain of losing someone, it was Nick. Instead of making things worse, which is all he really wanted to do, he walked away.

He walked aimlessly for several blocks before he returned to the hospital. The fluorescent lights in the hallways burned his eyes. He found the chapel and walked into the dimly lit room. He contemplated walking to the front to say a prayer at the altar. He had seen people do that in movies. He sat down in the back pew.

[This was bargaining.]

From the vaulted ceilings high above the red carpet and wooden pews hung fixtures with amber globes that dimmed the light shining through them. He thought of taking a candle from the altar. He could touch the small flame to the ornate paraments until flames engulfed the entire place for all its false hopes and unanswered prayers.

The night before his grandpa left for Arizona, where the weather was supposed to help keep him alive, they drank beer together and pissed in the backyard of the house his grandparents had just sold. Grandpa said, as he always said, “Don't tell your grandmother.” That night, the generation gap narrowed. It seemed like a small crack in an old sidewalk; spiders could touch both sides. But now, with a head full of acid, Levi clearly saw that his current mess of a night reflected the aggregate of his life. A Technicolor map of mazes with no ends. Realizing this, he saddened. The generation gap now seemed huge, like the great Grand Canyon. Nothing could touch both sides.

He folded his hands and bowed his head and tapped his toes until the restlessness grabbed him around the throat and squeezed and forced him to get up and move.

Levi dropped his pink earmuffs into a trashcan outside the door of the hospital. He breathed in the fresh air of late summer, and he felt the cool breeze from the river on his face. He began walking back to the house that held his upstairs flat.

He stopped only briefly to decline a ride from a truck driver looking to spread the Gospel. The man scared Levi as he pulled up, engine roaring. He hung out the window, leering. His wrinkled face, pushy demeanor, and evil smirk were all incongruous with the collared shirt and tie he wore inside the cab. “Need a ride?” he called down before spitting a line of tobacco through the gap where his front teeth should have been.

When Levi shook his head no, the man called out, “Been saved?”

“Not interested.”

“You should be.”

“Move along old man,” Levi said as the man's trailer-less big rig crawled along beside him, out of place on the nearly deserted residential road.

“Suit yourself,” the man said before closing his window and driving ahead.

Levi squinted against the sun that was just beginning to rise. He walked through town under streetlights. Each one seemed to turn off at the moment he passed. He walked through the bar districts, playgrounds, and parking lots. When he reached home, he kept walking. He didn't want to go inside and explain to Nick—who wouldn't understand—where he went and why he went there.

Hours later when he arrived home thirsty, lightheaded, and weak, he found his mother had left a message on the answering machine pleading with him to make the twenty-minute drive back to Bangor to be with the family. And if he wouldn't come home, would he at least please call her so she knew that he knew about Grandpa?

Levi lay on the couch without his shoes. Too tired to do anything, but too strung out to sleep, he allowed colors and images of the night to pulse and dance and flicker on his eyelids.

He heard the fridge open. When he looked up, he saw Eris through the pass-through window. She lifted her eyebrows in surprise as Levi caught her drinking directly from a jug of apple juice. She returned the bottle and wiped her mouth with her arm. She stood in the doorway of the living room and flipped her black hair. Her face was scrubbed clean of makeup, but she still looked like she was blushing. She wore a small pair of purple boxer shorts, which revealed taught calves and curved hamstrings, nearly all the way up to the rondure of her bottom. The white cotton tank top she wore was cut low enough to reveal the tan line that separated the summer-kissed skin of her chest from her alabaster breasts. She was not wearing a bra.

“What are you doing here?” Levi asked.

She yawned and stretched, oblivious to the fact that Levi had seen girls in magazines selling sex with the same poses while wearing more clothes. He turned on the couch to hide his arousal. He heard her bare feet stick to the linoleum with each step as she walked away. He rolled onto his back.

Sometime later, she returned holding a pair of strappy cork wedges. She now wore a black dress that clung to her hips. He looked at the ceiling to avoid staring. She looked better to him in the dress than she had just moments before.

She sat on the edge of the couch, her back pressing against his side. She put her shoes on the floor and slipped her feet in. “You need to come to church with us,” she said.

“You're going to church?” Levi asked.

Some people are church people, and some people are not church people. Eris was not a church person.

Nick, on the other hand, he could understand. Or at least, tolerate. Nick was born a church person. His Uncle Thomas was a preacher and, if Lutherans had nuns, his Oma would have been one. Those old saints were the only family Nick had left, and he had to cling to something.

[If this were one of the creative writing workshops I took in school, no one would buy this. Everyone would probably say acid + ecstasy + dying girl = okay, but acid + ecstasy + dying girl turns out just fine + they wake up early to go to church = implausible, but obviously they don't know you like I do. And I don't need to explain to you that teenagers + incongruity does not = implausibility.]

Levi got off the couch and went to the kitchen. He grabbed the jug of juice from the fridge and made a show of wiping off its mouth before drinking from it himself. He was about to tell Eris off, tell her to not bother asking again. He wasn't going. Not now. Not ever again. And she should know better. But when he turned the corner, he saw Nick shuffling out of his bedroom.

Levi met him down the hall and whispered, “Did she stay here with you last night? And she's going to church with you? What's going on?”

Nick took the jug from Levi and drank. He wiped his mouth with the back of his hand. “I'll tell you later.”

Levi raised an eyebrow.

“I will,” Nick said.

“Okay,” Levi said, skeptical.

[We told each other everything. I know you like you know yourself.]

“Want us to wait for you?” Nick asked.

Levi looked down at the floor because he couldn't bear to look at Nick's disfigured face. His nose was crooked and swollen, obviously broken. The trauma had bruised the skin under his eyes a deep purple. Despite his wounds, Levi sensed no checked aggression. On the contrary, Nick's eyes were full of a naked, earnest hope.