The Cranberry Hush: A Novel (28 page)

“Well do you want to go?” He was fanning his flushed face
with the tickets.

“I don’t know. I guess you can have my ticket. Take whoever
you want.”

He stopped fanning. “Why do you have to be like that?”

“Like what?”

He sighed. “Fine, I’ll take whoever I want.” He put one
ticket in the front pocket of his t-shirt, dark in the pits and sagging like
too much skin over his thin chest, and threw the other one at me. It did a few
curly loops in the air and came to rest against my shoe.

There was a silence between us that even punk rock
filling the arena at a chest-pounding volume could not penetrate. Our tickets
were general admission for the floor. We were twenty feet from the stage, on
the edges of what was fast becoming a mosh pit. People kept stepping on my
toes, bumping my shoulders, pressing against me. People in soaking wet shirts,
in no shirts, in bone-white bras and bare flesh. Usually the idea of a crushing
orgy of half-naked young men and women would be sexy, but not here and not now.
I received an elbow in the ribs and I shoved the guy I assumed it belonged to.
I expected him to retaliate; maybe even wanted him to—I was almost
craving a fight. Instead he gave me a crazy-eyed grin and then shoved the guy
standing next to him. Mosh dominoes.

I used the claustrophobia and the reeking strangers and my
ringing ears to stoke a rage inside me. And when it was burning nice and hot I
turned my eyes to Griff, who was hopping up and down beside me like a fucking
pogo stick.

Was he
happy
in
this place? Was he at home in this tight, smelly cacophony? Was this
him
? It was not me. We would never be
compatible and we could never be together. There. Done. Finished. After all
that, he wasn’t even someone I wanted to be with! We were too different. Way
too different. It was easier then, easier to know that fate and biology were
the least of our problems. When all was said and done, I could barely even
stand
the guy.

Right?

The frontman of Elsewhen, shirtless with sleeve tattoos and
wearing cut-off Dickies, stopped screaming into his microphone long enough to
do a back-flip off a speaker.

Griff, his face flushed in the swirling colored lights, his
hair damp, was mouthing something at me. Though he was only inches away, I
couldn’t hear him. I gave up after his second shout and returned my eyes to the
stage. He cupped his fingers around my ear and screamed, “Are you having fun?”
It was in the middle of the fourth or fifth song of the set. And after he’d
said it, maybe a half-second later, the legs of some crowd-surfer went over us.
I saw a black leather belt with metal studs. The crowd-surfer’s black boot met
the back of Griff’s head. I heard the
thump
even over the music; maybe I felt it myself. His fingers tore away from my ear
as he started to go down. I yelled but it made no sound. Not even I could hear
it.

I had heard of people being trampled to death in crowds
without anyone around them noticing, not until the crowd dispersed and a
crushed body was discovered among the litter and footprints. I started to
panic.

But Griff didn’t go all the way down. He was supported by
the tightness of the crowd—there was no empty space to slump into. I got
my hands under his wet armpits and hoisted him to his feet. His hair had fallen
down in front of his eyes and I couldn’t immediately tell that they were open,
but fluttering and dazed. He started to sink back down. No one noticed. I knew
no amount of yelling or flailing was going to clear anyone away.

I kneeled down, taking a deep breath first as though I were
going under water, and leaned against his legs so that he tipped forward over
my shoulder. Then I stood up, locked my arm around the backs of his thighs and
fought my way forward. His black Converse stuck out in front of us and
mercilessly crunched against shoulders, chests and faces, parting us a path
through the crowd. I felt his fingers squeeze my waist and then clutch my belt
but he made no other movement.

The crowd thinned at the outskirts of the pit. I carried him
to the back of the floor, waiting there a moment because I thought I would need
to catch my breath. His shoelaces swung in front of me; colored lights played
over his jeans. I adjusted my grip on his legs and then I carried him to the
landing at the top of the first set of stairs, past rows of people standing on
seats, just scenery—it was just me and Griff in this arena. He felt
light. Maybe I just didn’t want to ever put him down. I carried him up to the
second landing and then out into the empty corridor that encircled the arena. I
brought him to a soda machine and knelt down and, in a series of jerky movements,
slid him off my shoulder and leaned him against it. The side of the machine
dimpled. He promptly threw up in his lap.

I bought him an Elsewhen t-shirt, gray with blue letters, in
a size that would actually fit him, and helped him change.

*

Griff turned down the Elsewhen and tapped the red
dial behind the steering wheel. “Jetta needs gas,” he said.

“You still have almost half a tank.”

“It takes diesel,” he said. “You can’t find it everywhere so
you have to get it where you find it.”

“Ah.”

We pulled into a Tedeschi’s with a gas station and I watched
him in the side mirror as he unscrewed the tank cap and filled his new car. He
drummed his fingers on the charcoal roof.

I liked watching people pump gas. It felt almost intimate, a
thing they didn’t think about being observed at. Like watching someone brush
their teeth—they get lost in themselves. He looked across the salt-white
street, put his hair behind his ear, rubbed his nose between his forefinger and
thumb. What was he thinking about, I wondered. About Beth? About packing up his
new car and driving to Phoenix? About what highways he would take, what giant
roadside balls of yarn and chocolate cows he would pose for photos with on the
way?

When the nozzle clunked full he walked across the lot to the
convenience store, pulling his wallet from his back pocket as he went. I leaned
back on the headrest. I was glad I’d taken the afternoon off. For all the time
he’d been at my house, we hadn’t had much time alone together. It was
easy—it was just starting to be easy.

But Phoenix loomed.

He got back in the car, emptied some change into the
cupholder between the bucket seats. He tossed into my lap a package of Hostess
Snoballs—pink, coconutty, almost alive the way a sea sponge is alive. I
tore open the cellophane wrapper and held one out to him.

“Come to daddy,” he said, coaxing it off the cardboard onto
his palm. He pried off the coconut-and-marshmallow shell and ate the chocolate
cupcake hidden underneath. He held the marshmallow, jiggling and quivering, in
his open hand. “Isn’t it almost arousing? It’s practically begging me to fuck
it.”

“I knew you weren’t completely straight,” I said, biting
into the other Snoball. “You’re one of those cocosexuals, aren’t you?”

“You caught me. Should we go have an awkward game of pool
now?”

I laughed. He folded the marshmallow shell in half and
crammed its entirety into his mouth. Pink strands of coconut poked out between
his lips as he attempted to chew.

In Orleans we parked in the snow-packed lot of a
little pub called Soundings. The walls inside were lined with old photos of
fishermen, some in frames but most tacked up with push-pins; the bar was lined
with old fishermen perched like gargoyles on wooden stools. All old men on the
Cape looked like fishermen to me—they looked crusty, weathered, even if
all they’d ever done was own a goldfish. Maybe it was the salt air.

A stereo behind the bar played Neil Young. Our waitress, a
wide woman with gray-streaked hair pulled back in a ponytail, whose name-tag
said Lois, brought beers to our booth while we looked at the menu. It was
written out longhand and the prices were marked on little white stickers.

Griff took a swig of beer, swished it through his teeth like
mouthwash, swallowed, licked foam from his lips. “Talked to my cousin Dave yesterday,”
he said.

“Oh yeah?” I rotated my glass slowly counter-clockwise on a
napkin. “He buy his hot-tub yet?”

“Yeah, it was delivered.”

“Cool.”

“One of those ones with all the spouts and seats for like
twenty people.”

“I have a kiddie pool,” I said, looking across at him, not
even sure what I meant by it.

“A what?”

“You know, those plastic kiddie pools.” I looked down at my
glass. “It has pictures of starfish.”

“And you use this for what?”

“Came with the house. Last summer I’d fill it up and sit out
there and read.”

“But it’s not deep, right?”

“About like this.” I held my hands a few inches apart.

Lois brought our burgers and then disappeared to find us a
bottle of ketchup.

“Anyway,” he said, banging the bottle against his palm, “the
trip’ll give me something to do, you know? I figure I can get out there pretty
cheap.”

One of the old guys at the bar put his hand on the shoulder
of the guy sitting next to him. “Barney?” he said.

“It’s something to do, all right,” I said, returning my eyes
from Barney to my plate. I ate a fry. It was good, had some kind of seasoning
on it. Spicy.

“You know what?” Griff said, leaning forward a little,
brushing his sleeve against a pickle. “You should come with me! What do you
think? You can keep me company on the way out there and I’ll buy you a plane
ticket home. We could take our time, see the country. It’d be like that summer
road trip we took in college.” There was a glimmer in his eyes that made me
want to say yes. I would’ve liked nothing more.

“But I have the store.”

“Oh—right. Yeah.”

He put the burger to his lips and was about to take a bite
when there was a thud at the bar. The man named Barney had fallen backward, was
lying on his back on the floor with one leg over the toppled stool.

Griff spun around. I got up fast without first sliding out
of the booth—the edge of the table slammed my crotch. The ketchup bottle
tipped over and rolled into Griff’s lap. He absent-mindedly placed it back on
the table.

The other men at the bar were scrambling into a group
surrounding the one on the floor. One busied himself with uprighting the stool.
The few other people in the pub were standing, some moving toward the bar,
sneaking to it, almost, in a way that made clear they were only there to watch
and wanted nothing to do with any blood.

“Is he OK?” I said to Griff.

“I think—don’t you know CPR?”

“In health class!”

One of the old fishermen was kneeling with his hand on the
guy’s chest. He held his cheek over the guy’s mouth, waited for a moment
without moving. Griff and I got up and stood on the edge of what had become a
semicircle around the sick man. The bartender was on the phone asking for an
ambulance. When it seemed it was up to me alone to help the guy, Lois pushed
through the circle and told everyone to step back. People parted and Griff and
I were given a scenic view neither of us really wanted. Lois started pumping
the man’s chest, shapeless beneath his green plaid shirt, then breathing into
his thin-lipped mouth. She did this for five minutes, maybe ten. Griff stood at
my side, his arms folded, his fingers anxiously drumming on his elbow. I began
to hear the distant but oh so reassuring wail of sirens.

But then, just like that, the old fisherman died.

His transition from living to dead was amazingly obvious
maybe because it didn’t happen everywhere at once. His lips were still alive
even as his eyes were dead, and then his nose. It was like a curtain being
pulled from his forehead down to the bottom of his white-stubbled chin.

“Barney,” growled the guy kneeling beside him. He had a
thick, phlegmy voice I suspected a good throat-clearing could do nothing to
smooth. “Come on.” He took Barney’s liver-spotted hand and squeezed it white,
whiter.

Lois kept doing CPR, now with her eyes mostly closed, until
the paramedics came through the door. The man kneeling beside the old guy
looked from Lois to these new men, the rescuers, with hesitation, with
skepticism, as though unsure whether these strangers could help his friend
better than their familiar waitress could.

“Let them do it, Stu,” Lois said, and she stood up to let
the paramedics take over. She smoothed her apron. Her chest heaving, she looked
at Griff and me and said, glancing at the men on the floor, “Barney and Stu.
Been friends since before television.”

“You did good,” Griff said as she pushed past us.

“He’s dead, honey,” she said without turning around. She
went through a white swinging door in the back of the pub and that was the last
we saw of her.

We went back to our booth and poked at our cold lunches and
watched the paramedics bring the old fisherman’s body out of the pub on an
orange stretcher. There were diagnoses being bandied about by the
patrons—heart attack, stroke. The ambulance pulled out of the parking lot
with its lights off.

“Your food’s on the house, folks,” the bartender said,
wiping his forehead with the back of his hand. Stu returned to his stool and
laid his head on his arms folded across the bar. The bartender filled a glass
and pushed it against the man’s elbow, but he didn’t seem to notice.

“A kiddie pool, huh?” Griff said, reaching for his vest.

“I used to sit in it and read.”

“That sounds nice.”

He left Lois a forty-three dollar tip. It was everything he
had in his wallet.

***

Five days after the Elsewhen show and one day after
my ears finally stopped ringing, I sat down on the bed—my bed, at least
until my RA arrived to check me out. It was empty now, bare green fireproof
vinyl. The room looked strange split down the middle this way. It wasn’t bare
the way it had been when we arrived last September. Griff hadn’t packed yet and
his stuff was still there—his posters (always the items that left the
most noticeable absence) still hung off-kilter on the walls. Only I was missing
from it now, as though I’d been cut out with a scalpel.