The Duration (4 page)

On the night of the Senior Appreciation Dinner, Unsie had borrowed his parents' Suburban, the biggest car around. One or two girls had lost their bras in that car, but not much else, even though the way-back was large enough for a twin mattress—an accessory we often discussed obtaining but never did.

“We should get the fish,” Chickie said, as we passed around a couple of purloined Zimas in the parking lot.

The fish in question was one of Chick's many obsessions, but this time, high school ending, twelve years of the straight-and-narrow behind us, nobody said no. Next thing I knew, we were in the truck.

The fish was a guppy, I guess. I don't know fish. Ten feet of cement poured over a mesh and wood frame, 4 feet high from her flat hollow belly to her stout dorsal. She was bright pink except for her fins and lips, which were a chipped blue, and her eyes, which were white and wide and lashed. She sat hidden near a copse of scrub pines along a commercial stretch of the Knotsford-Gable Road. A tube ran from her open mouth to a spot down on her tail, as one does, I guess, for all of us. She'd been a pretty easy third hole until the mini-golf went broke a few years earlier. All the other holes—the octopus, the submarine, the pirate ship, et cetera—were gone, taken off to who knows where, and nothing else remained of the course except a rusted chain-link fence around a plot of weeds.

Who knew why the fish was still there? Maybe she had resisted.

The glory of the Knotsford-Gable Road coursed on—a Dairy Queen was operating out of the mini-golf 's former rental office, and the fish sat forgotten about 50 yards away from it, surrounded by spring vegetation. As you drove past, all you could see was her dorsal fin peeking out above the weeds, and then only if you knew where to look.

Unsie cut the lights of the Suburban and pulled as far as he could down an old driveway that bent around the back of the trees, until we got to a chain across the drive. We got out.

It had rained earlier that night, and the glow from a nearby McDonald's glittered across the damp field. Chickie lowered the tailgate, and we crept through the underbrush, past the shadow of the Dairy Queen, over to the fish.

We hadn't really thought much about what to do next—we hadn't anticipated getting this far. But now it seemed obvious, sort of. Free the fish.

The fish watched us mutely. We were all still wearing our slacks and button-down shirts from dinner, a style we might one day call business casual if we ever got jobs. Chickie and I got on the sides and Jimmer bent over the tail. Unsie stayed at the car. We designated him the getaway driver, but I had little doubt that if the cops came, Unsie wouldn't hesitate to leave us where we stood. He wasn't stupid. Wind rippled through the brush, and the fish sort of seemed glad for the company. We counted to three and strained.

The fish did not budge. It was heavy as shit. We tried again, until Jimmer said he felt something pop in his abdomen.

We reconvened at the Suburban and spoke in whispers.

“So, uh,” Jimmer said, hand on his pelvis.

I shrugged, a little relieved. Chick limped off a ways and kicked at some tall grass. It was getting late. My curfew was 12:30, a notional concept in a town like ours. There was rarely anything going on, and if there was we'd probably missed it already. Unsie started talking about St. Lawrence, a school at the North Pole, where he'd been offered a scholarship. I still hadn't chosen a college—my top four choices had rejected me—and I left the conversation and crept back toward the fish. Chickie had migrated there, and I joined him next to it.

We didn't speak.

I could remember playing mini-golf at the course with my dad after Little League practice. We were always happy to see the fish, a straight shot and early enough in the course that we weren't yet bored. But I'd put away mini-golf when I got to high school and hadn't been there in years. And apparently I wasn't alone. Once she'd had a whole oceanography around her. Now she was an orphan, swimming in the weeds.

Chick bent down on the fish's left flank and patted the pocked cement.

“Maybe we can roll her,” he said.

He looked at me and grinned, like all this time we'd just been thinking about a better way to do it.

My slacks were damp and stained at the knees, and my tie was rolled up in a pocket. The ground sank when I kneeled down.

I slid my hands under the fish's belly, got a purchase on her hollow interior. Chick knelt next to me, our shoulders touching.

“Ready?” he asked.

I didn't say anything, so he counted to three and we went for it.

Nothing happened for a second, but then the fish slowly tilted, 20 degrees, then 45, and then it rolled from one side to the other, traveling about 4 feet and ending up lying on the side we'd been pressing against. Nearly a full rotation. We fell forward into the uncovered divot and I clipped my chin on the fish's blue pectoral. Unsie and Jimmer were still shooting the shit back at the truck. Chick scuttled forward on his knees.

“Come on,” he said, not a command or a request, because at that point my participation was assumed.

Another roll. Hey, that was 8 feet. I looked up. The open tailgate was still about 20 yards away.

Fuck, I thought. We're going to get it there.

Chick put his hands on the top of the fish. He was grinning from ear to ear. “The Egyptians built the pyramids,” he said. “And they weren't even wearing shoes.”

I cruised down from the Church-on-the-Hill into Gable village. Olde Gable, settled in 1750 and don't you forget it, now full of boutiques and farm-to-table restaurants. The town was built on a sort of midsection of hill—north was a climb; south a descent. There were few flat roads—everything rolled somewhere or bent somewhere else. In the summer evenings of our youth, before we devoted our time to girls and hoop and stealing fish, Chick and I used to take our bikes up to the Church-on-the-Hill driveway at the apex of the village, look out over the nighttime town, and then turn our wheels south. We'd drop our heads and speed down the hill, past the dark library and locked town hall, right down West Street, left to Prospect Hill Road or into the marshes around Stonover Farm, through clouds of fireflies blinking in the night; you'd be at Lake Mackinac almost before you had to touch the pedals. Hill-to-Bowl, we called it, a solid 4-mile drop. Of course, then we had to get back.

Gable was the sort of place that, when I finally left for college and told people where I was from, would usually get a response like, “How lucky you are!” Which is true, in the grand scheme of things. Gable's a walk-to-school, public park, historic home sort of place. A “25-Best” list sort of place. We had a select board, a local diner, Little League. High property values and low crime rates. We had two lakes to swim in—Laurel Lake and Normanton Bowl. Hills and fields and clapboard churches and a typhoon of foliage in autumn.

But growing up Rockwell wasn't uncomplicated. Gable was the historic seat of Berkshire County, the thin Massachusetts municipality that stretched from the Vermont border to Connecticut. Out here in the woods, across the state from our putative capital, it was easy to feel a little isolated from the rest of the Commonwealth. The rough citizens of all those grim and gritty boroughs of Bostonia had an identity. They were Massholes, and proud of it. They went to the Cape and Maine in the summers, kept their attention on themselves and their tenuous place in the national urbanism. We were their forgotten cousins, their woodland folk. Stick-children, as it were, separated by 30 miles between us and the next eastward exit. In the summer months, Manhattan drove up with its money, a sort of foreign aid that tethered us to the Empire State. In the winters, our storm forecasts came from Albany.

Of course, it had ever been thus. We were our own country, a protectorate, a bucolic Sudetenland. For two hundred years, the artists and oil barons and steel magnates of New York had come to gambol across the Berkshires, drawn first by a copper vein and held by the rolling hills. The Gilded Age of summer palaces began in 1845 and lasted until the federal income tax took effect in 1913. The Great War followed, and then the Depression. When the millionaires left, they abandoned their cottages to the hills. Aspinwall, Springlawn, Shadowbrook. Elm Court. Two dozen more at least. Some burned down, fell apart. Others became prep schools or convents or conference centers. Some became one thing, failed, became something else. All of them were haunted.

When the Boston Symphony Orchestra started coming out to Tanglewood in the late ‘30s and money started to flow again, the cottages began reappearing, rising from the woods like Avalon. In Gable alone, Blantyre and Wheatleigh became hotels. Shadowbrook, which had burned down, was rebuilt in austerity and became a monastery, then a prison, and then a yoga retreat. Cranwell put down a golf course. The same thing happened in Normanton, in Great Barr, up and down the Hudson River. The estate in the woods behind my house, called Fleur-de-Lys, stayed empty and shattered off of Bramble Street—Fanny Bramble, mother of our ghosts—until the mid-90s, when an outfit called Head-Connect decided to expand its lucrative holistic health racket from the dry heat of Nevada to the cold comfort of the Berkshires.

I parked on Church and walked over past the Knights of Columbus hall. The K of C sponsored our Little League team in 1992, the year we won it all, and then hosted the trophy ceremony in that hall. Now it was a bistro where you could buy an heirloom-tomato flatbread and a faro salad for about $19, but I could still see Coach Cimini handing us our shiny little batters right where the espresso machine now sat.

Screw it, though, you know? They made a good flatbread. Nostalgia's fine but you can't eat it.

I kept walking to the corner of Church and Housatonic. With Head-Connect and some of the other luxury spas operating year round, Gable had money in the winter, and Unsie, who had made the Olympic cross-country ski team as an alternate in Torino, had bought the old Kirkwood pharmacy and turned it into an outdoor sporting goods store called Asgard. Skis and snowshoes and $9,000 road bikes for the finance enthusiast, sold by fit locals in a shop whose pale planks and straight lines evoked a probably inaccurate version of Scandinavia.

I walked in and found him toward the back, taking inventory on a shipment of rock-climbing shoes.

“Homeboy,” I said.

He looked up. Put out a palm for a tap and a half hug. Kept it short. Real life wasn't touching him so far—he was still long and lean, elbows and knees. He smelled piney. I have this picture in my head of what the word “hale” means, and that picture is Unsie.

“So Handsome,” he said back. “How's Boston?”

I shrugged. “Fine. You know.”

Unsie nodded. “The big city.”

“I guess,” I said. My sense of Boston was that at any given moment it was pretty convinced that it was in a three-way tie for the biggest city in the country. But the law firms paid well, so I shouldn't complain. “Hub of the universe. That's what they say.”

Unsie didn't reply, didn't seem to think a reply was called for. After a second, he nodded to himself and looked up.

“Have you seen him?”

I shook my head. “He asked me to meet him up in the Knots today, by KMC. He never showed.”

I looked around the store. Early March, but still three couples wearing North Face and sunglasses inside. “You?”

Unsie looked at me and raised his eyebrows.

“Yeah. Not great. Fun, sort of, but not great.”

“What's he doing here? Last I heard, he was in the Pacific. Saipan or Tortuga or some shit.”

He shrugged.

“Don't know. I think that ended, not sure if he had a next thing lined up. Sort of floated back, that was my impression.”

“Where's he staying?”

“KMC emergency room once or twice, I think. When he's not there, he's at the Horse Head.”

“The Horse Head?”

The Horse Head was a motel up along the Knotsford-Gable Road. I'd driven past it twice today already.

“Yeah, that's what I said. He asked me for a tent. Too cold for that, still. I mean, we have some good tents, but you have to know how to use them. I told him he could stay with Sara and me, but he said he was okay.”

Unsie turned back to his shoeboxes.

“Sara was relieved,” he said, sort of reluctantly. “He looked a little rough. Accident-prone. And she's pregnant.”

Conditioning being what it is, it took me a second to realize that this was happy news.

“Hey,” I said. “Hey!”

Unsie turned a little red. His neck, mostly. His cheeks were sort of always red.

“Yeah,” he said, shrugging.

I clapped him on the shoulder.

“My boy,” I said. “Yours?”

He flipped me the finger and continued to sort boxes. I paused a decent interval.

“Why was he at the E.R.?”

Unsie shook his head. “Not sure,” he said. “But it's Chick.”

I nodded. Chick once got concussed in his driveway because he decided he could do a backflip.