The Duration (7 page)

In the morning, I opened my eyes and he was in the bed across the room, pale and thin, asleep. Mouth open a crack, chin turned toward the ceiling. In repose he looked as young as the last time I saw him, shortly after high school. I watched him until I felt confident that his chest was moving and then closed my eyes again.

An hour later, I woke back up. I'd been having a dream about canoes, like the kind the natives would make from saplings and birch bark. First guy who made one of those must have been a genius. This time Chick was sitting across from me, on the edge of the other twin. He was wearing a full suit of long underwear, the fabric pocked like soundproofing. He had a beard I hadn't noticed before—had it been there before?—and looked a little brittle, but his eyes were smiling.

“Guy,” he said, in this fucking saccharine way that combined “it's great to see you” with “don't be mad.” But sometimes it's still sweet even when you know it's saccharine, you know?

I rolled over toward the wall, still clothed, still on top of the sheets.

“Be that way,” he fake-huffed. Then he bounded over and jumped on me, holding on the way a koala holds a bamboo spear, his arms around my chest, his legs thrown over mine. What you call spooning when you're trying to get a girl to trust you.

“Shhh,” he said. “Let it happen.”

I felt his beard on the back of my neck.

“Dude,” I said, my mouth full of cobwebs. “Get the fuck off me.”

I should have been mad, but instead I felt like I imagine a soldier feels when he's reunited with his unit after leave. Kind of sad, but also kind of relieved. It was the feeling I always got with Chick. Got it again, even after our long estrangement.

He rolled onto his back and lay beside me. I could almost hear him smiling.

“Guy,” he said again, both the beginning and the end of a sentence. Then: “What are you doing here?”

I lifted my head. Wan sunlight filtered in through the high window. I snorted.

“Don't even,” I said. “Asshole.”

“You're the asshole, asshole,” he said. “Breaking into someone's room and sleeping here. Who do you think you are? Goldilocks?”

He threw his arm back around me.

“It's a good thing you're so handsome.”

I shrugged free again.

“Off,” I said.

Chickie put his head on my cheek. His breath smelled burnt, sleepy. Then he stood up, over me. I opened one eye and braced myself. This was the kind of situation where, back in the day, you'd get an elbow-drop to the ribs just because. A friendship equal parts tender and macho, landing in the middle most of the time. It probably sounds weird. I don't know what to tell you.

I levered his leg away from the wall and sent him off balance. He leapt across the short gulf to the other bed. I could hear the springs buckle. The sunbeams registered the turbulence.

“You got my message?”

“Fuck I got your message,” I said, rolling onto my back and rubbing my eyes. “What do you think I'm doing here?”

He was lying down now, on his side, looking at me as if we were at a sleepover.

“Horse Head. I thought you came, you know, for the Horse Head.”

I closed my eyes. So it was going to be like this.

“Where were you yesterday?”

I could hear him bouncing, but at least the question shut him up for a second.

“I waited up there for an hour.”

I looked over at him. He was smiling, but his face was red. He wouldn't look back.

“Haven't seen you in forever. Random calls. I drove my ass all the way out here because you asked me to. And you leave me hanging.”

Nothing.

I picked up the envelope he'd left for me.

“And what is this, anyway? Fleur-de-Lys and a picture of a dick.”

Chickie looked up. Almost like he'd forgotten about the envelope. His face brightened.

“It's not a dick,” Chick said. “It's a horn.”

He crouched between the beds and inclined his right hand up and away from the bridge of his nose.

“A horn. Get it?”

A horn. I should have known that. Maybe I did.

“I get it,” I said.

In the spring of our seventh grade, our history teacher, Ms. Bitz, got caught in the weight room after hours, pinned under the captain of the wrestling squad. The sub, Ms. Flemmy, who was about a hundred and eight years old, came in looking to buy herself a week or two of adjustment time and immediately gave our class a project.

“For the next week, each of you is to write a report about a famous historical figure who is buried in town,” she said. “Fifteen pages.”

Jimmer had suggested we write about Ms. Bitz herself, since she was now both famous and buried, at least reputation-wise, but that seemed sort of cruel. Plus she was pretty hot, and who knew when and under what circumstances we might meet again. Maybe there was wrestling in our futures as well.

Anyway, there was no shortage of candidates. What with the village's history, the cottages and such, we'd been milking our ghosts for a hundred years already. Local lore was the go-to for every teacher from home ec to humanities. It was inescapable. Our high school mascot, the Gable Millionaire, was a rich dude in a top hat and tails running around the bleachers at home games, fake-smoking a cigar and handing out Monopoly money. He was our patron and sovereign and albatross all at once, the tycoon who'd carved up the woods so he had somewhere to go on the weekends. And none of us were even rich. We were all service-industry kids, ice-cream scoopers, lawn mowers. We walked your dog and delivered your paper. Our great-grandfathers kept Carnegie pools clean. Chandeliers swaying overhead and naked ladies in the gardens. Write about a famous figure buried around here? Shit, we would dig them up just to bury them again.

As it happened, on the very day that Ms. Flemmy gave us the assignment, Chick and I were already a couple of hours into a report on Guy Van Nest, whose estate, Fleur-de-Lys, sat about 200 yards off of Bramble, past a chain-link fence and a marble gatehouse in disrepair. The property was hidden behind a brocade of pines and cedars and, from the road, if it was winter and the leaves were down, you might just catch sight of a ruined corner of the Italianate main building, maybe a column or two, maybe the edge of what was once a fountain. Nobody had been in there regularly for fifty years, roughly since the Sisters of Mercy bought it at auction in the 1940s and then didn't have the money to restore it. A fire in the '70s gutted the second floor and was locally attributed to a nun-sponsored insurance gambit.

From the back of my house, it was a couple miles walk through the woods to get onto the Fleur-de-Lys property. We used to hike over there all the time, hunt for turtles in the old pools, look through the broken windows of the main house. Run around for hours, trails to more trails to statues and gazebos splintered by time. Cowboys and Indians. Capture the flag when we had numbers. The estate was a labyrinth, and the main mansion its center. All the windows were damaged, and the rooms inside looked dank and gangrenous. It was a mess. We snuck out to it every chance we got.

Chick and I'd been there just the week before, in fact, trying to force open a window above the porch, when we were surprised by Officer Grevantz, the newest member of Gable's police force. Slick son of a bitch was on an ATV, an appropriation for which the police department had lobbied just the past summer, and when folks asked what do you need an ATV for anyway, our jowly Chief Winston could probably have said “to bust kids trying to sneak into Fleur-de-Lys,” but didn't.

The ATV was loud as shit, but the window was nearly open, and we just weren't paying attention. Grevantz jumped off that thing like he was roping a steer, light shining off his sunglasses, gum snapping between his teeth. He pointed at the two of us.

“I know you two,” he shouted, I guess to forestall any thoughts we might have of escape. He was wearing a cross between a smile and a snarl. “Benecik and Johansson. I know your parents. Get your asses down here.”

Grevantz was only about twenty-six years old at the time, in his second year on the job. Man, you just knew this was the best thing he'd done all week and that he could hardly wait to get back to the station. I think he was hoping we'd run for it.

The thought did cross my mind. Chick gave me a look—part panicked, part thrilled. I shook him off. The ground was wet, we were wearing boots, and the motherfucker was on an ATV. Plus, he had a gun, not that he'd use it.

Anyway, it was irrelevant. He knew us. Even if we shook him, he'd just be waiting at our houses.

We climbed down. Grevantz called for a cruiser. A little unnecessary, I thought, until I noticed how cool his walkie-talkie was, and how staccato and totalitarian he got to sound speaking into it.

Chief Winston was a big man with a wide head and an avuncular quality that I associated with gardeners and the '80s Celts coach K.C. Jones, who I admired despite his having ruined my Magic-Johnson-loving childhood. Chief Winston was in-laws with George Harvey, our CYC coach, and had a daughter our age named Ava who went to private school in Connecticut. We knew her from the summers, from Tanglewood where we parked cars and she wandered with her private school friends through the mazes, girls with names like Karina and Ellis, girls who ignored us until they needed someone to smuggle in a fifth of blackberry schnapps and make out with and then throw up on. But nobody messed with Ava, probably because she was the daughter of the local police chief and maybe also because she didn't make herself available, as if she felt a little torn between her school world and her home world and didn't want to throw up all over the latter, at least not yet. And as long as she kept bringing hot chicks in to slum with us, that was fine.

Maybe because we'd never tried to lay a hand on Ava, or maybe because he knew about the stuff with Bill Trivette, Chief Winston went easy on us. Grevantz had marched us to the rusted gates of Fleur-de-Lys and stuffed us into the back of a cruiser driven by another of our local cops—there were only six—named Mulvaney, who had been on the job forever and didn't say anything to us except “watch your heads.” Then Grevantz had led the cruiser back into town on the ATV, like he was at the head of a big parade, a hunter towing in the bucks he'd brought down. People on Main Street stared at the cruiser. Chickie stared back. Sometimes he waved.

In his office, Chief Winston fixed us with a glare he'd probably been practicing for years. An old yellow dog lay curled at the foot of his desk.

“Where'd you stash it?” he asked, squinting first at Chick and then at me.

We looked at each other.

“Stash what?” I asked.

“We didn't stash anything,” Chick said.

“So you have it on you?” Chief Winston said.

“What?”

“Don't get smart with me, son.”

“What?”

The chief let me shake for a minute, then started chuckling. Man, these fuckers were bored. I recognize that now. At the time, I almost started to cry.

Then he picked up his phone and dialed a number.

“Yeah,” he said, after a pause. “They're here. I'm sending them your way. If they aren't there in the next”—he looked at his watch—“five minutes, let me know. I'll send out the dog.”

Chief Winston hung up the phone and snapped his fingers. The dog at his feet raised its head. The chief looked at us.

“You're wanted,” he said, “at the library.”

The town library was three-quarters of a mile away. Chick and I sprinted across the street, through the back parking lot of the Curtis, over the fence at Lilac Park, almost got hit by a car crossing Housatonic, and arrived at the doors just as the head librarian, a wizened octogenarian named Florence Banish, bent her bun to check her watch.

“You are the miscreants?” she asked, holding the door handle with fine fingers, her bones sheathed in parchment. With her other hand, she pressed her glasses back over the crook of her nose.

We were keeled over, wheezing, our hands on our knees.