the taps, unless you plunked a 25-pound block of salt in the softener a couple times a month. A basement that flooded every year when the pipes froze and burst. An attic overrun with yellow jackets. And the only thing shabbier than the aesthetics were the memories I still had of living there. But anyway, when would I be back here again?
I take a right at the corner, go up Evergreen Lane, even though I know Evergreen Lane, and Evergreen Lane never looked much at all like this. Though the land is the same—a soft rise just before the plummet that leads to the river and the concrete bridge leaping it that transforms into bland, interstate high-way—almost everything on top of it has changed. My feet keep going. I’m losing light, but feel it’s close. I search the stores and little homes for their numbers. I walk past an unlit credit union, a bargain store with guitars hung in the windows, and I worry I might have passed it, or forgotten the way, but that’s impossible. I go by a dialysis center, a seafood place, some kids trudging home with their sleds. I knew this place backward and forward.
Soon, there is a bowling alley, its sign of neon red pins already searing through the new evening dark. I slow to a stop. I’m standing in the parking lot of Holy Roller Lanes & Arcade. Looking around me, I see, one street over behind a break in some spindly, wind-bothered trees, the crooked house of an old neighbor, whose face resists my mind’s conjuring. Someone I didn’t like, or didn’t really know, or who was more a friend of Mom’s than of mine.
It dawns on me then—I’m standing in my living room.
Behind me, a car horn sounds, and there’s Vince, watching me, smoking out the window. “They made your street a cul-de-sac. Guess your old man sold the place when the alley opened up. Had to make room.”
“What was the hold up back at that house?”
“Needed to return some gear, borrow some good shoes.” He shrugs. Classic Vince, really, but still.
“Oh, a real emergency then.”
He snorts, gestures at the empty lot. “And this? Some kind of five-alarm fire?”
An ambulance screams by, making us dizzying blue and red until that recedes as the sound goes flat. I kick a hunk of asphalt into the middle of the lot.
“Expect the world to stand still for you? You need a hug?”
“Ah,” I say, “to hell with it.”
I bite my lip. One pain muffles another, and who cares. Then with a quick little tick, we’re the off yellow of the street lamp overhead. For that moment, we’re lit up, then we keep going.
*
Once we’re into a bit of open road, I say, “How’d that hand happen?”
Vince holds it up like he’s surprised to find it braced and bandaged. “Work accident. Hammered myself,” he says. “Stupid of me. There was a babe walking by. It’s not bad. Tingles more than anything.”
“You should get your balls zapped again. Maybe they didn’t finish the job.”
He coughs. “That was a joint decision. Me and Caroline are fine.” Vince adds, “It’s Marcy and Dan in rough shape…”
He fingers around in the change holder for his pack of Pall Malls. When he finds them he lights up, steering with his knee. We drift from the left lane to old tawdry snow—a running scab of gray snot where the road’s shoulder was. He rolls down the window. Cold air gushes in. The guy behind us beeps and Vince corrects course. I light one too.
He shouts over the roar, “They couldn’t identify the body. So I did.”
“How’d he look?”
“How you think he looked?”
“It was just a question, okay?”
“He looked like everything else Bullets ever got at.”
It’s so easy for me to forget things about people I used to know. Just hearing that name.
I remember trying to teach Bullets tricks when he was a pup. Shake hands, I’d command, tapping his outsized paw. I got bit one day doing that. Just a nip, but that’s when lessons ended, maybe a month before I moved away.
He was our friendly neighborhood dirtbag pervert Gavin Kwasneski’s dog. Even as a kid, Gavin was pretty foul, prone to peeping, cornering girls, lifting skirts, that kind of thing, but that was all one heard about back then. Still, the lore gave us all the creeps and whenever something new happened, we would look askance at him right before looking the other way, preferring thoughts less vile. Years passed.
One afternoon he knocked on my door. He began explaining to me the sex violations that landed him nine months in Joliet Correctional, from which he was freshly released—rehabilitated, a new man, he claimed, with a very off-putting kindness in his voice.
I never knew any of the people Gavin hurt, and aside from these encounters he barely registered in my or Vince’s life at all. He was just one of those things people bury as well as they can. Because that works for a while. One day though, as you’re going about your business, you end up tripping on a tiny little itty-bitty rock in the ground, the rock turns out to be a bone, and you can’t help it—you start digging.
Gavin had a puppy with him. He gathered it up in his arms.
“This is my new doggy,” he said, and held out a vanilla-white pup, its nose pink as a piglet’s.
“Hi, doggy.”
I remember the pup gave a yawn. Gavin dropped him; it hit the ground hard. Then they shuffled over to the next house.
*
“They’re shutting down the high school,” Vince says. He feeds his cigarette through the window slit but it flies back in, onto the backseat.
“Nice. I loved snow days.”
“Not for the weather—for the mourning, you dummy. They’re having some sort of memorial for him on Monday.”
Vince goes to swat out the burning filter with his free hand but he can’t reach. We swerve hard this time.
“Not even two feet of snow on the ground,” he says, “and it’s like twenty out. They won’t even think about closing unless it’s below zero.”
I tell him to just focus on not killing us. Keep a window cracked.
*
I love that funeral parlors are like fake living rooms. How they appear to be equal parts resort hotel lobby and sitcom set for the bereaved. The knockoff Turners and Titians proudly hung in the foyer, the bowl of Starlight Mints, the chandelier around which the staircase dovetails. The ashtrays, all at the ready, inside every desk and coffee table drawer. The raw wood aroma you get opening up the cabinets, of sawdust; the unvacuumed carpeting strangers trample with their dress shoes on, the film of spilt coffee burning on the gummy hotplate.
I love that it could almost be someone’s home, nondescript save the marquee in the drive, the brass plaque beside the doorbell. They try so hard, and yet the further one pokes around, the more abnormal it becomes—the bare cupboards, hollow clocks, empty closets, the absence of cohesion a family
