Just a silent, desolate house. The sheer, fucking, maddening waste of it all.
He wasn’t even sure why he’d come back here at all. It was one of those blind impulses that had always gotten him neck-deep in trouble. Gus was five months gone, his body cremated. It had taken a long time for the news to make it to Afghanistan. It had shot his concentration all to hell. He’d started having the fire dream again. A roaring, ravenous circle of fire that closed in on him from all sides.
What had happened to Gus didn’t square with his memories of his uncle. Nor did it square with the cryptic e-mail that Gus had sent him on the day he died. That e-mail had sounded like the ravings of a paranoid madman, yes, but not a defeated, suicidal madman.
So here he was. Financially, he could afford a break. He’d never cared much about money, but he’d managed to make a lot of it, running the risks that he did. It just sat in the bank and accumulated, since it seldom occurred to him to spend it. Returning to LaRue was an idea to approach gradually, ease into gently, so he’d flown to New York and bought the bike. Three thousand miles of highway was a bare minimum of lead-in time, and he’d spent it trying to justify the impulse.
He had to find out what had happened to Gus. Flip the finger to everyone who’d written him off as a loser. Thank the people who had been kind to him. El alone was worth a journey of twelve thousand miles. His memories of El were so bright, they shone.
Oh, shit. It was impossible not to think about El when his belly ached like this. He’d gotten deep into the habit of thinking about El to comfort himself when he felt bad. The habit was backfiring on him.
All that time on the road still hadn’t braced him to give up his El fantasies and replace them with reality. There had been times when those fantasies had been his only refuge. A man had to have some safe place to go, even if it was only inside his own head. It was like not wanting to see a favorite book made into a movie for fear it would obscure his own mental images, only he knew the end of this movie would be different. And it was all just a head game anyway.
So reality would be hard. So it would hurt. Surprise, surprise.
He couldn’t bully his mind into submission today. It was running wild, wherever it wanted to go, and it wanted El. His fantasy El, the only other person in all of LaRue who’d given a damn about him. Gus had cared for him, when he wasn’t too drunk. He’d shown it with a gruff scrap of praise, or a dry, private joke shared between the two of them.
But El’s devotion had needed no hopeful interpreting. It was there for him whenever he wanted it, like the air he breathed. Constant, and sweet, and taken completely for granted.
Since he left LaRue, he’d taken nothing else for granted.
He shaded his eyes and squinted out at the grassy hills that hemmed the valley in, baked a deep, metallic gold. The handsome house that El Kent had grown up in was visible from the highway, perched on the bluff in an oasis of lush green landscaping and forever looking down its nose at Gus’s ramshackle house in the ravine below.
Kent House was a fancy hotel now. He knew that much from a random search for El’s name on the Internet. It had landed him on a page on fine hoteliers in the Pacific Northwest.
Kent House is a gracious Bed & Breakfast perched on a hillside overlooking the LaRue River…paradise for sports fishermen and white-water rafters…breath-taking view from every room…two-hour drive from Portland, but worth every winding, scenic mile…the weekday continental breakfast is worthy of special mention for the fine pastry, to say nothing of owner and pastry chef Ellen Kent’s awe-inspiring weekend buffet spread…
Rave reviews from fancy critics. Damn. Not bad.
He stared down into the checkered green bowl of the valley, and reminded himself for the thousandth time that over half of her life had gone by. She would have forgotten him. She was still using her maiden name, but that meant nothing these days. She could’ve married a guy named Scruggs or Lipschitz, and kept her own pretty name for business purposes. She probably had a bunch of noisy kids and an SUV.
Good for her if she did. He just hoped whoever she picked deserved the kind of love she could give more than he’d deserved it.
He wondered if she dreamed of the night he’d run away the way he still did. He’d gone to say goodbye to his friend and found himself in the arms of a lover. A storm of freaked-out passion and adrenaline.
He’d taken her virginity that night. The memory was etched in his mind. Every last, exquisite detail of it.
Wind pushed a bank of bruised-looking clouds across the sky. The cloud shadow that swept over him put an abrupt end to his speculating. Of course his return to LaRue would be heralded by a thunderstorm. It was obligatory.
He put on his shades and his helmet and accelerated towards town. The place hadn’t changed much. The strip mall was longer, with monster chain stores adrift in the oceans of their gigantic parking lots. A video store had replaced the Twin Lakes Diner. A multiplex cinema had taken the place of the drive-in theater.
He glanced up the hill to where the Mitchell Stables had once stood. It hadn’t been rebuilt. The country club’s golf course had been extended instead, into a smooth, bland swath of green lawn that sloped gently down towards the river. Part of his brain still expected to see it a blackened ruin. The ultimate fuck-up that had drop-kicked him out of this town, and ironically, it hadn’t been his fault.
The memory was all too vivid. Drinking beer with his pin-headed buddies out behind the stables until Eddie and Randy had gotten the bright idea to shoot off firecrackers. In August, for Christ’s sake. The whole forest could have gone up, and the town along with it. It was sheer, dumb asshole’s luck that only the stables had burned.
They hadn’t even seen how or when the fire started. Simon had felt the familiar prickle of impending disaster on the back of his neck when they were already halfway down the hill, and had looked back to see the dull, ominous glow of illuminated smoke. Not one of his so-called friends had gone back with him to let the horses out. He’d done it alone. The acrid sting of smoke in his throat and the high-pitched screaming of the maddened horses had haunted his dreams for years.
He glanced up at the lowering sky. He had a couple of minutes of grace—the time it would take to reach shelter under the awning of the Shopping Kart, where he could buy detergent and ask around for a laundromat and a hotel. Time to clean up and act normal. Not that any effort on his part had made a difference before, but hey. He could try.
Maybe he would get lucky, and no one would even recognize him.
“Did you hear the news, Ellen? Simon Riley is back in town!”
Peggy’s sharp eyes watched avidly for a reaction as she swiped Ellen’s eggs and paprika across the check stand’s electronic scanner.
Ellen stared back at the checkout clerk. She closed her mouth and arranged her face into a mask of polite interest. “Really?”
Peggy wasn’t fooled. Her mouth curled into a triumphant smile as she swiped Ellen’s cream cheese and butter. “I saw him with my own eyes. He’s a biker now! Big and dirty and sweaty, dressed up in black leather like a Hell’s Angel. Hair all the way down to here. If I’d been your mother, I’d have heaved a big sigh of relief when that boy disappeared. He was trouble then, and he looks like bigger trouble now. After that bad business with the fire, well! He has some nerve.”
“That fire was not Simon’s fault,” Ellen said tightly.
