that?’
I explained that a guy from another school had recently revealed himself not only to be good at throwing, but to care about it also. After easy wins had stopped being a given, my interest had waned. I didn’t put it in those terms, but that was the bottom line.
He shrugged. ‘Never know. Could be Friday’s going to be your day. Be cool to go out on a win.’
For a moment then, I found I did care. Maybe I could do it, this last time. Fisher stood a while longer, looking across the track, as if hearing the beat of feet in races gone by.
‘She was provisional,’ I said, suddenly.
It was like he hadn’t heard me. Then he slowly turned his head. ‘What’s that?’
‘Donna,’ I said. ‘She never really … locked in, you know? Like she was just renting space.’
He frowned. I kept going.
‘It was like … like she knew it might just not work out, you know? Like she came into the world aware that happy-ever-after was a long shot. So she put all her chips on one bet to win. Came in red instead of black, so she just walked away from the table.’
I hadn’t rehearsed any of this, but when I’d said it I felt proud. It meant something profound, or sounded like it might – which is plenty good enough when you’re eighteen.
Fisher looked at the ground for a minute, and then seemed to nod faintly. ‘Thanks.’
I nodded back, all out of words, and went thudding down the track to hurl my spear. Maybe I was showing off, hoping to impress the Gary Fisher of eight months before. Either way I pulled my arm over far too fast, reopened an old split on the tip of my middle finger, and wound up not making the last meet after all.
The end of school came and went. Like everyone else I was too busy rushing through celebrated rites of passage to pay much attention to people I didn’t really know. Tests, dances, everything hurried as our childhoods started to run out of gas. Then – bang: out into the real world, which has a way of feeling like that super-test you never got around to studying for. It still feels that way to me sometimes. I don’t think I heard Fisher’s name mentioned once during the summer, and then I left town to go to college. I thought about him every now and then over the next couple years, but eventually he dropped out of my head along with all the other things that had no relevance to my life.
And so I was not really prepared for the experience of meeting him again, nearly twenty years later, when he turned up at the door of my house and started talking as if no time had passed at all.
I was at my desk. I was trying to work, though a time management study would probably have suggested my job consisted of staring out the window, with only occasional and apparently random glances at a computer screen. The house was very quiet, and when the phone rang it jerked me back in my chair.
I reached out, surprised Amy was calling the land line rather than my cell, but not thinking much more about it than that. Being on the phone to my wife meant a break from work. Then I could make more coffee. Go have a cigarette on the deck. Time would pass. Tomorrow would come.
‘Hey, babe,’ I said. ‘How stands the corporate struggle?’
‘Is this Jack? Jack Whalen?’
It was a man’s voice. ‘Yes,’ I said, sitting up and paying more attention. ‘Who’s this?’
‘Hang onto your hat, my friend. It’s Gary Fisher.’
The name sent up a flag straight away, but it took another second to haul it up through the years. Names from the past are like streets you haven’t driven in a while. You have to remember where they go.
‘You still there?’
‘Yes,’ I said. ‘Just surprised. Gary Fisher? Really?’
‘It’s my name,’ the guy said, and laughed. ‘I wouldn’t lie about something like that.’
‘I guess not,’ I said. I had question marks right across the dial. ‘How did you get my number?’
‘A contact in LA. I tried calling last night.’
‘Right,’ I said, remembering a couple of blank calls on the machine. ‘You didn’t leave a message.’
‘Thought it might come across kind of weird, getting in touch after nearly twenty years.’
‘A little,’ I admitted. I found it hard to imagine Fisher and I had anything to discuss unless he was running the class reunion, which seemed unlikely in the extreme. ‘So, what can I do for you, Gary?’
‘It’s more what I might be able to do for you,’ he said. ‘Or maybe both of us. Look – where is it you live, exactly? I’m in Seattle for a few days. Thought it might be cool to meet up, talk about old times.’
‘Place called Birch Crossing. Hour and a half inland. Plus my wife’s got the car,’ I added. Amy has claimed that if you could get enough unsociable people together in a room to vote, they’d make me their king. She’s probably right. Since my book came out I’d been contacted by a few other people from the past, though none as far back as Fisher. I hadn’t bothered to reply to their emails, forwarded via the publisher. Okay, so we used to know each other. What’s your point?
‘I’ve got a day to kill,’ Fisher persisted. ‘Had a string of meetings cancelled.’
‘You don’t want to just tell me on the phone?’
‘Would be a long call. Seriously, you’d be doing me a favour, Jack. I’m going nuts in this hotel and if I walk round Pike Place Market one more time I’m going to wind up with a big dead fish I don’t need.’
I thought about it. Curiosity struck a deal with the desire not to work, the terms brokered by a small part of my soul for which – absurdly – Gary Fisher’s name evidently still held something of a charge.
‘Well, okay,’ I said. ‘Why not?’
He arrived a little after two. I’d achieved nothing in the meantime. Even a call to Amy’s cell phone for a hey-how are-you had dead-ended in her answering service. I was becalmed in the kitchen thinking vaguely about lunch when I heard someone pulling around in the drive.
I walked up the polished wood steps and opened the front door to see a black Lexus where our SUV usually sat – a vehicle that was currently in Seattle, with my wife. The car door opened and some late-thirties guy got out. He crunched over the gravel.
‘Jack Whalen,’ he said, breath clouding up around his face. ‘So you grew up. How did that happen?’
‘Beats me,’ I said. ‘Did everything I could to avoid it.’
I made coffee and we took it down into the living room. He looked around for a few moments, checking out the view of the wooded valley through the big plate glass windows, then turned to me.
‘So,’ he said. ‘Still got that good throwing arm?’
‘Don’t know,’ I said. ‘Don’t get much occasion to throw stuff these
