The Grievers Page 3

  “Bother?” I said. “Bother? Sorry if I’m bothering you, Neil, but you’re supposed to be my best friend.”

  “You know what I meant.”

  “If you can’t help me, I’ll understand, but my blood is on your hands.”

  “There’s no emergency exit? No escape hatch?”

  “It’s a dollar sign,” I said. “Not a school bus.”

  “Can’t you shimmy out the bottom or something?”

  “I think I’m suffocating, Neil. Growing lightheaded. How does it feel to be the last person ever to hear from me?”

  “Christ,” Neil said. “Give me an hour.”

  “If I don’t make it, tell Karen I love her.”

  “Do me a favor,” Neil said. “The next time I see you, remind me never to talk to you.”

  NEIL AND I never said much to each other in the months following our first encounter at the Academy. He was a face I’d see in the hallway, another kid in a rumpled blazer rushing from World Religions to Algebra. If we made eye contact, he’d drop lines from what I could only guess were Marx Brothers movies: My boy, I think you’ve got something there, and I’ll wait outside until you clean it up. Don’t look now, but there’s one man too many in this room, and I think it’s you. The next time I see you, remind me never to talk to you.

  The best I could do whenever he’d say something like this was smile and hope it passed for being in on the joke. Not that anyone else was in on the joke, of course, but as long as someone at the Academy was under the impression, mistaken or otherwise, that I was in on something, I wasn’t alone.

  The first real conversation I had with Neil didn’t happen until January of our freshman year. The North Philadelphia neighborhood where the Academy made its home had yet to succumb to the pull of gentrification, and when I stepped out into the blustery winter air after eight hours of being cooped up with hundreds of other pimply boys in our sweaty, smelly brick-and-mortar hotbox, the sun had already begun to sink low and red behind the crumbling row homes and dilapidated storefronts a block west of the school. At the far corner of the long, broken street, my usual bus sighed to a stop and opened its doors to three of my classmates. If I missed it, I’d have to wait another half hour in the growing darkness on a corner with no bench and only the cold, gray walls of the Academy to lean on, so I sprinted up the sidewalk in my battered brown oxfords and slapped at the door of the bus until the driver let me in.

  “Say, I used to know someone who looked exactly like you,” Neil said when I dropped, nearly breathless, into the seat next to him and the bus started to roll. “Emanuel Ravelli. Are you his brother?”

  I smiled and hoped it would suffice, but the look on the kid’s face said that he expected me to answer the question.

  “The Marx Brothers, right?” I said.

  “Yeah,” Neil said. “Which one?”

  “Which brother?” I said.

  “No, which movie?”

  “Horse Feathers?”

  It was the only one I knew, and only because Neil mentioned it the first time he’d ever spoken to me.

  “Close,” Neil said. “Animal Crackers.”

  “Right,” I said.

  “For playing, we get ten dollars an hour,” he said in a broken accent. “For not playing, we get twelve. For rehearsing, we get a special rate. Fifteen dollars an hour. And for not rehearsing? You couldn’t afford it. You’ve seen it, right?”

  “Once,” I lied. “But it was a while ago.”

  The neighborhood rolled by—shattered stoops, sagging porches, windows of burnt-out houses covered over with plywood sheeting. Dripping red letters on the side of a rusty panel truck read Angie’s Soul Chicken, and a life-size drawing of what appeared to be a rabid penguin stood guard at the door of a faded yellow bodega on the corner of Nineteenth and Porter. When a man with tiger stripes tattooed to his scalp crashed through the glass door of a pool hall on the next corner, the bus slowed to a stop just in time to get caught in the crush of locals that came pouring onto the street after him.

  On the sidewalk, the man with the tiger stripes curled into a ball while a pair of muscle-bound goons, breathing steam in the cold winter air, beat him with the heavy back ends of their pool cues. In the space of a few heartbeats, the clientele of a neighboring bar swirled out onto the street wielding bats and broomsticks and anything else they could get a hold of, and it wasn’t long before everyone’s efforts at horning in on the proceedings erupted into full-blown mayhem.

  As the bus shook and swayed with the swell of angry bodies, Neil shot me a glance, and I shrugged. Though a police officer had lectured the freshman class on keeping our wallets out of sight and avoiding dark alleys, he failed to mention what to do in the unlikely event that a riot should break out during the evening commute.

  “I’m guessing it’s like rock-paper-scissors,” Neil said as a woman in a dirty apron cut a path through the fray with a soup ladle. “What do you think? Ladle scoops broomstick?”

  “Right,” I said. “Ladle scoops broomstick, and broomstick sweeps pool cue.”

  “Nice,” Neil said. “But what does the pool cue do?”

  “You don’t want to know,” I said, adopting the broken accent he’d used earlier.

  Emerging from the knot of bodies, a man with a gash in his forehead pounded a fist against the front door of the bus. Without so much as turning his head, the driver opened the door while the passengers held their collective breath. When the man climbed aboard, he asked the driver if the bus went as far as the nearest hospital, and the driver said it stopped a block east of Saint Joseph’s.

  The man with the gash paused for a moment, then reached into his pocket for bus-fare. As he made his way toward the back of the bus, I glanced at the empty seat across the aisle from me, then glanced at the man, whose gaze met mine long enough for both of us to guess what would happen next.

  The man took the seat.

  I pursed my lips and nodded.

  The man nodded back.

  Red and blue police lights swept the darkening street. As the crowd dispersed and the bus started moving again, Neil pulled a white handkerchief from the inside pocket of his gray overcoat and passed it wordlessly to the bleeding man.

  “I’M STILL not entirely clear on why you took this job,” Neil said, squishing across the bank’s muddy lawn to help me get back on my feet.

  “Why does anyone take a job?” I asked, lying on my back. “I needed the money.”

  “But that’s not the question,” Neil said. “The question is why did you take this job?”

  When he wasn’t busy rescuing his friends from the consequences of their own foolish endeavors, Neil handled contracts for the Quartermaster Corps in their office just outside of Philadelphia. His wife Madeline, meanwhile, was finishing her doctorate in developmental psychology somewhere in Maryland. For the sake of fairness, at least in terms of the commute, they split the difference by living in Delaware, so I understood why the charm of my current job might have been lost on him.

  “Flexibility?” I said.

  “Try again.”

  “Potential for advancement?”

  Not sure where Neil was standing, I reached out and groped blindly at the air in front of me, imagining that I looked like a turtle or an overturned insect from above.

  “Sorry,” he said. “Not until I get an honest answer.”

  “I told you before,” I said. “I need time to work on my dissertation.”

  “Right,” Neil said. “The dissertation.”

  “Ask your wife. It’s a very complicated process.”

  “I know it is,” Neil said. “I still don’t believe you.”

  “Okay,” I said. “I thought the job would be fun. Are you happy now?”

  “Not yet,” Neil said, but he took my hand anyway.

  “What do you want to hear?”

  “Fun’s only half of it.” He pulled on my arm, and I rose from the ground at an awkward angle. “And I’m not sure how much I buy that one either.
”

  “Would you believe funny, then?”

  “You took the job because you thought it would be funny?”

  “Probably,” I said. “Maybe. I guess.”

  “Hell of a reason to take a job.”

  “Look who you’re talking to.”

  Finally standing on my own two feet, I pulled my arms back inside the dollar sign and lifted the boxy costume up and over my head. It was a variation on Neil’s earlier suggestion of shimmying out the bottom, but if he took notice of this fact, he didn’t let on.

  “I still think there’s more,” Neil said. “Something you’re trying to avoid.”

  “Please,” I said. “You’ve been spending too much time with Madeline.”

  “I wish,” Neil said.

  “Too much time with her books, then. Do you feel like getting lunch?”

  “I need to get back to work,” Neil said, already turning away.

  “No,” I said. “I mean, wait. This is important.”

  Neil stopped and let out a sigh, then turned as if to ask what I wanted—or, more to the point, what I wanted this time.

  “It’s about Billy.”

  PILLS HE could almost see, Neil said as we picked at tuna salad sandwiches and sipped iced tea in a booth at a chain restaurant in the strip mall across the street from the bank where I worked. Going to sleep and never waking up was one thing, but jumping from a bridge?

  “Telling your legs to do this thing,” he said. “That last second. I can only imagine.”

  “I don’t want to think about it,” I said.

  “I went up in a helicopter once. You look down, and your bones freeze. You can’t move a muscle.”

  My glittery dollar sign lay next to our table like an abandoned prop from The Price Is Right. Whenever I moved it or shoved it into the backseat of my car or slipped in the mud, a few sequins would flake off, but so far, the costume wasn’t looking too bad—for a giant, glittery dollar sign, anyway. The only problem was that the costume made me look like a joke wherever I went, and I wasn’t in much of a mood for joking.

  “Do you remember New Year’s Eve?” I said.

  “Which part?” Neil said. “Packer hitting on Karen or you grabbing Madeline’s ass?”

  “That was an accident,” I said.

  “You don’t grab someone’s ass by accident,” Neil said. “Especially when your wife is standing right next to her.”

  “That doesn’t even make sense,” I said. “What would possess me to grab your wife’s ass when Karen was standing right there? If I really wanted to grab Madeline’s ass, wouldn’t I have waited until we were alone?”

  “I don’t know,” Neil said. “You do a lot of things that don’t make a whole lot of sense lately.”

  “This isn’t about me,” I said. “It’s about Billy. Did you see his wrist or not?”

  “No,” Neil said. “I didn’t.”

  “Well I did, and I didn’t say anything.”

  Neil chewed on the inside of his lip, and our waitress breezed by the table to ask if everything was okay. Almost in unison, Neil and I turned to the woman and said that everything was great. Delicious, Neil added, though he’d barely touched his sandwich. In my mind, I thanked her for not asking any questions about my giant dollar sign, and in real life I asked for another glass of iced tea.

  “He was hardly there,” I said, looking away from Neil. “On the night of the party, he left after twenty minutes.”

  “He was in a bad place,” Neil said.

  “His fingers were so skinny,” I said. “I remember thinking that. I remember looking at his hands and thinking that his fingers were so skinny, so bony, and then seeing the stitches in his wrist and not saying anything.”

  “You couldn’t have known,” Neil said.

  I raised my eyebrows. “Stitches in his wrist? What else could it have meant? He spent the whole time telling me that he was going back to school for computers. Twenty minutes of this, and then he stopped and apologized and asked if he could use the phone, and all I could think about was how glad I was that he finally stopped talking.”

  “Who did he call?” Neil asked.

  “His mother,” I said. “She dropped him off at the party and came home to a ringing phone.”

  “She told you this?”

  “She told me a lot of things.”

  “Like what?”

  I shook my head. “He got off the phone and said he had plans. I knew it was a lie, but I let it go. It was the last time I ever talked to him.”

  Neil told me again that I couldn’t have known, that our friend was in a bad place, that there was nothing I could have done, but all I could think about was Billy standing in the cold and waiting for his mother to come and pick him up while the rest of us laughed and drank and listened to loud music—while Greg Packer hit on Karen and I grabbed Madeline’s ass.

  WEARING THE dollar sign was easier than carrying it, so I climbed back inside the costume after Neil and I finished our sandwiches, and he held me steady as we crossed six lanes of traffic on our way back to the bank. If I did grab his wife’s ass, I said as drivers leaned on their horns by way of telling us to get out of the intersection, I didn’t mean it in a sexual way. I just thought it would get a few laughs.

  “That’s kind of sick,” Neil said. “Is that your reason for doing everything?”

  “Pretty much,” I said.

  “I feel sorry for Karen.”

  “You and me both,” I said. “But that’s why I need your help with this Billy Chin situation. I want to do something for him—something in his memory, anyway, but I don’t want it to turn into a joke like everything else I do.”

  Neil warned me to watch out for the curb, and soon we were squishing back across the lawn in front of the bank. Maybe we could raise some money and make a donation in his name, Neil said. He didn’t mention the Academy, but we both knew what he had in mind. He could make a few calls and get our friends together for dinner some night. We could say a few words about Billy and pass the proverbial hat.

  “Who are you thinking?” I asked.

  “The usual crew, I guess. Dwayne Coleman and Sean Sullivan. Anthony Gambacorta, if we can get a hold of him. Greg Packer, of course.”

  “Of course,” I said. “It wouldn’t be a party without him.”

  Back at the Academy, the rumors about Greg and his family sounded more like the stuff of soap operas and comic books than the lives of any teenagers I’d ever met. In some versions of the story, Greg’s father was the heir to a massive fortune, the child of a Rockefeller, a Carnegie, or a DuPont, but he had to keep his relationship with Greg’s mother a secret for fear of losing any and all rights to his legacy. In other versions, Greg had accidentally killed his father by putting the family RV in reverse and backing over him on the eve of a planned cross-country vacation to celebrate Greg’s fifth birthday. Depending on who passed the rumor along, Greg’s father could have been an artist, an inventor, a hit man, a priest, a rock star, an oil man, an embezzler, or a politician, while his mother’s roles tended to alternate between failed Olympic hopeful and disgraced nun.

  When my turn came to build on the elaborately inconsistent mythology of Greg’s life, I made him an heir to the Holy Roman Empire and said that his father had developed a formula for tires that never wore thin, which led a sinister cabal of tire manufacturers to have him eliminated before he went public with his invention. That Greg never confirmed nor denied the veracity of any of these rumors only contributed to their weight as they echoed up and down the polished halls of the Academy. What they all had in common was that Greg’s father was out of the picture and that Greg and his mother enjoyed a steady unearned income, the limits of which were anybody’s guess.

  The real trouble with Greg started after we all graduated from the Academy and he fell into the habit of sliding from one disappointment to the next. His official story when he dropped out of Princeton was that he was homesick, but that didn’t explain why it took him five years t
o complete a four-year degree at Saint Leonard’s University in lieu of the ivy league education he’d always aspired to. Good scores on the LSAT got him into law school a year behind Neil, but by then he was so far out of the game that it didn’t matter. Three car accidents, two of which involved collisions with parked cars, led to long periods of what Greg liked to call meditation and reflection but which largely consisted of chasing painkillers with bottle after bottle of Bud Light. When he wasn’t busy hitting on my wife, he was, in his words, gathering strength for his next big move.

  “What’s he been up to lately?” I asked, almost afraid to hear the answer but knowing in a guilty way that it would make me feel better about my own life. “Aside from pining away for Karen.”

  “Nothing good,” Neil said. “Failed the bar exam again, defaulted on his student loans, still fighting with his mother over whatever the hell they fight about.”

  “Is he at least good for a donation?”

  “Sure,” Neil said. “As long as I write the check. Sullivan’s pushing for an intervention, by the way, and Dwayne wants to lure him into the city for a forcible commitment.”

  “He can do that?” I asked.

  “In Philly? Please. The guy’s a cop. It’s the paperwork he’s dreading.”

  We stood by Neil’s car for a minute, not saying anything. When I caught my reflection in his windshield, I looked away. Dressed as a giant dollar sign, I looked like an idiot.

  “So why do you think he did it?” Neil asked, keys in his hand. “Billy, I mean. Why?”

  “I don’t know,” I said. “But I don’t think he was like us.”

  “No,” Neil said. “I guess not.”

  “He wasn’t an asshole is what I mean. Not that we’re assholes, exactly, but think about guys like Frank Dearborn. People like us, we knew how to deal with him—or we figured it out, anyway. People like Billy, though? He took things too personally. The Academy was sink or swim, and Billy could barely keep his head above water when guys like Frank were around. And that was just high school. Imagine being Billy in the real world. Imagine dealing with assholes every day and taking everything they did personally. Imagine how lonely he must have felt. How disconnected.”