Heat and Light (17 page)

“It's good on gas.”

“Christ, I hope so.”

Darren hands over his cash. “I've never seen this place so busy.”

“It's always like this.”

Darren looks over his shoulder at a long line of men in work boots, waiting to be fed.

He takes the slow route through town, past the dress factory, closed now, and the old train depot, unused in fifty years. Above it the famous sign is still standing, the familiar words now barely legible:
B
AKERTON
C
OAL
L
IGHTS THE
W
ORLD
.
He performs this ritual each time he returns, counting the newly empty storefronts like a doctor making rounds, measuring the health of the town or more properly, the rate of its decline. Arriving, always, at the same conclusion: Bakerton is a terminal patient, barely hanging on.

Crossing town ought to take five minutes—six at the outside,
if all four traffic lights happen to be red. But today, inexplicably, traffic has stopped. A Ford pickup idles in front of him, an even larger truck ahead. Craning his neck, Darren sees the reason for the slowdown: an orange
DETOUR
sign at the intersection, Baker Street blocked off with sawhorses.

A
detour
in Bakerton?

Darren turns down a side street and cuts south, in the direction of his dad's house, thinking how a detour presumes two things: traffic and its need to get somewhere in particular. Neither condition, in Bakerton, generally applies.

His parents' house is a tidy split-level, yellow brick. Darren idles a moment in the driveway. The house looks strange to him. A moment later he understands the reason. All the flowers are gone.

His mother had been crazy for flowers. Hanging baskets of petunias and impatiens, cement urns filled with geraniums and marigolds, beds of tulips and daffodils she planted each fall, never doubting that spring would come. His dad isn't the type to fuss over flowers. He keeps the lawn close-cropped. The porch's only decoration is an American flag.

Darren idles a moment in the driveway. The house's windows are dark, Dick's car gone. Darren, who has no house key, backs out of the driveway and heads back toward town.

Years ago, when his mother was living, they changed the locks on him, a security measure that was necessary at the time.

In town he parks in front of the Commercial and cuts the engine. It's still early, the blinding late afternoon of high summer. With any luck the place will be empty. He'll borrow Dick's house key and be out of there in five minutes.

The bar is cool and dim inside. It smells of beer and floor polish and brass cleaner, a smell of Darren's late childhood. He was thirteen when his dad and uncle bought the place, flush with Uncle Pat's settlement money. A beefy man stands behind the bar, alternately eating French fries and drying beer steins with a dirty towel.

“Is my dad around? I'm Darren.”

The bartender eyes him blankly.

“Devlin,” he adds. “The other son.”

“Oh. Sure.” The guy eats a French fry and wipes his hands on his pants. “Dick's at the funeral home. He should be back any minute, if you want to wait.”

Darren remembers, then: the AmVets. Anytime a veteran dies, a couple of the old guys are dispatched to the wake. Flags are involved. What exactly is done with them, Darren is unsure.

He sits at the end of the bar, opposite a giant TV screen.

“I didn't know there was another son. Sorry, buddy.” The bartender pours an Iron City and sets it at Darren's elbow. “On the house.”

I'm not a beer drinker,
he could have said, if he wanted to make things even more awkward. “Thanks,” he says instead.

A commercial flashes across the television: an animatronic lizard standing on its hind legs, speaking in an Australian accent.
Are you paying too much for car insurance?
Darren, who cares nothing about lizards or Australians or insurance, stares entranced. There is no looking away from it. The average American watches an ungodly amount of television, four or six hours a day, a habit Darren understands completely. If he owned a set he'd spend his entire life in this hypnotized state, gaping dumbly at commercials.

The lizard drives away on a tiny motorcycle.

A German sedan races along a mountain road, whipping around corners.
The Mercedes E Class,
a man intones with the gravity of a priest.

A heartsick man speaks directly to the camera.
For forty years, I've stood up for the little guy.
His heavy-lidded eyes are eerily familiar. An unusual name, vaguely biblical, flashes across the screen:
Paul Zacharias, Attorney-at-Law
.

“Who is that guy?” Darren asks the bartender. “I've seen him somewhere.”

“You and everybody. Those ads have been running day and night.”

If you and your family
are caught in a fracking nightmare, you have valuable legal rights.

The bartender snorts. “You sign a lease, you take your chances, is my feeling. If I had some land, I'd do it in a minute. Where the hell is Gia?” he shouts into the kitchen.

“Gia Bernardi?” A name Darren hasn't said in many years. “She works here?”

“Supposedly. Who do you like?” the bartender asks, nodding toward the screen.

It takes Darren a moment to understand the question. One team wears red hats, the other blue. The things people fill their lives with. A lifetime ago, in college, he read novels in French.
Ça meuble la vie.
He can't recall authors or titles, characters or situations; he can scarcely form a sentence in that language, but all these years later the phrase is still lodged in his memory.
Meubler,
to furnish. To fill up a life the way a sofa fills up a room.

“I always go with the underdog,” Darren says.

“Ignore him, Budd. He has no clue what he's talking about.” Gia Bernardi charges in through the back door at high speed, generating a perfumed breeze. Short denim skirt, the sleek suntanned legs of a high school cheerleader. She is more beautiful than he remembered. The picture he still carries in his head is eighteen-year-old Gia: the face rounder, eyes rimmed with black liner, a hairdo wider than her shoulders. Grown-up Gia is lean and sinewy. She looks freshly scrubbed and glowing, her hair in a ponytail as though she's just come from the gym.

“Whoa, Gia.” He gets to his feet. “You look great.”

They embrace briefly, her skin outdoor-warm. She smells like Gia, cigarettes and coconut suntan lotion. Her head fits neatly—he forgot this—in the crook of his shoulder.

From somewhere near his sternum comes a bright electronic melody with a catchy backbeat. “What the hell is that?”

“My ringtone.” She takes a cell phone from her purse, glances at it briefly, and stashes it beneath the bar. “I can't believe it's you! Where the fuck is your hair?”

Darren passes a hand over his head. His hairline had begun receding in college. Some years later, during his first stay at Wellways, he noticed a yarmulke-size bald spot on top. Possibly it had been there for some time. During his second stay at Wellways, he gave up and shaved his head.

“I must have left it somewhere.”

“I like it this way,” Gia says.

She busies herself behind the bar. Ignoring the beer at his elbow, Darren inquires politely about people he barely remembers, Gia's many brothers, her ancient father. “Hold that thought,” she says periodically, rushing off to serve a customer. He doesn't mind the interruptions. The spectacle pleases him: Gia racing up and down the bar, pulling beers, flirting with patrons, pocketing tips. If he had a video camera he'd have recorded it. That would be a reason to buy a television: Gia Bernardi on a continuous loop, Gia's bare suntanned legs in the short denim skirt.

Ignoring the beer is not difficult. He never was a beer drinker. Never a drinker, period.

A beaming woman in a negligee lies on what looks like a hospital bed.
My sleep number is fourteen,
she says ecstatically.

Beneath the bar Gia's cell phone rings.

Four hours a day. Darren is a single guy with no hobbies or pets, no girlfriend, not even a lawn to mow. And yet even his empty life holds no space for such a time-consuming habit. Television watching is like the earring he wore in high school: once you gave it up, the hole simply closed.

“Whew, I'm beat.” Gia takes Darren's cigarettes from his chest pocket and tucks one behind her ear, a gesture he remembers with a pang. It would be a lie to say he's thought about her in the last six
years. Even sober—especially sober—he is a master at not thinking about the past.

“I'm tired just watching you. Business is good, I guess.” Darren eyes the portrait above the bar, his father and uncle arm in arm, Pat's eyes sunken and unnaturally bright, the terrible avidity of end-stage sickness. His settlement check arrived in April. Mesothelioma would kill him the day before Christmas. That summer the brothers made an offer on the old Commercial Hotel, fulfilling a lifelong dream.

“The last six months have been crazy. Gas guys, mostly.”

Darren glances around the room. None of the faces looks familiar. “In Bakerton? They're, what do you call it, fracking?
Here?”

She stares at him as though he's been living on some distant planet. As, of course, he has. “Seriously? Jesus, Devlin. Ask your brother about it. He signed a lease.”

“
Rich
did?”

“He didn't tell you?”

“Er, no.” The brothers had spoken a few Christmases ago. Born ten years apart, with two sisters in between, they had never been close. “He's going to let them drill on the
farm
?”

“Sure. Why not?”

No short answer to that question, and Gia doesn't have time for the long one—not that he'd be able to articulate it. (Cancer? Earthquakes? Dick Cheney?) At the far end of the bar a man holds up his empty glass. Darren reaches for his wallet.

“You're not
leaving
!” Gia screeches.

He is aware of grinning like an idiot. “Nah. Just showing my appreciation for the excellent service.” He places a five on the counter, remembering that he can actually afford to get drunk in Bakerton. It's a dangerous thought.

“Your sister was up for a visit, a couple weeks ago,” says Gia. “With the baby. I saw her at Walmart. I guess she told you.”

Weirdly, she had not.

“She said you have a girlfriend.”

“I don't.” Darren feels his face heat. He'd talked too much about the receptionist at work, making it sound like more than it was—part of his ongoing campaign to reassure Kate that he managed some semblance of a normal life. “There was this woman, but it was nothing. I'm surprised she mentioned it.”

“I asked her.”

Clocks reverse direction. The earth pauses in its orbit, momentarily confused. It hovers there for weeks or months while Darren formulates a response.

Why, Gia? Why do you want to know?

But before he can speak the words, her attention shifts palpably. Like a sunbather under a passing cloud, he feels a sudden chill. Darren looks over his shoulder. In the doorway a guy is scoping out the room. Buzz cut, long ugly face, two thick gold chains around his neck. It's an exotic look for Bakerton, though he'd fit right in at Wellways—a garden-variety Baltimore street hood, lurking in the lobby waiting for his juice.

The guy lopes toward them, taking the empty stool next to Darren's. “Hey, girl,” he says to Gia. “What up?”

“Brando, this is Darren. My old friend from high school.”

“Hey.” Brando wears shorts and a frayed black T-shirt with the sleeves cut off. He's lean and sinewy—the way Darren might look with a little muscle. It's hard not to notice this, impossible really, since most of his visible skin is covered with tattoos: a motorcycle, a sunburst, a detailed scorpion.

Gia sets, at Brando's elbow, a shot of whiskey he didn't order. Clearly she knows what he likes. She races down the bar to serve a customer at the far end. Darren and Brando sit in silence.

“Nice ink,” Darren says finally, a line he's used with sullen clients. People loved to talk about their tattoos.

Brando grunts but doesn't speak, so Darren tries again: “You get them around here?”

“Nah, all over. Texas mostly.”

“How many do you have?”

“Eleven, if you count this one. It's pretty fucking small.” Brando extends a hairy foot, bare except for a flip-flop. On the instep is a replica of a military dog tag, actual size. “I got it before I redeployed. My serial number is on there, in case I lose it.”

“The dog tag?”

“The foot.” Brando knocks back his shot and calls to Gia. “I got your jumper cables out in the car.”

Jumper cables? Darren is immediately wary. It's a line he never thought of, himself.
I've got to hit the head. Smoke a cigarette. Make a phone call.
All the ways you excused yourself to go get high.

“I have a smoke break coming.” Gia looks around the room for Budd, who sits watching the ball game in a corner. She signals him as though hailing a cab, something she has almost certainly never done.

“Deployed,” says Darren. “You were in Afghanistan?”

“Iraq before that.” He pronounces it
Eye-rack.

Darren thinks, Never mind that. Tell me about Afghanistan.

“Be right back,” Gia tells Darren, briefly touching his hand.

Brando follows her out the door. Darren watches mutely, his hand burning where she touched it.

The room has gotten louder. Every stool is occupied, the overflow crowd spilling into the dining room. From their place above the gantry, his dad and Uncle Pat beam down at the scene.

Since childhood, apparently, they'd dreamed of owning a bar.

Pat worked for twenty years on an assembly line in Cleveland, making insulated windows. In the basement of the factory, another line churned out fireproof doors. His case was complicated by the fact that only the doors had contained asbestos. In the end the company settled—for Pat, just in time.