Be Safe I Love You (7 page)

Shane didn’t try to hug her or kiss her in the car, and she respected him for it. He smiled at her. He said, “I missed you.”

She nodded, said, “I just need to settle in, babe.” She wanted to tear his shirt open and bite him, wanted to pull his face down and shut his mouth with hers. But she sat looking at him, waiting patiently for him to say the exact thing he said:

“I’m kind of going nuts being here. I can’t believe I agreed to stay two weeks this time. My uncles are . . . I can’t even talk about it. I keep seeing people we went to high school with that still fucking live here. Live with their parents or whatever. It’s fucking crazy. It must be even weirder for you.”

She nodded, but it was irritating that he was talking about her and didn’t realize it. She was still there with nowhere to go and so was Holly. And most of the friends she served with had gone back to their hometowns too. She knew she just needed to leave it all for a while. She’d take it up with Daryl when she saw him. They’d both find good work up north. She could bring Danny with her to check things out. She had skills now and she didn’t need to take three steps back, follow a plan she’d set up before she’d ever been down range.

She said, “I’m going to walk home.”

He looked at her like he had just woken up, like he realized he’d been talking to a stranger, and it was a relief to see, made that tight sick feeling in her chest go away. And for a moment it made her love him like she used to. How quick he was. How he could see the way she was gone.

There was no reason why he should know her anymore. Shane was depressed running into people from high school because of what it said about who he was and where he came from. Now Shane lived among people who read like he did or talked about books, who went to parties that weren’t in parking lots or half-burnt warehouses. He was grieving for having lived here now that he’d been found. But as far as she was concerned Watertown wasn’t a place at all.

Watertown was like some imaginary landscape in a movie she’d once seen and now she had to go visit the set. See how the buildings were just facades propped up with pieces of plywood. It wasn’t just her father that had been replaced. Shane was trying to act like Shane, but he hadn’t aged a second or changed his clothes. Holly seemed like she was in some kind of hostage situation, forced to work as a waitress so Asshole’s parents would help her out. The Patricks had clearly been that way forever. Cartoon construction workers chewing on fat cigars claiming they’d ever had a chance to leave, lying to themselves every day at the bar.

And the town looked wrong—all high definition but flat like she was watching it from somewhere inside herself. Like she had no eyes anymore, just a scope that she stood behind, not even searching or aiming but watching, seeing everything a few seconds off—seconds before it really happened—and that removed the feeling of surprise or empathy you’re supposed to have. It was as though she was living ten seconds in the future and could tell before anyone else that nothing mattered. She’d already read the fairy tale this life was based on and it ended badly, the birds eat your trail of bread crumbs, children are beheaded while peering into old trunks, idealistic suitors fertilize the roses on which they’re impaled with their blood.

The rain was falling heavily on the car now, and it sounded like they were being buried in gravel.

“Sit here awhile until this lets up,” he said. She held his hand and watched the empty street succumb to the deluge before them. It was like a summer thunderstorm in the middle of winter: bare trees and naked muddy concrete and no wind.

Shane looked strong and lost at the same time and he was about to say something to her, but she pressed her palm to his face and pushed her fingers into his mouth. Cupped her other hand over the front of his jeans. He sucked on her fingers as she undid his belt, then reached in with her warm wet hand and felt him. Put her mouth on his mouth and straddled him, pressing her body against him. His glasses fogged and she took them off and put them on the dashboard—his head was against her chest and he looked up at her and she kissed him while he put his hands in her hair, guided her face down to his and kissed her perfectly, hungrily. Her back was against the steering wheel and she kissed his neck while she stroked him. So familiar and so much better than familiar in its distant dislocated newness. She could feel how tense he was, pulled tight and lovely, blood straining against delicate skin and filling her hand. The hum of their intent filled the little space and she felt for a moment the happy rush of living alongside him, not watching from outside, not far away. She held firmly to his flesh and beating blood and slid her hand along him in the cramped car on that chilly empty street beneath the hammering rain, hoping that if he could not bring her back this way, he could at least make her disappear.

Nine

W
HEN SHE WAS
done she rested her forehead on his chest, her hand slick and limp against his sticky tender skin, the car thick with the smell of him. She felt like she’d woken up, felt sobered. He leaned his head back and breathed while she adjusted herself and stepped out of the car. Stood in the rain, stretched. When she came around to the driver’s side he put the window down, looked into her eyes. She watched him uneasily as he loved and studied her, then she leaned down and kissed him.

“What the fuck, baby?” he whispered against her mouth.

She stood again and looked at him. “Nice language,” she said.

“Seriously, girl,” he said, smiling.

“Don’t call me ‘girl.’ ”

“All right, bad lieutenant,” he said, his face confused, reconfiguring itself. “What d’you want me to call you now? ‘Sar’n Clay’?” He said it in a southern accent, and she saw again that thing college had done to him that she didn’t like at all.

“You want to fight outside The Bag of Nails like one of your fucking uncles?” she asked. She had none of the warm feelings she’d had for him thirty seconds before.

He looked at her in surprise and his eyes changed slowly, like land growing lighter after a cloud passes. He was naive, and it infuriated her the way he still possessed the luxury of disappointment.

“My intention was to take you ice-skating, not to have sex or fight,” he said.

“So you’ve not achieved your goal and accomplished two things you didn’t want. What does that feel like?”

“
You’re
asking
me
what that feels like?”

Shane laughed through his teeth but stopped abruptly as her hands shot through the open window. She grabbed the collar of his shirt roughly in one deft movement and he jerked his head back, shocked. He was weak, and she put a stop to his flailing immediately by putting the heel of her palm right beneath his nose and pressing up. He tried to turn but was forced to tilt his head back against the seat. She scrambled farther into the car and pressed her other forearm against his throat. Her face was close to his and the car still thick with the smell of sex. He made a sick sad grunt as he struggled to turn his head, a frightened echo of sounds he made when she was touching him or in his sleep. It turned her stomach. The cartilage in his nose began to give and it revulsed her, a sickening, enervating jolt ran through her joints. She dropped her hands as if her tendons had been cut, stepped back, and shoved them deep into her jacket pockets to keep him safe.

Shane sat upright again, confused and disarranged, and looked at her. He was furious and hurt and didn’t realize those feelings served no purpose at all. Like everyone else, he simply had no idea of how easily he could be dispatched.

She was soaking wet and her tears were hot on her face, crying for what just happened to him. She hated all the intelligence behind his eyes, pitied him and was ashamed by his knowing look—as if he’d been studying up on her while she was gone. Now she was just doing what he expected, what they taught him about people like her at his smug liberal school. Thought he was seeing what war did but he had no fucking clue. Thought he was seeing trauma up close but he was seeing it from a remote distance, might as well have been seeing a glacier melting, an ocean dying, an oil field set on fire.

“I’m sorry,” he told her, looking steadily into her eyes. “I’m sorry I said that. But not because you tried to push my nose up into my brain.” She leaned down and he put his hand against her cheek, pushed her soaking hair back from her neck. Her clothes stuck to her body and she could feel their weight.

“I hate it here,” she said. And she did not mean the bar or the town or the country in which they lived.

Ten

S
HANE WASN’T ANGRY
until after she turned and walked away. She’d messed up his face and he could feel the heat of blood swelling in his nose and upper lip. He should not have apologized to her after she did that. She was not all right, and god only knew, in her house nothing would be done to help her and no one would say a thing. Lauren could breeze through her whole life, doted upon or ignored, left to figure it all out for everyone else. Even when they were in high school she kept things to herself, protected her father, pretended for her brother. Shane punched the steering wheel with the side of his fist. He touched his face where she had hurt him, the skin hot and sensitive, beginning to swell.

•    •    •

Holly smiled when he walked back in, then stopped abruptly when she saw his face. “That was a quick trip to the rink,” she said. “You okay?” She was standing too close to Patrick, and his other uncles were playing dice.

Patrick winked at him. “Lauren all right then?” he asked, pointing his chin in the direction of the door.

Shane shrugged, nodded.

“She didn’t look herself, did she?” Patrick asked, a knowing smirk spreading across his face.

“Oh for chrissakes,” Holly said. “She’s been home twelve hours. You don’t look yourself after a day of delivering that fake newspaper.”

“Sure I do,” Patrick said. “I look better than myself, got plenty of time to reflect while I’m driving around. I’d say I actually have one of the most relaxing jobs in town. Makes me feel fantastically myself. I get to take part in the life of the proletariat. I get to cruise around and think about what I’m reading or what I’m going to read next. You know what I’m going to read next?”

Shane and Holly said nothing, just looked patiently at one another.

“I’m reading
Wilderness and the American Mind
,” he said, answering his own question. “It’s next on my list.”

Shane looked up at him for a minute and Patrick nodded. “That’s right,” he said.

Shane didn’t want to hear his drunk, delivery-boy uncle say intelligent things because all he could picture was the man borrowing money from his mother. Borrowing money after she’d worked all day and cooked dinner for three grown men who were perfectly capable of feeding themselves or getting real jobs. It made him want to elbow Patrick hard in the face. He wondered why he was so short tempered today, then clenched his teeth thinking about the force with which Lauren had grabbed him. Recognized how eager he was to pass that treatment on to someone else. Someone who deserved it.

His mother had gone to college for two years, had Shane, and then went to one year of professional school—secretary school, they called it then—and she was supporting all of them, happily. As if her brothers’ sweet faces still shone for her. She still saw them as boys, ignored or denied the things they had done, took on the weight of survival for their family name or some hereditary poetic tendency that was carried on a coffin ship and made it alive, only to be delivered this century to The Bag of Nails, the department of social services, and the Jefferson County jail. In fact Shane wanted to hit Patrick hard in the face just for standing there, for just looking at him. He wanted to break something, to clear the bar with a baseball bat. But instead he nodded at his uncle. Said, “It’s a good book, though dated.”

“Though dated,” his uncle repeated, winking at Holly and laughing, then he reached out and put his hand on his nephew’s shoulder—shaking him back and forth a bit. “All right, easy there, take it easy, boy. Think I can’t read your mind but I can.” He looked at Holly and grinned. “I can read yours too,” he said. Then he turned his attention to his brothers who were shaking dice inside a plastic dessert cup and spilling them upon the tacky grime-darkened wood of the bar.

The bartender put up a beer for Shane and he stood and drank it this time. He had another week in Watertown. Every bit of it was worse than he remembered, and the way Lauren had blown back in from nowhere was tearing down everything he’d built. He was spent and sticky from her touch, snared by the relief and grief of seeing her. Inhabited by her even as she seemed disembodied herself.

He drank the pint and ordered another, and Holly watched him from a booth across from the bar where she sat sending texts and rolling silverware into paper napkins. She smiled at him and then pointed to the seat across from her. When he brought his drink over he said nothing, touched his nose lightly to feel if it was swelling. His phone buzzed and he looked at it guiltily, then hit
SILENCE
again.

“I guess this throws a wrench in your Swarthmore romances, huh?”

“I’ve seen her twice in three years,” he said of Lauren. “But once I get around her I can’t think of anyone else, or I can’t even fucking think.”

He shook his head and smiled sadly, looked up into his friend’s wise, wry face.

“What happened out there?” she asked. “She mad at you? Why’s your nose all red, you been crying?”

“Doesn’t mean anything.” He shrugged, amazed at how inarticulate he’d become in just a week. How he didn’t even bother. Right now he was drinking in the same bar with the Patricks. He was sitting with a woman who’d been his peer in every way, and whose life had been tanked six years ago by some jackass party boy and she was still trying to make good. He shook his head and started over. “I think Lauren may be having some real problems,” he began, then Patrick crossed the bar with a fresh drink in his hand and stood beside Holly, resting his other hand on her shoulder.

“Anyway,” he said to her. “Getting back to my point before we were sidetracked by this romantic tale of woe, you have to engage them especially if you think they are looking down on you. I’ve had conversations with professors in houses where Gerry and me were working odd jobs and they are blown away by what I’m reading, by the thought experiments I’m undertaking. You should see their faces.”

“We’re talking,” Holly said to Patrick, giving him a shy smile and gesturing at Shane. But Shane couldn’t tolerate another of his uncle’s interruptions, couldn’t stand the things he said.

“That’s just great,” Shane told him. “Of course the people whose garage you’re cleaning out are shocked you’re reading things from their freshman seminars. You were a national merit scholar, now you’re a newspaper delivery man, how many of those do you think there are?”

Holly said, “Prolly more than you think” at the same time Patrick said, “None.” And Shane shook his head at both of them.

“No, none,” Patrick said again, taking no offense at all—as this was all clearly part of some fundamental case he was making. “Or not too many. I’ve had conversations with these people and they say I should be teaching their class. You know I could have done that if I’d actually wanted to.” He shrugged and took a gulp of his drink. “It was my choice. But I just didn’t want to. I got offers to go to St. Lawrence and George Washington.” Patrick laughed mockingly, shook his head and raised his glass to his lips again, smiling to himself. “People think if they hold out a bone you have to sit up and beg.”

Shane’s rage roiled again and his uncle watched with amusement.

“What are you going to do about it?” Patrick asked him belligerently.

“About what?” Shane asked tightly.

“This great weight upon you whenever I talk about having the things you never had.”

Shane looked genuinely startled. “Excuse me? Having what I never had? You seriously think I’m angry because I’m
jealous
of you? You never had a fucking thing, Paddy. You never had a thing.”

“You’re mad because I got freedom and you don’t,” he said, slowed by drink and whatever grand vision it provided. “You all care so much about what people think and how they see you. All of you.” He waved his hand in a dainty circle and spoke in a falsetto: “All the little sheep, little college sheep, grazing along.” He dropped abruptly back into his normal speaking tone. “I’ve got riches up here. I’ve got things they can’t imagine.” Patrick straightened his shoulders, raised his chest expansively; he breathed deeply, smiling a wistful self-congratulatory smile, and Shane knew they were about to be the audience for one of his drunken soliloquies.

“Here’s what I have that you don’t. That you can’t get—can’t even begin to get. I wake up at four in the morning amidst this beautiful decay, this city that’s an object of your scorn. I get to smoke and read and drink coffee and then load the car, all simple but complexly transcendent pleasures. I get to feel my muscles working. I get to see the faces of the grotesques that do this job—they’re real people, you know. People your kind don’t want to know exist because they’ve got nothing, not even books. But they’re beautiful, dressed in their dickies and thermal underwear, smoking generic cigarettes, pulling the bundles off the great filthy truck from the printers and heaving them onto the loading dock.”

“Patrick,
shut
the fuck up,” Shane told him. “Enough with the Herman Melville of the loading docks routine.”

“What you can’t stand, boyo,” he said, invoking his father’s accent, bringing on some pugnacious, bred-in-the-bone fury that had no place in this country or century, “is that I love this life and I
want
this life. I can live in my little room and read Nietzsche and have more wealth and depth than you’ll ever have following orders about what you’re supposed to think and learn. You just keep lapping it up and maybe you’ll be a good little professor one day and perpetuate the whole sycophantic monstrosity all over again.”

It was a mistake to have told him to shut up and Shane knew it. Patrick’s competitive nature would guarantee a longer monologue, and Patrick had an advantage over normal people because he didn’t care if what he said made sense or not; it was more about the cadence of the language and the emotion it carried. Shane had seen this his whole life. Regardless of his high-school glory days, Patrick didn’t actually know much, didn’t retain information for very long at all. He rarely finished anything he started reading and couldn’t articulate concepts or follow more than a basic plot, but he did read on occasion, he did remember the names of titles and authors and memorized big words he liked the sounds of, and the uncanny nature of these acts where they lived was enough to convince himself he was intelligent. Patrick was versed in nothing and because of that he was doomed to perpetual audience, perpetual awe, everything a mystery. He had placed himself on a pedestal—he was his own high-school sweetheart.

Patrick was so ignorant he didn’t even understand the fundamentals of his own poverty, had created a mystique and heroism around it, made it about being looked down upon by professors who were suddenly shocked to learn of his genius, exploited by some phantom elite, even as he was paying the Guinness and Marlboro empires for his own death on credit. Shane concentrated on not responding.

“I’m a loser to you!” Patrick went on, and Shane stopped himself from nodding in agreement. “Home from college just a few days and you can’t even
pretend
you want to spend time with us. I’m a loser to you? Guess what? Nine tenths of humanity is losers.
You
, my friend, are outside of real life! You’re the freak. I’m not ashamed to be what I am. I’m closer to real brilliance and transcendence and all the things you worship down there at your dainty little school than you’ll ever be. I can go home and read Cormac McCarthy and Faulkner and Heidegger and Husserl. All. Goddamn. Night!” He viciously enunciated the
T
in
night
and jabbed a finger into Shane’s chest, leaving it there while he took a trembling, menacing step forward. “I’m closer to them than you’ll
ever
be.”

At that point Shane actually laughed; he could see the sweat on his uncle’s upper lip and smell his inky, dirty clothes. The man had just shouted the name of Husserl in a dive bar, as if it was part of some incantation to bring him power.

“Let’s just take a break here for a minute,” Holly said, trapped in her seat at the booth. She put her hand on Patrick’s arm.

“No,” he said, choked with emotion, buoyed by drinks. “Hon, this is just what we were talking about the other day. Just exactly what we were talking about.”

He turned to Shane. “I’m not keeping my little foot in line to make sure my interpretation is correct. I’m reading masterpieces in the white-trash wilds.” His face was red now and he was shaking his head emphatically. “
You,
you just
degrade
people like me—poor people, you look down on me and the joke’s on you because I get the real meanings. I get what you never will. In MY way, not the way that keeps the world all buttoned up tight. I get it in MY way. In MY way!”

Shane sighed and shifted in the booth. He was trying not to speak because it would only make it worse. There was a certain tone Patrick took, halfway through the grandstanding, where it became entirely comic, one of those rousing speeches from the end of a ’60s-era movie. Some hushed and grandiose pronouncement. He whipped himself up into a rage, his body tense, almost bringing himself to tears at the thought of his own bravery in the face of the struggle for authenticity.

“I’m the last wild animal in this region,” he said, teary eyed and grinning defiantly at his nephew. “All the rest of you are afraid,” he said, and raised his voice to falsetto again: “Like your poor little mother, pinching every penny, terrified to do the slightest thing for herself because she’s so—”

At this Shane stood up and punched his uncle hard in the mouth. Holly leapt from the booth and stood in front of Shane, putting her arms around him to block whatever response might be coming, but Shane pushed her away, trembling with rage. Patrick staggered back, put a hand to his face but managed to keep hold of his drink with the other. He smiled and his teeth were slick and red with blood. He took a frightfully calm step toward Shane, his eyes dancing.

Gerry and Shamus were standing now, looking at them. Gerry laughed and folded his arms across his chest, waiting.

“Go,” Holly said, turning to Patrick, pointing to his barstool. “Go. Enough. Enough.”