City Boy (25 page)

Jack and Reg watched the rain pool along the sides of the street in
shallow lakes. The overworked sewers were forcing water back out in plumes and sluices. “Good day for ducks,” Reg offered.

“The ducks can have it.”

“When I was a kid we used to go fishing up in Wisconsin every Fourth. My folks had a cabin and my aunt and uncle had one next door, so there’s all us kids running around, swimming and scratching mosquito bites. We fished for crappie and bass. Had ourselves some big old fish frys. Bread em in cornmeal, cook em in bacon grease. Nothing better.”

“You won’t believe this, Reg, but I’ve never been fishing.”

“Get outta here.” The flag shirt made it seem as if Uncle Sam was giving him a look of national disbelief.

“Well we didn’t exactly live on Lake Gitchigumee.” No cousins or other kinfolk on the premises either. The Orloviches were a meager and dispersed clan.

“We gotta do something about that! Jack! We’ll get you out on a bass boat with a high-test reel and some hungry bigmouths. You’ll be in heaven! Any weekend. Just say the word.”

Jack said thanks, it was something to think about. He envisioned a fishing trip with Reg. It would have its moments. The fishing would be all right. He and Reg would get by. Maybe they could trade dirty jokes. Find some conversational path that didn’t reach the usual dead end. He tried to imagine asking Reg about married happiness. His imagination stopped right there. He wondered when he had last talked to anyone with ease, without withholding himself, hedging and guarding.

Reg took another melancholy look at the rain. He was probably measuring this holiday against the idylls of his youth. An early, rainy twilight was closing in. Jack turned on the radio to try and get the word on the fireworks. Fran and Chloe came back in with potato chips and dips and carrot sticks, and they killed a little more time wondering what to do for dinner, if anything was open, if it was worth getting wet to find out. Nobody wanted to go to Lincoln Park. Eventually Jack and Reg drove around until they found a Kentucky Fried Chicken and came back with buckets of chicken so heavily breaded they looked corrugated.

At eight o’clock the fireworks were officially canceled. Almost immediately the rain let up and the sky softened to a misty drizzle. “Well that’s crummy,” said Fran. “I guess I don’t feel real patriotic.”

Chloe said, “We could sing songs. We could do historical reenactments.” She seemed to have settled on mirthless irony as her tone for the evening.

Or Reg and Fran could just go home, which was probably what they were waiting around politely to do. Jack willed them doorward. His brief flicker of affection toward them had not caught fire. He gave them credit for good intentions, he granted that they were loyal to the point of perversity, but in fact they bored him and always had. He was trying to keep his distance from Fran, who eyed him from time to time with moist sympathy. You want to fuck Fran, Chloe had accused him, although she hadn’t said it again and gave no sign of remembering it. The truth was he both did and didn’t want to fuck her. As a pure fantasy, some yummy, blond-furred, bottoms-up romp, sure. As an actuality, a walking talking human being with the capacity to cause him endless wreckage …

CRACKCRACKCRACK

“Whoa, what was that?” said Reg. Ever since the rain had slacked off, firecrackers had begun to go off at greater or lesser distances, an isolated pop or a fusillade of noise. One of these had sounded from the street right in front of them. As they looked out to see what was happening, a small, rocklike object arced past them from above, trailing a fizz of gray smoke. It landed on the sidewalk, fizzed and smoked a few seconds more, then CRACKCRACKCRACK, exploded. From somewhere overhead came the sound of applause and encouraging cheers.

Chloe said, “Tell me they are not doing that.”

“I think they’re up on the roof.”

“Are those the guys you were talking about?” asked Reg. “Pretty wild.”

“Call the police,” directed Chloe.

“I’ll go holler up at them.”

“Jack, you could get hit by one of those things.”

“Well go ahead and call the cops if you want, it’s only going to take them about three hours to get here.”

“I think we should just all stay inside.” Chloe looked more peeved than worried about Jack getting himself exploded, but he knew she was stressed to begin with about the day. If he got himself beaned by a live cherry bomb, he assumed she’d feel bad.

“Look, I’ll go out back, that should be safe enough.”

“Be careful,” said Fran, as if to balance out Chloe’s irritation and to demonstrate her anxious concern for him. He had avoided hugging her when she arrived. She looked as if she might try to sneak one in now. Jack ducked out the door with a wave. He thought they were all secretly pleased to have this minor drama to enliven things.

From the backyard he could hear them clearly. There was music playing, and the smell of something charring on a grill, and voices. They’d managed to use the fire escape, a spidery zigzag metal thing, to haul themselves from the kid’s kitchen window. “Hey!” Jack called. “Hey, Rich?”

They either couldn’t hear him or didn’t want to. Jack jumped, pulled the bottom rung of the ladder down, began a cautious ascent. He wondered how often, if at all, anyone inspected fire escapes. This one seemed barely code legal. When he reached the platform that was its terminus, he was still a good four feet below the roof. “Rich?”

A face peered over the edge, the young, pudgy girl he’d seen once on the stairs. She was wearing a white, abbreviated undershirt. Breasts on legs. The cotton fabric squeezed so much of her up and out, even looking at her was an indecent act. She said, “You have to get on top.”

“What?”

“Up on the top rail.”

There was an improvised stair made out of milk crates, and with it you could reach the railing and haul yourself up to roof level. The girl gave him a hand and Jack tried not to graze her anatomically well-defined nipples with his ascending head. He felt like Mr. Dandy. “Thanks,” he said, once he got upright and clear.

“Wow, you’re really tall.”

“No, just an overachiever.”

She walked away. Among the seven or eight people on the roof, Jack identified Rich Brezak, Ivory, and Raggedy Ann.

It was a flat roof with a raised, waist-high parapet of brick, so that it was possible to walk around on it without real caution. This was only a two-story building, but Jack had the sensation of entering some different air, like a bird or an urban astronaut. Neighboring buildings revealed themselves in new, peculiar angles. The sky opened up, the gridwork of wires pressed down. The roof’s surface was some gritty, freckled, sandpaperlike substance. Housings for different mechanical items, heating vents, ducts, piping, were scattered around, a field of metal mushrooms. There was a chimney, crumbling brick by brick, marking a long-dead fireplace. Rain still glazed the metal surfaces and puddled along the roof’s edges. Everyone was damp from the intermittent drizzle. Brezak looked as if he’d been wetted down to keep him fresh, like lettuce in a grocery store.

He and the rest of them were squatting over a cache of bottle rockets, flares, M-80s, Roman candles, and other less than legal entertainments, laid out in a clear plastic bag. Raggedy Ann leaned across Brezak’s shoulder. Ivory crouched with her back against the chimney, fiddling with the boom box, seemingly untroubled by the other girl’s presence. He would never understand these people. “Hey, Rich?”

“Don’t tell me you’re here to bitch. Itsa holiday.”

“How about no more aerial bombardment. It’s making people nervous.”

“No problem. Those were just practice shots.”

“Practice?” Jack the obliging straight man, as always.

“We got some big stuff here. Red white and blue, downtown-sized fun.”

“Great. Try not to kill anybody. We have company.”

“Bring em up, come watch the show. Somebody get this man a piña colada.”

“No thanks.” But Breast Girl was already pouring from a thermos, handing him a cup. In fact he wasn’t anxious to go back downstairs and labor through another round of conversation where each remark landed like a bowling ball. At least up here he had no hosting responsibilities,
and if it was a weird scene, it was at least weird and interesting. He took a drink of his piña colada. It tasted of summer and beaches. By now it was nearly dark, but they had distributed a number of cheap citronella candles at intervals along the parapet, shielded from the rain. The music was something not reggae, for once, it was bouncy and rapid-fire and while Jack could not say, on balance, that he liked it, there were parts of it he did. Ivory stood up from her crouch by the boom box and came to stand next to him.

“Happy Fourth.”

“Same to you.”

Not that she looked happy. But then, she never did. She said, “Act like you’re telling me something really really funny.”

Jack bent down to whisper into her humid ear. “This is about showing him how much you don’t care what he does?”

“Something like that.” She threw her head back and laughed, hahahaha.

“Then you shouldn’t even be here.”

“Hahahaha. What do you know.”

“Men don’t like being stalked and pursued.”

“Yeah. Well that’s not what I’m doing.” Her eyes passed over Brezak and Raggedy Ann. They amused her.

“I’m just saying. Try a little harder not to try so hard. Keep him guessing.”

“That how it works at your house?”

A veil of sudden rain blew across his face; he brushed it aside. She was such an odd, a freakish, even a dangerous girl, and perhaps that was why he could speak to her without certain kinds of caution. “Pretty much.”

She smirked at him. Her pale limp hair snaked over her shoulders. She was wearing her usual floppy cottons. She was so without vanity as to seem unkempt. The things they had done together seemed unreal to him, a sexual complicity that had no place in his waking life. She was shaking her head, smiling, her face relaxed from its pretense of mirth. “What’s your story?”

“What do you mean?”

“I mean, I know why I’m fucked up, but what the hell happened to you?”

Nothing, he started to say, pissed off that he’d left himself open to her peculiar sympathy. But wasn’t that what he’d started off wanting, under the guise of feeling sorry for her, somebody to feel sorry for him, his lost lonely pitiful jerk self.

“Yo, Jack?” Reg’s head appeared at the edge of the roof. They’d sent a second patrol after the first. “What’s going on?”

“I found the party. Check it out.”

Reg took it all in. The candles, the music, the grill, the promise of alcohol. “Well, let me go talk to the girls.”

“Sure.” He toasted Reg’s retreating head with his drink. Ivory had walked away from him. She was helping with the food, gray pseudo-sausages and some sort of corn and tomato and mushroom combination wrapped up in aluminum foil. Jack watched Rich Brezak and two other delinquent types argue about the timing, trajectory, and throw weight of some of the heavier items in their arsenal. Raggedy Ann was rubbing against him like a cat. Jack found the thermos and poured another drink. All around them now, from other rooftops, from vacant lots, back porches, the unsecured territory of parks, a steady crackle and whine of fireworks sounded, some of them visible as clusters of white or red starbursts, or a tail of orange cinders on a concussion rocket. There was a smell of gunpowder and drifting smoke, there were voices everywhere in the darkness, hooting, cheering, a sense that anything might happen, the city taken over by fire or violence, just for the hell of it, in the name of having a good time.

Jack was halfway to an agreeable drunk when Chloe, Fran, and Reg climbed over the edge of the roof. He was surprised to see them. At the most he expected Reg, while the women stayed below and thought dark thoughts, said dark things. But here they all were, making their way cautiously across the uneven, puddled surface. Jack saw them in silhouette, backlit by the alley light. “Hey there,” he said brightly. He thought Chloe was probably still mad at him, and now she was here to
rip him a new one. She and Fran had their heads together, giggling, amused by something, maybe just the notion of being here. Okay, not mad.

“Hey yourself.” Chloe sounded friendly for the first time that day. “So what have we here, the alternative Fourth of July?”

“Yeah. The kids are going to burn the place down, I thought we could watch.” Jack observed them taking in the scene, the costume of Breast Girl, the various and striking configurations of hair—braided, shaved, fluorescently tinted. Rich Brezak got to his feet, removing Raggedy Ann from his person, and walked over to rummage in the cooler for a beer. “Rich, thanks for letting us, uh, hang out.”

“It’s your roof too, buddy. Help yourself to …” He waved a hand, indicating food, drink, sexual favors. “Come here, you got to see these.”

Jack followed him over to the fireworks cache. A small, respectful crowd had gathered around it. Brezak said, “We got repeaters, candles, mortars, aerials. We got a Blazing Blast Furnace. Some Whistle Whirl comets. A Galactic Glitz. And a Battle of Khe Sahn.”

“Well that’s … Jesus Christ, where did you get this stuff? This isn’t fireworks. It’s ordnance.”

“Internet,” said Brezak. “I figure the small stuff, the candles and rockets, we can set off whenever we want. But once we get going with the heavy hitters, we gotta dump and run, cause some chickenshit’ll call the law down on us.”

Chickenshit Jack thought the kid had probably found his true vocation, as a tactician and guerilla commando, if only he had anything resembling a cause. He was cool and resolute, well provisioned, even organized. Whatever musky charisma kept the two girls fighting over him showed to good advantage as he consulted with one of his lieutenants over the fine points of the Airborne Mortar Kit. Raggedy Ann had draped herself over the kid’s knees. Jack had lost sight of Ivory. It occurred to him, dimly, that he ought to keep track of her if only to steer her away from Chloe.

He surveyed the darkened rooftop, but couldn’t sort anyone out among the moving shapes. He sensed a need for craft and strategy, without entirely being able to remember how he ought to proceed.
Somebody had fired up a joint. It wafted among the other burned smells. He located Chloe, finally, talking to Reg. And here was Ivory, a safe distance away, loitering near the fireworks. He took note of how amazingly stupid he’d been to have anything to do with her.