Guy Langman, Crime Scene Procrastinator (23 page)

I jump up. “Voilà!”

“Don’t check your wallet, Guy, I didn’t take it, I promise.”

“No,” I say. “It’s not that. Was the North Berry Ridge kid Toby Weingarten?”

“Who?”

“That’s the kid who, uh, killed himself at the golf course when we were doing our forensics project.”

“Oh yeah, now that you mention it, his face did look familiar when I saw it on the news … Yeah, I think it was him.”

“I know.”

“I didn’t kill him, though, if that’s what people are saying.”

“I know that,” I say.

“I totally remember it now. I don’t think he even noticed that I took his wallet until the secretary pointed it out. She made me give it back, but I had already emptied the contents into my pocket. No one even noticed. I’m good.”

“He was pretty messed up. And you
are
a really good thief.”

“Thank you, thank you. Now I just need to work on finding a less, you know, illegal skill set.”

“You’ll get there, Hairston. I never thought I’d be good at anything, and look at me—tracking down killers, identifying whorls, dusting for prints …”

“Except, you know, there weren’t really any killers. Kind of a weird mystery.”

“Right, well … you know, life itself is a mystery sometimes. It’s up to all of us to solve it.”

“You’re deep, Guy Langman,” he says. “Is that from your sad journal?”

“No. Shut up.”

“So I’ll go get the coins. I have them upstairs.”

“You still want Lisa Baker?” I ask, feeling generous.

“You’ve moved on from analog to digital porn?” he asks.

“Hairston, I’ve moved on from analog porn to reality porn,” I say.

“Wait, what? You’ve become a porn star?”

“No, I mean, she’s just, it’s that, I mean—we haven’t even held hands yet. I don’t know why I said that. It sounded a lot less gross in my head. Forget it. I just mean, there might be a girl I like. A real girl. Born in recent decades, not a seventy-year-old lady
who took her top off for money amidst articles about Norman Thomas, world’s worst presidential candidate. Nothing against Lisa Baker, of course.”

“You read the articles?”

“Totally. Some good stuff in there. I totally know the best places to ski in Europe now. You know, in 1966. Now if we only had skis.”

“And a time machine.”

“Ha-ha. You’re all right, Hairston. You’re all right.” I realize that this is a strange thing to say to a dude with whom I so recently had fisticuffs, but he’s okay.

He comes back down in a second and my heart soars as I see the old cigar box. “So listen, Guy, I’m really sorry. Thanks for not calling the police or anything.”

“No problem, Hair-Bear. Just, you know, keep seeing Dr. Waters. Tell that Slippery Rock diploma and the fish that GL says howdy.”

“You don’t think you’ll be going back?”

“You know, Hair-Bear, I don’t think I will. Fifth stage, here I come …”

“What is the fifth stage, a bar or something like that?”

“Something like that, Hair. Something like that.”

Maureen, TK, and I are at my house again. Just hanging out. Anoop and Raquel are off drinking double-tall soy lattes or whatever. Forensics Squad is over, disbanded. Soon the school year will be over too. Then summer vacation and—oh man—senior year.

“I am really bummed, though,” I say. I’m filling them in on how I confronted Hairston to get my coins back. I’m showing TK the headlock. It’s pretty fierce. I leave out the part about the Lisa Baker mag. No need exactly to bring that up.

“It did go okay,” I say. “Only bummer is that I didn’t get a chance to deliver an action-hero zinger. I have lots of good lines ready.”

“Oh, I know you do,” Maureen says.

“You should have met him in Zant’s room—you could have gone with, ‘There’s something
fishy
going on here,’ ” TK says.

“I already used that one earlier. Like eight times.”

“Looks like you’re a
fish
out of water?” he suggests.

“Meh,” I say. But then I get excited about something. I had been trying to figure out what kind of music I really like, inspired by Maureen’s making fun of me. I had done some searching online and came across a band called the Dead Milkmen who I clicked on just because the name is funny. They had a song called “Swordfish!” The lyric is “I believe in swordfish” for some absurd reason.

“How about if I said, ‘I believe in swordfish,’ like the Dead Milkmen song?” I say.

“You know about the Dead Milkmen?” Maureen says, cocking an eyebrow, obviously impressed.

“Yeah!” I say. “I’ve been, you know, trying to find myself or whatever.”

“Let me know what you find,” she says, and punches me in the arm. But then she adds, “Most people aren’t going to know who the Dead Milkmen are, so I don’t know if it really counts as a quality quip. Count me as impressed, though.”

“Yeah,” I say.

“Hey, maybe,” Maureen says, getting really excited, “you could have pretended like you were at a restaurant and said: ‘Waiter, I’ll have the fish!’ And then stabbed him and added, ‘The swordfish.’ ”

I laughed. “Yeah! That could work.”

“I’m going to get going,” TK says. “Let you two have some time together.”

“Why would we want that?” I say, suddenly nervous.

TK rolls his eyes. “Someday, that Guy becomes a man. And someday that Guy takes your hand,” he says.

“Omigod, you read those?!” she says. “I’m so embarrassed!”

“Don’t be,” I say.

“You read it too?” she says, blushing hard. “It’s so emo.”

“They’re on the Internet, Maureen. Not exactly a secret,” TK says.

“They are sweet. I’ve been doing some writing lately too, you know,” I say.

“Will you share it with me?” she asks.

“I will,” I say. “I will.”

Well, damn, it’s all on the table now. TK bids us adieu. I’m alone with Maureen. Um, what to do now? I break out my notebook. It’s not black ink on black paper. Nothing that dramatic. Just regular pen and paper. I show her the stuff I had written about my dad, even the embarrassing parts, which is pretty much all of it. The book started out as a collection of things Dad said, then became a biography, then it’s just my sad journal. It is weird, sitting there in the room with her, watching her read that notebook. It is like letting someone into my brain. It feels wrong, but right at the same time, if that makes any sense. She reads in silence for a long, long time.

“We need to burn this,” she says.

“That bad?” I ask.

“No! Not bad at all! You are a good writer, Guy, really good.”

“So good that it, my only written work, needs to be incinerated?”

“It would be the perfect gesture. We burn it and pour the ashes over his grave.”

“Um, is this some sort of weird Goth thing?”

“It’s a human thing, turd. It will be the perfect way to say good-bye.”

“I’m not sure I want to say good-bye.”

“You
need
to say good-bye. You need to realize that the pain you feel is real and that the only way to go on living is to go on living.”

“Hey, that sounds like something Dad would have said.”

“You need to stop worrying about everything he ever said and instead think about the way he lived his life. And you need to realize that some of his advice was incredibly dumb.”

“Hey!” I protest. It’s true, though. “And he was really a jerk to my brother,” I say. “I’ll tell you about him sometime …”

“I’d like that,” she says.

I pause. I pause for a long time, trying to hold the space of sixteen years, of sixty years, of a lifetime, in just a few moments. Maybe it is time to put some of this behind me. Maybe it’s okay to admit that Dad pissed me off sometimes. His sick game, pretending to be dead. And it’s definitely wrong how he treated Jacques. And maybe it’s wrong the way Mom never let herself grieve. Maybe it’s all wrong. Maybe …

“You’re saying I need to forget the book?”

“Forget the book, Guy,” she says. “Not because it’s not good, because it is! But forget the book and go on with life. It’s what he would have wanted.”

“It’s what he would have wanted.”

Neither of us has a car, and this doesn’t seem like the kind of mission we could ask moms or friends to drive us to. So we walk. It is a long walk. At first we talk. She asks me about Raquel, totally smoothly working it into the conversation. “Who cares?” I say. Anoop and Raquel are a thing, or whatever. And maybe it’ll work out for them. I wish him the best of luck.

Maureen and I reach the narrow shoulder of the busy main road through Berry Ridge, making it so I have to walk behind her. Single file like kindergartners on a field trip. It makes it hard to hold hands. Is that something that I want? Yes. It also makes it hard to talk. There is much to say, but somehow the silence feels comfortable too. Not that it is exactly silent. The constant grind of engine noise and the whir of passing cars fills my brain,
but it still feels like I am on a mission up a mountain. Revelation is where you find it, my friends. That’s a Guy Langman original.

We reach Berry Ridge Cemetery. It is bright and green and sunny. Flowers and beautiful displays. You could almost forget this is a place where dead bodies are stacked beneath the ground. I show Maureen the plot where Dad is buried. It feels so strange to be there in this private place with someone else. It is like letting a friend watch you go to the bathroom for the first time. I need to work on my metaphors, clearly.

“There it is,” I say.

“Why doesn’t he have an inscription on his gravestone?” she asks.

“He never wanted one.”

“Really?”

“His will said he didn’t need one. I never really knew why. But when I was in his room the other day, looking for golfing clothes, I think I found the reason.”

“Really?”

“Yeah.” I reach into my pocket. I had been carrying the piece of paper with me at all times. I read it to Maureen: “ ‘I do not need a statue. I do not need a biography written of me. I do not need plaques hung on walls or words written in stone. The world will remember me well enough when I’m gone. Because I had sons.’ ” I start to cry. “Thanks, Dad,” I say. I wipe my eyes. “Sorry. That’s weird. I don’t know. I talk to him sometimes.”

“No, that’s really sweet,” she says, and takes my hand. Her hand is hot, and a little wet. But I like it. It feels right.

“Maybe I should tell Jacques about this. Maybe it would make him feel better,” I say.

“That’s really sweet of you.”

“He’s a pretty cool guy. I’d like for you to meet him. He made fun of Anoop’s coffee.”

“That earns him points in my book.”

“Want to take the bus into the city someday?”

“I’d like that.”

It feels like she wants me to say more, but somehow nothing more needs to be said. There is silence. Our little ritual happens in silence. I take the papers, the handwritten pages of my book, and set them on the ground. She takes a lighter out of her pocket. She hands it to me so that I may do the honors. I light the corner and … I’m not sure what I feel. All that work! But it does seem right. Very right. It burns, the smoke pluming upward to the sky like a hand waving good-bye.

“Good-bye,” I say.

“Do you talk to him a lot?” she asks.

“Yeah. All the time. And this is really weird. Sometimes he talks back. He even gives me crime-solving advice.”

“So you take all the credit even though your dad does all the work?”

“That’s how I roll,” I say.

It gets awkward for a moment.

“Listen,” she says, breaking the silence. “I brought you something.” She reaches into her bag and pulls out a bundle, tied in ribbon. “Open it.”

I do. It’s purple and shiny and oh my Lord. “An ascot?” I ask.

“An ascot!” she says. “You said you might start wearing one. You know, just for fun or whatever …”

“Oh man,” I say. “This is so great!” I flip it on and you know, it really feels right. Perfect.

“I’m not sure that’s quite right,” she says, reaching up and adjusting the ascot around my neck.

I must have gotten a strange look on my face. “What?” she asks, leaving her hand on my neck.

“Just … Dad,” I say.

“Is he talking to you? What’s he saying now?”

“Now?” I ask. “I don’t know. I have to listen.” I listen. It is quiet. The birds are singing. The sun is shining. The bright green trees blow in the wind. Life is going on. “He says to kiss the girl,” I say.

And I do.

I lied before. I do go back to Dr. Waters’s office, but just one last time. I’ll miss you, goldfish who I named Skip. I’ll miss you, comfortable leather couch. I’ll miss you most of all, diploma for Slippery Rock University.

“How are you doing, Guy?” Dr. Waters asks. She’s asked the question many times over the past year. Sometimes I would roll my eyes at it.
How are you doing?
That’s what they pay you for? And sometimes I’d almost start crying, just knowing I’d have to talk about things I didn’t want to talk about. Sometimes the question “How are you doing” is the most complicated and hardest question in the world. And sometimes, yes, I’d make a joke. I’d say stuff like “I think I’ve developed phobiaphobia, which is a fear of getting phobias, but maybe I don’t actually have it but am just afraid of getting it? It’s complicated, you know? Also, I have gas.” Stuff like that.

But today I answer honestly. And the honest answer is, “I’m doing okay.”

“That’s wonderful to hear,” Dr. Waters says. And I can tell she means it. “Have you spoken to your mother, like we talked about?”

“You know what?” I say. “I did. Mom and I have been talking
a lot
more. She took off her sunglasses, so to speak. Also literally. It was nice to see her eyes again. She opened up a bit. I opened up a bit. We ate tacos from Taco City. It was cool.”

“That’s wonderful,” she says.

“I didn’t know you loved Taco City too,” I say. She laughs. Finally! I get a laugh out of Dr. Waters. Sometimes humor is a way of hiding from shit; sometimes it’s just fun to make people laugh. I don’t say that out loud, though. I just keep opening up. Might as well. “I figured something out. My father was not a saint. He might not have been a genius. Or he might have been. But what he was, was my father. And he left me with a lot. A whole lot. Not just some coins, not just this beautiful nose, not just a brother. He left me a great deal, even if he didn’t leave me a guidebook on how to live. It’s up to each of us to write our own
Rules for Living
. Each generation’s guidebook is written in their own hand. The ways of the elders can only do so much.” She nods. I’m deep.