Silver Lake (31 page)

“Possibly,” Robbie said. “We can’t know,” he said again.

“I guess not,” Carlo said, and they sat a while and didn’t speak. Then Carlo said, “Tom Field.” He said, “Tom Field, Om Ield.”

Robbie smiled, but a tear formed, as well.

“Tom Field. Om Ield,” Robbie repeated. “Meld,” he said.

The two men were staring at each other in silence: How old they were in that moment, how old.

• • •

A
FEW DAYS LATER,
they went over to Gabriel’s aunt’s apartment. The boy had told his aunt he did not want to see them, but Gabriel’s aunt, grateful the men caught the boy when they did, perhaps fearing charges could be brought against her nephew (though bringing charges never once occurred to either man), said Gabriel didn’t have a say in the matter. Gabriel’s aunt said she knew the two men had been good to her nephew over the years, and she hoped they would forgive the boy for whatever he’d done. No, no, the two men told Gabriel’s aunt, it was the boy who needed to forgive them for however they’d tangled him up in the tragedy at their house that fall.

Then the two men talked to Gabriel alone. They tried not to be overtly amused by a teenager’s bedroom, the posters, the batik fabric across the top of the dresser. The candles next to the computer. Was that possibly an old teddy bear amid the bevy of pillows?

Gabriel sat up in bed. He pulled a flannel sleeve down over the bandage running the length of his arm. He had burns along his right side; they would heal. He was told to expect minor scarring at his hip. The side of his face had been burned, too, and was presently oily with salve, but he would recover. In the hospital, they’d had to shave his already shaved head as well as his right eyebrow. He did look a little strange, but he seemed to be his
same old self once they started talking—or no, maybe he was not his same old self, not so sweet, not so innocent. The boy’s voice had flattened out and he sounded weary and bitter when he conveyed what he knew about all the vandalism at the house.

He did not know for certain who had tagged the trash cans and thrown the garbage all over the front yard, but it was the kind of random prank that the crew of kids who hung out with Lonny (yes, Lonny) sometimes pulled when they were drinking. But was this a mocking response to Tom’s death and what might have been rumored as the unsavory way Tom died? Probably not, but they would never know. And as for the two plum trees and whether they succumbed to the wind or were snapped against an angry boot, Gabriel didn’t have an opinion. He didn’t think it was the kind of thing Lonny would do, but then Gabriel could certify that Lonny was responsible for the effigy. Lonny had taken one of Gabriel’s old shirts and a tetherball he found in Gabriel’s backyard and then strung it up during the night—in retaliation, Lonny claimed, for Carlo having roughed him up at the liquor store.

“That kid could have made a mess of you,” Robbie said to Carlo.

“It
was
pretty pathetic on my part,” Carlo said. “But, Gabriel, do you know this for sure about Lonny and the effigy?”

“I was with him when he did it,” Gabriel said.

The boy hadn’t tried to stop his friend, not in front of some of the other kids also lurking around, plus Lonny was not someone you wanted to get in the way of when he was both vengeful and stoned.

“And also …” Gabriel started to say.

“And also what?” Robbie asked.

The boy seemed reluctant to go on. He was scowling at Carlo. He said, “I didn’t owe Lonny money like I said I did. I was scamming you.”

“Oh,” Carlo said.

“And Lonny wasn’t with me when I set the tree on fire. You lied. I didn’t care if your whole house burned down. I still don’t.”

Carlo shivered. The boy was becoming one more stranger to them. He had to believe it was not too late to repair the splintered trust, and yet he’d be fooling himself if he didn’t admit he was worried. If a sweet kid could grow up and light up a pepper tree, and if a man could hang himself while the two men slept, then logic meant nothing, reason nothing. In time the boy might become that man. They needed to do everything they could to prevent that from happening, but could they?

Gabriel leaned back and stared at the bedroom ceiling, scarred by half-scraped-off celestial decals. He appeared to soften a bit. He said, “I don’t know. Maybe I was changing my mind. I thought about putting out the fire, but I’d spilled gas on the lawn and on my arm, and then I caught on fire—”

“Luck,” Robbie said. “Luck I decided to come home when I did. Luck Carlo was there, too. We’ve been lucky, we’ve all been lucky. Except for Tom, that is. Except for poor Tom.”

Carlo looked at him and he was thinking in some ways, yes, much of the life they’d led together before that autumn had been charmed, but there was also a part of him, he had to admit, reluctant to assign away what had happened to chance. He wasn’t yet but wanted to be at peace with the knowledge some things could never be understood.

• • •

B
ACK TO NEW YEAR’S EVE.
Once the nurses at the hospital said Gabriel was asleep and once the boy’s aunt arrived from a party, the two men went home. In bed, they held each other the old way. They wanted to take a trip somewhere but had run out of money and therefore would need to fall in love again without the benefit of a room with a view in a canal city. They talked about the office, its revival or maybe each of them moving on into separate jobs beyond their partnership. They talked about needing to do things alone, taking courses, lessons in something, they weren’t sure what. They talked, but not everything was said about affairs or why secrets were held for so long, though in time everything would need to be said. They had changed in ways they could not yet qualify, and they were going to live now with a kind of uncertainty about their future. Each in his way knew the possibility existed, perhaps even the likelihood that they may not always be together. No matter what happened, however, they needed to remain close, because what an uncommon history theirs was, and how rare to know each other the way they did. To be known in the world and to be seen, everyone lived for that—nobody alone, or never alone for so very long.

And so it was the first day of a new year, and when the sun was up, Robbie stood at the bedroom window and was taken by the color the lake, a self-possessed lapis lazuli. Also he thought he spotted something oblong going into the water off the concrete shore at the opposite end of the Reservoir, something fluttering then sinking.

“What is it?” Carlo asked when he joined Robbie at the window.

“I don’t know,” Robbie said, although he had a suspicion.

The two men dressed and went out front to look at the pepper tree. The trunk was black but they were able to rub off a layer of soot. Some limbs needed to come down before they came down on their own, and so they got their ladder and their saw, and when they were done trimming, the old tree didn’t look so terrible. They were enjoying the yard work and so they moved around to the back of the house and pulled out some dead brush and weeds, and they went down to the fountain and talked about what it would look like and Robbie was enthusiastic, willing to help finish it. And then back up on the patio, Robbie was sweeping while Carlo was looking back at the glass house, which seemed to him for the first time not modern at all, but instead simply old. They lived in an old house and who really knew how well it was built? It had survived some wind these last weeks and decades of other natural battering, but it was possible one day it could come down.

Carlo expressed his newfound concern to Robbie, who said, “Oh, you’re a silly man. It’s lasted this long, hasn’t it? Earthquakes and storms and now fire—well almost. That house is not going anywhere. Who’s a silly man?”

“I am,” Carlo said.

“What are you?”

“A silly man—Hey, look.”

“What?”

“There,” Carlo said and pointed at the Reservoir.

There was something again on the water in the distance. It looked like a raft of some kind, a raft with two people on it. Carlo went back inside to fetch their binoculars but by the time he returned, binoculars were unnecessary.

It was a raft and it had pushed closer toward the center of the lake, and the men could see plainly that the raft was in fact a small boat with a stubby mast. Two people stood up in the boat and worked at a white crescent of fabric, trying to loosen a sail, or maybe the sail had been released from its rigging but wouldn’t unfurl. There wasn’t enough wind up, although earlier it had been gusty, and Carlo wanted to shout to whoever it was down there to be patient for the wind to return. The two people in the boat kept struggling with the sail, one at the helm, one at the mast. They couldn’t catch any breeze. Perhaps some lakes were not meant to be sailed.

It was cold out and the day would be short again and yet the two men didn’t go inside. They sat next to each other on the back steps, their legs not quite touching. They sat there a long while.

Robbie was thinking that while he was skilled at his profession, he’d gone through life, his forty years, not knowing how to do so many things: He couldn’t really sew or cook. He couldn’t change a tire. He couldn’t build a chair. He couldn’t actually build a house himself. He couldn’t use a compass or pitch a tent. He couldn’t swim a mile. He couldn’t rescue a snake-bitten child, he wouldn’t know what to do. Oh, of course he could
do
all of these things—he would figure out what he needed or learn on the spot or train. But he didn’t want to be who he had been in the sense he didn’t want to be so dependent. He had changed but wanted to change more.

Meanwhile, too many images stayed with Carlo, his mother at the end, her mind gone, not recognizing him, or maybe recognizing him, he never knew. Tom hanged. The boy on fire. It was all too much, and Carlo felt weak but he let himself be weak.

He let his hands get cold, he let his teeth chatter. He stared up through the leafless bough of the Liquidambar at the noonday sky, and there was something strange yet wondrous about the way the top branches moved with a wind the listless lower branches showed no knowledge of, a vatic murmur above that went unheeded down below.

Robbie reached his arm around Carlo and tried to warm him up and wasn’t able, and he nodded toward the house to say let’s go inside, and it would have been at this point, as they stood at the same time, that the two men looked out at the Reservoir and noticed the boat in the center of the lake achieving its geometry, the white triangle of a full sail coasting from southeast to northwest across the water, gliding, banking, righting itself, curving around and tilting the opposite way, coming back now at the two men as if drawn along by their inhaled breath.

“How long do you think they’ve been planning this?” Carlo asked.

“I bet you they’ve talked about getting out there since -the day they moved in,” Robbie said.

“I wonder how they got the boat over the fence.”

“Very carefully. And in pieces, the hull, the sail.”

“You think?”

“Si, signor.”

“Nobody has come along and stopped them,” Carlo said.

“The police have better things to do,” Robbie said.

“Look. They’re headed back the other way.”

“They’ll go around and around the rest of the day, providing no one stops them and the wind stays up.”

“It will have to die down,” Carlo said.

“You never know,” Robbie said. “Anyway, they’ve got the wind for now.”

The two men watched the boat circle the lake, one man cold and the other exhausted, but they could not yet go inside. The boat on the lake was like a comet in the night, a date zero from which a calendar began, a new story they would likely be telling anyone who would listen for years to come.

PETER GADOL is the author of five previous novels, including
The Long Rain
and
Light at Dusk.
He lives in Los Angeles and teaches in the Graduate Writing Program at Otis College of Art and Design.