So Shelly (11 page)

I remember calling goodbye to my parents from outside their closed bedroom door as I did every morning before leaving for school, even though, typically, I’d receive no response. By then, my dad had already lost his ability to speak, and my mother—well, let’s just say that she’d never been the communicative type. That day, however, she returned my goodbye. It struck me as odd, and I sensed that something was wrong. But I immediately dismissed it and went on about my day.

By the time I got home from school, he was gone, both body and soul.

“Your father’s dead” was the extent of the explanation my mother offered through the exhaled smoke that rose from the lowered right corner of her bottom lip as she pressed a half-finished cigarette against the metal ashtray on the kitchen table. “Tell your brother. I have to go and meet with the man at the cemetery. I don’t know how we’re going to pay for this,” she mumbled without once looking me in the eyes. Life insurance, by the way, is one of those things I mentioned at the beginning that many poor people don’t do.

And then she left.

I stood frozen in the kitchen while she ignited the tired engine in the rust-covered piece of shit we called our “family” car and backed it out of the driveway. Alone, I aimlessly toured the entire house: downstairs and upstairs. Nothing had changed; he was just not there anymore. I peeked through the opening in my parents’ nearly closed bedroom door, but I didn’t go inside the room. Instead, I went to my own, lay on my bed, and waited for Tom to come home.

No obituary was placed in the
Reporter,
just a listing under “Death Announcements.” There was no wake or showing of the body. No funeral mass.

A Trinity school van was parked on the winding drive when my mother, Tom, and I arrived at the Ogontz City Cemetery (think permanent public housing). I had imagined that there’d be trees and tombstones. There was neither, just row after row of bronze-colored grave markers lying flat against the earth. The hearse parked behind the van. Through the tinted windows of the hearse, I saw Principal Smith; Father Fulop; six senior football players, all dressed in school-issued black sport coats; and Shelly. They stood in a solemn row near the canopy over the green-tarp-covered hole that was to be my father’s grave. I was both moved and mortified.

The football players were members of Trinity’s Joseph of Arimathea Society, a prestigious service organization that provided pallbearers and a touch of dignity for the homeless or for those who die without able-bodied friends or relatives to serve in that role. Joseph was the man in the New Testament who surrendered his own tomb for the burial of Jesus after the Crucifixion.

When the hearse stopped, the Joeys, as they’re called at
school, moved in practiced precision to the rear of the hearse, where they met the funeral director and extricated the coffin as we walked to the graveside accompanied by Father Fulop and Mr. Smith. Shelly met me there, took my hand, and stood silently by my side throughout the brief prayer service.

I felt oddly happy.

I walked Shelly to the van as Mr. Smith and Father Fulop paid final condolences to my catatonic mother. Inside, the Joeys had turned on the radio and were roughhousing, the way guys like that do.

I stopped about ten feet away from the van. “I don’t want to die,” I confessed to Shelly. It was the second time I’d shared my grim, irrational obsession with death with her.

Shelly didn’t laugh dismissively or tell me I was being silly. She simply said, “Write something.” She squeezed my hand, then squeezed herself inside the van among the Joeys, who, in their continued horseplay, remained indifferent to her company.

Afterward, not much, if anything, changed. Tom returned to his college classes, Mom kept to her cigarettes, and I kept to my anonymity with a greater resolve to make some mark of my existence, which, along with Shelly’s urging, prompted me to compose the following poem. It appeared in that semester’s edition of the
Beacon
.

I didn’t tell Gordon any of that; I just shook my head and said, “No.” But, of course, I’d heard about Shelly’s protest. She had even asked me to be part of it, but I’d turned her down for fear of … well … for fear of lots of things. Instead, I made sure I wasn’t in school that day. Telling the story, however, seemed like it would be somehow therapeutic for Gordon, so I played ignorant and let him tell it.

“Aw, man,” he began. “You know how she loved Indians, right? Even when we were kids, if you asked her what she wanted to be when she grew up, she’d say an Indian.”

I nodded.

“I mean, the Warriors makes no fucking sense for a goddamned Catholic school anyway. We should be the Peacemakers or the Apostles or at least the Crusaders or something like that. Anyway, Shelly had already collected signatures on a petition, written that article for the
Beacon
about the persecution of Indians and the bigoted use of tribal names by athletic teams, and took her cause to a board meeting.
Because of her dad, the school board humored her, allowed her to make a proposal, and politely listened to her demand for a name change. But, in the end, all she got was ignored.”

Gordon lost himself in the retelling.

“Then one day, during lunch, she walks into the cafeteria carrying her book bag. Without saying a word to anyone, she pulls her shirt off over her head and steps out of her uniform skirt, which gets all the guys screaming shit like ‘Take it off!’ Shelly ignores them like only Shelly could. So, she’s standing there in a one-piece buckskin Pocahontas costume or something—I think she wore it for Halloween in, like, the seventh grade. It barely covered her ass. Anyway, she pulls out of her bag a white bedsheet on which she’s written in black paint ‘Down with Bigotry’ and starts to walk up and down the center aisle of the cafeteria with her arms spread wide, holding that sheet like a goddamned ring girl, making sure everyone gets a good look, but all anybody is really looking at is her in that outfit. I don’t mind telling you, dude, although Shelly is—I mean,
was
—like a sister to me, she looked good. She got a whole new type of respect from the boys that day, even if it wasn’t exactly the kind she was hoping for.

“Now, there’s only one teacher, Father Fulop, in the whole place. And, at first, he seems to be enjoying it as much as anybody. But he eventually senses that he’s in over his head, right? He goes running for help. The next thing you know, Shelly returns to her bag, spreads out the sheet like a picnic blanket in front of one of those big, square load-bearing columns in the cafeteria. She pulls out a can of blood-red paint and pours it all over the top of her head. Finally, she
removes a heavy chain from the bag and motions for someone to wrap it around her and the column and to secure the chain with the biggest fucking lock I’ve ever seen. Trust me, there was no shortage of volunteers. Man, it was so Shelly. Fulop returned with Mr. Smith. Everyone was sent back to class. Even though some people hadn’t even touched their lunches. On my way, I saw the janitor heading toward the cafeteria with the most massive set of bolt cutters I’ve ever seen.” Gordon laughed out loud at the memory.

“I wish I had been there.”

“I can’t imagine what that stunt cost her old man in donations,” Gordon said.

“Yeah, for all the good it did.”

Gordon stopped laughing. Most of Shelly’s good deeds somehow ended in disaster—like her last one.

Talk about killing the mood.

“I guess you’re right,” Gordon said.

To the east, the horizon had begun to darken. Massive boulders, which had long ago been placed along the lake side of Sand Road, blocked my view of what I knew to be a strip of soft brown sand on the private beaches that ran the length of that side of the peninsula.

When I was a little boy and my dad was still in good health, he took Tom and me out on a fishing charter. Other than puking my guts up, the only thing I remember about that day was when my father pointed toward the miles of brown sugar-fine sand along the Strand, where I could make out only a few privileged and scattered beachgoers. He said, “Get a good look at it, boys. This is as close as either of you will ever get.”

*    *    *

Now that I was on the Strand for the first time, I was surprised to see that it actually contained a diverse assortment of homes, ranging from simple A-frames and one-room bungalows—most of which had been in the possession of people of modest means for generations—to the villas and two-story mansions of Ogontz’s gentry and its seasonal nouveaux riches. It reminded me a lot of Gatsby’s West Egg. All the homes were situated on the west, bay side of the road, which had to be crossed by the residents or renters to get to the private lakeside beaches.

“It’s right here,” Gordon said abruptly, pointing with his left arm extended through my line of vision.

I pressed heavily on the brake pedal and slid to a stop on the sandy surface. I shifted the Trans Am into reverse and returned to the wrought iron security gate between two large redbrick pillars that marked the only land entrance to Acedia.

“Five-eight-two-six,” Gordon said.

“What’s that?”

“The code for the gate. Press five-eight-two-six, then star.”

I did as instructed and watched the right side of the gate, topped with the “dia,” rise like prison bars against the orange-red gloaming of the western sky. Even intermingled with the magic colors of early twilight, the expansive, verdant cul-de-sac containing the cloistered inhabitants of Acedia dominated the scene and my senses.

The massive and many-windowed homes lorded over a veritable orchard of Babylon willow trees. Buried sprinkler
heads popped out of lush lawns and from among the manicured landscaping in a synchronized greeting in honor of our arrival. They began their frenetic oscillation, launching arched streams of water to battle the life-choking nature of the sandy and windswept soil. I instinctively turned right and followed the rotary around a centralized miniature English garden, replete with benches, a circuitous walkway, a dog park, and a fountain of three leaping dolphins spewing water from their mouths.

“That one’s mine,” Gordon said, pointing toward a massive Georgian colonial.

Beyond the horseshoe driveway, like sentinels, six bone-white columns rose from the front porch to a steeply pitched corniced portico high above. Paired redbrick chimneys rose from opposite ends of the roof on top of the gray-brown wide-planked wood-sided mansion. The weatherworn home was in desperate need of a refacing. Five second-story multipaned, rectangular windows encased in black shutters watched our approach in symmetrical perfection above four matching first-floor windows and centered French doors. The grounds were the only ones in the neighborhood not professionally maintained or washed in ambient landscape lighting.

I must have looked like I’d seen a ghost or something, because Gordon said, “It’s okay, dude; they’re just houses.”

I brought the Trans Am to a complete stop at the foot of the driveway, somehow feeling unworthy of advancing farther. I’m not sure how long I had been idling and staring, but a flood of shame washed over me as I considered Gordon’s
unplanned visit to my neighborhood and home, precipitated by my dim-witted forgetting of Shelly’s disc.

“It’s that one,” he said. “Shelly lived there.” He pointed at the monstrosity to the immediate right of his house.

“I know,” I said. “I’ve just never seen it from the front or this close.”

It was even bigger than Gordon’s and in much better repair. There were no signs of life in or around the house, even though the wake at Trinity should have ended by then.

“Let’s go,” Gordon announced. “We can’t have much time. Grab the disc and Shelly. I’ve got to get into Shelly’s pool shed and grab the boom box. I’ll meet you out back.”

I snickered.

“What?” Gordon asked.

“Boom box?” I said. “It sounds so eighties.”

“Says the guy with the Trans Am. What do you want me to call it? That’s what she called it. Do you want me to get it or not?”

“Sorry,” I said, stifling my amusement and shifting into park. “What should I do with the Trannie?”

“Leave it. My mother won’t notice or care, and by the time anyone connects it to us, we’ll be on the water.”

I took Shelly from the Trans Am and hurried around the side of Gordon’s house to the backyard, which I had viewed from my side, across the bay, so many times. On those occasions, I never could have imagined the events that would lead to my crossing his backyard at that moment.

Gordon reappeared from Shelly’s property carrying the boom box, and we headed directly toward the wooden docks
that extended into the bay from the thin strip of beach behind the houses.

“No trouble getting into the shed?” I asked as we reached the horizontally slotted planks.

He unclenched his hand. Resting in his palm was a key. “I know where they hide it,” he said, before carelessly whipping it, sidearm, far out into the water. “That ought to piss off her old man a bit.”

I gasped as if he were Sir Bedivere returning King Arthur’s sword to the Lady of the Lake.

We both tried not to notice the vacant space along Shelly’s dock, where her sailboat,
Ariel,
used to be tied off. Gordon jumped down into his sixteen-foot fiberglass Byron-brand Corsair-model outboard, powered by twin Mercury motors, and placed the boom box beneath the captain’s chair. I handed him Shelly in exchange for one of those puffy orange life jackets, double-checked that Shelly’s disc was still in my pocket, and cautiously lowered myself into the boat.