The Duration (6 page)

She blushed. “You wish, pal.”

“I do wish,” I said, and meant it.

“Hah,” she said. “No you don't.”

I leaned across the bar to kiss her cheek and made a point of looking around the room at the collection of flannel and early drinkers.

“Just tell me whose it is,” I said. “I'll make him make an honest woman out of you.”

She kissed me back and extended her left hand.

“Pull my finger,” she said, showing off a dainty rock on a silver band. “If I wasn't swollen like a whale, I'd let you try it on.”

I'd done some preliminary rock shopping over the course of the past year, and hers looked to be about a half-carat, and if the ring was platinum it wasn't a bad little buy.

“Who are you marrying?” I asked, trying to sound like I was trying to sound incredulous. Had to be careful with pregnant women, or so I've been told.

“You don't want to know,” she said, looking at me pointedly.

I thought about that for a second. Who was she marrying? Me? Nope. Chick? Too soon, though I wouldn't put it past him. Then it hit me. She was marrying Tim-Rick Golack.

“You've got to be kidding me,” I said, this time trying to sound like I was trying to sound like I was joking.

“I'm not kidding you,” she said, “and don't make me regret that kiss. What are you drinking?”

I ordered a beer and let both it and the conversation sit for a minute. Ginny moved with cetacean grace inside the bar, no bumping, no wobble, her belly like the central star of the system. I remembered that I'd heard, in the way you hear things on social media, that she'd been dating Tim-Rick Golack, who had emerged in recent years as a local businessman and, according to Unsie, a regular at Sunday Mass. But a ring and a baby I did not know. There were some chicken-egg questions that I didn't ask.

I sipped my beer, which tasted watery and vaguely funky, like the taps needed to be changed. A novice Heirloomer might have sent it back, but they'd just find out that all the beers tasted like that. It was almost a source of pride.

In the corner, some girl was setting up a karaoke booth.

“I saw your boy,” Ginny said, having rotated back over to me. She was still smiling but her eyes were subdued.

“Has he been coming in here much?”

She shook her head. “No, just the once. You know, the stuff with T-R.”

I nodded. I knew the stuff with T-R.

“It's so stupid,” she said. “That was high school. Time to grow up.”

I looked at my beer and raised my eyebrows. “Tell me something I don't know.”

Ginny put a hand on her belly.

“Petey, tell him he can come in. Or better yet, you bring him in with you. There'll be no trouble.”

I sipped my beer and shrugged.

“I can't find him,” I said. “Dude called me out from Boston and stood me up.”

Ginny put both her hands on the bar and leaned forward so that her belly canted toward the floor.

“I hear he's spending a lot of time in Sink City,” she said. “Back and forth.”

She sighed heavily. I gave my beer more attention.

“That's what I hear.”

“That's what you hear, huh,” I said. “In your condition?”

She gestured with one hand around the bar. “I'm in no condition to be in my condition. But I hear a lot.”

I finished my beer, stood up, nodded to no one in particular. Ginny swept the bar with a wet cloth.

I pulled $5 from my wallet. She tried to wave it away, so I stuffed it into the tip jar next to the cash register.

“When are you due?” I asked.

“Easterish,” she said, rapping her knuckles on the bar. “When things warm up a bit.”

“Well, there you go,” I said. “Something to look forward to.”

It was dark when I left the Heirloom. The streetlights were coming on, bright lozenges wrapped in gauze. Gable wasn't much for neon, but I could see farther down on Church Street an orange smear glowing through the windows of the tapas restaurant, formerly a hardware store. The Foodtown was closed, but the lights in The Bookstore—“Serving the community since last Tuesday”—burned on.

What did I know?

I knew the thing with T-R. The thing with T-R was a series of fights during our senior year of high school, two during basketball games and one shortly after graduation, each progressively bloodier and more serious than the last.

It was a weird thing. Chick was neither a lover nor a fighter, his notoriety creating a sort of buffer around him. His friends were loyal. His enemies, if he had any, kept quiet. He did some dumb things to property, but never had problems with anyone.

Except Tim-Rick Golack. Those two were like oil and water. Hoop-wise, Misconic was our main rival, a tough city school from the west side of the Knots, and Tim-Rick was one of those overmatched hustlers that people called either scrappy or thuggish, depending on their biases. The first fight had been mainly pushing, some language, as we pulled away in the fourth quarter. The second fight had ended both Chick's and my basketball careers, which were probably ending anyway but might have carried on at some midlevel college for a bit, and the third one had left Tim-Rick with a scar from his ear to his chin and Chick with a suspended sentence of a year in jail, pled down to simple battery from assault with a deadly weapon. With the third, they'd just crossed paths at the Berkshire Mall on the wrong day, Tim-Rick with his brothers and Chick with a hard plastic frost scraper in his back pocket. Why he was walking around with a hard plastic frost scraper I don't know—it was July—but mall security had to call the state police and a hazmat team to deal with the blood.

As for Sink City, I knew that too. It was a reference to the faded factories and coarse canals of a town forty-five minutes to the east, the Venice of Western Massachusetts, where they used to fit porcelain to pipes and, more recently, where one went to bargain-hunt for anything harder than weed.

The Horse Head Motel advertised free Wi-Fi and a hot tub but both were suspect, and the tired dude at the front desk gave me a key to Chickie's room even though I wasn't Chickie. I didn't even say I was Chickie. I just said “Benecik, and I don't have a key.” Dude had never seen me before, but he had an Italian sub and an issue of
American Sportsman
behind him, and he just did not give a fuck.

I'd never known anyone to stay at the Horse Head, which was distinguishable from the Comfort Inn and the Pine Ranch next door only by the big red horse head next to its empty pool. You could walk to the Price Chopper and to an all-night gas station, and those were just about the only advantages I could see to staying there. The key had a plastic diamond attached to it that said “15.” I walked across the parking lot and knocked.

Nobody answered.

I knocked again. It felt like the beginning of an episode of
Law & Order
, normal things happening and then a body.

I put the key in and turned it. The door opened.

“Chick?” I said through the gap.

No answer.

I pushed the door open wider. The room was tiny. There were two twin beds, one rumpled and one still made, dusty sheets at right angles. Papers were spread out across the made one.

I checked the bathroom. A toothbrush. A towel over the shower bar, slightly damp. Trash in the bin. A plastic grocery bag full of underwear hanging on the interior doorknob.

Back in the main room, I moved some papers aside on the made bed and sat down. There was a backpack, one of those serious ones, leaning in the corner, all zippers and ties and mesh. A pair of snowshoes, probably several hundred dollars at Asgard, but I doubted that Chickie had paid that much. It was nearing nine and I was beat. The outside temperature was already into the low 30s and descending. I wasn't driving back to Boston, that's for sure. Two hours on the cold road and then a night in a cold apartment, thanks but no thanks.

The papers on the made bed seemed to be a mix of maps and brochures and copies of microfiche. I scanned them quickly with determined disinterest. Whatever it was Chickie was getting into, it was not my problem. I was a workingman now, an adult with my own life to lead, my own crosses to bear. The sentiment felt about 70 percent true.

I flipped on the remote and checked the TV. The Horse Head's cable was a joke, and if you weren't going to watch grainy porn or hockey, there wasn't much to watch. I considered ordering the porn and sticking Chick with the bill for wasting so much of my time, but couldn't bring myself to do it after such a stupid day.

The morning after we emancipated the fish, I slept late. Seniors weren't required to check in until 9:30, when the buses left for graduation rehearsal. I drove to school, wondering if the fish would already be gone—indeed, if it had ever really been there at all—and parked near the back of the lot. Even from there I could see a crowd around the entry. I began to sweat. Walking across the lot, I passed Denton, our grizzled custodian. He seemed grouchy.

“What's going on?” I asked.

“You should know,” he said angrily, and for a split second I almost shat my pants.

“Seniors,” he said. “Somebody thinks they're real funny.”

I kept walking and tried to catch my breath.

That was one big-ass fish. A bunch of my classmates surrounded it.

“Had to be eight or nine guys,” someone said.

“The Lesters have a trailer,” another said, invoking the previous year's ne'er-do-wells. “Coulda been them.”

We got onto the buses to head to rehearsal and I slid into a row next to Jimmer. When we were all seated, Ms. J. appeared at our bus's open door and stepped up into the well. She was a wide woman, with a white helmet of hair.

The bus fell silent. Halfway back, I focused on my sneakers.

“I just want to say,” she said, gesturing with her hand. “To whoever put that fish there . . . ”

Ms. J. paused. For a moment, she looked like she might cry. I could feel my nuts retract into my stomach.

“To whoever put that fish there, thank you. I love it. I'll be taking it with me when I leave.”

Then she smiled, for the first time in our collective memories, and stepped back off the bus. The seats filled with whispers. Jimmer stared at me. I couldn't look at him. Two rows in front of us, the back of Unsie's head quivered. Through the window, I saw Chickie. He was over by the fish, wasn't even on the bus yet.