The Grievers (4 page)

“Too much grading,” I said. “I have a dissertation to write.”

“And how’s that coming along?”

“This isn’t about my dissertation,” I said. “This is about your best friend being trapped in the tomblike darkness of a giant polystyrene dollar sign. Are you going to help me or not?”

“I’m at work,” Neil said.

“You work for the government,” I told him. “Which means you work for the people, which means you work for me.”

“You’re being a dick. Are you aware of that?”

Neil had a point, but I had to keep pushing. The idea was to get him to meet me for lunch so I could tell him about Billy. My original plan had been to tell him over the phone, but every time I tried to call, I lost my nerve. Even now, the talking, witty, charming part of my brain was painting over Billy’s suicide with layers and layers of thick, meaningless chatter. As if by not mentioning it, I could hold his death at bay. As if by refusing to say the words, I could keep Billy alive forever. Yes, Neil knew that Billy was gone, but he didn’t know how our friend had died. That much information was my own private burden, at least as far as the two of us were concerned. Saying the words, relating the details and making them real, would force us into new territory. Given the chance, Neil and I could talk for hours and never say anything, but Billy’s suicide took that option off the table.

“I’m asking for your help,” I said. “If that makes me a dick, then I guess I’m a dick.”

“I’m not saying you’re a dick,” Neil said. “I’m saying you’re
being
a dick. There’s a difference.”

“So you’ll help me?”

There was a long pause, and as the wheels of Irish-Catholic guilt turned in Neil’s head, I told him where I was working and the easiest way to get there.

“That’s a half-hour away,” he protested, though we both knew how the conversation would end.

“Twenty minutes if you make the lights,” I said.

“Can’t you call Dwayne?”

“He’s on duty,” I said. “Either that or asleep. Besides, his solution would be to blast me out of this thing with his service revolver.”

“What about Sullivan? Or Anthony Gambacorta? Why can’t you bother one of them for a change?”

“Bother?” I said. “
Bother?
Sorry if I’m
bothering
you, Neil, but you’re supposed to be my best friend.”

“You know what I meant.”

“If you can’t help me, I’ll understand, but my blood is on your hands.”

“There’s no emergency exit? No escape hatch?”

“It’s a dollar sign,” I said. “Not a school bus.”

“Can’t you shimmy out the bottom or something?”

“I think I’m suffocating, Neil. Growing lightheaded. How does it feel to be the last person ever to hear from me?”

“Christ,” Neil said. “Give me an hour.”

“If I don’t make it, tell Karen I love her.”

“Do me a favor,” Neil said. “The next time I see you, remind me never to talk to you.”

N
EIL AND
I never said much to each other in the months following our first encounter at the Academy. He was a face I’d see in the hallway, another kid in a rumpled blazer rushing from World Religions to Algebra. If we made eye contact, he’d drop lines from what I could only guess were Marx Brothers movies:
My boy, I think you’ve got something there, and I’ll wait outside until you clean it up. Don’t look now, but there’s one man too many in this room, and I think it’s you. The next time I see you, remind me never to talk to you.

The best I could do whenever he’d say something like this was smile and hope it passed for being in on the joke. Not that anyone else was in on the joke, of course, but as long as
someone
at the Academy was under the impression, mistaken or otherwise, that I was in on
something
, I wasn’t alone.

The first real conversation I had with Neil didn’t happen until January of our freshman year. The North Philadelphia neighborhood where the Academy made its home had yet to succumb to the pull of gentrification, and when I stepped out into the blustery winter air after eight hours of being cooped up with hundreds of other pimply boys in our sweaty, smelly brick-and-mortar hotbox, the sun had already begun to sink low and red behind the crumbling row homes and dilapidated storefronts a block west of the school. At the far corner of the long, broken street, my usual bus sighed to a stop and opened its doors to three of my classmates. If I missed it, I’d have to wait another half hour in the growing darkness on a corner with no bench and only the cold, gray walls of the Academy to lean on, so I sprinted up the sidewalk in my battered brown oxfords and slapped at the door of the bus until the driver let me in.

“Say, I used to know someone who looked exactly like you,” Neil said when I dropped, nearly breathless, into the seat next to him and the bus started to roll. “Emanuel Ravelli. Are you his brother?”

I smiled and hoped it would suffice, but the look on the kid’s face said that he expected me to answer the question.

“The Marx Brothers, right?” I said.

“Yeah,” Neil said. “Which one?”

“Which brother?” I said.

“No, which movie?”

“
Horse Feathers
?”

It was the only one I knew, and only because Neil mentioned it the first time he’d ever spoken to me.

“Close,” Neil said. “
Animal Crackers
.”

“Right,” I said.

“
For playing, we get ten dollars an hour
,” he said in a broken accent. “
For not playing, we get twelve. For rehearsing, we get a special rate. Fifteen dollars an hour. And for not rehearsing? You couldn’t afford it.
You’ve seen it, right?”

“Once,” I lied. “But it was a while ago.”

The neighborhood rolled by—shattered stoops, sagging porches, windows of burnt-out houses covered over with plywood sheeting. Dripping red letters on the side of a rusty panel truck read
Angie’s Soul Chicken
, and a life-size drawing of what appeared to be a rabid penguin stood guard at the door of a faded yellow bodega on the corner of Nineteenth and Porter. When a man with tiger stripes tattooed to his scalp crashed through the glass door of a pool hall on the next corner, the bus slowed to a stop just in time to get caught in the crush of locals that came pouring onto the street after him.

On the sidewalk, the man with the tiger stripes curled into a ball while a pair of muscle-bound goons, breathing steam in the cold winter air, beat him with the heavy back ends of their pool cues. In the space of a few heartbeats, the clientele of a neighboring bar swirled out onto the street wielding bats and broomsticks and anything else they could get a hold of, and it wasn’t long before everyone’s efforts at horning in on the proceedings erupted into full-blown mayhem.

As the bus shook and swayed with the swell of angry bodies, Neil shot me a glance, and I shrugged. Though a police officer had lectured the freshman class on keeping our wallets out of sight and avoiding dark alleys, he failed to mention what to do in the unlikely event that a riot should break out during the evening commute.

“I’m guessing it’s like rock-paper-scissors,” Neil said as a woman in a dirty apron cut a path through the fray with a soup ladle. “What do you think? Ladle scoops broomstick?”

“Right,” I said. “Ladle scoops broomstick, and broomstick sweeps pool cue.”

“Nice,” Neil said. “But what does the pool cue do?”

“You don’t want to know,” I said, adopting the broken accent he’d used earlier.

Emerging from the knot of bodies, a man with a gash in his forehead pounded a fist against the front door of the bus. Without so much as turning his head, the driver opened the door while the passengers held their collective breath. When the man climbed aboard, he asked the driver if the bus went as far as the nearest hospital, and the driver said it stopped a block east of Saint Joseph’s.

The man with the gash paused for a moment, then reached into his pocket for bus-fare. As he made his way toward the back of the bus, I glanced at the empty seat across the aisle from me, then glanced at the man, whose gaze met mine long enough for both of us to guess what would happen next.

The man took the seat.

I pursed my lips and nodded.

The man nodded back.

Red and blue police lights swept the darkening street. As the crowd dispersed and the bus started moving again, Neil pulled a white handkerchief from the inside pocket of his gray overcoat and passed it wordlessly to the bleeding man.

“I’
M STILL
not entirely clear on why you took this job,” Neil said, squishing across the bank’s muddy lawn to help me get back on my feet.

“Why does anyone take a job?” I asked, lying on my back. “I needed the money.”

“But that’s not the question,” Neil said. “The question is why did you take
this
job?”

When he wasn’t busy rescuing his friends from the consequences of their own foolish endeavors, Neil handled contracts for the Quartermaster Corps in their office just outside of Philadelphia. His wife Madeline, meanwhile, was finishing her doctorate in developmental psychology somewhere in Maryland. For the sake of fairness, at least in terms of the commute, they split the difference by living in Delaware, so I understood why the charm of my current job might have been lost on him.

“Flexibility?” I said.

“Try again.”

“Potential for advancement?”

Not sure where Neil was standing, I reached out and groped blindly at the air in front of me, imagining that I looked like a turtle or an overturned insect from above.

“Sorry,” he said. “Not until I get an honest answer.”

“I told you before,” I said. “I need time to work on my dissertation.”

“Right,” Neil said. “The dissertation.”

“Ask your wife. It’s a very complicated process.”

“I know it is,” Neil said. “I still don’t believe you.”

“Okay,” I said. “I thought the job would be fun. Are you happy now?”

“Not yet,” Neil said, but he took my hand anyway.

“What do you want to hear?”

“Fun’s only half of it.” He pulled on my arm, and I rose from the ground at an awkward angle. “And I’m not sure how much I buy that one either.”

“Would you believe
funny
, then?”

“You took the job because you thought it would be funny?”

“Probably,” I said. “Maybe. I guess.”

“Hell of a reason to take a job.”

“Look who you’re talking to.”

Finally standing on my own two feet, I pulled my arms back inside the dollar sign and lifted the boxy costume up and over my head. It was a variation on Neil’s earlier suggestion of shimmying out the bottom, but if he took notice of this fact, he didn’t let on.

“I still think there’s more,” Neil said. “Something you’re trying to avoid.”

“Please,” I said. “You’ve been spending too much time with Madeline.”

“I wish,” Neil said.

“Too much time with her books, then. Do you feel like getting lunch?”

“I need to get back to work,” Neil said, already turning away.

“No,” I said. “I mean, wait. This is important.”

Neil stopped and let out a sigh, then turned as if to ask what I wanted—or, more to the point, what I wanted
this time
.

“It’s about Billy.”