The Grievers (7 page)

Anthony was also responsible for programming my cell phone to play the theme from
The Jeffersons
whenever it rang—a gift, he said after he’d done the deed, for my previous birthday, which he’d missed by two months. It was the last time I’d seen him in the flesh, and the only reason I was disappointed that he couldn’t make it to dinner with us was that I wanted him to change my ringtone back to whatever it was before. Not that I couldn’t figure it out for myself. I was simply standing on principle. Anthony was the one who put the damn ringtone on my phone in the first place, so he’d also be the one to take it off, come hell or high water.

“The good news is that he’s working on a musical,” Neil said.

“And the bad news?”

“It’s an adaptation of
Hogan’s Heroes
. He’s calling it
Down in the Stalag.
”

“Is he at least good for a donation?”

Neil shrugged.

Before he could say anything, Greg Packer arrived on the heels of our waitress, whom he instructed to return with a pitcher of margaritas and a plate of nachos. We were here to honor a fallen comrade, he added, so she should limit her intrusions to a bare minimum and keep an eye out for the remainder of our party. We were in mourning, he stressed—stricken with grief—so if she could please hurry up with the margaritas and nachos, he’d make it worth her while.

“Gentlemen,” Greg said, acknowledging our presence only after the waitress hurried away. “Given the circumstances, it is, of course, with a heavy heart that I dine with you this evening, but I am also pleased to report that my personal fortunes have taken a turn for the better. To wit, I think I’m in love.”

“Again?” Neil said. “Who’s the lucky lady?”

“And please don’t say Karen,” I added.

“Considering our larger purpose this evening, I’ll ignore that remark and say only that her name is Evangeline and that she lives in Chicago.”

“Illinois?” I said.

Greg looked at me as if I were something he’d stepped in. Yes, Illinois, he said in a tone that might have been justified if he’d ever come close to realizing the grandiose dreams of his childhood. As it stood, however, he was just another unshaven slob in a rumpled blue blazer who lived with his mother and spent his days trolling the Internet for potential mates who might, in his words, extend the Packer line by agreeing to carry his seed. If he had any regrets that it wasn’t the future he’d imagined for himself back at the Academy, he never let on. Instead, he proceeded to behave as if the world had, in fact, made good on the unspoken promise it makes to all children—that we can be anything, that we can go anywhere, that we can do whatever we want as long as we want it badly enough.

When our waitress returned with a pitcher of margaritas, she asked how many glasses we wanted. It was, I imagined, her subtle way of inquiring as to whether or not we needed such a large table, but Greg shot her down with a casual wave of his hand as if to say he couldn’t be bothered with petty details.

“Is it me, or does our girl seem a little infatuated?”

“I think it’s you,” Neil said as the waitress conferred with the hostess, the hostess conferred with the manager, and all three joined the hungry crowd at the front of the restaurant in eyeing our table with mounting suspicion. “And I’m also beginning to think that we need a smaller table.”

“Nonsense,” Greg said. “You reserved a table for twelve, so we’ll dine at a table for twelve.”

“That was probably a mistake,” Neil said. “I thought we’d get a bigger crowd.”

“So it’s only us?” I said.

“Irrelevant,” Greg said. “If the people out there had planned ahead, they’d already be seated. The fact of the matter is that they left too much to chance and now they’re paying for it. If we give up our table now, we’ll only be rewarding their indolence.”

“Sean’s coming,” Neil said. “But only because I told him you were interested in buying a Volkswagen.”

“Great. So now
I
have to suffer?”

“Don’t talk to me about suffering,” Greg said. “I know suffering.”

“Getting into a few fender benders doesn’t amount to a life of suffering,” I said.

“Fender benders?” Greg said, already pouring himself a second drink. “Is that what you heard? Because that particular turn of phrase hardly does justice to the horrors I’ve been through. Just waking up in the morning is sheer agony. I need a pill to get out of bed. And taking a shower? Forget about it. In fact, it’s a minor miracle that I’m even sitting here this evening.”

“There’s also a decent chance that Dwayne might come,” Neil interjected. “But other than that, I think it’s only us.”

“Will he be in uniform?” Greg asked.

“I don’t know,” Neil said. “Why?”

“Because if he is, the wait staff might assume that the fallen comrade to which I alluded was also a police officer, and that, by extension, we’re all, like Dwayne, members of the force. This perception, false though it may be, will foster the impression that we’re deserving of at least a modicum of recognition and, thus, that a table for twelve is a small price to pay for the privilege of serving us. We will, in short, be regarded as heroes, and there’s a better than average chance that we’ll receive a free round of drinks before the night is through.”

“That’s idiotic,” I said.

“On the contrary,” Greg said. “It’s human nature. Just watch.”

Greg gestured in the direction of the hostess stand where Dwayne Coleman stood in full uniform, towering over the hostess, whose demeanor toward our table went in the blink of an eye from wary to enthusiastic as she pointed our friend in the right direction with a wide, welcoming smile. Watching him cross the crowded floor, I thought about the race joke Frank Dearborn made at his expense on our first day at the Academy:
I thought this school was segregated!
As was the case with most of my friends from that era, the only reason I knew Dwayne at all was that we were both friendly with Neil. Though we never talked much at the Academy, Dwayne and I had a standing date to drink beer and wallow in self-pity on his father’s back porch every other Friday night in the jobless, womanless, directionless summer after college.

As if to prove Greg’s theory, our waitress appeared with a plate of nachos as soon as Dwayne took a seat. Ignoring the eight empty chairs at our table, she asked Dwayne if she could get him anything to drink, and he ordered a glass of water. He was going on duty in a few hours, he said when the waitress left and Greg offered him a margarita, so alcohol was out of the question. When the waitress returned with Dwayne’s water, she also brought Sean Sullivan, who handed me his business card by way of saying hello.

“I know this isn’t the best time,” Sean said. “But Neil tells me you’re in the market for a new car.”

“You’re right,” I said. “It’s not the best time.”

“I only mention it because I’m concerned. Are you still driving that old Saturn?”

“I wouldn’t call it old, exactly.” A leprechaun winked in the corner of the card. On weekdays, Sean put his graduate degree in counseling to work by helping the mentally and physically infirm find jobs in the private sector. On weekends he put dents in his student loans by selling cars to the same demographic. “I prefer to think of it as broken in.”

“All the more reason to trade up,” Sean said. His voice had the shrill tenor of a pennywhistle and the urgency of a police siren, and he’d recently taken to sporting a goatee to highlight the boundary between his neck and chin. “A few years from now, we’ll laugh you right off the lot.”

“I’ll take my chances,” I said, pocketing his card. “Right now I have bigger things to worry about.”

“Indeed,” Greg Packer said. “Our fallen comrade deserves our full and undivided attention.”

“And let’s stop with this
fallen comrade
shit,” I said. “He was our friend, for Christ’s sake. Would it kill you to use his name?”

“My apologies,” Greg said. “I didn’t realize you two were so close.”

I opened my mouth but didn’t say a word, ashamed to admit that Billy and I were never close at all. Friendly, yes, especially back at the Academy, but I’d be surprised if we spoke more than three times since graduation. Always polite, always cordial, but always with the ulterior motive—on my part, anyway—of escaping the conversation. In fact, the only reason I invited him to my New Year’s Eve party was to put off meeting him for dinner the night before Thanksgiving, and the only reason we’d planned to meet up the night before Thanksgiving was that I’d been putting off invitations to have lunch with him since the previous summer. In some ways, it was my main reason for having the party—not to see Billy so much as to gather all of my acquaintances together and not have to talk to any one of them for too long.

If nothing else, I’m a very social misanthrope.

“Remember how he used to bring a wok to school?” Sean asked.

“It wasn’t a wok,” I said. “It was a bucket.”

“Some kind of Asian thing,” Sean said. “Greens and rice every day. The kid should have outlived us all.”

“It wasn’t Asian,” I said. “And he wasn’t a kid. He was an adult like the rest of us.”

“I’m saying
then
,” Sean said. “He was a kid
back then
. Christ, Charley, do you have to be so goddamn difficult all the time?”

Greg signaled the waitress for another pitcher of margaritas. Neil asked if he thought it was such a good idea, but Greg brushed Neil’s concerns aside with a flick of his wrist. He’d made arrangements for a ride, he said.

“A cab?” Neil asked.

“In a manner of speaking.”

“He bit into a grub,” I said, still caught up in our previous conversation. “He was eating lunch one day, and when he looked down there was half a grub on his plate.”

“On his
plate
?” Dwayne asked. “You said it was a bucket.”

“Fine,” I said. “His bucket.”

“So, what?” Sean asked. “Was this some kind of Asian thing? Like eating grasshoppers in Mexico?”

“No,” I said. “It was an accident. That’s my whole point.”

“You’d think he’d be more careful,” Dwayne said. “Using chopsticks and all.”

“He didn’t use chopsticks,” I said. “He used a fork.”

“I remember chopsticks,” Greg said. “And Sean’s right. It was a wok.”

“The point I’m trying to make is that he ate a grub one day, and I watched him do it,” I said. “I could have stopped him, but I didn’t. I saw the grub, and I saw him going for it, but I let him eat it anyway.”

“When you say
grub
?” Neil said.

“A worm, okay? I let Billy eat a worm.”

“Like an earthworm?” Sean asked.

“Like a maggot,” I said. “Only bigger.”

“And you didn’t try to stop him?”

“What was I supposed to say?”

“I don’t know,” Dwayne said. “How about, ‘Hey, Billy, there’s a giant goddamn maggot in your lunch.’ ”

“You’re right,” I said. “I should’ve stopped him.”

T
HE WAITRESS
brought our second pitcher of margaritas, and soon we were meandering across the same conversational terrain we’d been treading for the past decade: Anthony Gambacorta’s extensive porn collection, Brother Timothy’s fascination with donkey dicks, and the unfounded rumor that a certain modern language teacher left in the middle of a semester because she was pregnant with a certain friar’s love child. When our perverted walk down memory lane started to repeat itself, Neil took a moment to remind us once again, and more gently than I’d managed, why we were gathered. We wanted to make a donation to the Academy in Billy’s name, he said—because he always loved the school, because he always lived the Noblac ideals, because our friendship meant the world to him. I added that I’d spoken to Phil Ennis, and though a scholarship in Billy’s name was out of the question, we could at least make a respectable donation to the fund the Academy was setting up for Philly boys.

“What if we bought the school a ping-pong table?” Sean suggested. “For the student lounge. I know some people. We can get it wholesale. Add a brass nameplate for twenty bucks or so? It could be a nice gesture.”

“We’re thinking more of a cash donation,” Neil said.

“If I recall correctly—and there’s no reason to believe I don’t—Billy
did
play a lot of ping-pong,” Greg said. “So Sean’s idea certainly has merit.”

“When did Billy play ping-pong?” I asked.

“Every day,” Sean said. “At lunch. I remember like it was yesterday.”

“You also remember that he brought a wok to school.”

“Even so, I think it’s an appropriate gift.”

“Whatever you guys decide is fine with me,” Dwayne said. “Put me down for twenty bucks.”

“Twenty?” I said.

“Okay, thirty.”

“You’re joking, right?”

“We were hoping everyone could at least give a hundred,” Neil said. “It’s not a lot, but at least it’s something.”

“Not a lot?” Dwayne said. “I’ll go as high as fifty, but that’s it.”

“This isn’t an auction,” I said. “We’re talking about a friend of ours.”

“I still think we should go with the ping-pong table,” Sean said.

“We’re not buying a ping-pong table,” I said.

Neil shot me a glance that said I was losing my cool, but it was too late. My cool, if I ever had any, was long gone, and I felt as if I were watching myself turn rabid in a low-budget nature documentary. My eyes went wide. My pulse turned rapid. My hands started shaking. I could hear my voice getting louder as I spoke, but even the prospect of drawing unwanted attention to myself and my fellow Academy grads didn’t slow me down.