The Youth & Young Loves of Oliver Wade: Stories (18 page)

The casket was dark wood and seeing it closed had put tears
in my eyes. I walked quickly past it and went through the receiving line in a
blur and was coughed out at the end of it with my palm wet from tear-stained
handshakes.

“So nice to see one of Dwight’s old friends from Lee,” his
mother had said sedately when I told her who I was. So I guessed I was the
first, or the only, but I didn’t care anymore. It was only 6:30 but I wanted
out. I felt so stupid. I walked quickly back along the line, around the corner.
Ahead was the door opening to the rainy evening. Then a hand sprung out of the
line and grabbed my arm.

“Ollie? Ollie Wade!” A loud whisper, loud as the speaker
dared in such a place.

I turned. Looked at the hand on my arm. Looked up at the
face. He was my age still, though now he looked like a man. We had gone to
school together once, had been great friends once, but were not anymore, and
hadn’t been even the last time we saw each other. But he wasn’t who I had come
for. He wasn’t
Boyd
.

“I thought it was you!” he said. He put his hands on his
chest. “Mike Alonzo, remember!”

“Itchy Chin Mike! I’m sorry I walked right past you. It was
kind of brutal in there.”

“I bet,” he said. “I’m thankful for that corner.” He seemed
to debate it for a second and then hugged me. He smelled good and was wearing a
nice crisp suit, and it was clear to me at a glance that when he’d become
popular in high school, it had stuck. “How are you, man? Wow! Ollie Wade!”

“All things considered, OK.”

“Yeah it’s really terrible,” he said. “So sad, man.”

“How are you, Mike Alonzo? It’s been a long time.”

“It has. I’m good. I’m working. Things are good.”

“That sounds good.” I paused awkwardly. “Had you kept in
touch with...?” I tipped my head in the direction the line was facing.

“No, not really, no.” He said it guiltily.

“I know.”

“Yeah. You know, you just never think— Well, you lose
track, I guess.” He shrugged.

“I didn’t keep in touch either. Not with any of you.”

He nodded. “Are you sticking around? Or are you heading—
Where’s home?”

“Amherst,” I said. “And I was. But I can hang out and shoot
the shit for a while if you’re not in a hurry. Would you want to get a burger
or something?”

“Cool, cool. That would be cool. Let me just, you know, do
this. Where will you be?”

“I’ll be in my car. I’m the black Jeep, near the front.”

I sat in the car wondering why I’d said it, about shooting
the shit. I didn’t want to shoot the shit. I didn’t know what we would possibly
shoot the shit about. I wanted to go home. I thought about driving away. I
would have, but there was still fifteen minutes left, and now that I’d seen
Mike Alonzo there seemed an even better chance that I might see
him
, so I watched the door.

In the last ten minutes no new people arrived, but still I
waited, and at 7:05 Mike emerged from the funeral home and stood at the bottom
of the ramp, looking at the lot. He spotted my Jeep and jogged over through the
drizzle glistening in the yellow floodlights. He opened the passenger door and
leaned in.

“There’s a pub place a few blocks down,” he said. “You up
for that?”

“Sounds good. I can drive if you want.”

He got in, and I was angry it was him getting in, only him.
The ease and naturalness with which this was happening was being wasted by him
not being Boyd.

“You were right about it being brutal, man. Jesus.” He
pointed. “Turn left. It’s just up the street.”

The hostess sat us at a booth near the back, under dim
lighting; it was almost romantic and again it seemed like an insult that Mike
was the wrong guy. We looked at the menu, made comments to serve as small-talk,
ordered beers and burgers and fries.

“So what made you come?” I asked, taking one of the rolls
the waiter had supplied, and buttering it slowly.

“Guilt.” He laughed and reached for a roll. “Jesus, these
are like iron,” he said, banging the roll on the table. “Guilt, maybe
gratitude. Dwight’s parents are good people. They did a lot for me when I was a
kid.”

“I remember you spending a lot of time at his house.”

“We lived next door,” he continued. “My parents were not the
most... parental people in the world. Dwight’s parents covered for them a lot.
Which is weird, I guess, since Dwight and I were never real close. Maybe we
were like brothers who had the same parents but weren’t actually close
ourselves. I dunno. It was weird seeing them today, they look so much older. I
guess so do we. —How about you? What made you come?”

“Same as you, I guess: guilt. Or shame, maybe. I don’t know.
It was all a long time ago. But I do remember the last time I saw Dwight, and I
wasn’t very nice to him. Pretty awful actually. And I’ve always felt bad about
that. I guess I thought I’d at least say goodbye.”

“When did you see him? I don’t think I saw him after his
family moved out this way. When was that? Sophomore year?”

“Just before sophomore year. That summer. That’s when he’d
stopped talking. Do you remember that? This giant mystery, no one knew why.”

He shut his eyes, almost winced. “I do remember. His parents
asked me to come try to cheer him up or whatever, get him to talk. And I said
no.” He looked into his beer bottle. “God, I was such a fucking shitbag.”

“They asked me too, and I went to see him.”

“Yeah.”

“It was fucking weird, man.”

“He didn’t talk?”

“He didn’t talk and I just got so frustrated with him that I
ended up beating the shit out of him in his bedroom.”

He’d been about to take a bite of his roll but his hand
dropped away from his mouth. “Really?”

“I mean I didn’t really
beat
the shit
out of him, I think I just pushed him around a little. His glasses
flew off, I remember that. But I’ve always felt bad about it.”

“Guilt tends to make people remember themselves as bigger
douches than they probably actually were,” Mike said
monkishly
.

Our food came and for a minute we ate without talking. Mike’s
mouth made funny smacking sounds as he chewed. Although it was easy to see why
he’d gotten popular, it was still easy to see why he’d been a geek, too.

“If it’s true what you said about guilt and memory,” I said
after a minute, “then in ten years or so I’ll feel pretty douchey about today.”

“How so?”

“My motives for coming today weren’t exactly pure.” I took a
sip of beer. “Want to know why I came?”

“Hit me.”

“I was hoping to run into Boyd Wren.”

“Boyd Wren. Now there’s a name I haven’t thought of in a
long time.”

“Yup.”

“I guess I’m surprised you would even need to run into him.”

“Oh yeah?”

“I remember you guys had some kind of falling-out or
something, right?”

“We did. Junior year.”

“Yeah. I dunno, I guess I figured you would’ve patched
things up pretty quick.”

“We never did. That was the end of us.”

“That’s surprising. You guys were like two peas in a fucking
pod.”

“You thought so, huh? I like that you’d think so.”

“To be honest, Ollie, you two were impenetrable.”

“Impenetrable?”

“I guess when it was the five of us I didn’t notice it as
much. But then Tyson went off to St. Mark’s after eighth grade, and then Dwight’s
family moved away, and it was just the three of us. And dude I felt so fucking
lonely around you two. You had your thing and it was the Ollie and Boyd Show
every day. And I felt like there was no room for me at all in that.”

“You did? Really?” I put down my burger.

“Dude, it sucked being the third wheel like that. I had to
go get other friends. I felt like such a poser at first when I joined the
baseball team but it was better than being lonely. And then I kind of fell in
with a different group of people.”

“Weird. I never saw it that way at all.”

“What’d you think, that I just ditched you for the cool kids?”

“Yes. Exactly that.”

He shook his head. “Impenetrable, man. Truly.”

“I didn’t mean to be, Mike. I’m sorry if we pushed you out.
We didn’t mean to.
I
didn’t mean to.”

“Don’t sweat it, Ollie, I ended up prom king.” He winked. “Anyway,
kids never mean anything, even when they’re mean. Kids are just acted on by
life. Dwight— I don’t know, I think that kid probably never had a say in
any goddamn thing. The only time he probably had a say was when he decided to
stop talking.”

My burger was gone. I wiped my hands on a napkin and then
dragged a cluster of fries through some ketchup.

“So can I tell you something, Mike? It’s something that, I
don’t know if it’s going to make you uncomfortable.”

“I’m hard to rattle,” he said.

“If I seemed like I was pushing you out back then, it wasn’t
because of you. It was because I was in love with Boyd.”

He paused, touched his beer bottle to his lips, and seemed
to be thinking. I didn’t know if he was pondering the revelation that I was
gay, or if he was just reexamining the past in light of this new information.

“In love with him, like, in a gay type of way?”

“Yeah, I’m a gay guy.”

“Huh.” He put down the beer. “OK. And you knew it way back
then, huh?”

“I knew way before then, Mike.”

He frowned; I didn’t know why. “And Boyd? Was he into you,
too?”

“Mike, I wish I knew, man. To this day that’s a question
that keeps me up at night sometimes.”

He leaned back in his seat. He lifted his hand and touched
the heel of it to his chin and rubbed. After all this time he was still Itchy
Chin Mike. “Yeah, I guess it kind of makes sense now,” he said. “I know every
time I’ve been in love it’s like the rest of the world didn’t even need to
exist. I guess now I see I was the rest of your world that didn’t need to
exist.”

“I’m sorry, Mike, it sounds terrible when you say it like
that.”

“Nah, it’s cool, Ollie, don’t worry about it. Everything
worked out fine for me. But... You really don’t know about Boyd?”

The way he said it made me think he had inside information,
some tidbit of high-school lore passed through a cool-kid grapevine I never
knew anything about. “Do
you
?” I
said.

“Me? No,” he said quickly. “No.”

“OK. Well yeah, I don’t know if he loved me back. I don’t
know if he’s gay or straight. I don’t even know if he still exists.”

“Have you tried looking him up on the Internet? Maybe that
Friendster thing?”

“There’s nothing. If he’s alive he must be in the Witness
Protection Program or something. But I’m sure he’s alive. My mother would’ve
heard if he died.” I smirked.

“He went to college out west, I think.”

“Yeah. Oregon, as far as I know.”

Mike touched his bottle to his lips again. “I wouldn’t be
surprised if he went all that way to get away from his dad. Guy was a
major
douche, a drunk. Remember that?”

I didn’t. “I guess I remember Boyd stealing beers from him....”

“Just a mega dick. On Boyd’s ass for everything. But I mean,
I don’t know if that impacted anything, really.”

And of course I didn’t either. I had learned it was
dangerous to ascribe motives to Boyd. “So. Anyway,” I went on, “I came today
because I thought he might be at the funeral.”

Mike was quiet for a minute. “I’m trying to think of who I
could ask,” he said. “I’m in touch with some people from Lee but I don’t think
any of them would know about Boyd. Not a lot of people knew you guys.”

“I guess, yeah.”

The waiter cleared our plates. Mike asked for a dessert
menu.

“So how about
you
,
Mike,” I said, and he laughed. “I didn’t mean for this to be all about me.”

He laughed again. “Well there’s nothing I can say that’ll
top your thing.”

We ate bread pudding and he told me about his life, about
his fiancée Bianca, about his job testing blood samples for drugs at a
diagnostic facility in Waltham. He was looking into getting a dog, a pug or a
Boston terrier; it was a tough choice. He seemed like an unburdened guy. I
wondered if that was because he was straight or because he was just lucky.

“So I have a question,” he said when we were splitting the
bill.

“Shoot.”

“What caused your falling-out with Boyd? You said you were
in love with him. What happened?”

“I wimped out, Mike. That’s the short answer. I wimped out.”

I drove Mike back to his car in the funeral home lot. The
only other car still there was the one Dwight’s parents had arrived in. I
imagined them inside standing at the casket alone. The sky had cleared and the
moon and the signs made the rain puddles glow.

“It was good running into you, Ollie,” Mike said. “I’m sorry
I wasn’t Boyd.”

“It’s fine, Mike. You know, I’m not really as— I mean,
it was a long time ago. I’ve had other loves. I’m not completely pathetic. I
just figured I’d try.”

“No, I get it. The first one’s hard to let go of.”

We pressed each other’s numbers into our cellphones and then
he opened the door and got out. As he looked about to shut it he said, “Do you
want to know what I really meant when I said you guys were impenetrable?”

“Yes.”

He stood with one hand on the door; the other hung in his
pocket. “When I was alone with you, Ollie, when we were hanging out, you only
ever talked about Boyd. Boyd this, Boyd that, what you guys had done, what you
were going to do, where he was now, when he was getting back.”

I understood where he was going with this. I wasn’t sure I
wanted to hear it out loud. Maybe he sensed that, because he waited for me to
prompt him for the rest. “Mike?”

“Yeah?”

“And how about when you were alone with Boyd?”