City Boy (26 page)

Chloe was wearing Jack’s rain slicker. It came almost to her knees and with her bare legs it made her look as if she might have been wearing nothing underneath it. What if Spence, Spence and Chloe … He made himself follow the thought. What if Chloe’s infidelity—Christ, what a word. You needed a word you could spit out of your mouth, like fuck. There probably was such a word but he couldn’t think of it. Maybe whatever Chloe had done was just as accidental and detached and stupid as what he’d done, and didn’t really count, except now he supposed he was only making excuses for himself.

Jack turned around and collided with Fran. “Whoa, sorry, sorry.” He was flustered but Fran was laughing up at him.

“Silly. Watch where you’re going.”

“Sorry,” he said again. Fran seemed to be blocking his way. Jack rearranged his face into jokey good humor. “You having fun yet?”

“Well they are a little, like Chloe said, alternative. But sure. Any old party in a storm.”

“I get that. Funny.”

“I’m just glad it quit raining.”

“Yeah.” Jack had stalled out conversationally. His head was full of rum and fumes and an idiot’s rage.

Fran lowered her voice so that Jack was forced to bend down to hear her. “I want you to know, if you ever need to talk to somebody, give me a call.”

“Talk about what?” he said, then backpedaling, “Thanks. But I don’t think I’ll need to bother you.”

“Like you would ever be a bother. Not.”

“Sure. Thanks anyway.” He tried to make her disappear. Hocus pocus.

“I know I’m babbling. I love you guys. I consider both of you my friends. You’re both precious to me.”

Precious? Shit. He was alarmed on all fronts, what the hell was she
suggesting, something about Chloe that everybody knew but him, and even as Fran plied him with concern she seemed to be offering up her big blond tits and pink-painted mouth and all the rest and how was he going to tear himself loose from the woman? Just then another round of firecrackers, loud ones, went off, and everyone turned to look at them. Jack pantomimed something to Fran that he hoped conveyed sincerity, regret, an urgent errand, and walked off to join Chloe.

She was still talking with Reg, only they had turned away from each other to register the firecracker noise. Jack made an effort to shrug off the alcohol, knew he was beyond making efforts. “Howdy, folks.”

“I’ve been trying to hit on your woman.” Reg not too sober himself. “But I’m not getting anywhere.”

Had everyone gone loco tonight? Jack punched Reg in the arm. What a guy. He hadn’t yet fixed on what he should say to Chloe so he turned back to the show. Brezak stood at the edge of the roof, overlooking the street. He had perfected a kind of one-handed lob, holding a lit firecracker at the top of the arc for what was probably an unsafe second or two for maximum cool effect. Then he let it fly. Oooh, said his audience. Oooh and oooh. Brezak took a bow.

“I thought he wasn’t going to do that anymore,” said Chloe. More commentary than disapproval, or at least it didn’t sound as if she wanted Jack to do anything about it.

“I don’t think it’s going to go on much longer.” They were setting up the bigger pieces along the edge of the brick parapet. The idea seemed to be a grand finale. At least the rain would probably keep anything from igniting. Raggedy Ann was standing at an admiring distance, Ivory just behind her, although they weren’t conversing. Maybe they’d worked it all out, maybe it was like one of those leering TV shows where the guy or girl—that’s what they were, guys and girls, certainly not men and women—had to choose between two dates, or sometimes even more than two, and you watched the show mostly so you could make fun of how shallow and nasty everyone was, but not entirely.

Jack turned around, but now Reg had disappeared. “Where’d Reg go?”

“To pee off the roof, I think.”

“He wasn’t really hitting on you, was he?”

“Oh, you know. Reg.”

“Yeah.” He could have made a joke about Fran, Oh, you know. Fran. But it wasn’t the same thing, it wouldn’t go over.

Chloe said, “I’m glad we wound up here. Our little group needed some loosening up.”

“Things were bound to be tetchy. Nobody’s fault.”

Chloe didn’t answer. Dead topic, by mutual agreement. Jack said, “If you want loose, I’d say this crew fills the bill.” He indicated a pair of hair boys pretending, semi-seriously, to push each other off the roof.

“They’re a bunch of lowlifes. And they should definitely keep their music turned down. But I guess they don’t ever have to worry about behaving themselves.”

“And that’s a good thing?” The longer he kept on top of the conversation, the more he felt crafty, a successful drunk.

“I don’t know. I guess there’s times when it would be a relief to be, well, not them, but to stop even pretending I’m normal … Never mind. I’m not making sense. Anyway they’re bottom feeders.”

“Catfish,” agreed Jack. He didn’t want to take on the idea of normal, why Chloe might feel she wasn’t. His sodden brain was busy contending with the surprise of Chloe saying what he himself felt, at least on occasion, that the kid and his ragtag household represented something one might envy. Lack of impulse control, maybe, all the childish, stupid, spiteful behaviors you condemned in other people and secretly allowed yourself.

Chloe drew the rain slicker close around her. It wasn’t raining, technically, but rain seemed suspended in the air around them, along with the smoke and noise of the citywide celebration. Next week she was going to New York. They had stopped arguing about it, that is, Jack had stopped. “I borrowed your coat.”

“No problem.”

“It smells like you. Sort of like the sheets when you’ve been in bed for a long time.”

“Thanks, I guess.” She was giving him an affectionate look, so he supposed he passed the smell test.

“Everybody has their own scent. If we were dogs, we could be happy just hanging around sniffing each other.”

The first of the major-league fireworks went into the sky, whump, traveled a long, whistling path, and burst into a chrysanthemum of gold glitter at the end of the block. People sucked in breath. The thing was huge. There were small towns that wouldn’t mount shows with pieces this big. More explosions. A trail of red stars that went off like popcorn. A blue and white waterfall, small but elaborately staged, then whump whump, two more sunbursts of redgreenpurple, and a Roman candle that cartwheeled along the rooftop, sending out zigzags of flame.

Everyone screeched and ducked. That one had come a little too close for comfort. Jack, who was watching and cheering along with everyone else, had to wonder what might happen if Brezak launched his missiles into a power line, or a parked car. The pieces were going off too fast to allow for safety concerns. Brezak and one other boy galloped along the length of the roof, lighting fuses. The noise was terrific. Jack’s ears went, not blank, because they were filled with reverb and stinging, high frequencies, but they weren’t working the way ears were supposed to. A silver-green flare crisscrossed overhead with a mortar. Surely the kid couldn’t keep this up much longer without getting very busted.

“Good morning, Vietnam.”

The air shook with whistles and reports, white strobes and bursts, electric crackling. The Battle of Khe Sahn, Jack guessed. Chloe moved closer to him, trying to speak. Her words came to him with gaps in between them. “ … shouldn’t … worried.”

Jack nodded. He was getting a little shouldn’t and worried himself, he thought it might be time to head back downstairs. He located Reg, eating sausages and gaping skyward. Chloe waved across the roof to Fran, and Fran mouthed something back. Jack saw … He couldn’t be sure what he’d seen. He was probably mistaken. By now he was whatever came right after drunk. It was dark, except for the occasional pyrotechnic flash. Even the street lamps were obscured by smoke so full of burnt particles, it settled into the back of your throat like paint. Now what the hell was happening?

Screaming and people flailing around. None of the apparatus in his head was working right, it took him a slow time to sort out this new commotion. It was a girl screaming. Chloe said, “Oh Jesus God.” He still couldn’t see right. Even when he moved closer and stared, there was some kind of shock filter in his brain that didn’t allow for comprehension, the new smell of burning, the raw red glossy wet slick of flesh, the deep angry wound, extending from Raggedy Ann’s waist to just below her arm. Something stringy, some part of her, flopped loose from her armpit.

She wasn’t even the one screaming. She was still on her feet and her fingers kept plucking at the torn edges of her clothing as if that was the only thing wrong. Except that some of what had been torn was skin. Other people were telling her to lie down, lie down, but the girl’s face was noncommittal, absorbed in the fussy task of trying to keep blood from soaking into her shirt. As if one cue, sirens began to sound.

Jack turned and herded Chloe away, toward the fire escape. “Go on down. Go with Reg and Fran.” Chloe had a hand pressed to her mouth, as if she was about to lose her stomach. “Can you make it?”

Chloe nodded. She looked seasick. “Hurry up, get moving.” He gave her a shove. The sirens had closed in on the street below and one of the girls was screaming down that they needed help, help. Jack watched Chloe take a shaky first step onto the fire escape as Reg reached up to steady her.

The injured girl was making a noise by now, a sound that would have been a scream if she’d had breath for it. It took the cops some little time to get themselves up to the roof, it took the paramedics longer, and until they arrived there wasn’t much that could be done for her. Jack and anyone else who chose to look at her had to get used to the sight of the red mess in her side. The cops’ flashlights exposed her left breast, tattooed now with both ink and blood. She found enough air to scream then, and her eyes rolled back whitely in her head, and while it was to turn out that she didn’t die, at that moment it seemed very possible that she might.

Brezak was saying
Shit shit shit
. He’d tried to talk to the injured girl, soothe her, but she was beyond talking. He stood a little distance away,
furiously smoking a cigarette. One of the other girls was crying. Jack didn’t see Ivory. Some of the kids had run off before the cops came, and he guessed she was one of them. He couldn’t get himself to move. He was still trying to work his mind around it all, understand just how bad things would get. Somebody had collected as many of the fireworks scraps and wrappers and unexploded pieces as they could when they hightailed it out of there. The cops took sour note of what was left.

“Whose party is this?” No answer. Brezak muttered something under his breath. “What’s that?”

“Nothing.”

“You the one with the fireworks?”

“Maybe you could get a goddamn ambulance here, huh?”

It seemed unsurprising that Brezak was angry. There were only so many emotions you might allow yourself if you were him.

“Maybe we could throw your stupid ass in jail and watch you spread some of that attitude around. Where did you get the fireworks?”

“Some guy brought them.”

“And where did he get them?”

“Place in Indiana.”

“Which guy?”

“I don’t know him, he took off.”

“Don’t go anywhere,” the cop told him. The ambulance was here, the paramedics were climbing up and hustling people out of their way and the girl screamed harder as soon as they touched her.

There was a consultation about how to get her down from the roof. The roof was going to make it a real piece of work, said one of the paramedics, chatting professionally with the cops. In the end they secured her to a backboard and lowered her head to toe, toe to head, all the way down, and by now they’d given her some kind of shot so that the sound she made was fainter, like a broken bagpipe.

Jack stopped the last of the paramedics, who was about to step onto the fire escape. “Is she going to be all right?”

“What the hell do you want me to say?”

Jack let him go. Everyone probably asked the same stupid question.

The ambulance left. The cops took down names. It didn’t look like
anyone was going to jail on the spot. Brezak and some of the rest of them were in a hurry to get to the hospital. Jack knew that Chloe would be waiting for him, probably Reg and Fran too, and there was still more of this night he would have to get through. Rain blew in from the northwest, the last of the day’s squalls, and turned the rooftop into a soggy territory of trash and diluting blood. Tomorrow’s paper might give the event an inch or so of newsprint as a cautionary tale, a stupid, predictable accident engineered by people who had not believed that such accidents really happened. No one had suggested it was anything else.

C
hloe wanted to be at the airport early. She always had to get to airports early, it was one of the things that Jack was resigned to. Her flight was at nine A.M., and they were on the road before seven. Chloe regarded the traffic on the Kennedy with grim intensity, as if everyone else was going to get there before she did. Jack said, “You know, the one thing about planes, they never take off early.”

“Funny.”

“I bet the others won’t show up for an hour.” Five of them were going on the same flight: Chloe, Spence, three of the trainees who Jack knew only by name.

“I don’t mind waiting. I can get coffee.”

It was true that she never minded waiting, and he was not to read anything into it.

O’Hare was one of those structures that came close to obliterating the natural world. The weather was always concrete, the weather was always traffic, exhaust, glass, and steel. The sky might be blue, as it was today, the sun bright and the breeze fresh, but once you entered the maze of access ramps, the only weather that really counted was On Time, Delayed, and Canceled. Jack threaded his way around to the United terminal, angled in to the curb among the cabs and heaps of disgorged luggage and surly security types making sure everyone kept moving. If you wanted to say a proper good-bye, you had to dawdle as you opened doors, stack and restack suitcases. Chloe was distracted, checking for her ticket and ID. It wasn’t even seven-thirty. Jack waited for her to stop fussing.