Old School (2 page)

But he doesn’t. He kicks your tackle box into the pond, throws your pole in after it. Stands there looking at you a minute, pulls the pack of Winston’s out of the pocket of the t-shirt that hangs on him ripped open, digs a lighter out of his jeans, blows a long stream of smoke out into the air.

“Fucking kids.”

He splashes back across the wasp’s waist to the Impala, and the car spins off in a rooster tail of dust and gravel, heading south back to Galena.

Later, at home, your back and shoulder bandaged, your scapula striped with bruise, the police come and gone, you hear that this Chris kid, a guy that had been two years ahead of you in school, big guy, star of every team, the date of every cheerleader, that guy had gone down to Starved Rock State Park that same day. He was fucking around with some friends and had fallen off a cliff. He was dead.

And you realize this. It is all wilderness.

Shackleton’s Hootch

Ernest Fucking Shackleton. That’s who a man wants to be. A leader of men on a romantic and desperate voyage in an age when the world wasn’t all worn-ass out yet, still a few mysteries left. And when the ship gets crushed in the ice and every man jack of them knows the jig is bloody well up, it’s goddamn Ernie who takes a fucking rowboat across the Antarctic Sea, hauls his ass over the rock-and-ice razor of Patagonia and gets back in time to sail every scurvyed one of them home to Jolly Ole in time for tea and crumpets with the missus. For the rest of their days not a one of those bastards would ever raise a glass without the name of Ernest Fucking Shackleton on their lips.

It turned out to be what you figured. Maybe you didn’t know the fancy-ass medical name for it, the whateverickyoma, but what you figured was bad and that’s what the doc told you. Bad. You half listened as he went on about the options – chemo, drugs, radiation. And in your head you crunched the numbers – survival rates, deductibles, co-pays. You figured in the margin for the HMO crap, because you’d been the guy who figured that in the first place, what the firm would save if your flipped over to this HMO thing on account of they were gonna push back on some of this medical bullshit, start reining in that double-digit sinkhole of benefit expenses that was beating the fuck out of partner draws each year. I mean Jesus, you already gave these fuckers jobs, right? What were you? Their freakin’ mother? Except you gotta remember so far as the HMO is concerned you are just one of those fuckers too, and those geeks at the HMO, they were gonna push back just as hard on you. Harder probably, when they got a gander at the price tag this whateverickyoma was gonna rack up.

There’s hope, the doc was saying. Something about hope. But you knew a sunk cost when you smelled one, and this one smelled like six figures and change. And for what? To spend maybe nine months getting pieces of you cut out, getting poison shot up your veins, getting strapped to a table for the Hiroshima treatment, you’re hair failing out, your skin getting that month-old lunchmeat look to it, and your only conscious thought the last week or so being can you push the button on the morphine gadget fast enough to keep you from tearing out your own throat – that is if the HMO pukes decide to pop for the morphine gadget instead of a bottle of Tylenol. Who wants to wait around for that bus?

The wife took it OK. You were a couple decades past the hearts-and-flowers bullshit anyway, so it’s not like you were expecting much. Funny how she sat forward a bit when you got to the finances, though. You wanna think, after thirty years, you’re not just an ATM, but what the hell. So you ran through it. You were gonna miss out on the real gravy years, but they’d have to cash out your partnership, so there was that and the insurance and your portfolio – that had taken a kick in the balls a couple years back, but you rode the bounce right, had it pretty much back where it was. Be a close thing, though, Mike already off at Princeton, med school next year. Katie starting Yale come fall, then she was talking law school. That six figures and change of HMO squeezings, you take that out of the pot, things were gonna get a little thin.

So you leave it in the pot, throw the insurance in on top of it. Not like you were a guy who was afraid of a hard decision. Sleep, you told the doc. Always had a little trouble with sleep, stress from the job and shit, and with this on top of it, if he could give you something to help you sleep. So you had a bottle of pills, a bottle of Glenfiddich, oughta do the trick. Thought of Shackleton again. Seems they found his hootch, been buried under the ice all these years and somebody’d gone and dug it up. Be nice to have a bottle of that for the festivities, a final little something, proper send off.

Katie’s picture there on the corner of your desk. Good looking kid, only one that really still seemed to need you at all. Mike, hell, he’d come out of the womb an adult, been perfect at anything he’d ever done. Guess you’d had your years when he was a kid, taken that Canada trip, fishing up at Great Slave. You got on fine with the kid, but he’d get on fine without you.

But Katie. Even now sometimes she’d still walk into your study, warp her arms around your neck, kiss you on top of the head. Even now sometimes, you’d be catching the Packers on the tube, she’d curl up on the couch next to you, watch the game. And you’d spoiled her some probably, mostly because she was the only one who seemed to actually appreciate it, the way she’d light up when you brought her home something nice, how happy she’d get if you were out at the mall and she’d see something and you’d sneak in and buy it while she was texting someone on her phone. How hard she’d had to work for the grades compared to Mike, how much it had meant to her when she got in at Yale. You didn’t want her losing that. Any of that.

You open the bottles, the little plastic one, the big glass one, a handful of pills, a couple good swallows of scotch, the rest of the pills, some more of the scotch, everything going a little hazy now. That fast, huh? Katie’s picture fading. Maybe you were Shackleton after all, sailing off on an ocean of booze.

Hold on baby. Daddy’s going for help.

Pink Cadillac

She was always on his ass about the volunteer firefighter gig. It’s not about helping people, she’d say. It’s just about drinking with the guys, just an excuse to get out of the house. Yeah, well, he was married to her, wasn’t he? Of course it was about getting out of the house.

But it also meant he had an O2 tank and a mask. Funny how things worked out.

***

So, the El Dorado. Totally cherry, a pink ’64, the wife’s dream car. Her surprise Christmas present a week or so back. Completely authentic except for the remote start he put in. Cold up here in the winter, and with the Taurus, the wife always liked to start the car from her office when she left work, warm it up. She’d hit the remote from the kitchen in the morning, too, Garage wasn’t heated, so she’d fire the car up while she got her coffee together.

Shouldn’t do that, he’d told her. Carbon monoxide, he’d told her. Dangerous. Her family was over for Thanksgiving, he worked that into the dinner conversation, her know-it-all brother reaming her out about it pretty good, telling her what a dumbass she was. Which meant she’d go right on doing it, because if her brother told her not to stick silverware in her eye, first thing she’d do is reach for a salad fork.

Thing is, with the Taurus? Not that dangerous. Catalytic converters, they scrub something like 99 percent of the CO out of the exhaust. He wasn’t a paramedic, but they were staffed pretty thin out here, so he rode along on some of the ambulance calls, helped out. Rolled on a 911 outside Lancaster maybe eight months back, some guy’d tried to off himself by firing up his Corolla in the garage. Burned a whole tank of gas, CO levels only got to where he wiped out his frontal lobe. Now the guy was at that long-term care dump out on 81, staring at the ceiling, drooling on himself, waiting for the clock to run out.

So running the Taurus for five minutes while she got her coffee? No big deal really. But the Caddy? 429 V8, and no catalytic converter on that puppy. Exhaust had CO levels of better than 7,000 PPM. Get the CO up around 800 PPM and you’re unconscious in fifteen seconds or so, dead a minute or two after that.

***

He’d brought home the Caddy while the wife was off Christmas shopping with her cougar friends, gaggle of fifty-somethings cruising the mall dressed up like Kardashians, all of them proving you shouldn’t wear anything real tight, not after twenty-five or so, for sure not after your ovaries shut down and you put on the menopause weight. Except for that Linda chic, she had a Jane Fonda thing going, Jane Fonda from ten years back, back in the Ted Turner days. Linda’d given him some looks, went a little heavy on the touchy stuff. Might just be some of that competitive territory-marking shit chicks do, always wanting to leave a little scent on everybody else’s man, but Linda was divorced now and the rest of them, when she wasn’t around, they all got in their digs about how word from the bars over in Platteville was that Linda still needed it bad. Classless bitch, didn’t have a thought in her head she hadn’t heard on reality TV first, but if she stopped by in the next few weeks, wanted to throw him a sympathy fuck instead of a casserole, hey, he still remembered his Catholic school days. Who was he to decline a corporal work of mercy?

When the girls got out though, it was an all day thing. All night, too. Closest decent mall was in Madison. Shopping excursion gave him the time to run a little test. Strapped on his mask, cranked up the 02 tank, took the CO detector out to the garage. With that big engine? Twenty minutes, the read out on the detector was at 825 and climbing. He shut the Caddy down, put a big-ass bow on the roof.

Wife’d get back in the wee small hours smelling like chablis and perfume samples. And consumer goods made her horny. Between shopping and seeing the Caddy, he was in for some good-bye sex. He’d have to make sure he didn’t tear up.

***

The wife’s morning routine? She’d hit the remote to warm up the car as soon as she got down to the kitchen, then she’d make her coffee, grab her purse and go, the car running maybe five minutes before she climbed in. Even with the Caddy, not enough to kill her, but yesterday was her first day back at the office after the holidays, and she’d driven the Caddy to work to show it off. That’d go on for another few days until everybody’d seen it and she figured out that a ’64 Caddy might look cool as hell, but it didn’t have shit like a six-disc CD player or a lighted vanity mirror. It was the vanity mirror that would get her. She’d go back to the Taurus and the Caddy would become her event car.

She called home that morning as soon as she got to the office, woke him up – he was on third shift that week – had to bitch to somebody about her headache. He got to thinking. The monoxide’ll do that to you, your blood levels get up a little. What if she warmed the sucker up, then got in the car and decided to check her makeup, maybe got a call on her cell, didn’t back out right away. She might get too close to the line without going over it.

He could picture it now, she’d hang on long enough to drop the car in reverse, Caddy’d roll down the driveway just as she hit the exit for Comaville. Caddy’d end up crunched into that Silverado the neighbors left parked on the street and he’d be stuck with a potted plant for a wife. Insurance didn’t pay off on potted plants.

Do it tomorrow.

***

Shift ended at six, so she was in the shower when he got up to the bedroom. Way it went nowadays, he’d be asleep by the time she got out to towel off. Not like either of them went out of their way to talk to the other one anymore, not like she wanted to talk to him anyway, not unless she had something to bitch about. The Caddy’d bought him a few weeks of goodwill, so she wouldn’t be bitching at him for another day or two, not in the morning at least.

Got in bed, rolled over toward the wall. He had the spare set of keys under his pillow. The remote worked from here – he’d checked. Faint sound as the engine caught, nothing she’d hear over the shower.

He heard the water running for another five minutes, maybe ten minutes of blow dryer hum, five or six minutes of make-up noises, bottles and shit rattling around in the bathroom, ten minutes of her fucking around in the closet, pulling her outfit together, tossing shit on the bed trying to find some combo that was going to make her sagging ass look hot. When she went back to the john to load up her purse, he hit the remote and shut the Caddy down. Half an hour, more than enough.

He feigned sleep while the wife left the room. Heard her walk down the stairs, heard the car start, heard a few minutes of kitchen noises, heard the hall door close. Waited. Never heard the garage door go up. Half an hour later, the CO alarm went off in the hallway downstairs. He smiled.

All my fault he’d say. That damn Caddy, he’d say. I warned her about the remote start, he’d say. In-laws would back him up on that. Talked about it at Thanksgiving, they’d say.

No note anywhere, she hadn’t been making any depressive noises to anyone, nothing to point at him. That would make it an accidental death. Insurance paid double on those.

Only January 5, and he had all his New Year’s resolutions checked off. Down one wife, up one Caddy. And the Packers had a first-round bye. Looked like a good year.

Thin Mints

Mopes has the Girl Scout, got the cheap-ass .38 shoved up under her chin. Grandma has the shotgun and this mother grizzly look on her face. And I have a choice to make. An easy choice three years ago. Three years ago, you put me in a room with some old lady, a kid and some mullet-headed Meth fiend and ask me which way to play it, that’s an easy call.

But that was B.C. – before crank. Things are different now. Like, for instance, Mopes? He’s with me.