Purgatory Chasm: A Mystery (26 page)

Besides, eating the potato salad took all my concentration.

I always volunteer to do the dishes, and Charlene always says yes. Not tonight: She and Sophie would clean up, she said, and why didn’t Fred and I relax on the deck?

So we faced west in Adirondack chairs and looked over the backyard. We were quiet awhile.

“You okay?” I said.

“Sore.”

“I’m sorry I threw you.”

“You should be sorry you
spun
me.”

“You were trying to spin
me
.”

Long pause. “I guess I was.”

We looked at each other and started laughing. We let the laughter roll, forced it to go on longer than it wanted to. Once I caught Sophie peeking at us through the screen door, a dish towel in her hand.

“A racer’s a racer, huh?” I said.

“Fucking A. Daytona or a cow pasture, it don’t much matter.”

We tried to laugh some more, but that was over. Shade deepened as the sun dropped.

I said, “You don’t seem like a wet-brain. Except for that one accident, you seem pretty good.”

“I can’t always remember things. Maybe that’s the wet-brain part.”

“Or maybe there’s stuff you don’t want to remember.”

“Lots and lots.”

“Do you, ah, want to go to an AA meeting with me?”

“I tried that,” Fred said. “It didn’t take.”

“What didn’t take? You sit in a room on a folding chair. About the time your ass falls asleep, you get up and go home.”

“The God part, the higher-power bullshit. It never worked for me.”

“That’s okay.”

“It is?”

“You don’t need a higher power to sit on a folding chair,” I said, checking my Seiko. There was an eight-o’clock at the Episcopalian church up the road. We could make it. “Although near the end you might find yourself praying for a pillow.”

*   *   *

A little over an hour later, as I started to take a left from the church parking lot, Fred took hold of my right forearm. “Want to drive around some?”

I said sure, hooked a right instead, and drove.

“What are you thinking?” I said after a while.

Face turned away, he said something I couldn’t make out.

“What?” I said.

“Brave,” he said. “To stand up and tell your story, your sins.”

“Sometimes it feels good to get it off your chest.”

“Do you do that? Tell your story to a church basement full of strangers?”

“Sure.”

“Do you tell
everything
?” He shifted to stare at my profile.

“The meetings are only an hour.”

“Don’t joke about it!”
He grabbed my forearm, and his intensity made me turn to look. We drove beneath a streetlight, and I saw his eyes were wet. “Think about the worst thing you ever done,” Fred said, and paused a long beat. “Is it part of your story? Do you stand up and tell it?”

I felt his hand on my sleeve, watched the road ahead, made an honest inventory. “I guess not,” I finally said. It came out half rasp, half whisper.

Fred’s hand relaxed some. “Why not?”

“Some things…”

“Yes,” my father said. “Some things.”

*   *   *

I drove a long clockwise loop, each of us thinking our thoughts.

As we paralleled a reservoir, getting set to turn south and head back to Shrewsbury, Fred said, “If you ever fell off the wagon, what would you fall into?”

“What do you mean?”

“What would you drink?”

“Knock it off.”

“You gonna tell me you never think about it?”

After maybe half a mile I said, “I used to.”

He slapped his thigh. “Well okay, then. You tell me yours, I’ll tell you mine.”

“First few years I was sober,” I said, “I had a two-days-to-live plan. You know, if the doc said you had two days to live, what would you drink? Jesus…”

“Keep going.”

“It was a long time ago. It was a crutch, a game I played so I wouldn’t have to think about the rest of my life coming at me.”

“Tell me.”

“I had two options,” I said, shifting in my seat, surprised it was kind of fun to talk about. “A summer plan and a winter plan.”

“Summer plan first.”

“Simple,” I said. “Rolling Rock longnecks. No cans, no shorty bottles. Got to be the longneck.”

“How many?” Fred said. “Six? Twelve? A case?”

I laughed awhile. Looked over, saw Fred wasn’t laughing: It was a serious question. “Never got that far,” I said. “Once I took that first sip, the daydream kind of faded away.”

He folded his arms and stared through the windshield. “What was the winter plan?”

“Take a highball glass,” I said, “and fill it almost to the top with crushed ice. Not big ice cubes from the fridge, not those crappy little gas-station cubes with holes in them, but real crushed ice from a decent bar. You know what I mean?”

I glanced over. He was staring like I was a circus freak. “I know,” he said.

“Then slow-pour Wild Turkey over the crushed ice. Bring it this close to the brim.” I showed him a quarter-inch with my thumb and finger. “There you have it. Summer plan, winter plan.”

He said nothing for a long time.

Finally I said, “Fred?”

“The sound the bourbon makes when it hits the crushed ice,” he said, eyes dead ahead. “That’s the thing.”

I nodded. “Warm on cold.”

Now
I
was looking straight ahead, but I felt Fred turn to face me. “You got both of those from me,” he said.

“Did I?”

“You know goddamn well you did.” He put a hand on my shoulder. “My legacy.”

I said nothing.

“I’m sorry,” he said.

I said nothing.

*   *   *

Later Charlene and I sat in her bed, pillow-propped against the cherry headboard. She wore sweatpants and a T-shirt and designer reading glasses that cost more than a good riding lawn mower. I watched her read a three-hundred-page magazine about keeping life simple. I liked the lines that radiated from her eyes and bracketed her mouth.

“You look cute,” I said.

“Don’t get any ideas. Sophie will be awake another two hours.” She flipped to an article about suitcases. “Fred go to bed?”

I nodded. “Tired as hell.”

“Did he enjoy the meeting?”

“Nah. He zoned out.”

“Old dogs.”

“Yes.”

“You two were gone awhile. Did you go for coffee after?”

“We drove around.” I didn’t want to say more.

Charlene closed the magazine and set her glasses on it. Then she put her left hand beneath my chin and thumb-stroked my cheek.

“I need a shave, I know.”

“Shush.” She stroked some more, ran the thumb around my lips, kept her eyes on mine. “You came back, Conway.”

I said nothing.

“You came here. I don’t care why. Maybe you were worried about Fred, or maybe you were worried Sophie would blab about whatever you all did this afternoon that’s such a big damn secret.” She leaned and kissed me, a soft kiss on the lips. She smelled like moisturizing stuff. “Thank you for coming here.” She set her magazine on the bedside table, clicked off her lamp, and lay down with her back to me.

I clicked off my lamp, stood, stripped, climbed into bed, spooned her in the dark.

“What’s on tap tomorrow, Charlie Chan?” she said, yawning.

“Trey and Kieu want to talk to me about something or other,” I said. “And I need to deal with Montreal and his muscle-head.”

“Is that safe?”

“Got help.”

“Care to divulge a bit more detail?”

“Mmph,” I said into her hair.

After a while she swatted my hip. “I said no funny stuff.”

“Ain’t nothing funny about
this,
baby,” I said, and wriggled.

When she giggled, I knew I had her.

Trying to keep quiet made it even better somehow.

CHAPTER NINETEEN

After, Charlene fell asleep, still on her right side. I lay on my back, my hand on her left hip, waiting to sleep.

But didn’t, and knew why. Rolling Rock and Purgatory Chasm.

It’s a state park—hiking trails, scenic views, like that. The big feature is a half-mile-long canyon with granite walls.

When I was thirteen and moved to Massachusetts to be with Fred, he wasn’t completely gone yet. He was a guy who couldn’t hold a job because he drank too much, but he wasn’t a pants-pissing, grate-sleeping, panhandling bum. That would come later.

He’d bragged about crewing for a race team, so one evening at dinner, mostly to make conversation, I said I’d like to drive race cars. Jesus, I was thirteen. I wanted to play center field for the Twins, too.

“Stand up,” he said, rising himself. He was buzzed already, and his knees banged the card table we used for dinner. His Rolling Rock longneck tipped one way, then the other, but he snatched and drained it before it went over. “I said stand!” He thumped down the bottle.

When I did, he said, “Hands like this,” and extended his arms, palms up.

I copied him.

“Don’t let me slap ’em,” he said—and then slapped my palms, hard, before I knew what he was talking about.

“Don’t let me
slap
’em!” my father yelled, slapping my palms again. “Reactions! Quickness! Instinct!”

I got it. I was supposed to whip my hands away and avoid his slaps.

So I did.

Easily.

My father got madder and madder, his slaps wilder and harder, as I made him whiff. He stood there in blue Dickies and a matching work shirt with his name on the breast, beer breath rolling off him, just about falling down now each time he lunged at my hands.

“Quick little fucker,” he finally said, and turned his own hands palms up. “Now you do me.”

It was too easy. I nailed him four times in a row.

Finally he said, “Think that’s quick? That ain’t quick. Come on.” My father plucked his keys from the card table and a Rolling Rock from the fridge, started out the door, backtracked, grabbed two more beers, and led me from the apartment.

It was early July, the end of a hot day. We rolled down the windows of the pickup—a beat-to-shit Dodge that looked like whoever’d painted it turquoise had used a roller—and hit the road. My father showed me how to hold his extra beers by the top of the neck, to make sure they didn’t get any warmer than they had to.

After a while, I asked where we were headed.

“We’re gonna do a little rock running at a place I know,” he said. “See how good your reactions really are. You wanna be a racer? This’ll give you a taste.”

I never learned how he found out about Purgatory Chasm himself. Probably went there with work buddies to kill a six-pack or two.

Soon we pulled in, parked, climbed out. At seven thirty on a hot weekday, we had the place to ourselves.

A short walk brought us to the mouth of the canyon, which ran downhill from where we stood. Its floor was fallen rocks, some the size of my head, others as big as my father’s truck.

My father worked on his second Rolling Rock. A cooling breeze swept up from the far end of the canyon.

“What are we doing here?” I said.

“Pay attention.”
Paytenshun
. He drained his beer and flipped the bottle to shatter on a rock way to our left. “So you wanna be a racer.”

I nodded, but wished I hadn’t brought it up. Wished we were back at the apartment for a typical summer night: me building a model while my father watched the Red Sox and drank himself to sleep. Wished I hadn’t badgered my mother into letting me move here. Wished I was at home in Mankato, throwing a tennis ball at the back of the house while she washed the dinner dishes.

My father squatted to set his face level with mine. He teetered some but held the squat. “When you’re racing,” he said, “things come at you every second. You got to think big and think small at the same time, see?
Can I beat that prick into the corner? If I do, will he get a better run off it than I will? Is his car heavier? Whose tires are better?
Like that. You wanna know what it’s like, making decisions like that?”

I nodded.

“Run, then.”

I said nothing.

“Run!” he said, pointing. “Down the hill. Best way I know to build the reflexes, what they call the muscle memory.”

I cut my eyes down the slope, wondering if he was trying to kill me, or at least make me break a leg. You’d want to be careful
walking
down that slope, those rocks, most of them jagged, some of them loose—and no way to tell which until you put weight on them.