Snapper (17 page)

I invited Darren to join me in Hickory. It meant sharing my room, but I had ample space. I shared a house with a couple of Hickory State graduate students named Rick and Alan. They spent their days in the library and their evenings in bars. There was nothing wrong with the arrangement in theory, and they agreed instantly when I explained.

I was in Hickory just for a semester, counting belted kingfishers on the White River. A Boy Scout could have done it, and the Parks Department should have known that, but since they signed my checks I didn’t enlighten them. The same Parks Department had an acute rat problem a few years before I arrived. Instead of implementing a sensible poison regime they wanted to do something “green” to burnish their public image. They bought three great Eurasian eagle-owls and introduced them within city limits. Anyone who had ever looked at one of those owls could have predicted the result, or so you’d think. Within a week nobody had seen a rat in about five square miles. Within two weeks puppies and kittens were missing. About three weeks later both the mayor’s Jack Russells were found eviscerated on separate rooftops. The town panicked, but the owls moved on to find tastier or easier fare, and the rats returned in force.

Every morning I clambered into a canoe provided by this illustrious Parks Department and paddled around looking for holes. Kingfishers nest in tunnels three to six feet deep, which they dig into natural mud banks. In other surveys I liked to get in and greet my birds personally, but all I could do was stare at the nose of the boat while I waited for the male to bring home some dinner. If he did, the nest was active, and if he didn’t, I had wasted two or three hours.

I enjoyed my work—even the dull canoes and kingfishers work—too much to take it seriously and get a graduate degree. A real ornithologist spends his life in a database: I was the underpaid field hand who collected the information in that database. I was like a voracious reader unwilling to taint or corrupt his passion by submitting to years of studying postcolonialism or feminist theory. Shane opted for library science instead of poetry for that reason. I didn’t want
to become versed in
alleles
or study birds’
resource allocation
. Field work was just fine.

Darren whimpered and cried and screamed in his sleep. I think I would have too—in fact, not long after he moved in, I did. I began to dream that Frank surrounded the house—in the morning I would wonder what that could even mean. I pictured him slashing the screen door and rushing through—not calmly as reports suggested he had at the coffee shop, but urgently with the blade already raised. And I dreamed that he came for me rather than Darren. Darren’s attack as I understood it was too surreal to be convincing: sunshine, jazz, the aroma of coffee, and those absurd folding chairs. It seemed like something that had occurred on a film set with no real consequence: the actors had to be told to lie down afterward. But in those first few nights listening to, absorbing, Darren’s own fear I shaped a different sort of scene for myself, a moment of high drama and tragedy, as though I were a penitent Claudius (though I had done nothing) and Frank a deranged Hamlet bursting from the wings. In the daytime certain things became troublesome, too. I could not picture eating steak again: drawing a serrated blade through moist flesh. This thought led me into difficulties even buttering my toast in the morning.

Ultimately I broke that spell with a joke. Every morning, holding the butter knife, head still reeling from the dreams of the night before, I asked: Is this a dagger I see before me? Darren was never awake at that hour, but when I told him about it he did not think it was very funny.

And it is worth mentioning here that when Darren shoved me down the marble steps of the Old Courthouse,
there was nothing dramatic about it. A hand on my chest, and a dizzy adrenaline surge as I reeled, and then I was in the ER with a Syrian doctor inspecting my ear and muttering “Oh.” His mustache was perfectly trimmed. It did not and does not seem dramatic, or tragic, or even surreal. Just stupid.

In the daytime Darren’s only ambition and activity was getting stoned. He had arranged his futon against the wall with a stereo next to his head, and when he woke up at noon or thereabouts he simply moved back in order to sit up, then pressed Play on some aging rocker indulging his guitar—I cannot listen to Mark Knopfler to this day—and lit up. I stopped bringing him food after a few days of this so that occasionally he might have to get up. I didn’t hold it against him, though. It seemed to me that he might need a lair like a wounded animal and that he would know when to venture out of it.

The first clash we had came about over a parcel he had delivered to the house courtesy of the U.S. Postal Service.

I had magazine subscriptions under pseudonyms as a joke. My copy of
Audubon
was always addressed to Ziggy Stardust, for example. One afternoon a large box arrived addressed to Saint Francis (Bacon), who usually took my
National Geographic
. I even signed for it.

“That’s for me,” said Darren, who had heard the knock on the door and entered the living room for what might have been the first time.

“What is it?” I said. Every inch of it was tightly taped and the return address was in Tennessee.

“A care package,” he said. I handed it over.

“Have you got a knife?” he said. I was momentarily startled
by the question. Steak and toast, it turns out, were just the first step.

“Don’t be a girl,” he said, and tossed the package onto the sofa before thudding off to the kitchen. I say thudding because Darren has a strangely aggressive walk—he’s not heavy, but he stamps his heels down first and rolls onto the balls of his feet. He returned with a steak knife and cut through several layers of tape around three edges of the box.

Inside were a small rock, an old shoe, and a pound of marijuana. The first two items were for weight and space, I suppose. The marijuana was very tightly wrapped, but Darren cut the top of that open carefully.

I was slow to react—that is, to get angry—because a pound of marijuana is very impressive. The fragrance is overpowering, of course, but the leaf itself is very pretty; still austerely geometric even in fragments, and still green long after cutting.

“Beautiful,” said Darren.

“Did you just have a pound of marijuana delivered to my
house
, Darren?”

“To Mr. Bacon’s house,” said Darren.

“Without asking me?”

“You don’t like it anyway,” he said, and obviously this was a serious character flaw on my part. “Puts you to sleep.”

“I would prefer Mr. Bacon not to get arrested,” I said.

Things that did not occur to me at the time: that a pound of marijuana must carry a substantial price tag, that it was a tremendous amount for personal consumption, or that selling it was how Darren earned his living after graduating with a degree in sociology.

The Brotherhood grew out of the Secret Ninja Coalition. We reached an age when calling one another by codenames
became embarrassing. It was not, however, embarrassing to leave a pair of cigarettes crossed beneath the windshield wiper of a friend’s car you came across at the riverside or the mall. It was embarrassing to stage sword fights with broom handles on a pedestrian overpass above the Expressway, but it was okay—essential—to inscribe the books we exchanged. Shane still does it, though now he just writes, “Read this.” We gave up our childish ways, and instead did lots of noble shoplifting from faceless fascist institutions like Walmart and the grocery store.

Flynn was the first to defect. He was bookish like the rest of us, but he had hard-working blue-collar Republican parents who taught him to hold down a job and watch his bank balance. While the rest of us were making plans to hitchhike around Europe he went and got a good job. Nowadays he’s very successful. He plays golf and other things that don’t bear thinking about.

Peter went through a long phase of stealing car stereos, sometimes shooting a troublesome dog with a teargas gun he found in an antique shop. At other times he has gone through a chess phase, a strip club phase, and a gambling phase, which ended his first marriage. I don’t know what he’s into or what’s into him now. He builds porches and decks for rich people in Kokomo. Flynn says he drinks beer on his lunch breaks.

What I am getting at is that a group formed from mere proximity outgrew itself as each member developed in his own peculiar way. Shane would come over with a plan to build a microlight airplane from a lawnmower engine and a couple of “very big kites,” but somehow one day the rest of us couldn’t go along with that kind of thing anymore.

As a Secret Ninja, Darren pouted whenever he wasn’t on
Shane’s team for whatever we played, always fought with the Dungeon Master during D & D, and as a brother he sulked any time anyone went anywhere without him. This was okay—every band of brothers needs a Grumpy Dwarf, and any group of outlaws needs one petulant sort who initiates all the scrapes and misadventures. Every Last Supper needs a Judas, too.

Partial deafness has some benefits: I can sleep through anything. Screeching babies in public places do not trouble me at all. What I can’t forgive Darren for is the blasphemy against the Brotherhood: the suggestion that my childhood and adolescence were not in fact charmed, that he and I and the rest of us were just fallible beings like everyone else who gave one another the elbow once we were grown up. Of course that is true, as events continue to prove. But at least the rest of us tried. Sometimes Professor Matt and Doctor Colin even find the time to check Facebook.

Shane has, as always, an alternative theory. He thinks Darren was more dependent than anyone else on our mutual camaraderie. Everyone else had some other interest, whether poetry or science or chess. Thus, when we drifted off to separate universities, Darren was left alone, foundering in bad company. By implication, when Darren came to stay in my house after the stabbing I should have been aware of his general lost and wayward condition; I should have offered a more brotherly hand to help him up.

This is why Shane and I don’t talk much about Darren.

Darren got Alan’s cats stoned, too. I had always thought his technique an urban myth until I saw the result. Allegedly the skin of a cat’s ear is sufficiently thin and porous to absorb the
toxins from a plume of smoke blown directly into it. More important—the myth goes—the cat’s system has no way to expel these toxins, so the cats remain stoned, as it were, for life. Once Darren had moved in, Alan’s cats grew increasingly paranoid and liable to sudden starts. Calvin, a tabby, had been a formidable mouser, but his kills went into freefall. He had trouble chasing balls of yarn.

Darren did such things fairly often. Again, it’s an urban myth that if you feed Alka-Seltzer to pigeons they will explode. Darren was disappointed when that failed to happen. It is true that antacids are usually fatal to birds, but they do not burst dramatically apart. What happens to them is analogous to my own brain hemorrhage as I lay on the marble floor of the Old Courthouse. The fluid—in my case blood, in pigeons, carbonated water—builds up within a confined space until the pressure of it crushes neighboring organs: for a pigeon, gastrointestinal things, for me, the brain. There is a slim-to-vanishing chance in each case that the fluid will find some point of release. A pigeon might be fortunate to drain his toxic cocktail through a ruptured cloaca, for example, corresponding to the human anus. My blood had the good sense to burst my eardrum from within.

He began making short trips into town, returning with a bag of CDs, some sandwich ingredients, and a box of beer. He would then treat himself to a three- or four-day Bob Marley binge that was no different from his previous routine. That is, he woke up, got stoned, had a nap, got stoned again. I did appreciate his contribution to our household beer requirements, though.

“I’m growing dreads,” he announced. He hadn’t bathed in several days. His wiry brown hair looked like the nest of
an incontinent mourning dove, and he wore a gray sweatsuit every day so that he looked like he belonged in an asylum.

We clashed again when he had been there for just over three weeks. I still thought he ought to handle his own convalescence in any way he saw fit, short of illegal deliveries to my house. If anyone was entitled to live in a self-induced haze for an indefinite time, it was Darren. Nevertheless, I suggested that he might benefit from going out now and then, taking an interest in Hickory, finding his way into a social life, perhaps meeting a girl—he was convinced his scars would work wonders—even applying, perhaps, for some kind of undemanding part-time work.

“I know when I’m not wanted,” he seethed.

“I didn’t mean that at all,” I said. “Do whatever you like. My house is your house. Just a suggestion.”

“You don’t have a social life,” he said.

I was inwardly reeling myself: a week after arriving in Hickory, fresh from a whole month with Lola, she had announced on the phone that she had met a folk singer from Boston. I noticed that I was getting older.

“You don’t go to bars,” he continued.

I got up at five a.m. most workdays, and a bar full of undergraduates, even or especially pretty ones, did not appeal. What if I spotted a delicate redhead like Lola across a crowded room?

“Fair points,” I said. “I’m not trying to get rid of you. Just a suggestion. When you’re ready to plunge back in, plunge.” I winced, thinking I had probably used the wrong verb, but Darren said nothing.

What followed was the sort of uneasy routine I suppose estranged spouses endure, or perhaps overprotective parents and their rebellious and insolent children. I knew he wanted to watch something on TV when he said he didn’t care,
we could watch whatever I liked. If I switched it he sulked out of the room, and if I left it on he reminded me every few minutes that I didn’t have to watch it at all. If I asked where something was, like the mayonnaise, he said, “How the hell should I know?” and if he ran out of beer, he said, “I’m out of fucking beer,” placing the problem squarely in my lap.

He never cleaned or washed dishes. I didn’t mind that either, at first. Rick and Alan were hopeless, too, but at least they made perfunctory expressions of guilt about it. And obviously Darren never cooked.