Songs Only You Know (13 page)

A
T
W
ILL
’
S DEMAND, HE
and I took my minivan for a birthday drive. He was fixated on my Ford Aerostar, an earlier, decaying model of the automobile that nearly pummeled me in Ridgewood Hills. The heater was useless. Worse, the cassette deck had malfunctioned. The interior was smeared with an orange funk and crusts when I bought the wreck off a dirt lot that spring. As I drove, Will basked in the grime. He fingered every reachable stain, toying with knobs on the dash to see which worked. I fretted about the transmission, which clanked as though the underbody were being bludgeoned. The cold whistled through. Buttoned to the neck was my Carhartt jacket, a brand of work coat the band had begun wearing as a proletariat, antifashion statement.

“Freezing in here,” Will said, warming his hands with his breath.

His halo jittered. His bare shoulders were exposed through tears in the lacy sleeves. The garment had refused to zip in the back, leaving his spine exposed. He was, indubitably, an angel. A birthday seraph. Beside him in the van, I felt his love for me.

We drove past the auto plants, our old junior high and the baseball diamond where I’d beaned poor Moe. Mister Donut. The Ford-Wyoming Drive-in. The fact of my return altered each landmark, rendered it new, as though we’d staked some claim here. We might spend the rest of our lives tooling those roads, which on a day like that didn’t feel so bad.

“Let’s go see Andrew,” Will said. “Give him a look at my outfit.”

Since learning about my dad, Andrew had been inviting me over for meals. Though I wasn’t a proper resident at his apartment, I’d been spending a good deal of time there, acting like I was.

Will parked the minivan. I followed him through the front door and up the staircase, intruding on Andrew, who was in the living room, engrossed in a science program. His boots were unlaced, his posture a postwork slump. It took him a moment to appreciate Will’s efforts. He winced as the angel began to prance and gesticulate.

“What do you want from me?” Andrew said. “For your birthday?”

“Nothing,” I said. “Just this.”

Will twirled and clapped his hands.

“I’ll come up with something good,” Andrew said.

But I was home, and the day was really just beginning, and that was more than enough.

T
WO WEEKS LATER, A
full-on December sleet storm was tacking against the windows as the three of us sat in the apartment, chugging from plastic milk jugs filled with Andrew’s homemade alcoholic cider. Outside was chill and ice. Mom’s path to the garage had frozen over after I forgot to shovel, and Caitlin had agreed to raise the thermostat several notches. Mailboxes had frozen shut. The booze went down like lava.

“Yum, yum,” Will said. “That’s a heavy taste.”

You never knew where you were with one of Andrew’s home-brewed potions. Sometimes a few bottles of his experimental wines barely did the trick. That night, my senses were sawed after a mug or two of cider. The brew had been fermenting beneath his sink since Thanksgiving, and Will had sampled it daily, insisting, “No, no. Not before its time.” Tonight, finally, he’d nipped from a jug and proclaimed it was ready.

“Let’s take a walk,” Andrew said. “Enjoy the weather.”

We were halfway through the second gallon. Will had opened a third for himself, raising it with both hands to pour it down. His flourishes dominated the apartment. He’d nailed flea-market wall hangings above the mantel: a nautical lighthouse scene that twinkled when you flipped a switch, and a framed, kaleidoscopic portrait of Christ.

“Beautiful,” he said. “Just imagine you’re yachting and praising the Lord.”

He’d also taken advantage of my position at the record store, once barreling through the theft alarm with an armful of LPs on an evening when I had run of the place. A Stooges LP was the soundtrack for a silent screening of
Pink Flamingos
; Marquis de Sade sat next to the King James Bible on the coffee table. Andrew’s cousin Ralph, a suavely violent, cologne-dipped Italian I’d seen terminate a house party using a single watermelon
as ammunition, was revolted by Will’s sensibilities and never seemed to be around.

A thick sediment had collected in the bottom of my mug.

“Drink the scum,” Andrew said. “The good stuff.”

I tipped up, swallowing the grime.

“Go for a joy ride?” I said.

Night driving was standard procedure. It raised the odds that something great or awful might happen, anything but sinking deeper into our chairs until we no longer had the wit to flip the records once they’d finished. Will gave a single clap of his hands, and we gathered our coats.

S
MUGGLING A JUG OF
cider into Andrew’s work van, we slid onto an empty, iced-over Michigan Avenue. Andrew steered. There was no radio, only the sound of the heater rattling and the scrape of the tires against the ice. On the van’s floor, I sat surrounded by toolboxes, copper piping and hardware. Andrew had been working as a handyman, installing granite countertops and rewiring outlets, tearing apart kitchens, saving his pay for solar panels he intended to affix to the upper flat’s roof.

Andrew braked for a red, and the van shimmied beneath the traffic signal.

I’d maneuvered the Orgasmatron through the worst midnight rains, but I had no interest in taking the wheel. I grabbed a crowbar from Andrew’s arsenal and tested its weight. Toolboxes, hammers, levels—they made me think of my dad. We’d not spoken since the season changed, and, concerning him, my confusion had grown lopsided, bottom heavy. I’d remind myself to give him a call, but then, from below, bitterness would surge. It wasn’t the drugs or the divorce or any obvious grievances that repelled me but his desire to know whoever it was I’d become these past few years. Though his love for his son—flesh
and blood—was innate, unconditional, he hadn’t bargained on dealing with an actual person, a being whose desires and feelings could break so starkly from his own.

I’d vacated his sightline, jumped off a cliff to escape his worldview. He now seemed to be peering over the edge, calling my name, realizing I was almost lost to him.

Idle moments—a night drive or sitting in a movie theater just before the lights dimmed. That’s when my father loomed, different versions of his face arising. To fend off these visions, I’d think of my mom fainting and the nights I’d searched for him. Then I’d feel the righteousness of an orphan, as though I’d been unchained, set loose and on the run.

I drummed the crowbar against the van floor, clanging out a rhythm. As we reached Dearborn’s outskirts, Andrew braked hard to skid the van across the open road. The toolboxes chattered. A jug of antifreeze rolled and sloshed.

“That was weak,” Will said. “Do it again.”

A thought arose, a wasp sputtering from the nest, the words coming to my lips as it materialized: “Let’s go see that fuck who pulled a gun on me.”

“To do what?” Andrew said. “It’s twenty miles from here.”

I’d told them the story more often then they’d cared to hear it: Will’s bat, the gun, the showdown in Ridgewood Hills.

“You want to get even,” Will said. Perhaps as a sympathetic gesture for all that had gone wrong with my family, Will had begun calling me “Our Boy.” He turned to Andrew. “Our Boy wants to get even.”

I raised the crowbar, imaging what blows it might administer to that red minivan.

“The guy deserves something,” Will said. “You don’t pull a move like that on Our Boy.”

From the back of the van, I watched the windshield being
washed by the streetlights as they passed above, lighting up the pane, the cracks and road-salt scum coming into view. “You really want me to drive there?” Andrew said. “Because I owe you—for your birthday.”

H
E DROVE CAUTIOUSLY ON
the highway, finally veering up an exit ramp that met a country road. The tires glided as the van braked. Sleet rained down, yet the night sky possessed a blueness you could see beyond the drizzle.

“Spin it,” Will said. “Spin this thing out.”

Andrew laughed, giving the wheel a playful tug.

“This van,” he said, “would flip.”

We were nearing Ridgewood Hills. I’d not been back since I’d moved and had no interest in seeing the old house. Twenty minutes west, it was a world so much darker. A streetlight here and there, the moonlight reflecting off the ice that covered everything. Andrew turned onto Ridgewood Drive, between the wooden signs marking the subdivision’s entrance.

“Take a left,” I said, at the same three-way corner where a year and a half earlier I’d nearly been smeared into the concrete.

“You sure you know the house?” Andrew said.

“I know it.”

We were there. I told him to turn the van around and park, giving us an exit strategy.

“That’s it.” I pointed.

The red minivan was parked in the driveway as though only the seasons had changed. The halogen path lamps I’d watched the man stalk past were unlit, iced mushrooms lining the walkway. Shortly after midnight, the neighborhood appeared barely conscious, the porch lights like burning oil through the falling ice.

“What do we do?” Will said, getting down to business.
Through the years—Dumpster fires, breaking and entering abandoned psychiatric hospitals—we’d conspired like this many times, wanting to prove to each other we had the guts.

A large bay window of plate glass stretched across a good part of the home’s street-side facade. “Let’s take out those windows,” I said.

“Why don’t you slash his tires?” Andrew said. “There’s razors back there.”

“Nah,” I said. “The house. Do the house.”

“Our Boy wants to get his. Don’t you?” said Will. “That’s a lot of glass.”

I needed my friends to witness something inside of me. What that was, I didn’t know. I dug through the van’s clutter, handing Will a tire iron. He clanked it against the crowbar in my fist, and there was nothing left to ask.

“I’ll wait here.” Andrew killed the low beams.

Will and I passed the jug of cider, chugging before stepping out of the van.

“Start the engine,” I said, “soon as you see us coming back.”

“The engine’s running,” Andrew said.

Walking up the pavement, I heard the fabric of Will’s down jacket grating against itself. Our steps broke loose small bits of ice in the street, scattering them across the sheen. Sleet tacked against our shoulders. The universe was watching. The holy spirits, all of mankind. For a moment we saw ourselves anew through their eyes: we were avengers, we were cowards. This much we knew.

“Go slow,” I said. “We’ll walk up and count to three.”

We marched over the front lawn, crunching footprints into its ice-crusted surface, right up to the darkened glass. Peering in, I could see through the house and out the back window to where the world glowed blue.

Will looked the street up and down.

I counted
one, two
.

On
three
we swung, and the leaded panes shattered with deep, clattering gusts. Thick glass came down in slabs. After our initial fully cocked blasts we tapped rapidly, hammering fast, reaching high and low for any shards that remained in reach. We moved across the window, each of us destroying a portion, cracking away until the screams of children came from inside.

“All right,” I said, and we were running.

Fast, shallow breaths. My thighs pumped. The crowbar’s weight propelled my hand up and down with each stride. Andrew hit the lights, and as I neared the van my feet slowed too quickly, skating several inches before my heels jutted forward beneath me. Then I was plunging backward—that instant when your feet leave the earth, and there’s just enough of a second to realize you are gravity’s bitch.

My head conked the frozen street.

A hard crack. The kind you hear and do not feel.

I saw nothing except the blurred sky above, as a familiar taste came to my mouth: like batteries, pennies beneath the tongue. The prepain shock of a bodily wreck, in which you ask yourself whether you are mortally wounded or suffering only a momentary oblivion.

But there was no time for that.

Will dragged me to my feet and into the van as its tires spun, carrying us back through the storm.

I
N THE MORNING
I awoke with a gelatinous bulge, tender in a malicious way. The hair covering the swelling was stiff with dried blood. A dark red stained my pillowcase. Whether it was the head wound or the aftereffects of Andrew’s cider, the thought of standing was wretched.

I yelled for Caitlin. Once, then louder.

Ozzy’s nails clacked over the floor upstairs.

Cloaked in blankets, my sister came to the basement to get a look, returning a moment later with cubes of ice wrapped in a hand towel, pressing it gently to my head. She wiped the cold drips from my neck with a blanket and asked what in god’s name I’d done this time.

“Like a truck hit you,” she said. “That’s what it looks like.”

And I didn’t feel good, but I’d felt worse.

“You guys were acting stupid last night, weren’t you?” she said.

At which I laughed. Because what about last night?

Last night was the past.

M
om had spoken of Christmas’s approach the way you might a surgical appointment. Yet when the time came, she met it with every bit of cheer she could muster. A wreath on the door and electric candles in the windows, candy-cane cookies and stockings hanging from the mantel—the simple things were what she lived for. Now that the carols played on WQRS, I could tell she was longing for the years when we’d bought Christmas trees from church lots and taken family portraits once the ornaments dangled from the branches.

She smiled sadly but had no intention of Grinching out just yet. “I guess we won’t be hanging your dad’s stocking,” she said. “We’ll make it nice. Do it our own way.”

For my part, I insisted that the season was an act of consumerist warfare. Spiting commerce and sentimentality and the hidden tenderness I, too, felt for Christmases past. And while the abrasion on my head no longer stung, a mysterious bulge remained—a hairy egg that, each time I ran a comb over it, left me guilty about the shattered windows and screaming children.