The Dwelling: A Novel (50 page)

It all threatened to overwhelm him, in the minutes before Dubs showed up at his door with a twelve for a night of fellowship, and it all boiled down to one thought (in his favor): surely if he had a drinking problem, a buddy of his wouldn’t be showing up at the door with a case. Surely not.

Doom shrouded him, a small feeling in his belly that if he didn’t do something right now, he would be on a different path altogether, and that the moment for thinking and doing was right there—right
there
at hand—and it was like opportunity knocking or shouting, a moment such as the sort he might give a character, like an epiphany.

Character shoots up in bed.
Aha.

Character stops in the middle of a thought and remembers,
aha!

Character stands poised above a precipice and jumps.

Richie pushed all thoughts from his mind. As if on cue, just the way he might have written it, Dubs knocked on the door and let himself in.

“Hey!” he said. Dangling from his right hand was a twelve-pack.

“Hey,” Richie said, smiling, casually. “How’re you doing?” With equal casualness, he said, “Here, lemme put that in the fridge.” And he took the box of beer from his friend while Dubs pulled off his boots and hung up his coat. He said things, Richie heard them and responded to them, they were the customary greetings of a friend, the how-are-yous, the what’s-ups, things that were heard and answered without labor or consideration, but Richie did it outside himself, hearing just the intonation and rise and fall of Dubs’s familiar voice, for by then he was in the kitchen, pulling out bottles that gleamed amber in the light and putting them on the nearly empty shelf in the fridge, their shape and weight comforting in his hand, the pounding of his heart slowing and being comforted, the shape and weight and necessary strength behind the act of twisting off the cap, the smell of the hops as he brought the bottle to his lips like balm, a bit of good news, a meditation, a prayer, a break in the storm. He answered Dubs, without once hearing him.

“You want a beer?” he called from the kitchen, the taste of it in his mouth, the cool earthy taste still in his throat, his lips still damp from it. He licked them.

“You having one?” Dubs called.

Richie drank from his bottle. “Does a bear shit in the woods?” he called back. He twisted the cap off a bottle for Dubs and took it to him. It was snowing outside, big fat flakes that said good-bye truly and inexorably to November and ushered in the long Midwestern winter. They toasted it, and drank.

Salud.

The beer was nearly gone by ten so they called Steve at home and told him to come over and to bring beer.

Steve came over and about an hour later they called Brad and he wasn’t doing anything. Everyone brought something to drink. Richie laughed with his friends, throwing his head back in long, cold swallows and felt good—
if I had a drinking problem would my friends drink with me?
Someone phoned Rob but he wouldn’t come and Richie, already loaded or halfway there, got on the phone and berated him, loudly calling him a pussy and a wuss. He laughed at this, hardly noticing that, at the other end, Rob said not much at all, and that all around him the room was pretty quiet too, but by then he was off the phone, hanging up on his friend of fifteen years with “Stay home, then, fucking wimp.”

He helped himself to another beer, also not noticing just yet that the number of full ones no longer exceeded the number of empties and that it wasn’t even eleven o’clock. Dubs was feeling no pain, but the other two had hardly arrived. Brad wanted to play cards, maybe a little poker, and they got out the cards, but Richie had trouble keeping his mind on the game. He folded on nearly every hand, the reds and blacks swimming into each other, the nines and sixes looking alike until he suggested that all he was good for was a round of
go fish
because he was seeing double anyway. This got a small laugh.

Richie stood at the open fridge around midnight and there were only two beers left. Brad had only brought a six. He swayed in front of the fridge, leaning on the door, staring unfocused at the two bottles left and called into the dining room, “Hey, someone’s gotta go for beer!”

He felt in his pocket for cash and pulled out a twenty. He hit the doorway between the kitchen and dining room and held it out. “Who’s going for beer?” he asked. “I’m not good to drive.” He laughed. It earned him a guffaw from Dubs (also not really good to drive) and chuckles from the others. Brad looked over his cards and said he had to get going. He had a shitload of things to do in the morning.

Steve tossed his cards down, folding. “Yeah,” he said, stretching, “I gotta take off too. We’re heading out tomorrow night with Al and Karen.” He offered Dubs a ride home. Dubs burped in acceptance.

“You guys are taking off? Where’s the party spirit?” Richie said, too loudly.

Brad patted him on the shoulder on his way into the kitchen, “Buddy, you got enough party spirit for all of us!” They got up from the table and lit smokes and started winding things up. Steve and Dubs got their coats on at the door.

“If you’re taking off, run by the off-sale and get me some more beer, how about?” he said, trying to sound casual; his voice was high and too loud.

“Go to bed, Bramley,” Steve said.

The door opened and snow swirled in, reminding Richie of the night Jennifer had come over. Terrible night. Had it really been just a few days earlier?

Dubs gave him the Boy Scout salute. “Later,” he said.

“Salud,”
Richie said, in another place.

Brad yelled good-byes from the sofa in the living room. He smoked a cigarette, reflectively.

Richie came in and said, “You leaving too?”

“Not yet. Any beer left?”

The sarcasm was lost on Richie. “Go get me some more beer when you go, okay?”

“What’s left?”

Richie shrugged, not wanting to say. Brad went into the kitchen and opened the fridge. Richie heard the sound of the bottle rattling on the slatted metal shelf in the fridge.

“You want one?” Brad called from there.

“Yeah,” he said, thinking,
Last one. Sad.

Brad opened it for him, “I ran into Karen yesterday,” he said pointedly. Richie blinked slowly. He raised the bottle to his mouth. He did not respond.

Brad continued, “She told me about Jen coming over.”

Richie shrugged. “Me and Jen are no more. Jen and me no more. She’s getting married.” For no reason, this struck him as amusing and he laughed. “It’s cool,” he added softly, more to himself than to Brad. He stared off into space.

“You really okay with that?”

He shrugged again. “Fuck it,” he said. He leaned over, his center of balance shifting too far forward and he caught himself on the coffee table. He laughed. He fished around in the package of cigarettes on the table, pulled one out, and lit it.

“Karen said Jen feels really bad about it. I guess she was here and it went kind of badly. She seems to think you’re killing yourself,” he said seriously, softening it, lightening it, with a snort of disbelief that he didn’t really feel.

“She wants to be a princess,” Richie said, getting pissed off. “And there’s only room for one in a relationship.” He dragged out “relationship” sarcastically. “And I’m it, in ours.” He laughed. “I don’t want to talk about this.”

Brad shrugged. Then, “I think we should.”

“What?”

He took a deep breath and said, a little louder than he should have, but not cruelly, “You’re a bit of a drunk, Bramley. You gotta nip that shit in the bud. You don’t want to wake up ten years from now and wish you had, right?”

Richie stared at him incredulously. He sputtered for a minute, his mind, fuzzy with drinks, unable to grasp even one of the four or five indignant responses that were always at the ready; and equally unable to assimilate his indignation with the sudden naked, terrified feeling he had. “What the fuck do you—” was the best he could come up with.

Brad stood up and raised a hand in surrender. “Okay, okay—I’m outta my element here. Just a friend, okay? Spirit intended and all that.” He started toward the door.

Richie, cheeks burning, heart thumping, stomach rolling, pain starting, just sat on the couch and said nothing more. He clutched the beer tighter in his hand, the glass getting warm around his fingers.

Brad put his coat on in the silence. He poked his head around the door and said, with genuine regret, “Hey, look, it’s none of my business, okay? But let’s hook up this week. We’ll go get something to eat and you can tell me what an asshole I am. Okay?”

Richie nodded.

“’Kay? Rich?”

“Yeah,” Richie said. “See ya.” Brad said good-bye and the door opened and closed, cold air rushing over Richie refreshingly for a moment, and then it was gone. And he was alone. Brad’s beer, left on the table, unfinished, was nearly full.

Least he left me his beer.

Richie finished his own beer, then took Brad’s bottle upstairs with him, fully intending to get into bed and (die) go to sleep.
Fucking friends. Like they don’t get pissed up every weekend.
The thought stopped there, but if he had been in the state of mind where a thought could be sustained, he might have added,
They used to get pissed up every weekend but they don’t anymore.
Kids, jobs, school, women, each additional element to their lives had reduced the amount of socializing they did. Each element had raised the quality of their entertainment, until those weekend piss-ups had dwindled down to once a month. Maybe twice. The guys got together and maybe a couple of them got out of hand, but someone would have to drive, someone had to work in the morning, someone had a life to deal with the next day and didn’t want to do it kneeling in front of a toilet.

It was just him. But he was not in the state of mind to take that thought to the next level. Not consciously.

He intended to get into bed, but on his way to the can for a piss, he noticed that the ladder and hatch were open, yawning, awaiting him.

Richie snorted, seeing it, his focus blurry-eyed and weak. He raised the bottle to the open mouth of the attic and said,
“Salud,”
and nodded. “First, a piss.” He stumbled into the bathroom and peed on the seat.

He climbed the ladder with the bottle in his right hand. Through the hatch he could see the glow of his computer screen and hear its quiet hum. The desk lamp was lit, casting a limited pool of light around the room. He could also hear an unidentifiable sound, a sort of thumping, like a pillow hitting the floor, soft and rhythmic. When he was high enough through the hole in the floor, he tucked his beer safely out of harm’s way under the small table.

As he pulled himself up through the hatch, a shadow danced on the wall opposite. He turned to look behind him.

A man hung from a rope tied tight around his neck. The rope was suspended from somewhere above, Richie couldn’t see where and did not follow the end of it much past the point of the darkness. The man’s body swayed (serenely) lazily back and forth. Richie started and screamed, a child’s scream in the night, ambushed, attacked, and like a child, he covered his eyes.
When I look up it will be gone.

He kept his eyes closed and breathed heavily through his fingers, concentrating on slowing the too-fast beating of his heart.
I’m having a hallucination, like the other night. I’m drinking too much. Too drunk. When I open my eyes it will be gone.

In the minute or so that passed, his heart stopped its relentless thudding against his chest and he calmed himself. Under the hum of his computer he could still hear the unfamiliar
thlump thlump
—of something soft on something hard?

He dared not open his eyes. If he could hear it he would see it. He did not want to look and see—
was it Dad? my dad?
—a dead man hanging in his attic.

It isn’t really there. It’s the drunk. I’m having a bad drunk.

“Richie.” He jumped again.

A voice, deep and silky, spoke from there. Richie sobbed. Without opening his eyes, he twisted his body around and jerked himself back down onto the ladder, finding a step with his right leg, fumbling with the other until he was on firm footing.

“Look,” the voice said. A man’s voice, low and rich, loud without volume. Commanding. He turned his head, still poking through the attic hatch, and opened his eyes.

They met a pair of feet, held steady about a foot off the floor. Black shoes, dark socks and trouser legs. He followed them up, not wanting to look, really, but unable—
it’s not really there bad drunk
—to stop himself. The man wore a long coat or tunic of some sort that reminded him of the old West, some kind of ranching coat, or maybe even a cleric’s coat, but it was of heavier material than that. He looked up, following the line of the man’s body to his neck, cringing as if preparing himself for what he would see.

Not really there.

There was nothing to see, just a neck. He looked at the man’s face. It was an old face, wrinkled and sad, with heavy pouches under two smallish eyes that were dark, too dark to be any color at all, just pupils.

“I would like to talk to you,” the man said.

“Go away,” Richie slurred. His eyes followed the path back down. The man’s feet were not touching the floor. He stood above it.

The man smiled sadly. “A moment of your time.”

Richie realized he was shaking. His hands felt weak as they clutched at the small ledge of the opening. His mouth was dry. He wanted to drink something. His eyes spotted the beer under the table.

“Please,” the man said, his voice an invitation. Richie shook his head, no.

“Come up and talk with me a while. I rarely get company. I’m off the beaten track, you might say.” The man smiled and seemed so sad even as he did that Richie felt himself relax slightly.

“Have your drink if you like.” The man opened his arms with such supplication that Richie was caught off guard. He began to pull himself up through the hatch again. His legs were weak and he thought,
None of this is happening,
but he was drunk. He pulled himself up far enough so that only his legs were on the ladder and he leaned over to grab his beer. Twisting his body to keep the old man in sight he grabbed the bottle and took a long, deep swallow. It did not go down easily, but he felt better.