The Slide: A Novel (28 page)

“What do you want?”

“The big ones are your car and ten thousand dollars. Few other trifling items for posterity.”

“The car’s not in my name, and I don’t have anything even close to ten thousand dollars.”

“Should start work on a list of people who might.”

Stuart and Marianne were momentarily put on display by the quick orange bloom of his lighter. My friend would not look at me. It occurred to me the darkness around us might have been less about mosquitoes and more about shielding me from the memories of this place, to render what was familiar foreign. I wasn’t sure whether this was something he did to make this easier on me or something he did so I wouldn’t feel compelled to stay very long.

“But it’s still the pool house, isn’t it?” I said, and reached down to remove my shoes and socks. I walked to the pool’s edge and lifted off my shirt before falling into the black water. I let myself sink naturally, then maneuvered myself deeper until I reached the cement floor, where I searched blindly for Audrey’s starfish, canvassing the pool’s deep end with waving hands. My lungs began to ache. It was not here. Of course not. But how many legs did it have by now? Three still? Were there three when it came in the box? Did she have the other two? Had she kept one and given one to Carmel? I kicked to the surface and gasped for air.

Out of the pool, I stood dripping at the table. I held my shoes in one hand and my shirt in the other. Stuart’s face was invisible, Marianne’s slightly reddened behind burning cigarette, and Edsel’s a dark mingling of hair and evil intent. It was as if he had split me open and shined a flashlight inside, then extricated that core of human sin we all spent lives working to contain.

“You and your filthy ogre shit. Your victorious filth and what have you got. You dick. You ogre dick piss shit cock suck. What’s it all now? You fuck. You fucking fuck. Ass fuck you in the fucking mouth you shit.”

Marianne stood from the table and laid a long finger onto Stuart’s shoulder. Together they stepped into the pool house without a word, while Edsel remained seated, comfortable in his certainty that nothing I did could ever cause him harm. Such dedication to personal ascent, such drive. Such dedication to himself, dominating. Amazing to think we were technically the same species. So terribly
big
.

It took an hour to retrace my route home. It would be several more before the sun came up, but I had no interest in opening the door and climbing those familiar stairs. I stood in the driveway looking at my car. Zoe’s Jetta was missing, out for Friday night rampage of teen carelessness, throwing herself around like some rubber ball. Maybe parked somewhere with Jeff. Luke.

I drove to the Rocket Slide. I parked facing the playground and reclined my seat, breathed deeply until the grinding sound had subsided enough that I could fall asleep.

I woke to the screams of children. I sat and listened to their yelps, marveling at their agendaless play. They circled in the gravel and scaled the structure, hollering at no set interval into the morning air.

Both of my elbows were covered in mosquito bites.

It was Saturday, a normal workday for the men and women who tended to the city’s network of roads. They were likely out there already, wearing their orange vests and hats and collecting their generous hourly wage. What I lacked today in invoices and a map, I could make up for with the duties of a surrogate big brother. I unreclined my seat, turned the key to bring the car to life, and checked the clock. Yes. It was indeed a fine time to visit Ian.

I found him sitting on the concrete steps with a piece of paper held in both hands in front of him.

“Yesterday I was out here reading this book we’re all supposed to read for school and a van pulled up and this man got out.”

“Did you run inside and scream that you were calling the police?”

“No. I forgot everything. I just sat here and made like I didn’t see him and I was still reading my dumb red-fern book.”

“What was he wearing?”

“I don’t know. Pants and a shirt.”

“You should try to remember clothing. Also height and hair color and race. If you can guess age, that’s important too. Age can be hard. So can height if you’re sitting down there. So be sure to stand before you make your approximation.”

“All he did was walk over and hand me this letter from my mom, then he drove away. And how am I supposed to read this stupid book now?”

“I’d better take a look,” I said.

He looked at me and then over at the yard where the kids had played but today were not. He began to bite his lower lip. The idea of secret mail carriers sounded familiar, but I didn’t know why. Nor could I explain my faith that the letter contained a thinly veiled code that, together, the boy and I would try and uncover this afternoon, sitting together on his porch with pencils, solving the puzzle.

“She says not to show it to anyone.”

“She means strangers,” I said.

“No she doesn’t,” he said.

august

three

i
said it like, why not, Dad. Suggestion from couch to computer, where he was sitting and working. I downplayed my severe inner turmoil and distress. Why not hey let’s just why not go to the Arch or something? Out of the house, father and son.

It cost us six dollars to park on the slanted cobblestone of the levee. I followed my father to the river’s edge, where we stood for a minute watching driftwood pass quickly from our left to right. The intermittent noise of mud-water sloshing onto the brick shoreline lent something to the moment, I wanted to call it naturalism, and it was tough not to appreciate the Mississippi for her onetime role as national lifeline, this huge muddy bitch of a river.

Beginning uphill, we climbed the two long flights of stairs up to the Jefferson Memorial Park and Gateway Arch. A thin crowd milled about the lawn and aimed cameras into the sky; park rangers on horseback posed and smiled with tourists. I went to one leg’s base and ran fingers across the etchings that scarred the steel close to the ground.

“Catenary curve,” he said. “The same wide as tall. People forget that.”

I did not ask for his help just yet.

We descended a sloping walkway, through metal detectors and into the sprawling subterranean Museum of Westward Expansion. While my father went for tickets, I walked among the exhibits. I peeked into replica tepees and mud huts and listened to animatronic actors describe the rigors of the prairie. I was looking closely at a stuffed buffalo when he appeared at my side.

“Eighteen dollars for two adults. I don’t remember it being so expensive.”

Not yet,
I thought.

We followed a set of painted dash marks to an area in front of a closed elevator door. When the doors opened, we squeezed with two women and another man into an egg of apparitional whiteness with modular plastic seating. A siren blew and we began to climb.

“Remember to swallow so your ears don’t pop,” he said.

One of the women offered gum, which I declined. Our capsule climbed for a bit on the angled track, then straightened, and again, continually adjusting for the rondure of the monument’s legs.

“The ride is shorter going down,” my father said.

At the top we were welcomed by a man in park-ranger green who proudly rattled off a sequence of facts so extensive you had to wonder if he’d ever been laid. The structure was designed to sway eighteen inches in strong wind. The average speed of the elevator trams was 3.9 miles per hour. The capacity of the observation deck was 140 people.

The windows were wide and squat and low enough that you had to half-crouch to see through them. Facing west, we saw that the clouds had cleared, and from here our tranquil hometown looked big and severe, alive in that fabled eight-million-stories sense of a living city. The sky’s simple mixture of pale blue and big, Super Ball sun pulled the city upward, into it, and this levitation brought with it movement and life. Below us—cars, bricks, and stone. Busch Stadium, a patch of green engulfed by red seats, neat rim of white around the top.

Begin simply,
I thought.

“One of the things I liked so much about school, Pops, was finding myself surrounded by people who didn’t know about Freddy drowning while none of us was watching.”

“That was not your fault, son.”

“One of these people was a girl who exemplified everything I could ever come up with to want. We grew very close very quickly and revealed dreams and compared fears and mocked gently and occasionally told lies, but nothing bad. The sex, I’m sorry, Dad, but the sex was unlike anything I believed might someplace exist. I remember lying with her in bed and touching her thigh and thinking,
My God. This is the reason I grew hands in
the first place.
”

My father nodded slowly. I stared out the window and didn’t move a muscle. It might have been the whole city I was addressing—from these junior skyscrapers and beyond, out to the bulging seams.

“I fell, as they say. Into love. I practiced saying it, first to myself, in my head. I believed in it. I did. I thought
love
and I bought it completely. I was excited by my belief but was careful not to let this excitement influence or manipulate the belief in any way. The belief had to be pure. So I said it to her, I love you, and she said it back. And this was our contract. We treated the words seriously and respected that they came with implications.”

What’s scary about looking out the Arch’s windows is that through some mystery of refraction, you are able to see directly below your feet, and see that there is nothing there. On the lawn, tiny heads spotted against green. And now, as if by some earlier agreement, we crossed to the windows on the Arch’s other side.

“Look at that,” he said. “There’s a reason that place has the reputation it does. Several, in fact.”

Changing the subject for a second was okay. Minus the garish riverfront casinos and strip clubs just beyond, everything in East St. Louis rests between dirt-brown and the loneliest shade of gray. Highways were pale streaks spread like medical tape across the country’s wounded heart.

“The love had a strength, Pop. And part of that strength came from my faith in the strength.
Look how strong,
I thought. I had no doubts that I would continue to love her in this manner for the rest of our lives.”

“I understand. You look at her and are filled with something grand and complex. With your mother I loved her so much I was given visceral pause. You should have seen her back then, son.”

“That’s right,” I said. “Grand and complex. You say
love
because people believe in the word, it has a shared meaning and demands respect. It makes the strength stronger. But the strength can be unpredictable, it can gain a life of its own and turn on itself enough to make love into something too strong, this massive force. Something horrifying, brief flashes, this same strength.”

I pressed my hands flat against the window like a kindergartner stenciling a turkey. It was frigid cold inside the viewing area, but the windows were warm. So much more to say. I had to make it through the Audrey part to get to the part where I ended up on top of Derrick Hoyne’s daughter.

“But sometimes, still, I needed to be elsewhere, away from Audrey. I didn’t understand. I pushed her away and found myself behaving in a way that didn’t align with
love
. I snapped at her and I lied. I lusted after her best friend and committed indiscretions. But why would I do these things if I loved her, Dad?”

“I hope I have made absolutely clear, Potter, that I did not ever, ever cheat on your mother.”

I stood from the window. We moved back to the other side of the deck. I followed the highway to the west, through the deep green of Forest Park, all the way to Clayton. There I spotted approximately where my parents’ home should be.

We said
I love you
so many times it lost all meaning. We may as well have been saying
I gerbil antacid
or
penguin Boston pole vault
. I had to wonder if I’d been using the word wrong the whole time. Where did the word even come from? Whose was it? And I began to suspect more and more that the word was part of a schematic that had been laid in place long before I came along. A system that, like all systems, should be regarded with caution. Now I was doubting not just myself, subject of the phrase, but the verb itself. It was only a matter of time before Audrey, object of
I love you,
removed herself from the sentence altogether. And told me to work on the verb. And I came back here. And. Well.

The park ranger welcomed another group off the elevator. People filed into the elevators for their return to solid ground, six hundred thirty feet below. Eggs and eggs of people, coming and going in an endless mechanical ovulation.

“I’ve made some mistakes, Pop.”

“Let me tell you about the things I know, son. I love you and I love your mother. What else do I know. I love my work and I love this city. I have always believed that this would be enough. We cannot account for surprise. It comes out of nowhere, by its very nature. I wonder now whether I should have made adjustments. But who can say? No one can say. And what options remain? Do you run away to some tree in the woods? You’ve read
Walden;
let’s not pretend that’s upbeat stuff. Plus he walked into town twice a week to buy eggs and flour. You stay and you try to make things better. That’s what you do. You do not give up like a twerp. You do not walk away. You work, Potter. You work at the commitment you’ve made. Otherwise, what’s the value of commitment.”