Blue Stew (Second Edition) (8 page)

“
No
. We go out of our way for you, we try to help you, and you start laughing, and—”

“I wasn’t
laughing
,” Walter clarified.

“Whatever,” said Nigel. “The point still is there: you’ve stopped looking out for yourself . . . you’ve stopped looking out for your friends . . . you’ve stopped looking out for anything that’s
not
a quick thrill.”

“I still have my job; I still pay my rent,” Walter protested halfheartedly.

Henry chimed in, hoping to cool some of the heat that, out of an unplanned wave of exasperation, Nigel was putting on, “Yes, you do. We’re doing this now because it’s
not
all bad, and there’s clear hope for things to get better. Nigel might’ve overstated some of that. Did you see how many friends showed up last night? People want you back to being
yourself
, Walter.”

Walter only shrugged. This again triggered the ire of the high-stressed Nigel.

“You don’t have
anything
to say to that? I just want you to
answer
me: You come from a perfectly normal family; your parents only left town when you were already in
college
. You have many good friends—
had
many good friends. What made you stop
caring?
”

Walter fought back the urge to shrug again. He put to words the vague explanation he had been privately operating under for the past few months, “I don’t know, man. Maybe I just got bored with life sooner than most people do? I’ve always been like that with video games, you know. I have no patience. I get halfway through, and then I get bored, and I start fucking around, and I never finish. Maybe that’s just my way?”

“That’s fucked up,” said Henry, having followed the metaphor all the way through.

“That’s bullshit, actually,” Nigel said. “Life is nothing like a
video game
. How can you even imply that?”

Walter opened and lifted his palms, “Sometimes I can’t see the point in either. Except that video games are
usually
less tedious . . . and hell, sometimes video games
do
have a point . . .”

“I’m sorry, but I don’t buy it,” Henry seemingly had fallen into the good-cop role: he had a much softer edge to his voice than Nigel, which was atypical for both of them. “This
does
sound like some shit you came up with in your head to justify your act.”

Walter intently and silently started buttering his corn.

Jamie now spoke, seeming emboldened at Walter’s appearance of backing down, “And what about your thing with Stephanie that Nigel told me about? You know,
don’t
think you’re too much of a man to accept that that
really
hurt. If you bottle something like that up, it can really sink you.”

“No,” Walter replied quickly and forcefully. “Stephanie started fucking Dave
after
I stopped caring. I don’t blame her, really.”

“Come
on
,” pressed Nigel. “You seemed
fine
before you found out about that shit. You’d been together over a year. You were talking like you were going to
marry
the damn girl.”

Walter shook his head and looked away, at anything, “Let’s cut out the soap-opera bit, can we? This is not about some college whore; it’s about how I
love
coke and booze.”

“Maybe Jamie’s getting at something,” Henry disagreed slowly, fleshing out the thought even as he spoke. “Maybe, instead of facing up to things like an adult, you forced yourself to stop caring . . . you made yourself numb, and maybe now the only way for you to feel anything is to do dumb shit?”

Walter was looking up at the birch-wood balcony of a sitting room that overlooked the high-ceilinged kitchen. Walter had always appreciated the house’s interesting use of vertical space.

“
Walter
. So is ignoring us like a four-year-old your way of agreeing with Henry, then?”

Walter looked back down at Nigel.

“No. It’s not true, I feel stuff. Depression breaks the numbness regularly.”

“Maybe you should see someone, Walter,” suggested Jamie, maybe putting on too compassionate of a voice, closing in on condescension.

“Yeah, really, you’ve obviously got some screws loose in there, because—”

“
Because
,” Walter cut over Nigel, “because I don’t have a good reason to be this way, right? Because there’s no way a twenty-five-year-old with his head screwed on
right
can legitimately lose interest in a repetitive, vanilla lifestyle, can he? Because there’s no way a
right-minded
person would willingly move into life’s fast lane and make some more colorful choices to liven things up, huh?”

“No,” said Nigel flatly. “Because life is boundless and amazing and only someone with a real dysfunction would treat it with such disregard.”

“You know something?” asked Walter dismissively. “You know how some guys at parties, when they’re having a good time, they let out this high, loud cheer? Like:
woo!
” Walter imitated the high, loud cheer. He sounded like a redneck who’d just roped a calf. Everyone appeared startled. “Before I tried coke, I could never do that right. I would do it too low, too quiet. At best I sounded sarcastic. It’s
liberating
.”

Henry raised an eyebrow, “And that’s
worth
the dangers to you?”

Walter turned on Henry, “Dude, I’ve seen your fucking dirt-bike races. There’s no way that shit isn’t as dangerous as
my
little recreational habits.”

“What I do is awesome; it wouldn’t be the worst way to go out. I don’t think anyone can say, with a straight face, that digging yourself into a miserable chemical hole is
anything
like that.”

Walter dumped some salt onto his corn and took a big bite out of it. He then proceeded to chew it loudly at his friends, making no effort to keep his lips sealed.

Jamie had had more to add to her previous line of dissection, and she saw a chance then to back things up. “Nigel also told me about your father, Walter; how it took years and years for him to regain himself fully after your mom left. You know, for some types of people, it’s much harder to cope when things don’t go according to the plans in their heads. There’s just no shame in having to rely on others to pull through tough times.”

“Jamie, you seem nice, but you’re describing a little
bitch
,” Walter spoke through a mouthful of buttery corn-kernels. “I’m actually
not
a little bitch. This has
nothing
to do with Stephanie. I was pissed for a while, and then I got over it. Nothing new about any of it. Happens all the time.”

“Maybe it doesn’t have anything to do with her
anymore
, sure, but if you opened yourself to her, made yourself
fragile
. . . that’s the kind of thing that can trigger a downward spiral . . . in the wrong type of person.”

“‘Wrong type of person’? A
fragile
person?” Walter scoffed and took a long drink of water. “What the fuck do you know, really, Jamie? You watch too many shitty TV shows. Real life shit doesn’t revolve around cliché relationship drama like it does on TV.”

“She knows a
lot
,” interceded Nigel, putting a defensive hand on Jamie’s shoulder. “A lot more than
you
, anyway. She studied this type of psychology in college. And pretty much
all
emotions revolve around our personal relationships, cliché or not.”

“Anyone else gonna eat?” asked Walter blithely before Nigel had finished. “It’s really good.” He bit into some chicken.

“You know, you
are
a lot like your dad,” Henry intoned thoughtfully, scratching the side of his beard.

“
Fragile?
”

“Or
sensitive
, I guess. Doesn’t have to be said like a
bad
thing.”

“Okay, good,” Walter’s sarcasm could’ve drowned a fish, “I guess we’ve had our breakthrough. I’m a delicate fucking flower vase. Life’s super awesome now. I’ll stop fucking around, I promise. Can we eat?”

They ate. The food was good, but the sour, muddy emotions made everything taste faintly bitter.

•   •   •

Henry told Walter that if he wanted a ride into work again tomorrow, he’d prefer it if he just spent the night at Nigel’s again, as it was much closer to Kall’s. Walter accepted the suggestion without the courtesy of checking with Nigel first.

Henry and then Jamie left soon after dinner.

Walter, who had grown to thrive in awkward situations, was borderline cheerful in handling Nigel’s attempts at innocuous small-talk as they watched a late-night talk show before bed.

W
ork regained much of its usual tedium the next day. Some of Walter’s customers didn’t even say anything about the already infamous previous night, and most who did simply asked if he’d heard of any new developments. But everyone, he found, seemed to be all caught up.

Jaded as he was, though, Walter couldn’t avoid appreciating the sunny, cool, crisp, perfect fall day. Nothing could be better for outdoor labor. As an added bonus, his sore joints had improved significantly overnight—though, Walter’s very fortunate good health had always been something that he took for granted.

It was just past high noon when a white pickup truck crunched along the gravel driveway at the back of the store, coming to a stop in front of Walter. Walter, seated in front of the large opening of the warehouse, kicked himself off of his waiting post of two stacked hay bundles.

 He went up to the driver-side window, “What’cha got?”

A pale hand extended through the window and handed him a slip with an order jotted onto it.

“Hi, Walter.”

“
Oh!
Hi Maddie.”

Madeline Wendell had gone to high school with Walter. They were about as poorly acquainted as two high schoolers from rural Vermont possibly can be—which is to say, they knew each other pretty well. Walter wasn’t sure why, but he always felt caught off-guard when Maddie came by. Maybe it was because he’d grown accustomed to interacting with pretty girls exclusively while wasted at parties—or maybe, after a week or two of dealing with hairy, large-bellied farmer types, a shapely young blonde pulling around to his warehouse was an expectedly jarring thing to have happen.

“I’m sorry I didn’t come last night,” she said, sounding sincere.

Walter stared at her. She had very full lips.

“Come to what, now?”

“The int—the
dinner
.” Her cheeks flushed.

An awkward beat. Walter’s eyes widened as comprehension smacked him across the face, “
Oh
. So Nigel tried to make a thing of it again, and have people over?”

She nodded.

“Don’t worry. No one else came this time . . .”

Maddie appeared disappointed, “A good amount of people came the first time. It was just
so
last-minute last night . . . and of course the night before had been so strange . . . and
horrible
. . .”

Walter was distracted by the prominent question of
why
Maddie had come to the original attempt in the first place. Had Nigel or Jamie awkwardly pressured her into it? Because, they really only chatted when she came to get supplies for her family’s livestock, once or twice a month.

“That’s okay with me. The whole thing was really uncomfortable and misguided, if you ask me.”