The Duration (29 page)

I sat steaming. These assholes and their stupid games. This old bullshit. I would kick all their asses.

“Tim-Rick. What a stupid name, anyway.”

“Robbie told me that it's two names.”

“No shit.”

“No. Like, it's the names of two people combined. Their mom was pregnant with twins, but only one made it. She couldn't choose, so she combined the names.”

That struck me as a terrible idea, and I didn't give much of a shit about Tim-Rick Golack.

“That's fucked up, man.”

LaBeau raised his eyebrows.

“Weird the shit people will tell you when they're high.”

We both sat there for a second. I imagine we were thinking the same thing, wondering what it would be like to carry your dead brother's name around for your whole life.

Enough with that shit. I checked my watch and looked up at the bell tower.

“What's he doing in there?”

LaBeau shrugged.

“Getting high, or coming down, probably. Dude's been high since last night.”

“Where were you last night?”

“The Knots. Came out here this morning because last night your boy said if I didn't drive him he was going to hitchhike. He was in no shape to hitchhike.”

“What's he on? Oxy?”

LaBeau nodded. “Among other things. He's an addict, man.”

“No shit,” I said. “And what the fuck are you doing to help?”

He looked at me.

“What do you want? I'm an addict too.”

He looked down at his hands. Opiates were coming in like rot out here.

“Shit. I took him in, let him crash. Dude has a fucking
tent
. It's freezing out. I drove his ass here so he didn't freeze to death. I'm the one sitting here waiting on him.”

He reached into his coat pocket, but all that came out were his keys.

“I don't need this shit, dude. You want him, you got him,” Elvis LaBeau said, and put the keys in the ignition. He was making a pretty good point. “Call the cops. Turn us in. You'd be doing me a favor.”

“Fine,” I said. “Go home. I'll take care of this.”

For a minute, I didn't get out and he didn't start the car. The two of us, we deserved each other.

Then I opened the door and stepped out onto the asphalt. Behind me, the Trans Am coughed to life, and LaBeau was gone before I'd crossed the street.

I checked the nave and the chancel, the narthex and the pulpit, a whole catechistic vocab coming back after fifteen years away. No Chick. The church was dark and quiet, votives flickering within a side grotto, velvet confessionals gossiping to each other. The rug swallowed my footfalls and I moved up to the choir. From the balcony, the empty wood of the pews shone in the cold late morning.

I found him at the top of the bell tower, in a small round room with a high ceiling from which the Sanctus hung. He was slumped silently on a bench, hands in the pockets of a light coat, passed out or asleep. His breath made clouds in the open-windowed room. His beard looked rough and his skin was pasty.

I sat next to him and waited for him to wake up.

So, yeah, sure, a bell tower again. I felt it, the symbolism, the events from half a life ago, half our lives anyway, the way you wonder, as you always do, in that useless way, how things might have been different if things had been different. But, and I'll be honest here, I was also thinking about Ava and Boston and my job and my life and all the things that did not involve my drug-addicted friend breathing unevenly on the bench next to me. Like my other, non-drug-addicted friends. And my new familiarity with yoga. And my weight, which was down about 5 pounds since last week and was beginning to seem scalable. All these things. And about how I would share them with Chickie when he woke up, and he would see what I was seeing and might offer an insight or two that changed the way I saw them, or propose some vaguely outlandish but nonetheless thrilling alteration. And he would do so with a smile and genuine fellowship. And we would wind up laughing.

And then the Sanctus bell rang, thunderclaps in the small room, because it was noon.

Chickie snorted and swallowed and his chin fell forward. He opened his eyes, which were bleary and unfocused. I sat there, waiting. The bells went on forever.

When they stopped, he shook his head and looked over.

“Where are we?” he said.

“Sink City. The bell tower,” I said.

The words seemed to drip into his ears and leech their way to his cortex. Then he lifted his hand and put it out onto mine.

“Sorry,” he said. “To make you come all this way.”

I shrugged.

“I had to be here anyway,” I said.

Chick smiled. The best smile ever.

“Sorry about,” he said, tilting his head in a way that I figured meant storming out of breakfast.

I nodded. “Me too.”

Glad that was cleared up. We sat there for a minute.

“What are we doing here?” I asked.

“I was about to ask you the same thing.”

I looked around the cold, stone room. This was fun. But silly.

“I hooked up with Ava Winston,” I said. I felt bad about it for a second, and then didn't.

Chick smiled again and tapped my palm.

“I was hoping you'd say that,” he said. “She's a sweetheart.”

I nodded, more to myself than him.

“Listen, your ride left. I'm going back to Boston to pick up some things and get sorted out. Come stay with me?”

Chick breathed out into the cold air. For a minute he was quiet. Then he shook his head.

“Naah,” he said. “I don't think that would be a good idea.”

I looked at him.

“What do you mean?”

“I'm not going to Boston. Appreciate it, but no.”

“Well,” I said. “What are you going to do instead?”

Chick looked around at the empty room and tried to smile again, but it was weak.

“Doing it, I'm afraid.”

“What?” I said, looking for a corner into which to spit the words but not finding one because it was a round tower. It was good too, because the last time I'd pressed too hard he'd split on me. I tried to modulate my delivery accordingly. “Get high and pass out?”

“I know it's not exactly ambitious,” he said. “It's not what you or the other guys would do. But my options are limited.”

I didn't know what to say, so I just sat there. Eventually I thought of something.

“Why'd you even call?” I asked. “When you got back. Why even call me if all you planned to do was fall down a hole?”

Chick shrugged.

“I knew you'd come.”

Broke my heart.

“I guess I shouldn't have,” he added. “I didn't mean to fuck up your stuff.”

“No, man,” I said. “Are you kidding? It's been great.”

He laughed at that.

“Look,” he said, straightening out his back and grimacing. “Let it go. Just let this all go.”

He stood up.

“We're in different places, Pete.”

I hated it when he called me by my name. It was never good.

“That's probably obvious,” he said. “Don't take this the wrong way, but sometimes I don't even know if we're still friends. I mean, you know? Maybe we're just guys who went through some shit together as kids.”

Dude was just flat-out throwing bombs.

He turned and walked out of the bell tower room, down the long, narrow stairs toward the choir. I followed, because what else was I going to do? In the narthex, where the latecomers would huddle during Mass, hoping to sneak over to a pew during a break in the homily, I dipped my finger in the holy water, blessed myself out of habit. Also it seemed like a good idea.

Chick slid toward the open door, moments from vanishing again.

“Where are you going to stay?” I asked him.

He didn't answer, just kept limping toward the cold city. He looked like a ghost on the skids.

I felt the clock ticking. What were the odds here? Chick was one pill away from an overdose and didn't seem to care. Jimmer wouldn't be hanging around for too much longer, and Unsie was ready to wash his hands, sensibly, of the lot of us. I could just go back out to Boston, act like the past week and a half had never happened. Let all this stuff go. Look up that paralegal-turned-physician's-assistant, see how her engagement had worked out.

Wait for the call saying Chick was in the hospital, or jail. Or worse.

Goddamn. It wouldn't even take much for things to break right. It was close already. I mean, there was Ava, and whatever that was, but promising, no? Ava and my new interest in probiotics and stretching and soon, soon, it would be spring. Jimmer was in love and Unsie was about to be a dad. March was the most dangerous month, the swing season, cold snaps still lurking and the occasional storm and then suddenly spring and it was light longer and the earth was wet and the creeks and lakes were thawed and you could get a glimpse of a distant summer. The trees woke up and the flowers returned. Chick said he didn't want my help, but I knew he did. Or even if he didn't want it, he needed it. If I could just get him through these next few weeks, just make it to April, everything would be okay. I mean, shit, Christ rose in April. We could too.

Fuck it.

“Okay, fine,” I called after him. “You win.”

He stopped in the doorway. I took a deep breath.

“About the rhino. The horn. You were right,” I said.

He turned around and looked back at me.

“It's there,” I said. “At Fleur-de-Lys.”

Nothing happened for a second. Then he raised his hands like touchdown.

He was only mildly upset about the lying. Almost like he got it, got why I would lie. “Really?” he kept asking. He would ask, and then laugh, and then ask again. He wanted to know where it was, how it was displayed, whether, after all these years, it still looked sharp.

We were sitting in the Escalade, still in Sink City. The street was mildly alive, a lunch crowd braving the wind for a smoke or a slice of pepperoni. Clouds were massing to the southeast, late winter checking its tank. The forecast called for snow.

I told him what I could remember, which was everything. Three feet, almost, curved like a scimitar, black and gray as if charred. I told him about the whirlpool room where the horn sat shining in its niche, about how the room opened up onto the rolling back lawn. I also told him what Jimmer had said, about the value of the thing, both in real and in historical terms, what Jimmer'd said about the class of felony it represented.

“What we'll do, then, is wait until the heat dies down, then we can save some money and spend a weekend there,” I said. “I'll show it to you then.”

Chick looked at me like I was crazy.

“Or we could go tonight,” he said.

“We can't go tonight,” I said. “You can't go near the property yet. You'd go to jail.”

“I'd only go to jail if I got caught, which I won't. And don't you still have a room there tonight?”

That was true, actually.

“So you go in, I hide in the truck, we go see the horn. Then we leave. That sounds pretty simple.”

It did sound simple. Too simple.

“It sounds too simple,” I said. “They're keeping an eye out for you. The guards are on, like, DEFCON 2. They wand the cars. Plus, you can't get to the spa area without walking through the lobby, which is where Ava and all the front desk people are. They'd recognize you.”

Chickie sat and thought.

“If I could get to the back of the tub room, then I could just come through a window or something.”

I shook my head.

“Those windows are locked. It's winter.”

Chick nodded.

“We need someone on the inside.”

He looked at me.

I was scrambling.

“Nope. Here's an alternative. We talk to Ava, explain what they have in there, why we want it, she shows it to us, lets us spend some time with it, and then takes it from there. Maybe she puts the horn in a place of honor.”