The Keep (3 page)

Riding back in the car, Danny couldn’t get warm. He pulled old blankets over himself and kept the dog in his lap, but his teeth knocked together so hard that his sister complained about the noise and his mom said, You must be coming down with something, honey. I’ll run a hot bath when we get home.

Danny went back to the caves by himself a few times after that. He’d walk alone up the hills to the boarded-up mouth, and mixed in with the sounds of dry grass was his cousin’s voice howling up from underground:
no
and
please
and
help.
And Danny would think: Okay, now—
now!
and feel a rising up in himself at the idea of finally saying those words he’d been holding inside all this time:
Howie’s in the caves; we left him in the caves, Rafe and I,
and just imagining this gave Danny a rush of relief so intense it seemed he would almost pass out, and at the same time he’d feel a shift around him like the sky and earth were changing places, and a different kind of life would open up, light and clear, some future he didn’t realize he’d lost until that minute.

But it was too late. Way, way too late for any of that. They’d found Howie in the caves three days later, semiconscious. Every night Danny would expect his pop’s sharp knock on his bedroom door and frantically rehearse his excuses—
It was Rafe
and
I’m just a kid
—until they ran together in a loop—
It was Rafe I’m just a kid itwasRafeI’mjustakid—
the loop played even when Danny was doing his homework or watching TV or sitting on the john,
itwasRafeI’mjustakid,
until it seemed like everything in Danny’s life was the witness he needed to prove he was still himself, still Danny King exactly like before:
See, I scored a goal! See, I’m hanging with my friends!
But he wasn’t one hundred percent there, he was watching, too, hoping everyone would be convinced. And they were.

And after months and months of this faking, Danny started to believe in it again. All the normal things that had happened to him since the cave made a crust over that day, and the crust got thicker and thicker until Danny almost forgot about what was underneath.

And when Howie got better, when he could finally be alone in a room without his mother, when he could sleep with the lights off again, he was different. After the
traumatic incident
his sweetness was gone and he got into drugs and eventually bought a gun and tried to rob a 7-Eleven, and they sent him away to reform school.

After Rafe died three years later (killing two girls from his class at Michigan in his pickup truck), the family picnics stopped. And by the time they started up again, Danny wasn’t going home anymore.

That was memory number two.

So now back to Danny, walking with his arms up and his cell phone on through the basement or dungeon or whatever it was in a castle that belonged to Howie. He’d come a long way to meet his cousin here, and his reasons were practical: making money, getting the hell out of New York. But also Danny was curious. Because over the years, news about Howie kept reaching him through that high-speed broadcasting device known as a family:

1. Bond trader

2. Chicago

3. Insane wealth

4. Marriage, kids

5. Retirement at thirty-four

And each time one of those chunks of news got to Danny, he’d think,
See, he’s okay. He’s fine. He’s better than fine!
and feel a bump of relief and then another bump that made him sit down wherever he was and stare into space. Because something hadn’t happened that should’ve happened to Danny. Or maybe the wrong things had happened, or maybe too many little things had happened instead of one big thing, or maybe not enough little things had happened to
combine
into one big thing.

Bottom line: Danny didn’t know why he’d come all this way to Howie’s castle. Why did I take a writing class? I thought it was to get away from my roommate, Davis, but I’m starting to think there was another reason under that.

You? Who the hell are you? That’s what someone must be saying right about now. Well, I’m the guy talking. Someone’s always doing the talking, just a lot of times you don’t know who it is or what their reasons are. My teacher, Holly, told me that.

I started the class with a bad attitude. For the second meeting I wrote a story about a guy who fucks his writing teacher in a broom closet until the door flies open and all the brooms and mops and buckets come crashing out and their bare asses are shining in the light and they both get busted. It got a lot of laughs while I was reading it, but when I stopped reading the room went quiet.

Okay, Holly says. Reactions?

No one has a reaction.

Come on, folks. Our job is to help Ray do the very best work he can do. Something tells me this may not be it.

More quiet. Finally I say: It was just a joke.

No one’s laughing, she says.

They were, I say. They laughed.

Is that what you are, Ray? A joke?

I think:
What the fuck?
She’s looking at me but I can’t make myself look back.

She says: I bet there are people out there who’d tell me Yes, Ray’s a joke. Who’d tell me you’re trash. Am I right?

Now there’s muttering:
Ow,
and
Shit,
and
What about that, Ray-man?
and I know they expect me to be pissed, and I know I’m supposed to be pissed and I
am
pissed, but not just that. Something else.

There’s the door, she tells me, and points. Why don’t you just walk out?

I don’t move. I can walk out the door, but then I’d have to stand in the hall and wait.

What about that gate? She’s pointing out the window now. The gate is lit up at night: razor wire coiled along the top, the tower with a sharpshooter in it. Or what about your cell doors? she asks. Or block gates? Or shower doors? Or the mess hall doors, or the doors to the visitor entrance? How often do you gentlemen touch a doorknob? That’s what I’m asking.

I knew the minute I saw Holly that she’d never taught in a prison before. It wasn’t her looks—she’s not a kid, and you can see she hasn’t had it easy. But people who teach in prisons have a hard layer around them that’s missing on Holly. I can hear how nervous she is, like she planned every word of that speech about the doors. But the crazy thing is, she’s right. The last time I got out, I’d stand in front of doors and wait for them to open up. You forget what it’s like to do it yourself.

She says, My job is to show you a door you can open. And she taps the top of her head. It leads wherever you want it to go, she says. That’s what I’m here to do, and if that doesn’t interest you then please spare us all, because this grant only funds ten students, and we only meet once a week, and I’m not going to waste everyone’s time on bullshit power struggles.

She comes right to my desk and looks down. I look back up. I want to say, I’ve heard some cheesy motivational speeches in my time, but that one’s a doozy. A door in our heads,
come on.
But while she was talking I felt something pop in my chest.

You can wait outside, she says. It’s only ten more minutes.

I think I’ll stay.

We look at each other. Good, she says.

So when Danny finally spotted a light in that castle basement and realized it was a door with light coming in around it, when his heart went pop in his chest and he went over there and gave it a shove and it opened right up into a curved stairwell with a light on, I know what that was like. Not because I’m Danny or he’s me or any of that shit—this is all just stuff a guy told me. I know because after Holly mentioned that door in our heads, something happened to me. The door wasn’t real, there was no actual door, it was just
figurative language.
Meaning it was a word. A sound.
Door.
But I opened it up and walked out.

There was a connection between this new Howie and the one Danny remembered as a kid, but it was a distant connection. For starters, this new guy was blond. Was it possible for hair to go from brown to blond? Blond to brown, Danny knew all about—half the girls he’d slept with claimed they were
so blond, you wouldn’t believe how blond I was as a kid,
which is why they spent half their paychecks on highlights, trying to recapture their rightful and original state. But brown to blond? Danny had never heard of it. The obvious answer was that Howie bleached his hair, but it didn’t look bleached, and this new Howie (except he wasn’t Howie anymore, he was
Howard;
he’d told Danny that first thing this morning, before he’d even clamped him in a bear hug) didn’t seem like a guy who would bleach his hair.

The new Howie was fit. Built, even. Love handles, girly pear shape—gone. Liposuction? Exercise? Time passing? Who knew. On top of which he was tan. This part really threw Danny, because the old Howie had been white in a way that seemed deeper than not getting sun. He looked like a guy the sun wouldn’t touch. And now: tan face and arms, tan legs (he was wearing khaki shorts)—tan hands, even, with blond hair all over them that had to be real, right? Because who the hell would bleach the hair on their
hands
?

The biggest change wasn’t physical: Howard had power. And power was something Danny understood—this was one of a slew of skills he’d picked up in New York after years of study and training and practice, skills that combined to make a résumé so specialized it was written out in invisible ink, so that when his pop (for example) took a look, all he saw was a blank sheet of paper. Danny could walk in a room and know who had power the way some people know from the feel of the air that it’s going to snow. If the person with power wasn’t
in
the room, Danny knew that, too, and when the person turned up Danny could usually spot him (or her) before he opened his mouth—before he was fully in the door, sometimes. It came down to the other people in the room, how they reacted. Here’s who was in the room with Howard:

1. Ann, his wife. Shiny dark hair cut in a pageboy, triangular features, big gray eyes. She was pretty, but not the way Danny expected a bond trader’s wife to be pretty. She had no makeup, and her jeans and brown sweater were the opposite of sexy. She was lying on her back on the gray stone floor, letting a baby in pink pajamas (which Danny figured meant a girl) pretend to take steps on her stomach.

2. Workers. They were young, they wore dust masks, they were busy doing something, somewhere, and in between whatever they were doing they churned into the kitchen through a couple of swinging doors. Sometimes they carried tools. Howard had told Danny these were graduate students from the MBA program at the University of Illinois and also from Cornell’s hotel school. Howard’s renovation was their summer project—in other words, they were doing this for credit. But it looked to Danny like what they were mostly learning was carpentry.

3. Mick, Howard’s “old friend.” Danny had met this dude last night—he was the one who finally turned up after Danny yelled
Hel-lo-ooo
for God knows how long inside that circular stairwell, where it turned out none of the doors had handles. There was something threatening about Mick. He had a slingshot body, strong but borderline gaunt, just bare muscles soldered together. Mick didn’t smile once the whole time he was leading Danny to his room, and when he reached up to pull away a velvet curtain from around the big antique bed, Danny noticed a mess of old track marks on his arms (you couldn’t see these now, he was wearing long sleeves). Mick was Howard’s number two; Danny figured that out the second he was in the room with both of them. Powerful people either had a number two or needed one or both—meaning they needed a different one from the one they had.