The Local News (25 page)

Eventually I made my way toward the far end of the park and the trails to nowhere. While a few dark outlines of people dotted the trees at the head of the trails, it was much quieter here. I chose a trail at random and for a long time just listened to the sound of my shoes crunching through the snow, which had not melted as much back beneath the canopy of branches. The day’s cloudless sky had held, and the moon hung above, a fat sickle. Even well past the nearest lamppost, it lit up the snowy limbs overhead, casting weird humanoid shadows onto the trail—there a rubbery pair of grasping arms, there an elongated leg, midstride.

I walked and walked. The cold began to feel good as I grew clammy, almost sweating beneath my coat. I thought about taking my hat off, though it seemed like a lot of effort. Every once in a while I heard a shout or laugh from the partiers, but those sounded far-off and muffled now. The trails went, indeed, to nowhere. Repeatedly I passed the same benchmarks—a felled trunk with saplings growing out of the stump, a discarded two-liter bottle of Mountain Dew lying on its side, the remaining liquid a frozen, neon yellow block. But the forest seemed to be a forest in earnest, far less anemic than I’d remembered. Perhaps this was because I hadn’t been to Croft’s in years. Or perhaps the snow added girth to the trees.

The drifts of snow, the shadows, the cracking sounds of wind through icy branches all managed to give the place a bit of an uncharted, otherworldly quality. I was Lewis and Clark on my way along the Oregon Trail. I was Cook in the Antarctic. For a short time I felt unbound, drifting through this blank space, absorbed in meaningless tasks like patterning my footprints into zigzags through the snow, breaking icicles off lower branches and suckingon them. By now the heat of the alcohol simmered low and constant at my center. I took to whispering to myself, feeling an urge for solemn, Jacques Cousteau–like narration: “So low hang the branches,” “Here, a mundane mountain of snow.” I amused myself with needless alliteration: “Whistling white wind.” I lay on my back to make a snow angel. I poked at icy clumps of foliage with a twig. Being the lost one, I thought for the first time with a certain envy, wouldn’t be so bad.

At some point—it was easy to lose track of time back there—I thought I heard footsteps mimicking my own. But the snow and the trees made it dense and echoey, hard to tell where noises were coming from. The sound rose and faded without a clear pattern, until I
convinced myself it was not there at all. Soon, though, the crunching persisted, and I whispered, “Crunching cracking cacophony,” though it didn’t seem as amusing now.

“Hello?” I called, spooked for the first time about being alone in the dark.

“Pasternak?” a voice called, and the footsteps grew more definite, louder and closer, and though he was shadowy and far away, the outline that appeared just before the farthest bend in the trail was so undeniably massive and He-Man like, it could be no one but Tip. I couldn’t believe how happy I was to see him. Company seemed suddenly like a great idea, in the seamless way alcohol had of accommodating any new variables into the equation.

“Jesus Christ, Pasternak!” he called as I jogged toward him. “You want a fucking search party or what?” He looked like the Michelin Man in his puffy down jacket. “What are you doing out here? Your boyfriend’s totally looking for you. That kid’s freaking out.”

“I was coming back,” I said when I got to him. The jog made me breathe harder, the exertion bringing a little rush. I worried that I’d just made it sound like I was going back for Jerold. “He’s not my boyfriend,” I said. Then, “You’re the Michelin Man,” and “It’s so beautiful back here.” I swung my arms in a wide arc, as if introducing Tip to the forest.

“Jesus,” he said again. “You’re drunk.” He was staring down at me hard. I was trying not to pant. “You know something about Pasternaks?” he said, his voice a mix of light and stern, question and statement. “They like the drink.”

I laughed. “I’m not drunk,” I said, though just having another body beside me made the loose, soggy center of my drunkenness feel more pronounced, as if it fed off the very idea of audience.

“What are you even doing out here?” he said.

“I don’t know. Walking and stuff. I did a snow angel. I poked things.” The last statement cracked me up. As I laughed, Tip watched me like he was still waiting for the joke. “What are you doing
out there?”
I said, pointing to the park.

Tip told me about how Kent and Gregory had almost gotten in another fight but how a bunch of juniors had broken it up. Some girl, too, had mashed a snowball in Cindy Kahlen’s face and Cindy had almost started crying. “Was her makeup all messed up?” I asked, all this the sort of meaningless nothingness that made these events enjoyable.

He said, “We should go,” and took my arm, not exactly roughly, but with a rough sort of confidence. His gloved hand fit almost all the way around my arm.

“I swear, officer, I’m innocent.”

“That’s what they always say.” He was smiling. “Let’s get you back before people think you’re dead.” He delivered this in the same stern-jokey tone he’d used since he found me, but as soon as the words were out, something of a low shudder went through him. I saw it: a strange twitch to his lip, a quiver in the thick cords of his neck. He stumbled all over himself, soon stammering. “Sorry. I was just talking crap. I didn’t mean—I don’t know. Fuck. Christ.”

At first I didn’t understand what he was upset about. But as his forehead creased and his mouth wilted into a frown, this was the Tip who had sat in our living room those endless August days, the one who cupped his face in his hands for endless stretches of time, who looked up only to reveal red, wet cheeks and wet eyes, who kept repeating the same useless snippets to my parents about offering Danny a ride, Danny saying he wanted to run home, it still being light out, everything seeming fine.

And then I got it, his stammering, his upset, but it seemed stupid
and silly and I didn’t want to be all serious with Tip. I found serious Tip alarming, akin to when teachers dressed up during Spirit Week, Mrs. Bardazian in a bright green leprechaun outfit, Mr. Fontana with a spongy red clown nose glommed to the middle of his face. It was the alarm of incongruity.

“It’s fine,” I said. “No big whoop.” I grinned, to display the no-big-whoopness of the situation. He smiled a little, but it was forced, and still we did not move, both of us just standing there in the middle of the trail.

Finally I said, “Listen. He’s not dead.”

“No. I know he’s not. He’s not.” He was still holding on to my arm. “He’s not.”

“I know,” I said. “That’s what I just said.” I meant it to come out less harshly than it did. I told him small bits about Tanda and Roy and the afternoon’s mug shots. I told him about Denis’s other leads—the rusty sedan, Akron, Windsor—all in the most general and hopeful of terms. I painted a picture of us as efficient, focused, and making real progress. It felt good to be talking about the investigation, like I was conjuring Denis here in this snowy netherworld, his smoky smell, his wrinkled brow, the Dias to my Da Gama, the Armstrong to my Aldrin. As usual, it barely felt like I was even talking about my brother.

“Cool,” Tip kept saying, “very cool,” though his face hadn’t entirely righted itself, something still off-kilter. Maybe his nose. Or the way one eye was opened slightly wider than the other. It struck me then for the first time that maybe he was drunk too.

A loud noise of cracking branches overhead made us both flinch. Quickly we laughed at ourselves for flinching.

“Avalanche,” I said with fake alarm, relieved for the tone change.

“Dangerous terrain,” he said.

“We should go,” I was finally the one to say.

As we walked, Tip braced his arm around my shoulder, guiding me down the path as if I weren’t capable myself. I let myself be moved along by the heft of him. Always, with Tip, there was that tree-trunk sensation. I thought of the deep-voiced tree in
Wizard of Oz.
That’s what Tip was. I told him something to that effect, though when he asked what I was talking about, I was too lazy to repeat myself. “I don’t want to make out with Jerold,” I said instead, with uncharacteristic candor.

Tip laughed. “Who said you had to? The kid’s kind of a tool.”

I laughed too. “Totally a tool,” though until that point I had only used that word to describe the likes of Danny and Tip.

He told a story about a shoving match Jerold had supposedly gotten into with Horace Lingham in the guys’ shower after gym class last year. Horace insulted Jerold’s older sister (I hadn’t known Jerold had an older sister), and Jerold jammed Horace against a showerhead. “A fight,” Tip said, full of scorn, “in the showers?” as if Jerold had broken a cardinal rule in the jock code of honor. Then he said, “You can do better.”

The earnestness of his final statement surprised me. He said it like it was so obvious.

“Yeah, right,” I said.

“Your problem, Pasternak, is that you’re like this little grownup already. Nobody fucking knows what to do with you. But like give it a few years. Give it college or something. I don’t know, after college, when you have some job running the world and the rest of us are just your little employees, you’re going to be like a total guy killer, with like a male secretary and shit.”

Even though he was saying all this in the smirky tone of the fun uncle spinning a tale, still, it might have been the nicest thing he—or anyone else—had said to me in recent memory. I wondered if he
thought these were the sorts of conversations Danny and I used to have behind closed doors.

“Thanks,” I said, feeling stupid for the slight wobble in my voice.

“I’m serious,” he said. “I’m fucking serious.” He squeezed his arm even more tightly around me, in a way that verged on painful. “Look at me,” he said, and when I did, he was searching my face as if he were suddenly looking for something.

“Thanks,” I said again, just for the sake of saying something, because otherwise it was uncomfortable being looked at that way and I feared he was going to say something about needing to tame my eyebrows or consider a nose job if I wanted anyone good to ever really like me.

Instead, though, he leaned down, and honestly, for a second I thought it was for some sort of joke, like he was about to chew on my ear or leave a wet slurbert on the side of my face. But as his face hovered just above mine and his hoppy breath warmed my face and streaming clouds of air came from his nostrils, I realized what was about to happen. And that realization brought with it shock and then titillation and yet more shock about the titillation. I began to feel shivery and a little undone, all of this in one swirling second. And then his mouth was on mine. His tongue moved my lips apart and he made a low rumble of a growl, as if deciding between eating and kissing me. He squeezed me close, my neck bent at an awkward right angle, him being so much taller.

This was
Tip.
Tip
fucking
Reynolds. His mouth tasted like beer and something meaty, a taste mostly but not entirely unpleasant. He lapped at my tongue with his. I wondered what to do with mine. It felt fat and useless in my mouth. This was my first real kiss, and it was startling and discombobulating and unexpectedly pleasurable, the way I was wrapped up in Tip’s hulking limbs. It was like being
hugged by a building. A giggle rose in my throat. Tip
fucking
Reynolds. For a second time that night, I thought about what if these were Denis’s hands on my back, though somehow this seemed closer—the broad sureness, the firmness of the grip, the way it seemed I could lean all the way backward in a deep, deep dip and still not lose my footing.

Tip moved one hand to my face, touching my cheek, moving my hair off my forehead. But he was still wearing his gloves, and they were thick and padded, the kind one would wear for skiing. There was something clodlike about it, and again the Michelin Man popped into my head and I started laughing, a quiet laugh, but a laugh nonetheless.

He moved his mouth from mine and stared at me. I stifled the sound to a giggle. I felt buzzed and hot and cold and happy. “Sorry,” I said, an eek of a laugh escaping around the corner of the word.

“Whoa,” he said, a low whisper, which I took to mean
Wow.
But then when he repeated it a little louder, there was an unmistakable judgment attached.
Whoa, Nelly.
“I’m more buzzed than I thought,” he said, and blinked and blinked. For a second I thought that perhaps he had something in his eye.

“Me too,” I said gamely, but already he was letting go and rubbing his gloves over his own face. When he looked at me again, his expression had flip-flopped once more, this time to a faraway, slightly puzzled look, as if he were trying to place me, an expression not all that different from my parents’ usual gaze.

“Huh?” I said dumbly. Then: “Sorry for laughing.” He looked at me like he wasn’t sure what I was talking about, and I filled with that old, familiar feeling when it came to Tip, like I was the butt of his joke, an unwitting dupe to his pranks. Suddenly I felt not drunk at all. I imagined him saying
Gotcha
and pointing his finger triumphantly at me.

Instead he rubbed his face one more time and announced, “Brainiac,” flashing me this huge, unfathomable smile.

“What?” I said, wondering if I had heard correctly.

“You’re so fucking smart,” he said. He wasn’t looking at me, though, looking instead at the tips of his shoes as he kicked up little flurries of snow. A sharp pang of humiliation moved through me. I wondered what sort of compliments he gave other girls, about pretty face and hot body and nice breasts.

He reached for me again, running his monstrous glove up and down my sleeve and then pulling me to him, and for a moment I thought that we’d just had a brief pause and were about to start again. But instead he held me in a strange embrace, patting the side of my hat. I could hear the clap of the nylon against my ear. Then he pushed me gently away, bracing me by both shoulders. I was beginning to feel like a rag doll.

“We should get back,” he said, his tone neither plaintive nor embarrassed. His voice sounded perfectly normal, as if we’d been spending our time back here building a snow fort. I wondered if this was the sort of thing they did, Danny and his friends—make out with people midway through conversations and then just stop.