Thumbsucker (20 page)

Scott welcomed us at a table spread with party food: kiwis and star fruit, jumbo shrimp on skewers, mold-flecked cheeses, wine bottles in buckets.

“Eva will be right out,” Scott said. “Drink for you, Justin?”

“Thanks. I’ll try the white.”

“Try the red. More character.”

“Whatever.”

Chris gestured at the overflowing table. “This house is all windows—the cops can see right in. Put on a total show for them, why don’t you?”

“We eat this way every day,” Scott said. “Don’t act paranoid.”

“I’m out of here.”

Chris didn’t leave, though. As Scott and I munched shrimp, Eva appeared from behind a potted tree, leaning against an aluminum walker. I’d never seen her standing up before, only sitting down inside her car, and I hadn’t noticed the S-curve in her back.

“I was listening to my tapes,” she said, but didn’t explain.

I wished her a happy birthday. She didn’t acknowledge me. Instead, she reached feebly for a hunk of cheese that slipped off the cracker she tried to set it on.

Scott said, “Eva and I treat
every
day as if it was our birthday. Because it is. What’s waking up but a form of being born? This whole Anglo-Saxon notion of special occasions, special holidays, doesn’t make sense to us.”

“That’s crap,” Chris said. He looked at me. “Ignore them. Two most selfish people I’ve ever met.”

“So, Justin.” Eva fixed her pale green eyes on me. “What are your hopes? Your goals in life? Your path?”

“I’d like to talk on television, maybe. Give my views and opinions.”

“Interesting. Are you a religious person?”

“Not really. You?”

“We prefer the word ‘spiritual,’ ” Scott said.

The remark seemed to drive Chris over the edge; he spat a mouthful of wine at Scott’s clean shirt and swung on him with his right fist. Scott blocked the blow. He grabbed Chris’s arm by the wrist and wrenched it back and doubled him over, his chin against his belt buckle. Chris begged for mercy but Scott held on.

“We’re the best thing that ever happened to you,” Scott said.
“Grease monkey.”

“Uncle.”

“Fucking
motorhead
.”

That’s when I heard the sirens. They started low. Eva picked up a skewer from the table and poked at her teeth and gums. Scott ate a cracker. Chris ran tap water over his sore wrist. As the sirens grew louder, Eva gripped her walker and executed an awkward, choppy turn. “I have a tape to listen to,” she said. “I’m halfway to qualifying as a naturopath.” Scott held her elbow and helped her over a rough spot where the kitchen tile bordered the carpet.

The sirens trailed off. The phone rang. I saw Chris look at it.

“Don’t even think of it,” Scott said.
“Mr. Good Wrench.”

Everyone came out to watch the fire, even Mike, whose store was closed for inventory. I saw him through the windshield of Chris’s van, standing behind the police line in a jogging suit. Not far away a column of volunteer firemen aimed hoses at the driveway and the gas pumps, soaking them down to keep them from exploding. Another set of hoses sprayed the station. Now and then the fire flared green and purple and sent up hissing plumes of yellow sparks from all the chemicals stored inside the building.

“You set it,” I said. “It was you.”

“No comment, man. I’m sorry about your car, though. Tried to warn you.”

My car had already burned up and been extinguished. The charred metal body slumped in the driveway, all four tires melted into lumps. Wisps of black smoke escaped the shattered windows.

“I worked hard for that car.”

“You’re better off,” Chris said. “Scott and my sister were halfway moral people until they test-drove their first Mercedes convertible.”

We sat and watched the station burn, not speaking. Chris put a tape in the deck and cranked his seat back and set his dusty ropers on the dash. Fumes had begun to penetrate the van, leaking in through the seals around the windows. They smelled of tires and gasoline and grease and were probably killing my brain cells by the millions, but I couldn’t stop breathing them in. They smelled like summer.

“I’m serious,” Chris said. “The problem’s cars, not people.”

I watched my old cruiser smolder.

“It’s our machines.”

Mike spread out a Forest Service topo map on the hood of his new International Scout, bought especially for our trip out west. Unbroken lines denoting elevation overlapped dotted lines representing trails. He shaded in our route with a red pencil as Audrey sat on the tailgate humming cowboy songs and Joel stared up at the sky and softly peed.

“You following this? It’s a long hike up,” Mike said.

“What if we shorten it some?”

Mike looked at Joel. “You think you can handle nine
miles this afternoon?” Joel’s ankles were bruised from an all-day tennis tryout for Adolphus Prep in Minneapolis. He’d come this close to winning a scholarship and been invited to try again next fall. Mike called this a brush-off, but Joel was optimistic.

“How long is nine miles in hours? On average?” Joel said.

“I try not to go by averages,” Mike said. “Averages, a wise man told me once, are usually an excuse for something.”

Mike got frustrated refolding the map and he gave it to me to fold. He’d been feeling shaky since early September, when Woody Wolff’s body had rejected his liver and left him in intensive care, on life support. A second transplant wasn’t in the cards, and Mike raged for two days that the doctors had given up. He telephoned former teammates and wept with them, swearing out loud that, if it came to it, he was prepared to sign an organ donor card and drive his car off a cliff. Instead, he got on a night flight to Ann Arbor, but he arrived too late. His old coach had lapsed into a coma. Mike stayed by his side around the clock for days, until Woody’s daughter asked him to go home because he was getting in the doctors’ way. He wasn’t the same person when he got back. God, he told us, was taking the wrong man. He behaved as though this were his fault, perhaps even something he deserved to pay for.

I gave the map back to him, neatly folded, and together we started unloading camping gear: a snakebite
kit in an orange rubber capsule, goose-down sleeping bags in nylon stuff sacks, a set of nested aluminum pots and pans. Except for Mike, who’d hunted elk in Idaho, none of us had ever seen the mountains, and the four or five times we’d camped out we’d stayed in campgrounds.

“You didn’t answer Joel’s question, Mike,” said Audrey. “Time-wise, what’s nine miles?”

“For me? Three hours.”

“That sounds awfully ambitious.”

“For you folks, four.”

Joel stood still as Mike hung a backpack on him, seating the quilted hip pads on his waist and guiding his arms through the cushioned shoulder straps. Audrey said the pack looked tilted, so Mike fooled around with some buckles and drawstrings. Every time he tightened one side, though, the other side leaned away. Mike’s face went red.

“Let me,” said Audrey.

Mike raised an arm and blocked her. He tugged on the drawstrings and tied their ends, then patted Joel on the butt and said, “You’re done.” He picked up Audrey’s pack next.

“Looks heavy,” she said.

“You brought along half the bathroom cabinet. Of course it’s heavy.”

“Let’s not fight. Just lighten it.”

The armpits of Mike’s shirt showed sweaty crescents
as he untied and unbuckled the bulging pack and transferred several items to his own pack. Two blood-plump mosquitoes were feeding on his forehead and I admired his ability to ignore them. He could turn off discomfort at will, it seemed, which meant that when he did complain, he wanted something.

“This trip’s a con. You conned me,” Audrey said. “You told me you needed rest. This isn’t rest, Mike. I can’t believe the kids are missing school for this.”

“I told you I needed to
think
,” Mike said.

“Same difference.”

“And we call this a family. What a joke. We can’t even walk up a hill together,” Mike said. “I hate to think what would happen if times got hard.”

“Times
are
hard,” Audrey said. “You make them hard.”

Mike opened his hands and let go of Audrey’s backpack. It struck the ground and stood upright for a moment, then toppled over sideways, spilling things: a tin Sierra cup, packets of freeze-dried stew, an envelope of powdered lemonade. At first we just stood there, staring at the mess, but then Audrey knelt and gathered up her stuff. She cleaned out the cup with a moistened fingertip and blew the dirt off the packages of food. By the end of it she seemed calmer, strangely soothed. Mike’s outbursts had this effect on her sometimes.

“I’m sorry,” Mike said. “I’ve let things get the best of me.”

“The man is almost seventy,” said Audrey. “He drank. He smoked. It’s his time, Mike.”

“So it’s
his
fault?”

“I didn’t say that.”

“Admit it: you never liked him. You thought he was stupid. Crude. Well, I’ve got news for you: before I met him, I was nothing. Zilch.”

“I’m sorry, Mike.”

“He’s
dying
.”

“I said I’m sorry.”

After more accusations and more apologies, Mike put the backpack back on Audrey’s shoulders. She unsnapped a pocket and fished around for something.

“Did you by any chance remember Vaseline?” Mike looked baffled.

“My lips. It’s dry up here.”

“Fine. So quit. The air’s too dry, give up.”

“A tip from the master.”

“What’s that supposed to mean?”

Mike threw his arms up and turned his back on us. He hooked his thumbs in his backpack’s shoulder straps and walked away down the woodchip-covered trail. I waited for Audrey to call him or to follow, but she stood still and Mike did not look back. As he was disappearing into the trees, Audrey sat down on the tailgate, unlaced a hiking boot, and held it upside down. A stone fell out.

“He
was
crude,” she said. “And mean. Mike knows it, too. That’s why he feels so guilty.”

“Why?” I said.

“He’s glad the old bastard’s dying. Deep down, he’s thrilled.”

I’d been dreading the trip to Montana since Mike announced it. He was giving me a haircut in the basement, sweeping electric clippers up my neck, and leaving naked swaths of itchy gooseflesh. All my friends got their hair cut by professionals, but Mike claimed he could do a better job.

“Woody had a famous saying,” he said. He squirted some 3-in-One oil on the clippers. “Until you’re broken, you don’t know what you’re made of.”

“Broken how?” I said. The clippers buzzed and chattered behind my temples.

“Your father could use a trip out west,” Mike said. “I think we all could. A chance to push ourselves. I’m starting to feel like a worthless lump of fat. Look at me. Look at this gut. There’s no excuse for it.”

“Maybe you should start jogging again.”

“Or shoot myself.”

The threat was upsetting, but it was nothing new; it reminded me of the notes that I’d been finding since Mike had returned from the hospital in Michigan. I’d discovered the first one tucked inside a dictionary after Mike challenged me at the dinner table to define the word “culpable.” He sent me to his den to look it up, and when I opened his Webster’s, a slip of paper fluttered out.

The next note was under the pillow on my bed. I found it on the morning of my birthday, written across the portrait on a twenty-dollar bill.

The third, most recent note was on the staircase when I went down to the basement for my haircut.