West of Here (29 page)

“The town will benefit from the power, Ethan, that is the point, is it not?”

“And what of the profit, Jake? Who will benefit from that?”

“Gracious, you are naive, Ethan. You sound like my sister.”

JULY
2006

If success had a smell, failure had a taste. It tasted like gunmetal, and it was strong on Jared Thornburgh’s tongue as he sat in his wainscoted office after hours staring at his half-eaten birthday cake. And what a paltry sight it was on its paper plate: a crumbling mound of angel’s food with white frosting and an avalanche of jimmies accumulating at its base, baby blue and lemon yellow and fire engine red. How paltry
all
of it was — the wainscoting, the softball trophy, the gilded plastic nameplate, the Rolodex full of seafood retailers, the fucking golf poster:
I’D RATHER BE GOLFING
. The hell he would. He hated golf, hated everything about it, hated nothing more than the smug camaraderie of its proponents, the reverence they afforded the game, as though it were sacrosanct, some gentleman’s rite of passage to walk around in the grass in a haze of martinis, swinging a club at a fucking ball for three hours. What the fuck did Don Buford from Prime Seafood know about sanctity? And the conversation. Ugh. One-upmanship. Big fish tales. And worst of all, business. Always beneath the gregarious laughter and the conspiratorial back-slapping and the air of nonchalance lingered the bottom line. That had a smell, too. It smelled like fish. His whole life smelled like fish. That was the real bottom line. It didn’t matter what appearance he cultivated, what car he drove, what his handicap was, what his wife looked like — the inescapable truth was that it all smelled suspect. Oh, he was fooling people, no doubt. He saw them looking at his wife’s ass (though he’d had little occasion to see it himself); he saw them admiring the GL-450 (with unit-body platform for maximum comfort and stability); he saw them looking up with contempt and admiration at his office from the processing line, as though he were the man behind the curtain, heir to the Thornburgh legacy, whose father had been
a senator, whose father’s father’s father had tamed the wilderness, dammed the mighty Elwha, and put Port Bonita on the map. Sure, he was fooling them. But he wasn’t fooling himself.

Just look at him now with a fucking stapler in his mouth (Ha! As if), and even that wasn’t loaded. Look at him, alone on his thirty-second birthday, which Janis (being
tied up late
at work for the third night this week) completely forgot. And where was the rest of that family they planned? Where was the next generation of Thornburghs to comfort him, those sweet-smelling vessels of hope to ease the discomfort of living? Where were they to loll around at his feet in his hour of need? Janis had grown impatient after three months of trying, until finally she took to grasping his manhood with a sort of ferocity, as if she could scare an erection out of it. And when he finally managed to get over the hump, after eight therapy sessions and some little blue pills, Janis wouldn’t have him. She just lay there beside him night after night like … well … like a dead fish.

And how sad had the birthday cake ceremony in the employee lounge been this afternoon, that grotesque cake glowing like something radioactive beneath the fluorescent lights. In cobalt blue frosting: happy birthday, boss! executed in a rather austere hand. And the card: no penguin in roller skates, no toad with a crown perched rakishly upon its head, not even a punch line, not even an exclamation point after Happy Birthday. Just Happy Birthday. There you have it. You were born on this day, and here you are thirty-two years later, still disappointing yourself, your wife, and the ghosts of your ancestors. And there it was, emblazoned with thirty signatures to which Jared could assign no faces, except for Dee Dee, who had warded off his only advance by wielding her pepper-mace key chain. Thank God they didn’t have HR around here, thank God Dee Dee was the forgiving sort.

A few people took advantage of the work stoppage to smoke cigarettes out back. Krig was among them. The rest of them sang “Happy Birthday” with all the jauntiness of Gregorian monks. Nobody called for a speech. Jared cut the cake. People dispersed. And here he was three hours later in his office, the cake growing staler by the minute,
the card propped open on his desk in some hopelessly lame stab at sentimentality. No plans. Big fucking success.

Jared knew the battle was over the moment it occurred to him that afternoon in front of the urinal — as he struggled desperately to pee while beside him Krigstadt thoughtlessly fired a wide stream at the porcelain — that in a certain way he envied a guy like Krigstadt, whom he envisioned, in spite of overwhelming evidence to the contrary, to be a happy guy, a hearty, prole-spirited average Joe, who drank canned beer with his buddies and had a thick-carpeted basement and watched football and hockey and wore T-shirts with winning teams emblazoned on them so that he could associate with a winner, and that was enough, the mere association. It was that easy. Raiders 32, Eagles 7. You didn’t have to be the coach or the quarterback or the guy in the skybox — you just had to be the guy with the thick shaggy carpet and the Raiders shirt. No scrambling up any social ladder, no debilitating self-consciousness or acute status awareness, just a Raiders shirt that said to the world, “That’s fucking right. What are you gonna do about it?”

Why tackle success when you could let the pros do it?

Jared finally mustered the energy to leave his office without knowing where the evening would take him. He figured he’d probably stop by the grocery store and buy a six-pack of Alaskan Amber and maybe some Thai from the deli, go home, watch
World News Tonight
on TiVo, or maybe, if Janis still wasn’t home,
The Wizard of Ass.
Maybe he’d poke around online, look into that plat development deal Doug Westermeyer was talking about. Could be a good investment opportunity.

He waved to the Mexican cleaning girl on his way out, Maria, Estella, whatever. She waved back, but she wasn’t smiling.

The Goat was still in the far corner of the front parking lot, and Krig’s silhouette was visible in the driver’s seat. His subwoofer was thumping. Jared checked his watch. Seven thirty. Krigstadt had been off for an hour and a half. What the hell was he doing out there? Maybe he needed a jump.

As Jared approached the Goat across the gravel lot, he saw the flash
of an orange halo appear suddenly around Krig’s head. And as he drew closer, he observed Krig chicken-necking in time to Aerosmith’s “Dude Looks Like a Lady,” his hand at his mouth as though he were kissing a butterfly, and a thin joint pinched firmly between his fingers, its little end glowing orange, unfurling a slinky plume of smoke toward the windshield.

Krig was apparently oblivious of Jared’s approach, and the tap on the window caught him totally by surprise, yet he was not startled. He stopped chicken-necking and turned down the stereo, but he didn’t hide the joint. He rolled down his window.

“What’s up,” Krig said.

Jared couldn’t resist leaning slightly into the smoky interior of the car. The smell of the weed struck a sentimental chord with him. It reminded him, like only smells can, of freshman year at the U, his dumpy room at Delta Sigma Phi, the endless supply of cheap beer, the wonderful thoughtless immediacy of life.

“So what’s up?” said Krig, a hint of impatience in his voice.

“You all right? I thought maybe your car wouldn’t start.”

Krig gave the fuzzy dash a firm pat. “Not the Goat,” he said. “The Goat leaves no man high and dry.”

Jared snuck a glance at the joint between Krig’s fingers. The glance did not escape Krig’s notice. “Get in,” he said.

Krig was quick to forgive Thornburgh for being an ass-munch and was more than happy to extend the olive branch, but it was Jared who forged ahead once Krig announced that “the doobage was toast.”

“You wanna grab a beer?” Jared said.

“Does the pope shit in the woods?” said Krig, who fished his Altoids out of the glove box and popped one in his mouth. He replaced the mints without offering one to Jared, checked his eyes in the rearview mirror, threw the Goat in reverse, and rained a rooster tail of gravel on the sidewalk as he tore onto Marine.

Krig slowed to a crawl once they hit Front. He settled low in the driver’s seat resisting the urge to say every single thing that came to his mind, fighting off the instinct to engender familiarity too quickly. Boundaries. He had to remember.

If Krig was trying to erect boundaries, Jared was trying to tear them down. Why not? What was he protecting? What threat could the shag-carpeted domain of Krig’s world possibly pose? Jared noticed Krig’s ring as Krig gripped the wheel: a chunky gold band with a blue and gold pendant inlay —
P.B.
’84, it said. “I used to watch that varsity team,” Jared offered. “The one with you and Lauridson and Richards. The Bucket Brigade.”

They missed the light at Lincoln. Krig gazed out the side window across the Red Lion parking lot toward the strait. He couldn’t remember what was there before that, but it was something else. The restaurant was called something else, too. And before that, it was just Hollywood Beach.

“Bucket Brigade, my ass. We blew it,” said Krig. “We sure as heck didn’t put out the fire against Aberdeen.”

“That was just one game,” Jared said. “You guys were unstoppable.”

“Yeah, for three quarters. We folded, bro. I folded.”

“You were a machine. Besides, Aberdeen had that Glovick kid.”

“I was one for nine from the field in that semi game. I missed a free throw that could have put us up with a minute thirty-nine to go.”

“Lot of time,” observed Jared.

The light changed. The Goat crawled into the intersection. “We’re talking about the lead though, bro. The
lead.
I was an eighty-eight percent free-throw shooter. They only had one time-out left. No way I miss that shot.”

“I don’t know, Krig. I don’t remember any of that. I was in junior high. I just remember it was the best team we ever had.”

Suddenly, no fewer than three fire trucks and a chorus of wailing sirens rounded the corner on Lambert headed in the direction of Wal-Mart. Krig promptly pulled to the shoulder and let them scream past.

“Wonder what that’s all about?”

“Probably a fender bender,” said Jared.

“Yeah, probably. So, you goin’ to Dam Days this year?” Krig asked.

“Hell no.”

“Why not?”

Jared waved it off. “What a bunch of self-aggrandizing bullshit.”

Krig didn’t know what to make of the statement. So he didn’t say anything. What was wrong with Dam Days? Sure, the bands usually sucked, and the smoked salmon was overpriced, and the crowds were kind of a pain in the ass, but it was Dam Days, it was a tradition, one of the last decent things left in P.B.

“They want me to write some speech,” Jared volunteered as they crested Hogback.

“About what?”

“About my stupid family and a bunch of ancient history I don’t give two shits about. Screw that bullshit.”

They drove in silence, past Payday Loans and the Wharf Side, past KFC and Taco Bell. They missed the light again at South Golf Course. Jared looked out his window across the deserted Rite Aid parking lot. The streetlights burned expectantly an hour before dusk. At night, this stretch of Route 101 glowed like the aisle of a convenience store. A guy could procure anything from 30-weight oil to Chicken McNug-gets along this stretch 24/7/365, a guy could
Shop Rite,
could
Save On,
a guy could even
Think outside the bun
if he were so inclined. A guy could do virtually anything in Port Bonita he could do in New York, Philadelphia, or Chicago. But somehow it was all pretty sad.

“You know,” said Jared, looking out across the expanse of empty parking lot. “It’s funny how something can keep getting bigger even after it’s dead.”

Happy hour was over by the time Krig and Jared arrived at the Bushwhacker. Jerry Rhinehalter from Murray Motors was still at the bar, along with a couple of guys Krig didn’t recognize. In the corner, a little black dude was having drinks with a familiar husky woman in heels. Was that Hillary Burch from high school — the one who almost bit Tobin’s dick off? It
was
Hillary Burch. The little black dude she was with had a milk mustache. This town was getting weirder by the day.

Molly worked the bar solo. She was doing something new with her makeup, and her hair was pinned up over her ears. She looked like a mud shark in blue eye shadow and hairpins. One of her tits was hanging lower. But she made it work. Krig felt his heat rising
when Molly came for their orders. Krig introduced his friend as “
Jared Thornburgh,
” and though the name apparently didn’t ring any bells for Molly, at least she saw that Krig wasn’t drinking alone, at least the guy he was drinking with didn’t smell like fish, at least the guy was wearing a dress shirt, a fact that might (Krig hoped) allude to his own upward mobility. And unless it was Krig’s imagination, Molly was a little more attentive than usual that evening, a little quicker on the refills, now and again flashing a little shark smile when she came for their empties. To top it off, she actually made a stab at small talk, something she’d never done before.

“Hear all those sirens earlier? Crazy.”

“Yeah,” Krig said.

“Dumpster fire at Wal-Mart,” she said, brushing some stray hair out of her eyes. “You guys ready for another round?”

Krig and Jared sat at the bar for two and a half hours, Kilt Lifter after Kilt Lifter, forging separate roads toward a collective past, summoning such points of reference as the Laurel Street stairs, the Lighthouse, and Swain’s General Store, enlisting such local benchmarks as the crab festival, lavender days, and the Clallam County Fair. Gradually, their experiential roads began to merge, finally converging in 1986 at the grand opening of the Port Bonita Fine Arts Center, where Jared’s dad delivered the keynote speech during the banquet. Krig worked as a busboy. The rest was history.