Wichita (9781609458904) (16 page)

“Well, that can be remedied now that you're here,” Virgil said.

“Gosh, you think?” Seth said brightly. “That would be so—I don't know what to say, Dad!”

There was a wheel-spinning pause, as of a decision being made, whether to go on addressing Seth's words at face value or switch to responding to the scorn and pent-up rage underneath.

“OK good!” Virgil said finally, with an air of concluding a satisfactory phone call. Lewis felt sharply sorry for him. “Since we're obviously not going to be able to resolve all this
tonight
—!”

“No,” Sylvie said, chastened, amid the clink of the cups and saucers being collected onto the serving tray.

“I need to finish something before bed,” Virgil said. “Seth, your room is all set up,” he added, his voice moving away but with an audible pinch conveying that Seth has incurred a debt by being here and should think about ways to repay it: “Sylvie was nice enough to give up her study for you.”

“It was no sacrifice,” Sylvie says as if dialogue with Virgil's undertone.

“You don't study anymore, Sylvie?” Seth said, no doubt observing the cleanup without moving a muscle to help.

“Not really, Seth,” she says calmly.

“Huh.”

“Some day I will tell you the boring story of my loss of interest in studying, Seth.”

“We can
trade
stories, Sylvie!”

“Yes, I suppose we could.”

There were more sounds of dishes being cleared, of the dishwasher being loaded and turned on, beginning the first cycle. Then Sylvie led Seth down the hall to his room. An hour later there was a knock on Lewis's door; he knew it was Seth. And he didn't open it.

 

 

S
eth brings the Escalade to a halt at the stop sign at the bottom of the neighborhood then eases it forward as if to exit in the usual way but pulls instead onto the downward-sloping grass shoulder and shifts into park. Leaning over the steering wheel, he stares past Lewis into the stand of trees where they rode out the morning-glory trip.

Lewis turns to look too. His lips are parted and dry, his tongue lies slightly swollen and tipped against his lower teeth. He wonders whether there might be some other component to this stuff, on top of the meth. But what does he ever know about the white powder he blithely sniffs up his nose?

Elms, cottonwoods, the one whose roots Seth puked on among them, not that Lewis would be able to point it out. There's a faint braided glint from the creek where the land turns down and becomes a bank. They must have passed this place, coming and going over the years, hundreds of times. It's such a sad little holdout of a grove really: thoroughfare on one side, street on other, eaten into by housing lots on the far, uphill side. Maybe Seth has taken to pausing to pay it homage. Or it's here he's planning to say whatever it is he got Lewis out of bed for. Meanwhile, the longer Lewis looks the more intense the act of looking becomes until it reaches a steady state, hollowed-out smolder and the satiny, gray-black shadows of the grove seem to be trembling in some high-frequency labor, on the verge of giving birth to a revelation.

With a slight clunk Seth puts the car in gear and pulls away before it can happen. He drives west on Douglas through sleeping neighborhoods, the road making a mournful gutted tone under the tires. There was no cause to worry about stare-downs at red lights: the cowpokes are all in bed. Lewis is beginning to crash from the first bumps though so gradually that “crash” is a misnomer. “Slide” or “slip” or “leak” would be better. “Taper.”

He asks Seth for the bottle. Passing it, Seth says, not unkindly, “Keep it, tweaker.” Lewis unscrews the top and, ducking down in his seat, loads the tiny spoon. The more he does, the less there is for Seth to do. He's in this way nobly working on Seth's behalf with every bump he does. After spilling a bit in his lap, he manages to do two quick hits, one in each nostril. He screws the cap back on, pockets the bottle, sits up and looks around with renewed lofty interest. He understands now how half of rural America is addicted to this stuff: he feels like a well-rested duke on a tour of his ancestral estates, which happen to include an Arbie's, a Dave's Fitness Center and the corporate headquarters of Pizza Hut.

After an indeterminate stretch of time and road, thinking to get Seth talking, Lewis tells him about the Musil thank-you note controversy. Seth frowns slightly as if having trouble grasping this quaint, Victorian convention—the
thank-you note
—but makes no comment.

They pass a sand quarry and hulking yellow machinery playing dead in the moonlight. Corrugated sheds, chutes, hills of bulldozed dirt, half-dug foundations. Then fields stretch away on both sides of the road, stands of corn.

Seth turns off onto a dirt road then into the dusty parking lot of a squat windowless bar. A white sign says, in red moveable letters, GIRLZ TONITE. Parked at the log barrier in front are a dozen cars and pickups.

Lewis doesn't like the looks of it but Seth is grinning fondly, coming fully to life.

“So Abby claims she has some technique for getting more recruits for the Birthday Party—”

Seth has his hand on the door handle. “It's always the same with her.”

“Oh, yeah?
How
?” Lewis asks as if it's very important that he understand this point though in fact he's hoping to stall Seth until he can think of a way to talk him out of going into this sinister bar.

“It's always some version of ‘You create your own reality.'” Seth says.

“Right, but—”

“So how do you like it?” Seth asks, opening his arms.

“Like what?”

“Me! You created me! How do you like your creation?” He cackles and climbs out of the Escalade. Lewis does two quick hits from the bottle, which Seth pauses to watch, shaking his head indulgently by the log barrier.

“This better not be a biker joint,” Lewis says as they go up the railed walkway built parallel to the side. Inside, the space is bigger than it seems from the outside and dark, lit mainly by the neon-tubing beer signs hung on the wood-paneled walls. The bar is linked to a narrow stage that divides the place in two. There are two silver stripper poles that may actually be “L'il Vixen” portable models and at one of them a topless dancer in unbuttoned cutoff shorts sways to a gangsta rap hit from the nineties. Another dancer wearing only a G-string squats at the edge of the stage, gazes back over her shoulder at groups of bikers who sit on the far side wearing sunglasses and leather. One of them videos the dancers with an upheld cell phone, the flesh of his flabby underarm swaying as he moves to the beat of the music.

“They park the choppers out back!” Seth informs Lewis gleefully, leaning toward him and half-shouting to be heard over the music. He's begun dancing goofily and without inhibition as if he's alone in his bedroom, acting out the lyrics of the gangsta rap like it's some Broadway-musical version: sawed-off shotgun (he mimes cocking a gun), hand on the pump! Sippin' on a 40 (mimes drinking), puffin' on a blunt (ditto)! These antics are attracting the baleful notice of a few dudes on this side of the bar, which is not occupied by bikers but by cowpoke types in trucker hats.

Lewis hastily finds a table with two empty chairs and gets Seth to sit in one of them. Then he goes to the bar and from the bartender, who looks like a graying offensive lineman, orders a beer for Seth and a double shot of Jack Daniels for himself. When he gets back to the table, Tori is sitting in his chair, breasts crushed together in a sequined top.

“I go on at one,” she's telling Seth, erotic raptor eyes flicking at Lewis then away, ignoring him. From a pair of cowpokes Lewis begs leave to use an unoccupied chair and they ignore him too. He carries the chair back and sits down next to Seth and drinks off half the Jack. Seth has Tori in a headlock; they seem to be kissing.

“Stop!” she says, pulling free. “They don't like it.”

Brooding on the meaning of this “they,” Lewis watches the bartender emerge from behind the bar and head toward them. Is Tori a biker-chick sex slave? Does Lewis owe the bikers money for what she did to him at Gar? Did Seth bring Lewis here to pay for that?

The bartender walks heavily up to the table. “She your girlfriend?” he asks Seth.

“Ah-hah! Gosh!” Seth says. “That's, ah, kind of
intimate
!” It's a good Virgil imitation, albeit lost on everyone but Lewis.

“Seth!” Tori scolds. “We're just friends, Bo,” she tells the bartender.

“Cause there's no boyfriends allowed in here,” Bo says. He has a weathered, kindly face. He's giving Seth a chance to start over, to lie about his status for the record, if Lewis is reading him right.

“Yeah, but see, I have a little problem with
commitment
?” Seth says as if he's in group therapy. He wrinkles his nose and looks around for sympathy. “So asking me just, boom, like that? Wow!” He makes a mincing face and shrugs apologetically. Bo heaves a sigh.

“We're just
friends
, Bo,” Tori says. “Seth, shut the fuck up! Damn! We're just friends, Bo.”

“I guess I feel, I don't know, kinda
put on the
spot
?” Seth says. “In front of the lady and all?”

Now Bo crosses his enormous arms. He's made his decision. “Gonna have to ask you to leave,” he says.

“What?” Tori says.

“You and your buddy,” Bo tells Seth, who's staring at him with a pleasant, abstracted look as though he hasn't heard over the music. Maybe he hasn't. Lewis gulps down the rest of his Jack, registering zero through the meth, and stands up. “Let's go,” he tells Seth, pulling on his arm.

Seth gets slowly to his feet but he's looking at Bo with dawning recognition. Lewis wonders whether he might have been Seth's teacher or coach. When Lewis looks over, Tori's chair is as empty as main street before a shootout.

“Wait,” Seth says, pointing at Bo. “Are
you
the guy?”

Lewis makes a dismissive, soothing face in Bo's direction. “He's just messin' around!”

“Am I
what
?” Bo asks, more mystified than provoked. Lewis senses the collective attention of the bar turn to them, the cow dudes and bikers uniting in the canopy of smoke below the ceiling. Trouble being an inevitable feature of things here, this table simply where the trouble happens to be coalescing now.

“What did he say?” Bo asks Lewis.

“The
guy
,” Seth says in a low voice, unsmiling now.

Bo says, “No, I'm not the guy, son.”

“Oh, OK,” Seth says with a shrug: Bo's word is good enough for Seth. He allows Lewis to guide him to the door, pausing on the way to bend down and say to a man in a trucker hat, jabbing his thumb at Lewis, “Summa.”

When they reach the door, Bo calls, “I don't know what the hell you're talking about, boy!”

“No problem!” Seth calls back as if graciously accepting an apology. As the door swings shut behind them, someone else shouts, “Crazy faggot!” and Lewis could swear he heard the scrape of chairs as people rose to come after them.

Climbing into the Escalade, he keeps an eye on the door of the bar. He's expecting it to fly open, bikers and cowboys to pour out into the night. Seth buckles his seat belt leisurely, adjusts the rearview mirror, backs slowly out of the lot, tracing a graceful C in the dust that places them tauntingly at the entrance again.

Lewis tries to use the sideview mirror to check behind them but he can't get the right angle and finally turns around and peers over the top of the seat. When after a mile or so no posse of pickups and Harleys appears, he faces warily forward, gradually settling into his seat with delicious relief, watching the town flow past along the dead quiet side streets Seth takes, trees in full leaf, poker-faced windows of houses and office buildings in some of which the Escalade appears briefly like a scrap of dream imagery, an entity possessed by two other entities.

Seth has guided the car into a winding private road or driveway, a long macadam snake at the end of which they come to high iron gates, shut and locked with a heavy silver chain. Seth turns sharply left and noses the Escalade off the road into the grass, tucking it behind a guard booth with gray shingles that sparkle in the light from a down-curved streetlamp. The branches of a tree rasp and screech across the roof, setting Lewis's methy nerves on edge.

He peers into the dark on the other side of the fence. Headstones glow dimly. Seth turns off the engine and gets out and after sitting in the ticking interior for a moment Lewis gets out too, peering around to be sure there's not a guard crouched in the dark booth or walking the rounds.

Seizing two vertical bars of the fence, Seth wedges the toe of a sneaker into a gap between a diagonal support and hauls himself up. He throws a leg over the horizontal bar at the top, straddles it, then swings the other leg over and drops to the ground, landing in a crouch and walking away without waiting for Lewis, who gets out the bottle and does two quick hits of the meth for climbing energy. He imitates Seth's holds well enough but snags the cuff of his jeans on a fleur-de-lis finial and by the time he gets free and is on the ground Seth is disappearing over a low hummock.

The ground is spongy, the grass brushing past his shoes is long and dry and sallow. Obelisks, urns, a headless angel. Engraved homesteader names—WARD, SWEET, ALLING—announce themselves from small tombs and sarcophagi.

Cresting another low rise, Seth stands out against the sky, veers right and stops under a wind-gnarled pine. Lewis catches up.

Seth has peeled off his shirt. In the hazy moonlight, Lewis can make out the new tattoo, a wide banner across the top of his chest and collarbone that says, in ornate flowing script:
In Loving Memory of Seth Chopik

Seth watches him take it in.

“You really are crazy,” Lewis says, shaking his head. It could have been worse but this is pretty floridly insane, a very bad sign. “How are you going to get that off?”

Seth stares without a word as if expecting him to change his mind but Lewis turns and walks off. Then he's on his back.

Seth's face is a moon with blue eyes and steaming breath. “There's only one way this tat is coming off,” he says. Lewis tries to move but can't, he's too firmly pinned. “That's what it's
about,
IDIOT. I thought you
knew
that. I thought you could
see through your
wound
but you can't see SHIT, can you? Let me spell it out for the dunce:
everything
I
do
and everything I
say
is
connected
and
sacred
and a perfect
web
. Got it now? I'm a
soul-catcher
. Should I get an iPhone? The iPhone is the SELF. I will be NOT be getting a new iPhone means I will be passing OUT OF THIS FORM into the non-material, into the ETHERIC, in your terms.”

“You're
caught
in my sacred web, you always
have
been. I let you go away because I
knew you would come back
. Because you were always in my web. I could feel you out there at the edges. I knew what you were doing. You went off to listen to con men with white hair who don't know
shit
when
the whole time
your
true teacher
was your supposedly quote unquote crazy brother. But it doesn't work where YOU GET WHAT YOU PAY FOR. It works in ways you don't expect AT ALL. Like, the very LAST person YOU expected to BE YOUR TEACHER was ME. And THEREFORE God made me your teacher! GET IT? What do God and I have to DO to get that through to you? Break you like a bitch in jail?”