Happiness Is a Chemical in the Brain: Stories (13 page)

One of Tim’s friends from the Forest Service had settled in the same town — and hurried over when the box came. “Tim’s wedding whiskey,” Ivan purred. “The pretty purple baby.”

“I’ve got the something old, and you’ve got the something borrowed,” Tim said as he pried the bottle from Ivan’s hands.

“Count your blessings, man.” Ivan settled into Tim’s battered recliner, kicking out the footrest. “If this was your wedding, you’d have a lot more people trying to horn in on the juice.”

Tim poured two tumblers a quarter full and knocked glasses with Ivan before he swallowed. The whiskey gave him a suntan from the inside out.

“Aaah,” Ivan exhaled from the back of his throat. “I could easily drink a whole fifth of this myself.”

A hockey game flickered on the TV with the sound turned down, while on the stereo Neil Young lit into another screeching guitar riff. Tim’s idea had been that he and Ivan, at this point in life his oldest buddy, would drink the whiskey with a quiet, ceremonial intent while Tim chewed on a few choice anecdotes about his father. But all he could think of was Sam standing outside, blasting the hose at dogs he suspected of shitting in his yard, Sam throwing his slipper at the TV, Sam borrowing Tim’s BB gun to shoot the mourning doves burbling outside the window. Then Ivan began to play some serious air guitar, his head thrown back, his mouth a crater with a crumbling rim. Watching him, Tim felt himself getting annoyed at the fact that Ivan had grown the exact same beard as him without asking his permission. A U-shaped goatee without the mustache, something to gain a little cred with the high school kids, down whose throats each year Tim crammed the Louisiana Purchase.

“What’s wrong?” Ivan asked, sitting up.

Tim shook his head. “Nothing.” The bottle was sitting in the kitchenette next to the morning’s dishes, the neck sticking from the felt bag like a headless aborigine shrugging from her frumpy dress. “Nothing except that it wasn’t supposed to be like this. It was supposed to be me and my dad wearing cummerbunds and sneaking swigs behind the church.”

“Oh, I had a wedding once. Believe me, it was overrated,”

“It’s not just the wedding. Forget the wedding.” Tim took the glass that Ivan handed him, full up to the rim. “I should be drinking this to celebrate something momentous, an event worth remembering for the rest of my life. Not, you know—” He waved at the apartment, the TV:

“This.”

“Hey, what’s wrong with this?” Ivan blustered, sucking the sloppage from his hand. “Who’s to say that thirty years from now you’re not going to think back on this afternoon and say,
Boy, one thing I will always remember is that afternoon when my old buddy Ivan and I sat around watching the Blackhawks whomp the living bejesus out of the Pittsburgh Penguins. And we drank this bottle of the greatest hooch I’ve ever tasted.
”

“Yeah, right,” Tim said with a rueful laugh. “The Pittsburgh fucking Penguins.”

“And you know what?” Tim continued as his rue gathered steam, “I’ll never be able to go back and see the Blackhawks play in the old Chicago stadium. Because I’ve got no one in Chicago now. And because they tore it down to build a new stadium just so the yuppies would have someplace to get their cappuccino—”

“Women like cappuccino,” Ivan interjected. “The new thing is, you’re supposed to bring a woman to the game—”

“Where they don’t even serve the hot dogs with tomato wedges lined on top.”

This led to a patch of silence, after which Ivan suggested absently, “You could always buy some tomatoes and cut them up and carry them around in a baggie in your pocket.” But he didn’t seem to be thinking about hot dogs anymore: he had taken the small box down from the bookshelf.

“What’s a cremain?”

“Sam. Sam’s a cremain.” The little men on TV were starting to make Tim dizzy with their spinning. “The old Chicago stadium is a cremain.”

Ivan unscrewed the cap and stuck his ear by the hole. “I think I hear Sam’s soul crying out for freedom.”

“The only thing Sam’s soul is crying out for is that whiskey,” Tim said. “Sam went to his grave wondering if his son was a homo or just a selfish little prick.”

Ivan carried Sam’s ashes into the kitchenette, where he splashed some whiskey in the box and stirred the ashes to a paste. “I’ll show you momentous, buddy boy,” he said. “Right after we kill this bottle we’re taking your old man to the Giff.”

AROUND THE TIME that Tim went back to school to get a teaching certificate in history, Ivan had angled with an opposite tack in regards to what he called “the straight world”: he’d moved to a cabin near White Pass where he would read the
Tao Te Ching
and live off the grid. But before the first snowfall, Ivan shot himself with his crossbow while trying to take down an elk, and the arrow so mangled the architecture of his leg that he would walk forever with a limp.
Shit happens, happened, will happen
: on the surface at least, Ivan let this conjugation roll off him with a shrug. Now he spent his days at the public library, where he wielded a light wand at the circulation desk, the computer going
Blip! Blip! Blip!
He said what he liked about this environment was its preponderance of women.

“. . and they walk up to you holding their books like a shelf for their breasts. Presented to you on a tray like the heads of St. John the two-headed Baptist.”

This Ivan was saying as they hummed along the I-5 in his pickup, Sam’s ashes on the seat between them, the sky souping up and the evergreens crowding in. Ivan had bought another bottle of whiskey to prove he wasn’t just a mooch, an inferior bottle that Tim wasn’t sure was worth reaching into another man’s crotch to dislodge. Ivan was talking about a girl he’d been helping at the library, a student at the community college who was trying to go premed.

“And get this, I’m showing her how to search
schizomycosis
on the computer and in the middle of it she looks at her watch and says, ‘Oops, I’m late for work, I gotta fly,’ and when I ask where she works she tells me she’s a dancer. So I go, ‘You mean like Martha Graham?’ only she doesn’t know who Martha Graham is since she’s Vietnamese, see, so I stand on my toes and she laughs and shakes her head and then — get this — starts wiggling around pretending that she’s going to undo her shirt.”

The truth was that Ivan had not dated anybody since his divorce some years back. Come to think of it, Tim had not dated anyone since Ivan’s divorce either, and this thought troubled him — that Ivan’s life might be exerting some kind of astral tug on his own.

“So what’s she like?”

“Who?”

“The shickomytosis girl.”

Ivan thought about it for a moment, driving along with his eyes closed. “Dang Kim Nhung is her name. She wants me to come see her dance.”

“Don’t do it,” Tim said. “Remember what happened the last time.”

“This is different — she invited me.”

“Yeah, sure, they always invite you; they want to prove they’re not ashamed. But how could anyone not be ashamed about having to hump a pole?”

Having said this, though, Tim wondered if he was underestimating women’s shame threshold. At the few strip clubs he’d been in, the women looked terrifyingly smug, like his stepmother, if she were young again and wearing nothing but a cowboy hat.

To dispel the image, Tim tried wrestling the bottle away from where Ivan had it pinned against the wheel, causing the truck to zigzag down the road. Ivan would not let go until he took another swig and hollered out the window, “To the Giff!” Words that were swallowed by the whooshing, drooping, and not-quite-but-nearly night.

SIX YEARS AGO, Sam had finally made it out to visit Tim in Washington, taking the Amtrak from Chicago. He got to town on a Monday and Tim had worked at school all week; his father passed the time by going for walks around the neighborhood. “Well, I don’t get it,” Sam concluded. “I thought there were supposed to be all these great big goddamn trees. If all’s I wanted to see was a bunch of candyass little bushes, I could of just as well stayed home.”

When the weekend came, Tim had taken his father out to the forest, and Ivan came too, as a sort of color commentator while Tim called the play-by-play: That’s a silver fir, that’s an alder, bigleaf maple, western red cedar. But Sam remained unimpressed. The spring day that was fair in town had been, in the mountains, cold and wet. Sam drank coffee from a cardboard cup and glared out the windshield. “So there’s trees,” he conceded. “But I don’t see one big enough to drive through yet.”

Tim planned to stop at a trailhead to show his father some of their old handiwork. He and Ivan had been on the trail crew, which besides clearing windfall mostly meant laying water bars: quarter rounds of cedar that channeled runoff from the trail. There was an art to wedging the logs so tightly that even a horse couldn’t kick them out, and Tim wanted to see if their bars from a dozen years ago were still in place. In this one spot he was thinking of, Sam would have to walk just a hundred yards from the parking lot. Ivan had worn a long black oilskin cloak under which his bad leg swung as he leaned on his cane — after his accident, he’d exchanged his mountain gear for the wardrobe of an Australian vampire.

When they reached the trailhead, Tim could have broken out in tears: the bars had held, at least these bars looked old enough to be the ones that he and Ivan had set — he even talked himself into a déjà vu about their individual knots and nicks. A tricky spot, where the trail plunged downhill. Over the years the logs had risen from the ground, and soon they’d have to be replaced so hikers wouldn’t stumble. And then the woods would bear no trace of him at all.

Sam contemplated the trail for a minute before his gaze swung back to Tim: “All those years, this is what you boys did?”

When they nodded, Sam shook his head. “Seems like a shame, to leave a perfectly good piece of fence post rotting in the ground like that.”

TIM MUST HAVE dozed off; when he woke the truck wasn’t moving and the sleeves of his jean jacket were being strafed by colored light. Ivan had pulled off at the Skookum Club, a blinking nest of wires thirty miles east, in the foothills. Its sign stood on a tall metal stalk: a neon fir tree with breasts.

“Ivan, no,” Tim groaned. “Let’s not subject ourselves to this again.” They’d stopped here maybe a half dozen times before, once for each friend who got married, which in the course of things meant fewer visits as the years passed. Last time, as they were leaving, Ivan stopped to help one of the girls jump-start her car, and they’d driven off as she watched her engine box go up in flames.

“We’ll just stay a minute, honest,” Ivan assured him. “Let Sam catch a little pooty before we set him free.”

No time to say that Sam had caught enough pooty back in the days when he could better appreciate it, because already Ivan was out and staggering toward the door. In his haste he’d kicked the bottle out of the truck and sent it rolling toward the dumpster. But Ivan didn’t notice, focused as he was on the club’s front door, where the bouncer made him open the box.