Ride Around Shining (12 page)

I hadn't heard anyone say Antonia's name in his presence for a month. He'd trained us; I hadn't heard him say it for two. When he learned of her other house, I got a voice mail from his mother out of nowhere, telling me to take a long weekend off. The weekend stretched for ten days, and I walked down through Jamison Square and past the early happy-hour crowds every night, like taking a walk was the new going out, and came home to watch the beginnings of the Brewers' wild-card run on the bachelor's tiny television. When I was finally called back to Dunthorpe, half the garage was filled with cat toys and old boxes meant to hold high-end cookware, and which now contained among them a few hundred cubic feet of Antonia's life.

The door in from the garage was ajar, and when I knocked the small sound flew through the empty space, as though her absence had opened the house up to new, desolate echoes. I couldn't find Calyph until I stepped out into the yard and heard him call down to me from the balcony in a flat, exhausted voice. All I could see were his hands, the nails bright where he gripped the rail. “Got some bags by the stairs,” he said. “You gonna need a week's change. We goin' on vacation.”

What followed were three grim days in Vegas, where Calyph met up with his best friend in the league, Tony Allen, to seek consolation in brotherhood and surface beauty and gambling and loss. It was clear from the first he was not going to find it. The nearest he seemed to get to solace was sitting at a poker table all night with his hood up and his leg splayed out on its own chair, ceaselessly shuffling his chip stacks and trying to ignore the continuous passive motion machine encasing his knee that he had to wear eight hours a day to help with his rehab. I wasn't much help with any of this, and he decided to send me home early.

On the last night before I flew back, after two days of sobriety, he and Allen split a fifth of scotch and some room-service sushi, and I pretended reluctance while they dragged me along for a limo ride down the Strip. Abruptly Calyph was happy, dangerously happy, lit up with the flashing, restless, ever-dissolving energy that is that city's promise to everyone. It came from everywhere but within him, and he must have felt almost obligated to go after his forty minutes of cathartic joy, juiced as it was with the premonition of its own passing and a return to his rightful state of sorrow with nothing but a new and more tangible pain in his head to console him. “I'm free,” he said softly, addressing himself to the open window and the passing twilit city. “I'm free.”

“You free,” Allen said. “You'll get her back if you want her back.”

“Who back?” Calyph asked.

“Don't say her name.”

They'd brought along another fifth, and I had enough of it that whenever I breathed out my nose I felt like I'd inhaled a little of the North Sea. I felt full of solemn excitement and decided this was true of everyone. We drove through the city with no music in the car, going station to station with fleeting bits of other people's gaiety, and I decided all three of us were contemplating our futures. I wanted America's conception of how long youth could last to continue to recede conveniently beyond my aging, and yet also to stop so I could settle down swiftly and fulfill my promise. Calyph must have known his dreams of an All-Star Game were probably dead, but he knew that he could still aspire to a ring, and to matter in the getting of one. Maybe Allen was already thinking of where he would go after Boston. We all nodded slow at one another, as though to affirm my speculations, and my vague future seemed no less firmly possible than their specific ones.

We knew, I decided, that the fact that we were on the Strip in a big tasteless car without destination said nothing good about us, that this was, for the aging non-baller crowd, pretty much a painfully spring-break play, and for them surely something better savored when one was sixteen and in town for an AAU tournament, the cup of glitz still new on their lips. But we knew, too, that it was within us to justify this extravagance, to carry it right, with the weight of our accumulated actual lives and our allowance that, yes, we were poised delicately between the present eagerness to lose ourselves and the indisputable future likelihood of gradually becoming the wrong people, of failing at everything worthwhile, and absolutely knew it. In front of the Venetian, Allen threw up violently out his door. He swore it all still tasted good.

At the Pharaoh's
, the night passed. Belmont and Goat played spades with a couple of the entourage, Goat laughing noisily at Odette's lisping jokes. Around midnight the host roused himself and called Calyph over to a sideboard, where Ras pulled out a plain decanter of dull metal. When he laid three stemless glasses on the polished wood, they rolled their way to rest like spinning tops. Ras poured and I watched Calyph take the liquor and swirl it around under his nose awkwardly, like a parody of a tony gent. I was relieved to see there was a culture to which he, too, aspired but didn't know the gestures for.

I saw Ras signal for me. I crossed the room and they put a glass in my hand.

“Let's take a walk,” the Pharaoh said.

I didn't know whether to be honored or afraid, but I drank, and my willingness was sealed. The cognac was finer than what I'd drunk before, less sweet. I was given the metal bottle to carry—I knew its shape inside the black velvet bag, and I knew that what they'd given me, however fine, had come from somewhere else. Shida handed Calyph his crutches, and then the three of us were moving out of the room, and I felt buoyed by the curiosity of everyone left behind.

When we came out onto the terrace, the path through the darkness lit up in stages with blue running lights.

“Didn't press nothin',” Pharaoh said slyly. “It just know.”

I walked behind them along the narrow stone path, and watched the rubber ends of Calyph's crutches plant on the flat centers of the wider stones. We moved out beyond the tent until the vast dark roar of the Pacific opened in front of us. The wind blew stiff down the north coast, and the moon lit up the whites of the waves, and, on the beach beneath, great strewn timbers and bits of scudding spume.

“Look at this shit,” Pharaoh said softly. “It always doin' this.”

“There it is,” Calyph said. “There it go.”

The sound of the sea rolled up and over us, timeless and elemental, the somehow reassuring noise of a crushing immensity patiently crashing against the human shore.

“Seem like every time I open up the house this gotta happen,” Pharaoh said obliquely. “Somebody come and wanna drink liquor at five. Somebody show up with no girl and don't know which here is free and which not. Boys see a little structure to a thing and can't help theyselves but break it.”

“It's his first taste in awhile,” Calyph said. “He think he in a mansion video. Got that wild look in his eye like he about to turn the corner on that pool where the girls just stand around and jiggle, day after day. He forgot the rapper ain't own that mansion.”

“Let 'em try to own one! Debauch the body all year and not put no rules to the thing. Sit by the pool and feel sick.”

They were both quiet a minute, and I guessed each was ruminating on his first flush year, the brevity and disillusion of the supposed endless summer.

“I always invite too many people,” Pharaoh croaked finally. “That's all it is. So what you think of my staff?”

“All good people,” Calyph said carefully.

“Take what you want,” Pharaoh said, and brought his glass to his lips.

Calyph was facing away, and I could only wonder how he took this blunt invitation. Once more they let the ocean swallow up their silence, and I turned the bag around in my hands. Its velvet and soft string made it feel like some particularly important object—a sack of gold or a prisoner's hood.

“We oughta be gods,” Calyph said quietly, looking out at the sea.

“Ought?”

Calyph didn't reply. He looked out, and I could see maybe half his face, and somehow he had just the right balance there, in the cast of his eye and the set of his mouth. He looked noble, and it pained me. His face was equal to the vista and the question, and I wanted to mimic it, or else scrub it all out. It's the black Lewis and Clark, I wanted to shout.

“No ought to,” Pharaoh said. “I made this. Somewhere there some boy in North Lawndale, restin' he head on bricks, on the side of a stoop, he can make this. We got to heaven, Yoshi. It's here. God's just some man who knows how to make laws for hisself. So he can stay in the place he made, and know it's good.”

Calyph nodded, remotely.

“So listen here,” Pharaoh said, louder, turning halfway away from the sea. I saw his eyes flash to mine. “You havin' a nice time here, I hope.”

“Sure,” I said. My voice felt rusted from disuse.

“Good. How you feel about looking after Mr. Montaigne a little bit? He don't have nobody, see. Yoshi and I been talkin', and he say he don't need you too much here. Shouldn't take much time. Whatchu say?”

“Okay,” I said.

“See, Goat, he lost,” the Pharaoh said sadly. His voice took on a new sensitivity, and I mistrusted it. “Might benefit him to have another boy to talk to. Tell him how we do here. Like we been sayin' just now—rules of staying in heaven and whatnot. What to talk on and whatnot. Who to dote on and who not. You having similar backgrounds and whatall, I thought you might could do it.”

I wanted to tell him I'd not gone to Boise State, but to the Harvard of the Midwest, but of course I only nodded, as if this were all easy business.

“He know the code, right, Leef?” Pharaoh asked.

Still Calyph looked remotely out at the waves. “Far as I know,” he said.

Pharaoh nodded, like this was good enough and we'd struck some definite deal. Raising his glass, he sent me back to the house, and I felt the swagger come up in my legs a little, for being confirmed a man of code. In the dark of the path I felt the fine strings of the bag loosen between my fingers, and lifted their bottle to drink.

I was taking my contacts
out for the night when Calyph came crashing into the bathroom. I'd read for an hour or so, and then, disdaining the narrow utilitarian bath near my own room, gone upstairs to use the one on the main floor with the bronze fixtures and the raised copper sink.

“Hup to,” he said, stumbling past me toward the toilet.

I had one eye out already. “Do you mind?”

“This the colored bathroom. Hup to,” he said again, giving me a little push toward the door.

I wasn't about to stand there and watch him rain down, so I put my eye back in and went. Five minutes later all was silence.

I knocked softly. “You all right in there?”

Eventually I heard him clear his throat and come back to life. “Get in here,” he said.

He was slouched on the closed toilet with his hands on his knees, wearing the blank, patient expression of a man waiting for something beyond his control.

“Drink some cognac?” I asked.

“Snuck up on me.”

“Can you stand up?”

He thought on this. “Don't seem advisable.”

“Let me help you,” I said. “I used to work for a night doctor.”

“A who?”

In retrospect I probably could have traded on my personal experience being too drunk to stand up, rather than inventing a more formal expertise. Still, I imagined a man with a private practice, catering to wealthy debauchees. He would make his rounds between midnight and dawn, carrying with him a black valise, coming to their bedsides after they'd incapacitated themselves and ministering to their indulgences with pills and IVs so that they could wake fresh and rested without fear of liver damage and resume their public lives with unnatural ease. He wore, I decided, a short Vandyke beard and pince-nez, and I had been his assistant.

“Let's get you to your room,” I said. “You need to throw up first?”

He shook his head so hard it was like he was asserting a moral stance.

“Don't be proud. It helps.”

“I'm straight,” he said, so I went and stood by him. When he put his arm around me it seemed to weigh thirty pounds itself, and I felt a quiet triumph that I didn't crumple as he lifted himself to stand. Feeling hammered to the ground with every step, I helped him out the door to his nearby room, thankful that only Pharaoh and Odette slept on the highest floor.

I was surprised to see his room was hardly larger than my own. We came on the bed in the dark and I was expecting at least a perfunctory spaciousness near the door, but the mattress about took me out at the knees.

“Water,” he muttered, shuffling away in the dim.

In the dark kitchen I could hear laughter through the walls, and I scrounged silently by the refrigerator bulb. I didn't want to be discovered and have to share the burden of him. I got some electrolyte water and fixed a plate of beans and cornbread, then went back to the bathroom for a single tablet of the right kind of painkiller. I added a few random vitamins, to show I had the professional touch.

When I got back he was sprawled out on the bed, epic in scale, pathetic in detail. His clothes were wrinkled and I could see the nubs on the backs of his socks. I knew that to nurse him as I would was yet another way of getting closer—I knew then it would be closer and closer always, after more and more control, and never enough. But it wasn't for the sake of that alone. I knew what I'd done to him. Every time his godhood slipped, every time he winced in a human way, I saw again the falling ice and the invisible wrenching of his ligaments; every time his face hurried to empty itself at the most oblique reference to Antonia, I felt my own casual hand driving them apart. I couldn't have known he'd take a little house so seriously. It seemed only right to help him put his life back together again. I might really mean something to him then, if I could do that. So when I woke him, and the cup touched his lips, I was in his service as purely as I knew to be. When the pills fell from his mouth, I was there to pluck them up again, and when he needed help with this clothes, I was there within his arms to lift them, serving and only serving.