So Shelly (17 page)

In an act of altruistic self-sacrifice, unwilling to burden her with his own torturous curse, Con surrenders his impossible love for Rachel, leaves St. Jude’s in a bilious puff of motorcycle exhaust, and rides off into a Midwest midnight. (Motorcycle fatalities have risen by nearly 7 percent in the past five years.)

The sarcasm-proof morons at Trinity loved it. Even the faculty swallowed it hook, line, and sinker, but Gordon knew that, even though his dull-witted, God-fearing readers would never have admitted it, if they could have traded lives with or fucked any one of the characters, they would have unanimously chosen Con.

“Keats.”

I vaguely heard my name, but it failed to stimulate any kind of synaptic reaction or verbal response from inside the syrupy morass of my muted consciousness.

“Keats.”

There it was again. This time a little more forceful and accompanied by something poking at my rib cage, a poking that chased what had been my temporarily unfettered thoughts and reconnected them to the weighty and disappointing reality of a body that was scrunched, fetal position, on a cold, hard, and momentarily unidentifiable surface.

“Keats! Wake up. We’ve got to go.”

Gordon. It was Gordon. Somehow, at some point in the night, I’d managed to fall asleep on the dock with a moldy-smelling life preserver under my head for a pillow.

“What time is it?” I asked for no relevant reason other
than to delay my ascent to the surface of awareness and to prevent a crippling case of the psychic bends.

“Time to get the fuck out of here. Let’s go. Undo that spring line and hop in,” Gordon directed.

I had no clue what a spring line was (I was picturing a Paris fashion show), but since there was only one rope still tied to the cleat on the dock, I figured that was it. I undid the simple knot and slid on board.

“Here,” he said, and handed me the urn. “Hold Shelly.”

The surface of the urn was warm. Gordon must have slept with Shelly snug to his body. I smiled at him.

“What?” Gordon asked defensively.

“Nothing,” I said, but he knew that I knew.

A quiet pall had descended on the early morning that would have seemed impossible during the raucous hours just prior. It evoked a stillness unlike any I had ever experienced growing up on my busy, well-lit Ogontz street, where cars whizzed past at all hours no more than fifty feet from my bedroom window, and sirens seemed to blare constantly. In my neighborhood, one learned early to discern the sympathetic wail of an ambulance from the angry command of a police car from the abject terror of a fire engine. Here, there was only the primordial quiet of an inland sea. The sole sounds were the occasional lapping of current against the dock pilings and the groaning of a too taut line being stretched to its excruciatingly painful extreme like an accused heretic on the rack.

Gordon gently turned the ignition switch as if his delicate handling would somehow convince the engines to understand our need for stealth. Unlike my rousing, theirs
was immediate and enthusiastic, like two puppies at play, but even their boisterous barking wasn’t shrill enough to penetrate the depths of drunkenness into which most of our neighbors had descended. Gordon’s goal was to limit as severely as possible any record or awareness of our coming or going, so we idled out of our slip and out of the docks, into the harbor, leaving a barely discernible and untraceable wake writ on the water’s surface.

As we inched out into the narrow latitudinal channel separating South from Middle Bass Island, Gordon turned on the running lights and eased the throttles forward. “It’ll be a short run,” he said.

Since the sun was still a good hour from peeking its nose over the eastern horizon, Gordon reconfigured the GPS settings and navigated according to the phosphorescent images splashed on the radar screen, rather than trusting his eyesight alone.

Our course sent us skirting around the west coast of Middle Bass. Between it and farther to the west lies what the screen identified as Rattlesnake Island. It was a diminutive privately owned island that Gordon tried to convince me was owned by members of a Cleveland Mafia family and was used alternatively as a hideout, as a sort of sit-down center for the bosses of Midwest mob families, and as a summertime getaway.

“During Prohibition, it was used as a way station for whiskey runners smuggling booze from Canada,” Gordon explained. “You know, a bunch of the boats they used were the original wooden-hulled
Byron
speedboats that my family made. Rattlesnake has a private airstrip, a helipad, a par three
golf course, and a fully staffed clubhouse with a whole herd of chefs flown in from the home country as demanded.”

It may have been Gordon’s bullshit imagination, but in the spirit of our own romantic quest, I bought every bit of it.

On course, we made a dogleg right around the even smaller, uninhabited freckle of earth known as Sugar Island off the northwest coast of Middle Bass. The Corsair was headed directly for the state park marina on the southeast corner of North Bass. The sky had begun to turn the gray of fired charcoal, and the lake had begun to show its morning green complexion, occasionally washed over by the whitecaps that had begun to transform our heretofore smooth run into a speed-bump-lined strip of nautical highway.

“What’s yours?” Gordon half-yelled, apropos of nothing, over the roar of the outboards and the splash of the fiberglass hull. With one hand, he breakfasted on what remained of the pretzels, as he steered with the other.

But I knew what he was asking; he wanted to know which R.E.M. song Shelly had assigned to me. “ ‘Try Not to Breathe,’ ” I said. “It’s pretty depressing.”

“I’ve never heard of it.”

“It isn’t one of their most popular songs. It’s an old one and wasn’t on the radio much, even when it was released. She’d play it for me sometimes while we worked on the
Beacon
.”

“How’s it go?”

“I’m not singing it,” I said, fully aware of my tone deafness.

“What about the lyrics? I mean, why did she pick it?”

I said, “There’s a line in the song that I think spoke to her somehow. I think it made her think of me.”

“So, how’s it go?” Gordon demanded.

I recited, “ ‘I have lived a full life / And these are the eyes that I want you to remember.’ ”

There was a moment of dead air between us.

“That’s fucked up,” Gordon finally said.

“You don’t know the half of it.”

“That was Shelly’s problem,” Gordon continued in his half-shout. “She started to take everything way too seriously. She became a drama queen. She wasn’t like that when we were kids, but somewhere along the way she became superfragile. Almost to the point where I didn’t want to hang around her, you know?”

I didn’t have the nerve to tell him that it was him, as much as anything else, that had created her brittle self-image.

“There it is,” Gordon pronounced, as he pointed toward a strobe flashing intermittently in the distance to our right. “Off the starboard bow. That’s a channel marker. A red buoy. ‘Red, right, return.’ ” He recited what he informed me was the mariner’s mantra for orienting one’s craft upon return to port, and he situated the Corsair so that we passed the buoy on the starboard side. With the throttles pulled back, we slunk into the unoccupied marina, which provided fewer than twenty slips.

“Why are we stopping here?” I asked. “I thought we were going to the north side.”

“We are. But there’s no dock there anymore. The state dismantled it to keep trespassers away.”

North Bass offered none of the advantages that the majority of the high-spending boating crowd desired, namely
alcohol and breast-flashing women. Fewer than a dozen residents lived year-round on the state-owned nature preserve (that’s the island’s official designation), and if near-total neglect was the means by which to establish and maintain such a preserve, then the Ohio Department of Natural Resources was doing an enviable job.

It was no secret, however, that many at the statehouse viewed the island’s offshore location as ideal for the construction of a mini Vegas, so they did as little as possible to encourage the productive usage of North Bass. In the lawmakers’ wildest and wettest dreams, ferry services (transportation tax), hotels (bed tax), souvenir stores and stands (sales tax), and fully staffed bars and gambling houses (income tax, sin tax, and property tax) would one day transform a budget deficit in the millions of dollars into a budget surplus.

Not knowing when the ranger’s shift and patrol would start, we hurried to begin our approximately one-mile hike to the north shore, with Shelly, her discs, and the boom box in hand.

As I’ve already made clear, Gordon flat-out hated Shelly’s stepsister Claire. He thought her pathetic, but in late March of his junior year, after having returned to Ogontz giddy with his second individual and another team state swimming championship, Gordon relented. That night, when he arrived home from the team party at Coach Mancini’s and parked the H3 half on the circular driveway, half on the front lawn, Claire was waiting on his porch with a homemade banner of “Congratulations!” draped diagonally across her chest and splitting her impressive boobs. She was holding an already quarter-empty bottle of top-shelf vodka, which she had pilfered from her stepdad’s liquor cabinet.

Well inebriated himself from the gin-laced water bottle he’d been sipping at the party, and as horny as hell, he was able to overcome his antipathy for his psycho-stalker. Gordon flashed his high beams to signal her into the Hummer, which she entered with her jaws already flapping. “Blah,
blah, blah, blah, blah” was all he made of Claire’s prattle as he took several swigs from the long smoked-glass bottle of France’s finest vodka.

A little bit of making out preceded a thirty-second screw in the back of the Hummer. Gordon’s uniform khakis never passed his ankles, nor did his school-issue blazer or tie come off, while Claire’s skinny-legged jeans and black with white polka dots boy shorts clung to her right foot like a bear trap. (In a typical year, there are only three deaths by bear attack in North America.) Her royal-blue flyaway cashmere cardigan was opened wide to reveal a white cami and a lace bra pushed up and over her breasts.

When he awoke in his bed the next morning, hungover and confused, he prayed that the tryst inside his Hummer had been a dream. But when Claire’s onslaught began only moments later, he knew there to be no such luck. He ignored phone message after phone message; he deleted unread text after text. The very second Gordon stepped onto his front porch or activated the garage door, Claire came running. If he snuck out back to hop on a Jet Ski or into one of the water crafts, she was waiting onshore when he returned. At school those last two months of his junior year, she haunted him to the point that he frequently just stayed home. Worst of all and despite his protestations, many were beginning to think them a couple.

It wouldn’t be until August, however, that she’d begin to show.

*    *    *

On a Friday afternoon in early May, five months after her abortion, Shelly finally brushed the remaining surface layer of dirt from her shallow grave of depression, climbed out, and reclaimed her space among us living.

It had been a harsh winter.

Shelly had played host briefly during her leechlike stepsister’s introduction to Trinity. Soon, however, Claire had found Gordon and ditched Shelly. Prior to the Key Club’s Christmas toy drive, Shelly quit as president, and she stopped volunteering at Planned Parenthood. Not once did she perform an act of civil disobedience, and she carried out her duties at the
Beacon
with halfhearted indifference and didn’t provide a single submission. By spring’s arrival, Shelly had been reduced to a faded shade of her former self.

Lost in the self-pity caused by my own increasingly shitty reality, I wasn’t much of a friend to her. The paltry funeral we’d provided my father had drained dry the shallow pool of our family finances. His disability checks stopped coming; and the government aid we did receive was quickly eaten up by utilities and grocery bills. Sometimes—and I know being poor is no excuse, but having money gives you no right to judge either—my irregularly washed and re-worn school clothes were less than fresh, so I avoided contact with everybody at school and rarely showed up to help Shelly with the
Beacon
. Like her, I offered nothing for inclusion, and also like her, if for different reasons, I was disappearing.

Tom, still healthy, dropped out of college for the spring semester and took on additional hours busing tables at a local restaurant in order to make at least minimal payments on
my tuition at Trinity. I volunteered to transfer to Ogontz Public, but he insisted that our Catholic school education had been a source of pride for our father, and transferring wasn’t an option. I could have applied for tuition assistance, but my father would have been mortified. He was prideful that way. I’m sure that if I’d been a head taller and seventy-five pounds heavier and I could have rifled a football or dunked a basketball, Trinity would have found a scholarship for me. But I wasn’t, and I couldn’t. And brainy little shits like myself do not much inspire alumni to crack open their wallets.

Meanwhile, sitting in a permanent haze at the kitchen table, my mother seemed intent on joining our father by starving or by smoking herself to death at a world record pace.

It was Gordon who conjured Shelly’s resurrection.

That Friday, Shelly and I sat, sharing a computer and completing a final edit of the spring edition of the
Beacon
. For his part, it was the first time that Gordon had set foot inside the room all semester, having had, until recently, turned his attention away from the
Beacon
’s needs in response to his editor at Pandroth’s insistence that he get moving on the sequel to
Manfred
.

As Gordon entered the room, he dropped a folded copy of that day’s
Ogontz Reporter
across the keyboard. “Do Not Remove from Library” was stamped in lipstick red across a banner headline reading “Indian Uprising!”