The Duration (5 page)

“Dude is leaving me clues,” I said, digging in my pocket for the piece of medical scrip.

Unsie unfolded the scrip, looked at it. It was of a curved, pointy thing. Might be a sword. Might be something else.

“This supposed to be you?” he asked.

“Fuck off.”

Unsie laughed to himself, looked at it for a second longer. Shrugged. Gave it back to me.

“I've seen bigger.”

I waited him and his stupid jokes out, until eventually he had to re-engage.

“I haven't seen him in a week,” he said, finally.

A customer beckoned from a rack of ski poles and Unsie clomped away, his feet both heavy and light on the floors like a marionette.

We strained against the fish's side and it rolled again. It was a little off-line.

“Psst,” Chick whispered.

Uns and Jimmer looked over at us, realizing what we were doing. They didn't look thrilled, but they trudged over and got down on their knees next to me. Jimmer positioned himself at the fish's tail, turning it like a rudder. We rolled and rolled again, and within twenty minutes, we were at the back of the truck.

“Put the tail up there and then we all lift the front?” Chick asked breathlessly. He was sweating. Into it.

None of us nodded, except Chick at his own idea. We knew the drill. Chick and I pivoted the tail up, and Jimmer backed the tailgate under it. The truck dipped under the strain. Jimmer climbed into the back and held the tail steady. Chick and I bent down on either side of the massive head. We looked at each other and lifted.

Slowly the fish rose off the wet ground. Unsie, surrendering, got between us and applied his substantial lower-body strength, while Jimmer pulled from inside the truck, which didn't help at all. But we got the head up over our belts and leaned in with our bellies. “I can't hold it,” Unsie said, but he did, and then we got leverage and slid the fish right into the back of the truck.

Or almost, at least. The Suburban's way-back was thinly carpeted, and the fish slid tail-first up over the collapsed second row of seats. But then the dorsal fin hit the lip of the roof, and she stopped moving. The fish's round pink face sat on the tailgate, hanging out over the edge. We tried to tilt her, roll her, and then we tried to pull her back. She wouldn't budge.

“Maybe if we just bash the head in a little,” Jimmer said, measuring with his hands from somewhere inside the truck, and in our adrenaline-flushed state, it sounded reasonable. If we could clear five more inches, the whole fish would fit in the trunk.

I shrugged. Unsie was in the driver's seat. He was ready to bolt.

I found a thick log on the ground and swung it at the dorsal fin. The log struck with a muffled thump and flew into pieces—damp wood against cement. The fish was unscathed.

“Don't,” Chick said as I searched for a rock.

Then he laughed.

“I mean, you know. But don't.”

We paused and considered our situation. It was late on a spring night, the sort of night our local cops lived for, and there was a giant stolen fish sticking out of Unsie's mom's Suburban.

“Isn't there a blanket in here?” Jimmer said.

Unsie passed one back, and we draped it across the fish's head. It was a small blanket and didn't even reach the gills. Now it just looked like a fish with a fever.

“Let's take it to school, drop it outside the office,” Chick said.

There was a certain logic to that, since we'd just given Ms. J. a fishing rod. Still, it seemed dangerously close to vandalism. The previous year, some seniors had put toothpaste and shaving cream on the middle school windows on the evening of Senior Skip, and they'd been banned from graduation.

My parents would kill me if I got banned from graduation.

Chick looked at us. I could feel my heart beating beneath my wet shirt. The clock was ticking. In Gable, this time of night, about 40 percent of the cars on the road were cop cars. We knew some of the cops—one of them had been the assistant soccer coach a few years ago. They loved catching local kids, seeing as how they'd each been local kids themselves. Last Halloween, when people were out egging, Gary Lenehan had chased our high school's current track star 4 miles on foot. Caught him too.

“In?” Chick asked, and one by one we each nodded.

Jimmer got into the passenger seat. Unsie started the engine. I sat in the back with Chick and held onto the fish's tail. It would be bad, I thought, if the fish fell out of the car. Four seniors, out on a springtime lark, drop a giant cement fish on top of some poor young family. That would be next year's public service announcement.

“Take side streets,” Chick said, as Unsie veered onto Route 7 and headed south a quarter mile until he could pull off. We were all quiet. In the back, I held the tail both tightly and loosely. I didn't want the fish to slide out, but if it did, I didn't want to go with it.

Midafternoon and the sun was a pale penny sinking toward the western hills. It was cold outside Asgard. I couldn't bear to hike back up to the Horse Head just yet. And fuck Chick, anyway, for standing me up. For a little while, at least. Fuck him while I got myself a flatbread.

We still owned a house on Scrimshaw, I guess my mom owned it, but she was living in a condo up in Burlington with my dad's ashes. I drove up our dead-end street, drawn by the magical magnetism of . . . what? Boredom, probably. Or muscle memory. Whatever. I could see the renters' kids in the front yard. Two boys and a girl, each under nine from the looks of it, passing around a purplish ball in need of air. Didn't those kids know there was probably still a hand-pump in the garage and a bent needle in the top left drawer of the kitchen? Silly kids. Even without the extra air, I could punt that ball right over the garage, I bet, send them off to hunt for it among the hydrangeas. But I'd never do that, of course. It was bad enough to be lurking there as it was. I was going to spook the neighbors, and then I'd probably recognize one of them, or not, whichever was worse.

It was nice to have kids in the neighborhood again, frolicking like when we were young. Made me happy. Not really. Neighborhoods have life cycles, right? I wondered if they climbed the sugar maple in the back, where the treehouse had been, or if they'd found the coffee tin full of Hulk action figures and the Kris Kross mixtape I buried in the side lawn in 1992. I wondered if they followed the trail that went all the way through the woods out back, a couple of miles to the Magic Meadow, to the rear flank of the Fleur-de-Lys property. Our places. The doorjambs were full of our pencil marks, the briars were full of our blood. Chick's dad had left when Chick was tiny and his mom had moved to Florida, to a golf course near a lake. Their house, a small ranch that used to be across the street from mine, was gone, subsumed by a barn-like home built by a barn-like man whose late-model SUV sat next to a boat and a lacrosse net in the driveway.

The barn-like man stood on his porch, staring at me.

It was five o'clock. I'd wanted a reason to get a beer for a while, and now I had one.

Our high school was 3 miles from the abandoned mini-golf. The fish swayed and pivoted but stayed in the truck. We passed two cars going the opposite way, each of which we were sure was a cruiser, and when we got to the parking lot, it was lit up like a football field.

“Ready?” asked Unsie.

There was no cover in the lot, and we'd have to get in and out fast.

Unsie pulled in and raced to the school's main entrance. The truck jumped up over the curb by the doorways, and we scrambled out and pulled on the fish with all our might. It wouldn't budge. We were fully exposed.

Unsie was pushing from the back, whispering “Shit, shit, shit!” Jimmer had a crazy look on his face. Chick and I were pulling and twisting as the truck's exhaust heated up my pant leg. Then the dorsal fin cracked, and the fish tumbled out onto the walkway. There was no time to do anything aesthetic. Chick and I dove into the open back of the truck, and Unsie peeled out onto the road. Behind us, the fish stared balefully into the parking lot.

“Oh shit!” Chickie yelled, smiling ear to ear.

I couldn't believe it had worked. Jimmer started to giggle, and it was left to me and Unsie to be the serious ones.

“We can't say a word,” Unsie said eventually. “Nobody can say a word.”

We each nodded. Unsie drove to the all-night carwash, and we got out and hosed the grass and mud out of the trunk. It seemed prudent. Could they dust for mud? It was past midnight, and my shirt was smeared with pink. Events were irreversible.

“Look,” Unsie said, pointing at the ground. A big toad, the biggest ever, had washed out of the trunk and sat on the carwash floor, staring at us. He'd been inside the fish. Like Jonah. He croaked his thanks and hopped off.

We dropped Jimmer off at his corner, then Unsie drove me and Chick to the bottom of Scrimshaw. We had to pass the high school. The fish swam in the glow of the parking lot lights. Our humanities teacher liked to remind us that Melville wrote
Moby-Dick
while sitting at his cottage right up the road, imagining the great whale breaching beneath the white winter curves of the distant mountains. We looked quickly over at the fish—ahoy, Tashtego! Thar she blows!—and then quickly away.

I sat on a stool at the Heirloom and tried to catch Ginny Archey's eye. She was bartending. We'd dated for the length of a party once, near the end of junior year. Her dad owned the bar, a proud testament to tradition and Keno in a rapidly gentrifying downtown, and she'd been working there since she was fourteen.

“Hey,” she said when she saw me, with a smile that turned quickly into a scowl. She slid a bowl of peanuts toward me. “Still allergic?”

“Only to you, peanut,” I said. I wasn't allergic to either of them.

She laughed, said “I'm just kidding, Petey,” and ambled down the bar toward me. Her belly was round and heavy. First Sara, now Ginny. Everybody was pregnant but me.

“Well, look at you,” I said. “If you'd looked like that back in 2001, we might have had something.”