Son of Destruction

15




Bobby


Bobby didn’t expect to be here, at the door to the Bellinger family fishing shack. Chape’s grandfather built it in the boondocks before he or Chape were imagined, when land was cheap. It sits alone on an inlet, so far out that whatever they did there, stayed there. No outsiders saw and nobody heard. Bobby would just as soon forget some of the stuff that went down when Chape brought him and his posse out here in high school, but here he is.

As instructed, he’s dressed for one more endless evening at the club. Chape phoned an hour ago. ‘We have a problem.’

‘Damn straight.’ Lucy’s son in a holding pattern, circling Fort Jude like an unanswered prayer.

‘Can you come?’

‘When?’

‘Usual place. Six.’ For a second there, Chape dropped his take-charge manner. ‘I need you, dude.’

Like it or not, Bobby is walking into his past.

He’s here because Chape was his best friend in high school and together they ruled. The guys he cared most about in high school will be inside. Well, all but Darcy, who wiped out at the end of junior year. Their names are carved in the unpainted door, along with the name of the one guy he ran with but never liked. If there is a call to accounting in life, this is the group he has to report to: living yardsticks, measuring him off. At another level, although he knew then that he was nothing like these men, Bobby Chaplin is thinking, These are my people, and this is my place.

In spite of everything, it still makes him grin.

They used to hide out in Chape’s shack on the inlet; all through high school they got wasted on the Bellingers’ booze. In a town where everybody knows everybody’s business and your friends’ parents know you well enough to call you down for bad behavior, it was the secret place in their lives. Out here where the scrub pines give way to mangroves they could do anything, and Fort Jude would never know. It was all about whiskey, weed and pipe dreams: five kids too young to drink and barely old enough to drive, kicked back around the keg mainlining Jack Daniels like good old mountain boys, the only thing missing was the coonskin caps.

Even when you look happy you aren’t, really, he thinks. Even though outsiders can’t see it, there’s always something wrong.

They still got together here during college breaks but they were coming from different places in their heads, and that bad last night of houseparties pushed them over the edge. They landed in a new place and nobody could say which ones stood on which side of the rift, although Bobby knew that wherever he landed, he would stand alone.

The rift widened as the four of them solidified, like puppies growing into their feet. Whatever they used to be in common was no more. Chape was always going to be a lawyer like old Judge Bellinger, but until he grew into his father’s face, they could pretend. Stitch Von Harten’s dad set him up to take over the printing business. His family started it in Fort Jude during the Depression, so Stitch could forget the dive shop and the fishing boat, whatever he really wanted, although at that point, he still believed. By the time they were twenty his head was settling into that thickening neck; he didn’t look quite like old Mr Van Harten, but it was only a matter of time, and the twins? Doomed to take over Coleman Chrysler, no wonder Darcy rammed that tree and bled his life away on Route 19. Second and third-generation businesses, Bobby thinks uneasily. That’s what makes this city great. It explains a lot.

None of which explains the problem of Brad. The Kalens had him when they were too old, and spoiled the crap out of him because they didn’t know what else to do. By the time he hit Northshore Elementary he was a gorilla; even teachers cringed. Old Orville Kalen used to go to the club in that white suit with a gold chain across the vest and if you ran into him it always came up in conversation that the watch fob was his Phi Beta Kappa key, he graduated magna cum from Yale. Brad got kept back in first grade, so he was seven when they started. They found this big kid slouched in his seat with his feet on the desk like a hard timer when their moms brought them in on the first day. He glared and showed his teeth, like, watch your back, but they did what you had to, and made friends. They used to play over at Brad’s because the house was so big that nobody cared what they did and his folks were too old to do anything about it when and if they found out. Brad’s mom kept cold Dr Pepper and a freezer full of Dove bars and there was an attic where she never came; ‘please don’t make me climb up all those stairs.’ He had a toy race car you could drive around in and a Noah’s Ark with thirty hand-carved animals that were supposed to be paired off on the gangplank, which they never were. Most of them were missing tails or legs and half of them were smashed because Brad used to make his animals fight and kill each other; Bobby saw it once, so he was never easy with Brad.

Kalen grew up handsome and stupid wild. He was an ugly drunk but they hung with him anyway because he was the first to turn sixteen and get his license, and until Judge Bellinger bought Chape the Jeep in their senior year, he was the only one with a car.

Six friends. Well, one’s dead now and another’s an alcoholic, and Bobby? He’s been better. Still, he feels the same pleasure, going in. It’s like slipping into a pair of hightops you’ve worn for so long that the canvas is like part of you, softened by wear and ripe with thirty years’ accumulation of foot smell.

He opens the door, making a big smile for them.

But Chape is alone.

‘Where is everybody?’ He knows Chape has an agenda; he always does. Why else would he call? ‘What’s up?’

‘Long time no see.’ Of course Chape won’t show his hand right away. He never does. He’s set the ritual bottle of Jack Daniels out on the crate with a bowl of Cheetos and some weed, a gesture to the past. Chape is drinking Diet Dr Pepper out of the can but he greets Bobby with the usual: ‘Hair of the dog?’

Bobby says the usual: ‘No thanks, I’m driving.’ Har har. Cheap, but it’s the easy way in. They can jump cut to the present without stumbling over the years between then and now.

‘Beer?’

‘No thanks. You called?’

‘We have a problem.’

‘You said.’

‘It’s not what you think.’

His best friend from high school is touchy. They both are. What stands between them is the thing they never talk about. It’s tacit. They never did. They’ve spent their lives since that night avoiding the matter even though, walking away, silent and dumbfounded, they recognized it as a central event. In a way, it would be a relief to get it out and get it over with. Chapter and verse on what happened. The guilt.

If unpacking the business of that old, bad night is on Chape’s agenda, Bobby thinks, bring it on. He starts. ‘About this Carteret kid.’

Chape cuts him off. ‘That’s not why you’re here.’

‘Chape, I saw him. He’s got to be Lucy’s . . .’

‘Don’t.’ Chape rakes him with a look sharp enough to cut him off at the knees.

Bobby finishes anyway. ‘. . . son.’

‘I said, don’t.’ There are things they never talk about. They aren’t going to talk about them now.

Bobby goes cold. ‘Then why am I here?’

‘Yeah, well.’ Amiable Chape mends it all, with that familiar, polished grin. ‘I had to get you here somehow.’

Bobby shrugs. ‘I’d have made it sooner or later.’ They both know this is not necessarily true.

‘OK. It’s Brad.’

‘Brad!’

‘He’s out there somewhere, raving, puking drunk.’

‘So what else is new?’

‘He’s supposed to be hosting this great big f*cking party at the club.’

‘You got me all the way out here for this? For another stupid party at the club?’

‘No. For Brad. For the Famous Five.’ The tired tagline makes Bobby flinch. They are both embarrassed by what Chape says next. ‘I thought maybe you could help us, you being A.A. and all.’

‘How did you know?’

Chape shrugs. Everybody knows everything in this town. ‘Buck is checking the bars on Baywater Drive and Stitch is covering the beach dives as we speak.’ He adds, to make Bobby feel better, ‘You might as well know, Buck isn’t doing so good.’

‘What’s the problem.’

‘Depression. He’s scared shit he’ll catch it.’

‘Catch what?’

Chape gives him a you-know look. ‘What Darcy had.’

‘Suicide isn’t catching . . .’ After Darcy’s funeral the Colemans took Buck away sobbing, but Bobby and Chape and the others got crazy in the parking lot, cackling with relief. Next day they brought Buck out here to the shack and they all got loaded – survivors, same as it ever was. It’s funny how easy it is to get over a thing, when you have friends. He falters. ‘. . . I don’t think.’

In that spirit Chape offers, ‘Stitch has prostate cancer.’

‘Men die with it, not of it. He’ll be fine.’

‘He hates to sit down. Says he feels all those radioactive seeds, sliding around.’

‘Ow.’

Chape is studying him. ‘You look good.’

Bobby approximates a smile. ‘You said dress for the club.’

‘With Cecilia dead, the girls are throwing the engagement party for Brad’s girl. Grand ballroom, silver everything. The works.’

‘Brad has a daughter?’

‘Somebody has to do it,’ Chape says.

‘You got me here for a party?’

‘I know how you feel about the club, but we’re all going, for Brad.’

‘You got me all the way over here for a party?’

Chape adds with a stern look, ‘Even you. Re-entry.’

‘I should have known.’ He understands what’s happening here, at least part of it. With Chape, it’s never just the agenda. There’s always the hidden one.

‘Brad needs all the help he can get.’ Chape falls into one of his rhetorical silences that he thinks of as a significant pause.

During the beat, Bobby does not say eagerly, Whatever you say! He narrows his eyes. OK then. Show me your hand.

Here it comes. When he thinks the pause has done its work Chape adds, ‘If you can find him.’

‘What do you mean you, white man?’

‘Given the . . . you know.’

He sighs. ‘A.A.’

‘Give me a little bit of credit, Bob. It’s more than that. You know that girl Brad kidnapped in college? Hauled her off the Chi Psi front porch screaming, Fourth of July in our junior year?’

‘Secret marriage, Mrs Kalen’s opal ring.’

‘Valdosta was just a story,’ Chape says. ‘It cost the Kalens plenty to keep Brad out of jail.’

‘I was away.’ Every summer Bobby fled his parents’ expectations; he can still see that sad, hopeful pair, blinking like frogs whenever he came into the room.

‘But you’re the only one who ever saw the woman. Remember, Labor Day?’

‘Brad’s Georgia girl.’ Everybody has to come home sometime. He fills his cheeks with air and lets it out through tight lips. ‘I did.’

‘He had you out to his secret place, wherever he was keeping her,’ Chape says.

‘He did.’

‘God only knows why you went.’

Because Chape has made clear that they aren’t going there, he keeps the worst memory at bay. ‘I had to see if she was OK.’

She looked OK when Bobby met her, pretty but the kind of girl who has sharp elbows, cheap clothes – not the kind whose parents call 911 when she doesn’t come home; he saw Mrs Kalen’s gold slave bracelet riding just above the long bruise on her skinny arm as she flashed the ring. Given Brad’s history, were those K-mart rhinestones or was that a real wedding band? Kalen clamped her to his side maybe a little too tightly but he was proud and smiling, like this was the most important thing he’d ever done: ‘Bobby, meet the wife.’

Even so, Bobby whispered to her while Brad poured him another of whatever they were having, Are you all right? She lowered those spiky eyelashes and touched Mrs Kalen’s diamond lavalier with a sly smile. There were roaches running on the Formica and flies buzzing in the plastic curtains in that awful place but she was laughing and Brad seemed happy, maybe the only time he was allowed to be, but the Kalens put out enough money to make it all go away. Later he married Cecilia Parker. ‘Her mother was an Arnault,’ Bobby’s mother wrote him, ‘third generation in Fort Jude, charter member of the Junior League.’

Knowing how that one ended he asks uneasily, ‘Did Brad ever tell you what happened to that girl?’

‘There are things you don’t need to know if you want to stay friends.’ In a tone loaded with reproach, Chape takes Bobby where this meeting is going. ‘You’re the only one who knows the place.’

‘It was a trailer.’

‘Now you need to show me where.’

‘Oh, hell,’ Bobby says, and he means it on several levels. ‘Don’t make me go back.’

‘The man is passed out in his own vomit somewhere, with that poor child waiting for him at the club. Now let’s go find our friend and pick him up and scrape him off.’

‘Sorry, I can’t.’

‘Won’t, you mean. Harvard didn’t do you all that much good, did it?’

Bobby shrugs.

‘Look. If you won’t show me where he kept her, at least tell us where to look.’

He shakes his head. ‘I can’t. It’s all freeway now.’

It’s as if Chape hasn’t heard. ‘OK then. One way or another, we go out there and find the bastard. We have exactly one hour to do this and get him to the club.’