Son of Destruction

24




Bobby


‘How drunk was I?’

‘You were pretty disgusting.’

‘The shit I was, I don’t remember that.’

‘Do you remember anything?’

‘Not if I can help it.’ That grin.

Bobby sighs. ‘Right.’

Trailing Al Chaplin’s old sweats, which Bobby threw on him after the shower, Brad surges up from the sofa like Jabba the Hutt, all phlegm and bad odor. ‘Where am I?’

Bobby grimaces. ‘My house.’

With Brad, there is always the possibility that he will rise up and pound the shit out of you. Instead he blinks, belching, ‘What am I doing at your house?’

‘Beats the crap out of me.’

Some lame idea Chape had, that smug, privileged bastard, gearing up to remove his glossy nuclear family from the fiasco at the Fort Jude Club. Efficient, too. Chape couldn’t herd his nuclear support group into his Escalade and return them to the safety of their showy house with its gold bathroom fixtures and terrazzo floors until he processed certain particles. Hugging busty little Sallie like a kid with his squeeze at the senior houseparties, he turned and handed Brad off to Bobby with the condescending smile of a man who was born knowing how life works.

‘Best you take him. You people are supposed to be good at interventions.’

‘There’s a difference between intervention and garbage disposal,’ Bobby said, too late.

‘Carter will help you shovel him into the car,’ Chape said, propping Brad up against a surly teenager who looked too much like Chape.

‘But my car is . . .’

‘No problem. I had Marco bring your car in from the shack.’

Astounding, the man’s level of organization. He dumped Brad and that was that. Smart kid, Chape’s son came armed with one of the club shower curtains, ripped off a rod in the locker room, to keep the damage contained, and there was damage. It will be days before Bobby gets the smell out of the car.

Thank God his siblings left last night to go birdwatching in Homosassa Springs. With her life in tatters, Maggie loves to study anything smaller than she is, solemnly checking off creatures sighted against her guide book. It gives her the illusion that she’s getting a grip, which she isn’t. And Al? Al has nothing better to do. There’s a bar he likes in Homosassa, so he indulges her.

When he made it to his feet after several tries, Brad went padding out through the dining room without breaking anything, although it was close. If the gods are kind, Bobby will get shut of him and expunge all traces before they get back tonight.

The fat f*ck is in the kitchen now, sticking his head under the faucet, Bobby knows the sound well enough. Then he hears the fridge door slam. He’s out there drinking Bobby’s seltzer straight from the bottle or orange juice out of the carton, smearing the opening with disgusting Brad-drool. Worse. Brad’s always been a backwash kind of guy, you didn’t want to drink after him, so he’ll have to throw everything out. Bobby waits a minute because he doesn’t really want to see it going down. He goes into the kitchen reluctantly. Brad doesn’t see him at first.

Then he does, with a resentful, ‘Oh, it’s you.’

Bobby shrugs. ‘My house.’ He shouldn’t have to explain these things.

‘And I’m here . . . why?’

‘Chape sent you.’

‘It figures. F*cking Chape.’

‘Chape is overorganized.’

‘That’s one way of putting it. And you brought me here after . . .’

Brad Kalen, thinking, is alarming, but Bobby isn’t about to help him out.

He stands there scratching his armpits like a monkey. Oook. Oook. After a long time he asks, ‘Who bailed me out?’

‘You weren’t in jail.’

‘Where was I?’

‘You don’t remember?’

‘Not really.’ Brad’s grin drips vestigial charm. ‘Where was I?’

‘The club. Engagement party for your daughter.’

‘Oh, f*ck. Patty. I forgot her f*cking party.’ The grin gets sweatier as he asks, ‘But hey, I made it to the party anyway?’

‘If you want to call it that.’

‘Is she still speaking to me?’

‘I wouldn’t.’

‘Don’t look at me like that.’

Bobby says grimly, ‘It’s the best I can do.’

‘Ug. I’m beginning to get the picture. So, the party. Um, did I do anything?’

‘It was pretty bad.’

‘Something I said?’

‘You weren’t rightly talking.’

‘What did I, flash my dick? Yack in somebody’s lap?’

‘You were out cold. You didn’t do anything.’

Brad blinks with that wide blue, innocent, who-me? look, he’s been getting by on it ever since first grade. ‘Then what was so bad?’

‘If you have to ask, I can’t explain it.’ Bobby isn’t really listening to this conversation. He’s weighing his options. Chape’s done with his personal pro bono renovation project and it’s clear Brad’s daughter isn’t about to come and get him, she probably never wants to see him again. Is there a removal service he can call, or is he going to have to shovel rank, disgusting Brad Kalen back into the car, which already reeks of him?

‘What the f*ck happened?’

He says harshly, ‘You landed on the bandstand like a side of beef.’

‘I did?’ Brad’s face is working. He is casting around for ways to make the best of this, but the whole thing is too much, even for him. He tries for a smile. ‘But, hey, I made my appearance.’

‘If you want to call it that.’

‘So Patty can stop complaining. It’s not like I’m never there for her.’

‘You don’t want to know what Patty would say.’ Bobby would do anything to scrape that pleased, smug look off Brad’s fat face. ‘You know who dragged you in and dumped you, right?

‘F*cking Walker.’

‘Right.’ Funny how Brad gets this part so quickly. Is this what he does, pretend to forget things he knows, but would rather not remember?

Brad says heavily, ‘Walker Pike.’

‘So you did know.’

‘I do now.’

‘I’m surprised he didn’t kill you.’

‘Who, me? Why would he want to do that?’

Every muscle in Bobby’s face tightens. ‘After what you did.’

Brad bulks up, a monument to denial.

Stupid lout, Bobby thinks, as Brad’s shoulders sag into a simian slope and his head sinks into a mess of baggy sweatshirt and rolls of flesh. F*cking Neanderthal. Standing here in my kitchen all rank and foul. Even though they aren’t standing close, the hangover smell is strong enough to unpack its luggage and hang up its dirty underwear inside Bobby’s head.

Eighteen months sober, Bobby hates the feeling because he knows it so well. He hates the memories filling his kitchen; they came in with f*cking Brad, he’s already knee-deep but they’re still pouring in. Overweight, drowsy and not exactly harmless – benign for the moment at least, Kalen scratches his belly under the sweatshirt and waits for the next thing. It’s like watching fruit rot. Bobby wonders how they could have been friends. If Brad’s folks hadn’t given him the motor bike, the car, the money, if they hadn’t let him throw those big parties when they were out of town and asked no questions when they came back, would he and Chape and the others have hung out with Brad in the first place? Would they have tolerated him?

Aware that his unwanted guest hasn’t responded, Bobby tilts his head and leans closer, trying to get a good look into those dull eyes. ‘Are you in there?’

‘Shut up.’ Brad is thinking. It is excruciating to watch. Awareness comes in stages. Finally he looks up. ‘Shit, he can’t still be mad about that old thing.’

‘He wanted to kill you after what you did.’ Bobby is listening hard. He waits for Brad to fill in the blanks, which he refused to do back then. ‘That night. After you guys rolled me out of the car. What happened, anyway?’

Whatever happened, Brad stonewalled Bobby then. He is stonewalling him now. ‘Shit happened.’ It’s his way of saying: Nothing.

‘Then why did Lucy leave town before graduation?’ God he despises Brad.

‘Man, that was a hundred years ago.’ Looking briefly at his fingernails, Brad lifts both hands and scratches his head: the thick gold hair has gone dark, but he still has those spoiled-rich-kid curls. ‘Besides, we just got there, I barely had the girl’s . . .’

‘Don’t say it.’

‘. . . pants off. Well, I didn’t.’ Guilt makes him insistent. ‘We didn’t do shit.’

‘You would have, and Walker knows it.’ Bobby knows Brad is too stupid to grasp the relationship between the intention and the act: crazy night at the end of a bad week, they were all out of their mind on vodka, stoned and high on whatever else they were taking, wrecked by the pressure of last things. What would Bobby have done if he hadn’t been laid out facedown in the mangroves by the time it came down? What could he have prevented, that changed certain lives? He doesn’t know.

‘F*ck that old shit, Chaplin, forget it. It’s over.’

‘That’s not what Walker thinks.’

‘That night is long gone.’ Kalen jams his fists into his mouth, gnawing thoughtfully. Then he looks at Bobby over his knuckles and says cleverly, ‘Besides. How do you know it was me?’

‘Who else did you roll out of the Jeep before you got her to Lands End, Kalen? Buck and Stitch too? Chape?’

‘You were too loaded to know who was there what went down, a*shole. Face it, you were drunk. You’re nothing but a f*cking drunk.’

My name is Bob Chaplin and I am an alcoholic. If Bobby had been in his right mind he never would have let Lucy get into the Jeep that night, not after that thing with Jessie Vukovich, which was an abomination. He’d have grabbed the wheel and wrenched the Jeep off the road if he’d been in his right mind, he would have done it before they ever reached the turnoff to Lands End. Bobby groans. ‘I should have stopped you.’

‘Yeah, right. Like you were there at the end.’

‘But Walker was.’

‘Walker, Walker, what does Walker know?’ There is a pause during which Brad casts around for suspects. ‘It was probably Coleman, Buck always had the hots for her. Yeah, everybody knows he wanted that – what do I want to call her – that sweet little piece of . . .’

‘Don’t.’

‘Lucy.’

So Bobby lets him have it with both barrels. ‘She has a son.’

Now it is Brad’s turn to shrug. ‘She wasn’t pregnant that summer when she left.’

‘He’s in town.’

‘She wasn’t pregnant when she came back for Thanksgiving, either.’

‘That doesn’t change what you did.’ He means: what we did.

‘Maybe not,’ Brad says genially, ‘but it’s somebody else’s problem.’

‘That’s what you think. He’s been asking around.’

‘Tell him it was Buck.’

‘I don’t lie.’ It hurts Bobby to say, ‘This isn’t about just one of us, Brad, if it was, it never would have happened.’ Bobby was crazy-drunk that night, yes, and psyched to be riding along in the back next to Lucy Carteret, and what would have happened if he’d had her alone, would he have gone too far because he was in love with her? His voice drops a register. ‘It was all of us.’ Grieving, he thinks: It would have been different. I’m not like them.

Brad chooses not to hear. ‘Now, if you’ll just get me a cab . . .’

‘You can’t say a thing’s over just because you’re done with it,’ Bobby says gravely. Why is he so disturbed? OK, he loved her, he still does, and when she got into the Jeep that night he thought – he doesn’t want to know what he thought; they were all crazy out of control.

‘So I can get out of here and into some decent clothes. Back off.’

Bobby says, ‘We’re all involved.’

‘You’re standing too close.’

‘I’m responsible . . .’

Brad pushes. ‘F*ck it, Chaplin. Move.’

‘. . . and you’re responsible.’ He pushes back.

‘Shit I am. What makes you think it wasn’t Walker?’

‘Well now, there we have a problem,’ Bobby says. In another minute he’ll either have to back off or suffocate. ‘You pushed her down.’

‘How do you know?’

Bobby’s voice is low and clear. In a kinder world, he could be heard in the back of a courtroom or in balconies far above any stage, but his life went a different way and he’s just-Bobby, here with just-Brad. ‘I saw you.’

Bobby is too close to the truth about himself. He did see, but he was drunk and raving, too trashed to get up off his face.

Brad’s voice is a congested rattle. ‘Like, you think I did all that single-handed?’

‘What did you do, Brad? What happened?’

There it is: that hateful, careless shrug. ‘Beats me.’

Bobby grabs those baggy shoulders and starts shaking. ‘Tell the truth, you f*cking a*shole.’

And with a practiced, guileless, who-me grin that confirms all Bobby’s suspicions, Brad glides out of his grip. ‘Dude, I was too f*cking drunk. How am I supposed to know what went down?’