"Okay."
"You have my number in your phone?"
"Yes."
"Do me a favor. Delete it."
"Delete it?"
"Just do me the favor. Just for peace of mind. My mind. I want to start over. I don't want people like you to know where I am."
"I'm not one of those people," I said.
"Right," said Sasha. "Bye."
I did not delete her number.
I studied our block in the sun's glitter, listened to the wind in the trees, thought vaguely of Jimmy Easter. Then I watched some television. There was a movie with the male lead's father from Caller I Do. He was much younger, on a chestnut stallion, waving, or maybe brandishing a saber for the Confederacy. He loved a lady but he had no cell phone and could not save her from the Union cannon.
Maura would be home soon. Then it would be time to get Bernie at Christine's. But this really wasn't my life right now. My life was across the river. My life was in the rough patch. My life was vaporing about. But I'd be back. I belonged here.
A man sat beside me on the bus out to Nearmont. He looked about my age, with black and gray stubble on his face, a flannel shirt. He tapped a packet of guitar strings in his hands.
"Do I know you?" he said. "You look familiar."
"I don't think so," I said.
"Pat?"
"No."
"No, that's me, Pat White. You look familiar. You play music? Did you ever play with Glave Wilkerson? Spacklefinger? Out of Eastern Valley?"
"No," I said.
"Sure?"
"Yes," I said. "I'm pretty sure."
I pointed to his packet.
"You play?"
"Hells, yeah," said Pat. "Used to have a band. Alternative. You like alternative?"
"I guess."
"What they play now, that's not really alternative. My generation, maybe our generation, looking at you, we were truly alternative. My band, we played all over. We dominated the area in terms of battle of the bands and whatnot. We even beat Spacklefinger one time."
"What was the name of your band?"
"Sontag."
"Really? That's an amazing name for a band."
"It means Sunday."
"Oh, right."
"That was the days of true alternative rock," said Pat. "Now it's just commercialized. But anyway, what was I saying?"
"I don't know," I said.
"That's 'cause I didn't say it yet." Pat laughed. "Oh yeah. We were good, is my point. But our drummer, he fucking signed up for the army, went to the Gulf War. Never came back. I mean never came back around here. Went to California. And that was the end of the band, because, I'll tell you, man, you can teach any human ejaculant to play bass or guitar or even front the frigging thing, but you can't turn somebody into a kickass drummer. People are born with that gift, and not many, bro, trust me. Look at what's his name, the British dude, who died of his own puke. Nobody's hit like that since, and that was forty years ago. Forty years is a lifetime. Forty years is my lifetime."
"Let's hope you have more than that," I said.
"Bro," said Pat, "I have no intention of outstaying my welcome. I came, I saw, I rocked, I made no money, I got Hep C. End of story."
Pat pulled a fifth of whiskey from the gym bag at his feet. He took some clandestine pulls, offered it up.
"No thanks," I said
"It's decent stuff."
"I'm trying to cut back."
"Dude who says that is never cutting back. He's either drinking or not drinking. I know all about it."
"All the same," I said.
Pat slipped the bottle back into his bag. We both put our seats back and stared out the window for a while. Night fell and I stared at the dark shapes of trees until they were just dark shapes.
There was city darkness and the dark outside the city, the Nearmont dark, the Eastern Valley dark, which, being only one town over, was pretty much the Nearmont dark. I pictured the Pangburn Falls dark as something else. Darker, maybe. Did Purdy ever stay the night in those upstate motels, cuddle with Nathalie under scratchy bleached-out sheets, kiss her shoulder to wake her before his dawn drive home? Or did Nathalie leave first, nervous about young Don, his dinner, his suspicions? Only Purdy knew. Only Purdy's version would ever stand for truth. Maybe that was what Don finally understood. There was no use fighting it. Especially when all you were really fighting for was the love of a man you hated.
Nobody was going to tell Nathalie's story. Stories were like people. We pretended they all counted, but almost none of them did.
"Hey," said Pat. "Want to rethink your decision?"
He was hunched over with the bottle near his knee.
"What the hell," I said, took a sip.
"That's the way," said Pat. "This country was built on the backs of dudes who drank on buses. What we do honors them. Anyway, it's all highly dealable in the end."
"What's that?" I said, drank some more.
"Everything. As long you don't choke on your puke. That's my golden fucking rule."
Twenty-nine
We rolled into Nearmont late. I stepped off the bus and walked the berm of the county road. Big Jeeps and minivans roared by and a cold wind blew off Grandy Pond. It was hard to see inside the cars, but I could almost make out the mothers and fathers and children in them, the dirty cleats and grocery bags, the lulling glow of dashboard lights. Everybody wanted to get home. Home could be a ruined place, joyless, heaped with the ashes of scorched hearts, but come evening everybody hustled to get there.
Once I walked this road on early spring evenings, knapsack slung on one shoulder, the cars ripping along, headlights slashing the yard barrels and wet lawns, my hair wet, too, from the track team showers, my body sore and buzzy from the weight room, all those snatches and squats and curls.
I threw the javelin then, was no champion, not even a contender for regional ribbons, just good enough to know the happiness of making your body a part of that spear, to get a good trot up to the throwing line, to slip into a rabbity sideways hop and snap your hips, launch a steel-tipped proxy of yourself at the sky.
I would savor the long walk home, the sweet, achy daze of it, drift into the jagged excitements of my future, paintings, parties, people, women people, a ceaseless celebration of my greedy, spangled destiny. There was nothing noble about such want. But it was me, and maybe some of you, walking home from school in April drizzle, dreaming.
And maybe it was me and some of you who took a nap before dinner, lay back on the sofa with a book, the assigned reading, another novel with the old-fashioned folk, their stiff speeches and chafed hearts. Maybe some of you, like me, shut your eyes with the book open on your chest, tumbled into another world, near and impossible, homeroom skin beneath rain-damp denim.
Certain noises would sever the reverie, a cough, my mother in the kitchen, the local news flipped on the kitchen TV-arson and elevator assaults across the river, or Don Mattingly, Donnie Baseball, with his leopard swing and porn-star mustache, on another hitting streak for the Yankees-the sounds of dishes pulled from their shelves, the rubber smooch of the refrigerator door, the tepid click of salad tongs, the hiss of garlic, frying.
No, Claudia never cooked with garlic. Maura did.
But this house in Nearmont, with all its woes, a Jolly Roger here and also never here, and the poison sadness seeping from my mother, even then this house in Nearmont was always a home, heated, with food, and familiar noises, and I was lucky to have it, this home to trust and hate, to launch myself from like a javelin that tails and wobbles and does not drive into the turf but skids to a halt at a slightly less-than-average distance, a mediocre distance, from the lumped lime line.
This is what the blessed get. A heated box, a stocked pantry, a clumpy metaphor.
The blessed get legs. The unblessed get humps, titanium girls.
I turned onto Eisenhower. Lights blazed in the bay window. Francine opened the door before I could knock.