“Okay,” said Fontana. “I take it back. I’m sorry. I don’t know what got into me. I need help. I’m ready to surrender to a higher power. A higher power I call hairy sky pie. Will you help me?”
“Hell, no.”
“Then fucking do me, nihil-humper!”
I’m not sure how many Catamounts witnessed the blow. All I saw was Hollis rear back with his mace as though fixing to hammer a tent stake. Chip Gallagher was falling on top of me, the bottom of his clenched bourbon bottle mashing my nose, when I heard the muted crunch, Loretta’s scream. I wormed up out of the swarm, saw Fontana folded over, blood running out his stove head, its seep lit by bulbs in the dance floor. Hollis paced around his fallen prey, mace up, as though expecting reprisal.
He was wise to expect it. Catamounts edged in from all sides. Hollis kept them at bay with big swings of his mace. Philly stepped forward with Brett Meachum’s pistol.
“Put the club down!” he shouted, maybe imagining that along with Brett Meachum’s pistol came Brett Meachum’s training.
“Fuck off,” said Hollis, stepped in, banged the flanged iron mace head down on Philly’s arm. Philly shrieked and the pistol dropped to the floor. Hollis snatched it up, waved it at the room.
“I’m walking out of here!” he said.
Hollis hauled Philly up by the collar, pressed the pistol at the back of Philly’s head, made for the fire exit.
“You’re the worst fucking sponsor in the world!” came a shout, and here came Gary, flying out the shadows.
He crashed into Hollis and Philly and the three of them went down in a writhing heap. We heard a shot. Gary rolled off the pile holding his shin.
Now Hollis was up on top of Philly, choking him, working the pistol into Philly’s mouth. I took a running start, dove at Hollis’ ribs, knocked him over, pinned his arms under my knees. It was stupid, Catamounts, I know, but I was lucky, lucky I’d watched so many
goddamn cop shows. I guess you get one move like that in your lifetime. The pistol skidded clear of both of us. Bethany Applebaum picked it up.
“Oh my God, is it on?” she said.
Hollis squirmed beneath my knees. Philly winced up at me, clutched his crushed arm.
“Teabag him, Teabag!” said Philly.
“Shut up, Philly.”
“Kill me, Larry,” said Hollis.
“For real?” I said.
Now Philly stood, stomped on Hollis’ gut.
“You’re fucked!” he said.
Hollis wheezed for air.
“Pile on!” Mikey Saladin called. Catamounts poured in for the gang pounce. I could hear the crunches and moans and ecstatic sighs behind me as I scooted over to where Fontana lay.
LORETTA CRADLED his broken head in her lap. Stacy Ryson had slipped off one of Loretta’s leg warmers to stanch the wound. Bits of brain clung to the wool. I knelt, took Fontana’s damp hand, laid my knuckles on his brow. His eyes swiveled in faraway milk. I figured he was falling through folds of time.
“Miner,” he said.
“I’m here,” I said.
“Tell Loretta I love her.”
“I’m here, Sal,” said Loretta. “I love you, too, baby.”
“Oh, baby,” said Fontana.
“It’s okay,” said Loretta.
“Oh, fuck,” said Fontana. “It’s not fair. I don’t want to wake up.”
“It’s okay, baby.”
“Miner?” said Fontana.
“I’m here,” I said.
“No wakey.”
“No wakey,” I said.
“My sweet baby,” said Loretta. “My poor horsey.”
“No eggs,” I said. “No bakey.”
“No bakey,” I said again, but I don’t think he heard me. Fontana was pretty much dead by then.
CATAMOUNTS, once more I stuff my heart into the firing tube of language, loft it into the void.
See the wet meat soar?
I swore an oath off updates after the death of Fontana, but I’ve been checking the bulletin board on occasion, shocked anew each time at the dearth of soul-searching there. It’s as though that night at the Moonbeam never occurred, our lives one unruptured procession of promotions and breeding success, summer cottages, marathons. Who called for the moratorium on feeling? Who pulled the plug on the true? Or was it always just me, feeble Tea, who believed in the power of updates, who thought that by sharing with my brethren of the valley the story of my days and nights, my fears and joys, or even just the febrile murmurings of my mind, our forts of ruinous solitude might be breached.
Okay, maybe it was just me.
Saith the man: wakey, wakey.
I’ll keep it short, Catamounts. I know you are all busy with your lives, your amnesia. It’s been seasons since the Togethering, seasons since we gathered at the Nearmont cemetery, too, recited homilies, prayers, sank our principal into the loam. (I think it was loam—kind of clayey?) Autumn was cold, winter colder, the snow like white dirt. Now it’s spring and I’m giving it one last go at telling you what’s happened.
I don’t think you’ll be hearing from old Teabag again.
Hollis Wofford, as you’re probably aware, was convicted of two counts of murder in the second degree. He awaits sentencing in a special wing of the county jail.
I attended the trial, had the pleasure of hearing Hollis’s testimony regarding the night of the Togethering.
“Fontana got up in my face,” explained Hollis. “I happened to have my war mace with me. I figured, what the fuck, I’m already wanted for that punk’s OD. This tragedy, Your Honor, is the direct result of our society’s dragony drug laws.”
Hollis’s mace, as it happened, had been missing from a traveling exhibition of Germanic tribal artifacts. Hollis had some urns adorned with Wotan’s visage, too, fakes from the 1950s. He’d filled these with cocaine.
Rumor had it Hollis had shared a cell for a few weeks with Georgie Mays, who was being held on an assault charge. Georgie had exposed himself to the maiden aunt of a noted but recently disgraced historian whose latest best-seller included this index entry:
Mays, Matheson, 443—45
traitor, 334
brutality as slaveholder, 358
ultimate negligibility of, 516
“It’s been brought to my attention that one of the historians responsible for the ensmearment of my family name has been accused of plagiarism,” Georgie later wrote in an open letter to the
Eastern Valley Gazette
. “If this proves true, I apologize to this man and his old bag of an aunt. As for the originator of these so-called historical facts about my forebear, please understand I intend to track you down and inflict hurt of notable severity on your person. I will not tire until the Mays name is cleared or I am dead. And even if I’m dead, I won’t really be tired. Just dead.”
Let’s see, what else? Mikey Saladin caused an uproar after coming clean about his steroid use on a prime-time magazine show. He rolled up his sleeve to show the interviewer, a kindly woman in lavender, his needle marks.
“What’s the big deal?” he said. “There are five guys in the world who can do what I do, with or without the juice. Do you hate me because I’m multiracial, or because I’m trying to help kids stay off the streets? Make up your minds, America. One day human clones will play baseball on the moon. They won’t care what you think.”
Who’s to say he’s wrong, Catamounts?
Mikey signed with St. Louis and, if you haven’t been watching the highlight reels, he’s been putting up monstrous numbers. The league has ruled any records he breaks will be tainted by his confession. The taint will be designated with an asterisk, a likeness of which Mikey had tattoo’d on his forehead.
Many of you Catamounts attended the wedding of Doctor Stacy Ryson and Philly Douglas of Willoughby and Stern. I was not present, of course, but according to the “Hitchings” section of the
Notes
bulletin board, the sunset ceremony at the recently refurbished boat basin was quite a stunner. The bride wore cream, the groom a sporty sling for his mangled arm. Newly elected Congressman Glen Menninger made a rousing speech about the sanctity of the sacred. He also condemned those who would attempt to regulate the ingenuity and shininess of the American dreamscape.
“The roads of our great nation were built by men and women,” he added, somewhat cryptically.
PETE THE LANDLORD came by a few weeks after the Togethering to disavow his hoodlum stint. He’d stowed away his knuckledusters, his cologne.
“Sorry about all that,” he said. “I don’t know what came over me. I’ve stopped watching those Mafia shows. They’re an affront to my heritage anyhow.”
“I thought you were Greek,” I said.
“I am. How come we don’t get a show? Tell your Jewish friends in the media to do a Greek mob show.”
“I’ll get on that,” I said.
Pete seemed a bit sad and I invited him in for a beer. His troubles had nothing to do with his heritage, though, or even Hollis Wofford. A dustup at our alma mater had him worked up. The Eastern Valley school board had sent down a memo banning obstacle courses, even use of the phrase. Challenge Trail was the preferred nomenclature, but whatever the term, a single pliant traffic cone would now replace those old assemblages of ropes and radials and two-by-fours. Every child would charge the cone unimpeded, touch it with self-empowering triumph, no exceptions.
“Fucking fools,” said Pete. “It’s like they
want
the empire to crumble.”
The Challenge Trail sounded like an improvement on the old Catamount style of physical education, which, as you may recall, was predicated mostly on pummeling people with hard rubber balls or else enacting their humiliation via hanging rings, but I nodded along with Pete enough to buy a few more weeks in the apartment. I’d have his rent money soon. Penny Bettis had already risen like some Lady of the Artificial Lake to hand me the sword of temporary employment. A major athletic wear company wanted to promote its child workers in Malaysia as master craftspeople. Consumers would be able to choose which set of malnourished fingers stitched their crosstrainers and Penny had somehow convinced the project managers I was the man for the job, which was, and still is, to fabricate kiddie-cobbler biographies on the company’s website.
Teabag is back in the saddle, Valley Cats!
Daddy Miner, sad to say, has not been riding so high. Business at the Moonbeam has fallen off since the Togethering, and the opening of Don Berlin, Jr.’s Orchard of Bliss, erected on the site of Don Berlin’s Party Garden in an ambiguous swirl of filial redemption and oedipal zoning, hasn’t helped matters. Still, at least my old man isn’t doing okay.
I wouldn’t have the nerve to honor his wish.
I STILL SEE a good deal of Captain Thorazine. I’m happy to report he’s up and about with only the barest of limps. His shin wound was painful but shallow, healed in a few weeks. He’s living at home in Ben and Clara’s den, deals weed out of a reasonable facsimile of the Retractor Pad, which he had to abandon when he gave his money away.
No terrace, but a patio.
He smokes bales of his own supply but at least he’s been going to meetings again. I know it’s supposed to be anonymous and so forth, but Stacy Ryson’s sister Tiffany is not only born-again but an excrackhead, too. Maybe I’m revealing too many secrets but, according to Gary, Tiffany hates her sister’s guts for good reason. You should hear the sick manipulations Stacy pulled when they were tots, like convincing Tiff the only way their father would ever love her as much as he loved Stacy was to eat worms and defecate on the sidewalk.
Kids do the darnedest things, detest each other forevermore.
Gary still won’t talk to Mira, but I visit her sometimes at the Bean Counter. She’s dating Dean Longo’s brother Darren, studying pharmacology at night. Darren Longo is an inspector for Taco King, drives up and down the state ensuring the guacamole is fresh and feces-free. This gives Mira extra time to brush up on biochemistry, which I believe is her euphemism for popping fistfuls of Percocet. Sometimes when I drop by the Bean Counter I talk to the Colette
Man, whose real name is Craig Sperlman. Turns out he used to be a well-regarded college-sports affinity marketer before he had a breakdown at the Fiesta Bowl, ran out on the field in a diaper with a sign that read: “I love my poopy and football.” Craig’s a little crazy from a stint in the bughouse, but at least he has conviction.
He doesn’t read Colette anymore.
“Burned out on the bitch,” he said. “I’m heavily into feminists from the seventies now. Hairy first-wave hags with a seriously valid point about patriarchy.”
He loaned me some of his books and it turned out I remembered a few of them from my mother’s bedside table. I used to page through them whenever Hazel was out of the house, skip past the manifestos to the fucking, the sun-soaked orgies in a manless paradise. This time, though, I read the books for their arguments, and when I finished I wanted to call every women I’d ever known, make amends, the way Gary does whenever he goes a few weeks without getting loaded. Maybe I’d call Bethany Applebaum, or even Sarah Chin. No, Tea, I finally told myself, that’s too easy. You’re not Gary. Just try to be a good guy for a while.
Besides, the only person I wanted to talk to was Gwendolyn, and I didn’t even know where to find her anymore, except on Tuesday evenings at 8:30 P.M. That’s when her sitcom is on TV. It’s about a girl with big dreams living in a boring suburban town with her nowhere boyfriend, Grinder. It’s called
North Hills
and, as a veteran of those aforementioned twenty-five thousand hours of commercial television, I predict without hesitation this tripe won’t last the month.
Days I don’t visit the faux-Retractor Pad, or work on my sneakersmith bios, I drive all over town. That’s right, Catamounts, Teabag is now a mobile bundle of anxiety and remorse. Fontana wasn’t kidding that day at the diner. He really did leave me his old Datsun. It was in his will, notarized the morning of the Togethering. I’ve tried not to think about that part too much. Let’s just conclude the man had a peek at the cosmic calendar, saw his name penciled in.
It was Loretta who called to say the car was mine. She’d finally gone over to Fontana’s house. The place was mostly shut down, the water turned off, the furniture covered with sheets. He’d left a strange assortment of objects behind. There was a leaf blower in the bathroom, a trash bag full of golf balls in the refrigerator. He’d Scotch-taped Bat Masterson to the TV screen.
“He died typing,” I told Loretta.
“Lucky him.”
We were boxing up Fontana’s books when I flipped open a steamer trunk heaped with yokes, straps, bits. Loretta wept in sight of their old love gear.
“Goddamn it,” she said. “He just wanted to open up the earth for me.”
We sat and I held her for a while. It was nice to hold her, it was beginning to be more than nice, the smooth warmth of her shoulders beneath her blouse, the blackberry scent in her hair.
“He really admired you, Lewis,” said Loretta, tugged herself away.
“I admired him.”
“He said you were a guy who did the best you could with what you’d been given.”
“What the hell does that mean?”
This comment didn’t sit well with me, Catamounts. I guess secretly I’d been operating under the assumption the opposite was the case, that I’d been paralyzed by my enormous gifts, but what the hell did Fontana know? He was dead, for one thing.
“Don’t take it the wrong way,” said Loretta.
“I’ve got to go,” I said.
I drove out to the cliffs, parked at a scenic overlook. Barges loaded with garbage chugged down the river. Sick-looking gulls swooped, cawed. Factories on the far bank blew black smoke into the sky. A perfect May day.
Fontana had left me a note with the car keys.
Dear Lewis,
Like I said, nothing never happens. Keep an eye on Loretta. Don’t put any moves on her, though. If she finds true love again encourage her to trust in it.
Cheers,
Dead Fontana
PS Best get the brakes aligned or we’ll be having a putrefaction contest, and I have a head start, though the booze may finally hamper me in this, too.
I slipped the letter into a plastic sleeve with the Datsun’s papers, drove to Fontana’s grave.
I hadn’t been there since the funeral, which a few of you, to your everlasting Catamount credit, attended. I’ve forgiven Mikey Saladin his absence. He was playing a crucial doubleheader in Atlanta (two for four, three for five, one error). Why our illustrious representative Glen Menninger couldn’t make it is less clear, but even sending his minion Lazlo would have been gesture enough.
You never had my vote, congressman, but Gary was always on the fence concerning your legislative gifts. Yes, he’s just one man, but all you need do is alienate a single undecided a day and your next election could be your last. It’s such political miscalculations that confirm my belief you will never be more than a junior drone on Ways and Means.