Hothouse Read online

  DJ nods. “Canned goods and a kettle.”

  That’s what they found, basically, of the old guy’s life. Of his kitchen life, anyway. That’s what he lived on, until he didn’t. That’s what my dad kept saying and, apparently, DJ’s dad too.

  “Canned goods and a kettle,” I repeat.

  The sea, I can hear, is creeping up closer behind us. The tide is coming in and the flat little waves are making their broad crispy noises by raking back through the line of shells and pebbles not far off. DJ aims his beer bottle at mine without looking at me. We clink as we watch the party.

  “Russ and Dave. They are everywhere, aren’t they?” he says, then sips.

  “Everywhere,” I say. “Long may it last.”

  I expected something. A repeat. Maybe not the words, exactly, but the feeling. I get a muffled grunt instead.

  So I help. “Amazing. How two guys could cover so much ground, so much life, the way they did around here. I didn’t think it was possible, but I actually think I’m getting prouder as—”

  “You going out with Melanie, now?” he asks me, bluntly.

  “No,” I answer, bluntly. “Just asked her if she wanted to come along. She’s in Young Firefighters with me. What brought you here, anyway? I didn’t expect to see you.”

  “An invitation brought me.”

  “You know Adrian?”

  “Not really. But enough. You know how it plays, Russell. We are invited everydamnplace now. We are America’s guests, me and you. Standing invites, anywhere, anytime, anywho. We are stars, brother.”

  We clink glass necks again, in the most uncelebratory way possible.

  “Sounds like you don’t like it, DJ. If you don’t like it, why don’t you just stay home?”

  DJ drains his beer, stands up, looks out at the coming sea and then at me. “Because I want to be home even less, Russell.”

  It’s sad and a little wobbly, his voice, and his expression matches. Then it’s all gone again. “Beer?” he asks.

  I look at my bottle, half full. “Beer,” I say.

  Before DJ has a chance to return with my next beer, before I even have a chance to kill my previous beer, I am surrounded. It’s like the first day back at school, with everybody congregating in the school yard to compare long hot summers. Even though I haven’t been away, in any real, physical sense.

  “Dude,” Cameron says.

  My people don’t really say dude to each other. That’s the first sign. That things are not quite in the correct cosmic order. It is even, apparently, an organized approach, my old friends creeping up with caution once I am obviously alone. Didn’t want to approach, really. Didn’t want me alone though, either. Jeez, not that. I have seen them all at points, mostly funeral points and wake points and other such unnatural occurrences, but this, you would have to say, is the first real, live connection we would attempt to make since. Funny, guys seem to forget how to talk to a guy who has suddenly, spectacularly misplaced his father.

  “Dude,” I say in response to Cameron and the weirdness.

  Cameron gets it. I can see him visibly relax, exhale like the sea, let his shoulders fall back to their natural slump. The stupidity of a well-placed dude can really defuse a situation. He shakes my hand. “You doing all right, Russ?”

  “He’s still dead, if that’s what you mean.”

  It just came out. I think what I meant was to make light, to break ice, to help us all through the awkward moment that then would leave all the awkward moments behind us so we could enjoy something like a party and something like life from this point on.

  That was what I meant. What I get are two other things entirely. First, all the eyes in the lowering light go white as Wiffle balls. Philby and Jane and Lexa and Cameron and Burgess, folks I’ve known and schooled with and joked with for years, all go dead with bafflement over what I said.

  Second, though, is even worse. Second is what I did to myself. I choked myself, was what I did. The words were meant to show that I could handle it now but the fact is that I can’t, not quite, not now, and it takes every bit of my control not to spoil it all even worse by letting my face tell the truth.

  Firefighters come to the rescue. As they do.

  “A toast to heroes,” Melanie says, wedging herself in tight next to me on the wall. DJ, sitting in tight on her other side, hands across a beer.

  Everybody toasts heroes.

  “Toasted heroes,” DJ quips.

  “Wow,” Adrian says, leaning in and clinking everybody in reach, “you guys are hard-core.”

  “Gallows humor,” DJ says. “It’s the very bedrock of the firefighter community. Think nothing of it.”

  “Anyway,” I say, “toasting yourself there too, Melanie. All firefighters are heroes.”

  “Until proven otherwise,” DJ adds cheerily, initiating another round of clinks.

  Despite our best efforts, the crowd is beginning to relax and talk with something like the old familiar freeness. Adrian backs away into hosting; somewhere inside music creeps up a little louder to compete with rising tide and breeze.

  “But you really are,” Melanie whispers, very close, breathy on my ear. “Both of you, heroes.”

  She hangs, just there, for a few seconds, breathing after talking, and who could argue?

  “Thank you,” I say.

  She slaps my leg and goes back inside. That leaves me staring at DJ, across the empty space that was Melanie. With a grin, he slaps my leg just like she did. Except a lot harder than she did.

  “Having fun?” I ask into his broad curious grin.

  “Nope,” he says, slapping my thigh again.

  “Is my leg somehow responsible?”

  “Sorry.” His sorry is real, though he slaps me again.

  “Try and have fun, DJ,” I say. As with so many times in the past, I bounce my own time off of what I read on his face, and his face is reading uncomfortable now. I want him to start getting over it as much for me as for himself.

  “I am trying,” he says, waggling the beer bottle in front of my face.

  Philby interrupts with a snack bowl, which he shoves between us. The combination of Doritos and shrimps in the same bowl confirms the absence of any parental input here.

  “What a great idea,” DJ says, mashing up a fistful and working it into his mouth.

  “You guys know each other?” I ask.

  They shake hands while DJ chews.

  People are starting to pair up, I notice, both here at the party and for the longer haul. Philby and Jane have been circling each other for a while and it was fairly assumed that they would go through the events of senior year hand in hand. Same pretty much for Lexa and Burgess. This is all coming together and is all right by pretty much everyone.

  Was I dramatic to think, for a minute, that the events of my life would have somehow derailed these things? That anybody’s life out there was not going to go on as planned?

  “So you are not going out with Melanie?” DJ asks.

  “I said I wasn’t,” I say, again.

  “Well you wouldn’t be the first guy to say something like that and not mean it.”

  “I mean it.” I turn to face him. “This would be a curious point in life for me to start lying to you, now wouldn’t it?”

  His hard smile then loses just that bit of the crystal-cut edging. “Of course it would,” he says, patting me lightly on the cheek.

  “You are unusually handsy tonight, pal,” I say, gently taking his hand and placing it in his own lap.

  “I am, aren’t I?” he says. “I should probably have a beer.”

  “Are we drinking all their beer, though?” I ask. “Did you bring anything? I didn’t even bring anything.”

  Adrian, passing by, reaches over and gives the cheek another mild slap.

  “Don’t you dare,” he says, jolly, deadly serious. “You hear me? You just drop that shit right now. If you two ever have to buy another beer in this town I want to hear about it because somebody’s going to be due an ass
whippin’.”

  Without pause, Adrian is on his way again.

  “Kinda cool, huh?” I say, standing up now next to my oldest and dearest. “I mean, how nice does that feel?” I pat his shoulder.

  I feel his shoulder muscle tight as a baseball in my hand. “Let’s go drain every goddamn drop,” he says fiercely.

  We don’t drain every goddamn drop, but we make a solid effort. It is a nice party, a warm and breezy finish to what has been an unbreezy summer, and a decent approach shot at the better eventful year to come. The music is kept at a mellow level, glasses never break, fights never develop, bedrooms are not violated. Maybe it is the somber element DJ and I brought, maybe it is the newly mature and responsible air about us turning seniors and experiencing real life more than we had intended, but the party is a more dignified affair than last year’s or the year before. Some people, I suppose, might be a bit disappointed by that. I wouldn’t know. If they are, it doesn’t show.

  We are all, in fact, pitching in cleaning up as Adrian prepares to close up shop not too long after midnight, in accordance with the pretty fair and reasonable no-parents arrangement. There is even Simon and Garfunkel music coolly soundtracking the housekeeping as if to have the parental types there in spirit.

  “Canned goods and a kettle,” I say at the same time S&G say hello to darkness their old friend. I am washing up a sampling of the perfectly beach-house collection of mismatched drinking glasses in the old tub of a beige enamel sink. I shift on my feet, feeling the puckery sheet linoleum on the floor where the old man was found somewhere right here near me. Where the old man was found by my old man, right here near me. I imagine it clearly now, the scene. Not the grisly, not the befoulment, the decomposition and the dogs and that. I picture the remnants of the life that my dad came into when he came into this place. I see him seeing the canned goods and kettle, and wishing more than anything he had gotten there in time to sit down to a cup of tea with the gent. For every “stench of death” detail he ever brought home from this gig, he brought home thirty-five hundred little swatches of quilts and slippers and whiffs of baklava and bitter home-perm hair junk that made up the lives and deaths he crashed through with some regularity.

  And I think, That was the hero stuff. I know, that was the hero stuff.

  “Nice work,” Adrian says, his chin on my left shoulder as I dry a tall textured avocado-green glass. “You are the kind of guest who is always a joy. Thanks for coming.”

  “Thanks for having me. And now, you are brooming everyone out, correct?”

  “Largely correct,” he says.

  We turn from the sink, head out of the empty kitchen toward the living room, Adrian snapping off the light behind us. The majority of people are gone, a handful of stragglers, straggling, waiting for me, apparently, which I particularly appreciate.

  “Where is DJ?” I ask. Normally, I would not have asked. I am not my brother’s keeper, as I am barely my own, but there was an unsettling feeling about him to me, this evening, and I just want to see him all right.

  “He’s all right,” Adrian says, snapping off that light as well and shepherding us out through the screened porch. “He said he would rather not go home. Asked if he could borrow the house.”

  I double-take, then figure why not. Home will be there tomorrow.

  “Is that within the rules?”

  “Not technically. But I’m not saying no to him, and you know, neither are my parents.”

  As we stand on the patio now, DJ’s voice floats down over us.

  “Another fringe benefit,” he says.

  We turn to look up at him, and Melanie, leaning over the porch railing, with beers. “Thanks, Dad,” he says, holding up his beer in the direction of the wide ocean.

  It’s getting hard to distinguish between surf sounds and people gasping.

  “Keep a low profile,” Adrian advises the couple as he leaves them with his house.

  “How low should I go?” DJ asks, his beaming grin and outstretched beer making him a pervy little Statue of Liberty.

  “Just get in the house,” Adrian snaps, and Melanie pulls the lad inside.

  As a bunch of friends walk up the beach, the high tide now snappling in one ear, I’m thinking that getting the girl is generally considered to be the high-water mark of a young man’s evening. There are, though, even finer, and rarer happenings, and one of them is when you recognize a moment when you have a breathtakingly great friend. When Adrian bumps up close and speaks to me over the crunch of tiny defenseless seashells, I have exactly one of those moments.

  “That’s kind of shit, man,” he says. “Now you got no father and no date.”

  You have to be a breathtakingly great friend to say something like that.

  I continue looking straight ahead, the baby whitecaps flickering at my left peripheral, the luminous white sand doing similar off to the right. The girls, Jane and Lexa, let out gasp-squeals of horror and the guys, Burgess, Philby, and Cameron, make uh-oh noises down deep in their throats. Adrian, though, knows just how to proceed.

  Nudge. He prods me at the back of my shoulder. Then again, a little harder, then again until I lurch forward, and burst out laughing.

  “She was not my date, jackass,” I say.

  He bear-hugs me from behind and lets me drag him along the sand as everybody exhales, laughs, and contributes to the discussion of what a slime Adrian is.

  “I’m sure you will do better tomorrow, Russ,” Cameron adds, “when girls see your imprints in the sand.”

  I look at my feet as I walk, seeing Adrian’s feet together dragging a deep trough between my footprints.

  “Fine,” I say. “I’ll take all the help I can get. With you all marrying up at a worrying rate, I’m going to wind up having to take my mother to the prom.”

  “Too late,” Adrian says. “Your mom already asked me to take her. Don’t wait up.”

  It is perhaps possible to have too good a friend. I drop Adrian facedown in the sand.

  “You could go with Cameron,” Adrian says into the sand. “Nobody’s buying what he’s selling, either.”

  Cameron silently walks on top of Adrian’s prone body, including his fat head.

  “Well done,” I say.

  “Thanks,” he says. “Doesn’t mean I’m not interested, though.”

  “I’ll get back to you,” I say.

  It goes on like this while it lasts, and in its quiet uneventful way this is the finest time I’ve had since my dad died. Quiet and uneventful were underrated in my head before. Friends, even, were underrated. They all seem like more now.

  We lose Jane and Philby at the foot of the lifeguard stand. Burgess and Lexa make it as far as the ramp by the fried dough place where Melanie and I first hit the beach preparty and all. They are suddenly quite tired and need a short sandy rest.

  Lexa kisses me on the cheek. “You’re a brave guy,” she says, mistylike like girls can get by the water, late at night, so I’ve heard.

  “For what?” I ask. “For living?”

  She kisses me again, this time right near my mouth, which feels right and wrong and wonderful. “Maybe for that, yeah,” she says, backing away toward her man.

  “Okay,” I say, a grateful smile stretching my face. “I’ll take it.”

  Cameron is now standing right in front of me.

  “What?” I ask.

  “Have you decided yet?”

  “Ah, no, Cam, I’m still working on it.”

  “Okay,” he says, “then I’m going to walk the beach some more, as long as we’re still free agents.”

  “Good luck,” I say, and Adrian blurts, “Safe sex … or the other kind,” as Cameron heads across the sands.

  Adrian and I walk on in the direction of the neighborhood proper, which is two or three miles interior. All the small beachy businesses are closed as we pass through that unrealness into the substance of grub town life.

  “I like that,” he says, maybe ten minutes beyond the beach.

 
“You like what?”

  “I like what you said to Lexa, ‘Okay, I’ll take it.’ It’s a good attitude, in light of all.”

  “Hey,” I say, shrugging, “I’ll take anything. I’m not proud.”

  He gives me a backhand knuckle slap in the ribs.

  “Like hell you’re not,” he says firmly.

  I laugh. It can be nice to be caught out. It can be joy to be known.

  “Like hell I’m not, true,” I say. “Adrian, I gotta tell you, I know it’s not mine, exactly, I know I haven’t earned anything, but I am so insanely proud, of everything remotely connected to my father. I want to scream with it, I’m so goddamn proud, of myself somehow. Am I mental? Am I shitty?”

  He grabs my shirt at the shoulder, walking along at the same time, shaking me all over while he talks. “No, no, no, no, hell, no Russell. Jesus, I hope you don’t smack me for this, but I feel the same, exact way. Just knowing you, knowing your dad, just touching it like, that much … Jesus, I’m getting goose damn bumps and choking up over it just trying to tell you.”

  He lets go of my shirt, holds out his arm in the warm late air, and I can easily make out a full range of tiny flesh mountains.

  “And I can promise you,” he adds, “that everybody feels the same. Even if most of ’em probably can’t say it to you, they’re feeling it.”

  I hold out my arm, to compare my own childish, awkward bumpiness.

  “I’m glad you can say it, anyway,” I say.

  “I can. You’re a hero, just go ahead and take it, take it all.”

  I walk on a bit like that, holding out my arm and looking at it. “Okay,” I say. “I will.”

  Lots of the time, it’s more like a great friend has up and moved away on me. Without telling me he was going. Without calling or writing after he left.

  I wake up at night pretty often. I always woke up at night pretty often but that made sense because I would get up to meet my dad and we would eat.

  Firefighter’s shifts are weird things anyway, but my dad put some effort into making them even weirder. His shifts would be twenty-four hours some days, ten hours other days, fourteen hours over nights. Then he’d be home for four days straight. But what I loved was when he would come in at the odd hours—six in the morning or twelve at night. He was always volunteering to do extra this and that at the station because, he said, “I got the next four days off to rest up.” But really, because he loved that fire station, and he loved those guys. “Hunker in the Bunker” was what he called hanging out at the station. “Firefighting is a team sport,” he told me over and over. We both looked forward to the day when I would join the team and we could fight together.