“Poor kid,” Harry said, and Buddy tried to pin down whether Harry’s sympathy was real or synthetic. “Know what, Buddy? I just caught a glimpse of her. I mean, you were blocking my view of her, for crissakes. But she looked familiar. I don’t know. I’ve been trying to place her ever since. Something about her. I’ve seen her before somewhere …”

  “Is that right?” Could Harry hear the hollowness in his voice?

  “Yes, it’s one of those things. You know, like a name on the tip of your tongue and you can’t quite remember …”

  “Sure, I know what you mean.” Was Harry toying with him, teasing him?

  “Listen, what is her name, anyway? Maybe that will solve my memory problem …”

  “Her name?”

  “Yes, you know. What’s on her birth certificate. What she signs on her theme papers at school, what she puts down at the end of her letters.”

  He knows, of course, he knew all along.

  Reckless suddenly, figuring he had nothing whatever to lose, he said: “Guess, Harry.”

  “Guess what?”

  “Guess her name. You’re good at games. Go ahead, guess.”

  Let him say her name, if he knows it. I’m not saying it.

  “Give me a clue, then.”

  “Like what?”

  “Like her initials. The initial of her first name.”

  “Nope, you’ve got to guess the whole name.”

  Big pause. Buddy almost smiled. Harry liked cat-and-mouse stuff and he was being given a taste of it.

  Harry sighed. “This is going to be hard. I mean, there are twenty-six letters in the alphabet and her name has to start with only one of them. I’ll tell you what, Buddy. I’ll have to think about it. I’ll have to give it some time. Let me think about it tonight and I’ll call tomorrow and give you my guesses. Okay?”

  “Okay,” Buddy said, trying to disguise the relief in his voice.

  “But you know what might be even better?”

  “What’s that, Harry?”

  “Maybe I should call up Jane Jerome and ask her about that fellow I saw her with this afternoon at the Mall. Think she’d make me guess?”

  Harry hung up almost before the word guess was out of his mouth and Buddy Walker stood there, the dial tone like a small explosion in his ear.

  Harry did not call back for two days and Buddy became anxious. Knowing Harry, familiar with his tricks and techniques, he wondered whether he was planning one of his exploits, as he playfully called them. On the third day, he decided to confront Harry and waited for him at the doorway to the school cafeteria before lunch break.

  Harry was alone, for which Buddy was grateful. He stepped in front of him, planted himself in front of him, in fact, barring his entry into the cafeteria.

  “I want to talk to you,” Buddy said.

  “I’m really starved, Buddy,” Harry said. “I hear they’re having meat loaf. You know how I love meat loaf. And I hate to talk while I’m eating …”

  The smirk on Harry’s face, his cool appraising eyes, the what-the-hell way he stood—all of this was irritating but Buddy had to accept it.

  “This’ll only take a minute,” Buddy said. He had seen Harry talking a mile a minute many times while eating but knew that this was another pretense, another game he enjoyed playing.

  Harry lifted his shoulders in surrender, indicating his patience with friends.

  “Okay, Harry, so the girl is Jane Jerome.”

  Harry raised his nose to the air. “That meat loaf smells delicious.” Buddy could, detect no aroma at all in the air, only the stale smell of the corridor itself. “Why were you avoiding me at the Mall, Buddy? Why didn’t you at least wave? Maybe even introduce me?”

  Aghast, Buddy said: “For crissakes, Harry, you were in court for wrecking her house. Your name was in the newspaper. And you wanted to be introduced?” Buddy bowed in exaggerated fashion. “Hey, there, Jane Jerome, let me introduce Harry Flowers. Name sound familiar? He’s the guy who trashed your house …”

  Harry smiled his lazy smile. “And then I would say: And how about Buddy Walker here? Has he mentioned that he was with me when we trashed the house and took special pains with your bedroom?” Frowning at Buddy: “Did you or didn’t you piss on her wall? Or did you just vomit on the carpet?”

  Speechless, Buddy turned away, all appetite gone, actually smelling the meat loaf wafting from the cafeteria but finding it repugnant. When he turned back to Harry, his face was only inches away, Harry leaning in to him.

  “What the hell are you doing with her?” Harry asked. “You some kind of madman? Looking for trouble?” Then relenting a bit, withdrawing: “How did all this get started anyway?”

  “I called her up. To tell her I was sorry.”

  “And she decided to go out with you?” Disbelief in his voice.

  “No, she doesn’t knew it was me who called. But when I heard her voice on the telephone …” And he told Harry, who kept sniffing the air for aromas of meat loaf, about following her in the Mall and falling down and the rest of it.

  “I love her, Harry. And she loves me,” he finished, lamely.

  “But what happens when she finds out, Buddy? What happens then?” He seemed sincere, now, as if he really cared.

  “She won’t find out,” Buddy said, his words more convincing than his feelings.

  “Of course she will,” Harry said, “Wickburg’s a small place and Burnside is even smaller. Is her sister still in the hospital? Still in a coma?”

  Buddy nodded, trapped, knowing what question Harry was going to ask before he asked it, because he had asked himself that question a thousand times. And Harry asked it:

  “What happens when she comes out of the coma? When Jane Jerome says, ‘Karen, I’d like you to meet my boyfriend, the guy I love.’ And she looks at you and remembers that night?”

  “I’m not sure if she saw me that night,” he said. “I was upstairs when she came in the bouse.”

  “You’re in a no-win situation, Buddy,” he said. “Sooner or later, Jane Jerome’s going to find out you were in the house that night whether her sister remembers you or not. You picked the wrong girl to fall in love with. The wrong girl and the wrong time …”

  “She’s worth the chance, Harry,” he said.

  Harry stretched his arms, flexed his shoulders. “Ah, smell that meat loaf,” he said, sniffing the air again. “Time to indulge the appetite.”

  “You go ahead, I’m not hungry,” Buddy said. Even if he had been hungry, he would not have wanted Harry Flowers’s company during lunch.

  As Harry walked away, he shot Buddy a glance over his shoulder.

  “Another thing you should worry about, Buddy,” he said. “Suppose somebody decides to tell Jane Jerome all about you and what you did to her room?”

  He left Buddy standing there, like a target on a shooting range with no place to hide.

  The whiteness of the ceiling woke her up.

  But that was silly.

  Ceilings, not even white ones, didn’t wake people up.

  What did then?

  She didn’t know. Noise, alarm clocks, Mom calling from downstairs: “Get going, Karen, you’ll be late for school.” Those things woke you up.

  But not ceilings.

  Besides, she was looking down at the ceiling and ceilings should be up not down.

  She closed her eyes demolishing the ceiling, but the darkness of her closed lids threatened to engulf her, eat her up, and she opened her eyes again.

  The ceiling was still white but this time it was above her where it should be and she saw a crack in the ceiling, like a small streak of lightning caught forever in white.

  She blinked her eyes rapidly, testing them, to see if they worked, which was also silly but somehow necessary. She tried to move. Or rather she thought about moving, again testing, although she couldn’t figure out why she should be testing herself like this. And why should she be here?

  But where was here?

  That’s when the panic hit, like a wave engulfing her, swinging her up and over so that she felt her body lifting, straining at the sheet but more than the sheet, something pulling at her arm, her arm imprisoned, held fast, tied to a terrible something next to the bed, from which came a hum or a blip, she wasn’t sure which.

  She knew suddenly with the force of a door slamming in her face that she was in a hospital and she had an image of stairs tumbling around her, up and down, but the memory and the panic were like shivers now, even her blood seemed to be shivering like icy worms that had been disturbed under her flesh and she was about to scream when she plunged into darkness and everything was wiped away like crazy drawings on a blackboard.

  Jane found out about Buddy’s drinking in the lobby of the Wickburg Cinema when a half-pint bottle of gin dropped out of his jacket pocket as he stooped to pick up one of her pearl earrings that had fallen to the floor.

  Later, Buddy realized he had been stupid to have carried the bottle while on a date with Jane. Before leaving home, he had, on impulse, slipped the bottle into his jacket pocket. Just in case. In case of what? He didn’t know. But he was jumpy. Had to be prepared. Prepared for what? For anything. In case. In case of what? In case Karen suddenly recovered and Jane wanted to take him to the hospital to meet her. In case Harry double-crossed him, made a phone call to Jane, for instance. In case, for crissakes.

  Jane was stunned when she saw the bottle tumble out of his jacket and shatter on the lobby floor. She knew immediately that it was some kind of liquor even though it was as clear as water as it spread across the polished tile.

  Still she asked:

  “What’s that?”

  Buddy, speechless, on one knee, stared at the mess of broken glass and spreading gin.

  “Bud … dee,” she said, drawing out his name. “What were you doing with that bottle in your pocket?”

  Conscious now of the people streaming by, looking at them curiously, someone giggling, someone else snickering.

  “I …” That was all Buddy could utter, not wanting to look at Jane, and not wanting to look at the mess either, and wondering what the hell he was supposed to do with it. He began to pick up the shards of glass, handling them gingerly to avoid cutting himself and then looked around for a waste container, couldn’t see one through the legs of people passing by. He looked up, dreading to see the look on her face, the look that would match the horror of her voice. But she was gone.

  Standing by his mother’s car in the parking lot, Jane felt as though the pieces of a puzzle had come together to form a picture, not a really clear picture but a picture anyway. Of Buddy as a drinker, maybe an alcoholic. She wasn’t sure about any of that. Yet, there had been clues that she had ignored simply because they had not made any sense in relation to the Buddy she knew and loved. The smell on his breath sometimes, what she thought was some kind of medicine. His incessant chewing of gum or Life Savers after he had admitted once that he hated gum and Life Savers. His shirred speech on occasion. For a time, she actually thought he had a speech defect that he was trying to cover up. All unconnected in her mind, her suspicions coming and going so swiftly that she had barely acknowledged them. Waiting for him now, the crowd thinning out, thankful that he had parked under a floodlight, she winced as she thought of him kneeling on the floor of that lobby, his head hanging down, like the first time she had seen him at the Mall. God, how she loved him. But that love was now a lonely aching that had found its way into every crevice of her body.

  She saw him coming slowly across the parking lot, head down, like a little boy going home to be punished.

  Tenderness entered her aching and brought tears to her eyes.

  “Oh, Buddy, poor Buddy,” she murmured, a bit of pity mixed with the tenderness. Maybe she had leaped to wrong conclusions, maybe she had exaggerated those clues. All she wanted to do was to gather him into her arms and kiss away all the bad things in their lives.

  The argument went on for more than an hour in the car in the parking lot, the theater crowd long gone, the night turning chilly and the wind kicking stray bits of paper across the pavement.

  “But it’s not a problem,” Buddy insisted. “I drink because I like to drink. And if I stop drinking, then that’s admitting that it was a problem. See what I mean?” He was amazed at his sharpness, how he could be so logical and persuasive, although doubt remained on Jane’s face. And a distant look in her eyes, as if she were contemplating things she could not articulate.

  “But it’s not natural, Buddy,” she said, trying to remain calm and keep her voice reasonable, disguising the panic that had her in its thrall. “You’re in high school. You should not be drinking at all. All right, maybe at a party or something. But not as much as you do.…”

  He frowned, wondering what she would think if she knew how much he actually drank. He had told her that he liked a drink now and then while doing his homework and to relax after school. “Not very much,” he had said.

  “How much is not very much?”

  His thoughts scurried. “Oh, maybe a pint every few days.” Knowing he had to walk a delicate line here, not saying too much or too little. When he saw her face stiffen, he knew he had gone too far. And tried to amend it: “I never really count. I don’t even think it’s that much …”

  Her questions were unending. Where do you buy the stuff? How can you buy it when you’re not old enough? Who sells it to you?

  He answered guardedly, telling her the truth but shading it. Did not tell her about the times he could not connect with Crumbs and lurked in the park with the bums, feeling like a bum himself. Did not tell her about the hangovers in the morning when he stumbled his way to school waiting to get to his locker where he had stashed a bottle. Did not tell her that right now, this minute as they were talking, as he was insisting that he drank because he liked it and could give it up any time, he was desperate for a drink, he was dying for the sweet balm of the booze.

  “Why did you take that bottle to the movies tonight?” she asked, honestly curious.

  He lifted his shoulders in a weary shrug. Could not tell her the truth and could not think of a lie. He hated the word lie. Excuse was a better word. He could not think of an excuse that she would accept.

  “When you went to the John once, was that so you could have a drink from the bottle?” She remembered how he had returned chewing Dentyne furiously.

  “No,” he said. Lying. He was a liar.

  “You’re lying,” she said, her voice flat with accusation and regret.

  He turned to look at her and saw her as the enemy. The girl he loved but still an enemy. Her eyes flashing with anger and something else beside the anger. Sadness maybe.

  “Okay, I lied because I didn’t want you to feel bad,” he said.

  “But why did you have to go and have a drink of whiskey during the movie?”

  “It’s not whiskey. It’s gin.”

  “It’s liquor,” she said.

  “Because it makes me feel better,” he said, blurting out the truth at last. “Because the world is sometimes a rotten place and it takes away the rotten things …” The rotten things he had done—like the trashing.

  “How about me?” she said. “How about us? How can you say the world is rotten if we have each other?”

  Tears flooded her eyes, more than tears. Sobs, her shoulders heaving, her body shuddering, uncontrolled. She had not cried like this since she was a baby, maybe never had cried like this. And then she was in his arms, encircled by him and he was murmuring against her cheek as she clutched him.

  “I love you, Jane. You’re not part of the rotten world—you’re the reason why I’m happy. You make the rotten things go away …”

  Like the gin, she thought. I’m like liquor to him.

  His love for her was a sudden rushing through his body and he saw what a wretched lonely thing his life would be without her. Worse than being without the booze. He thought of the emptiness of the days ahead if he should lose her. He started to cry, his tears joining hers as their cheeks met. “I love you, Jane,” he said, his voice strangled, unrecognizable to himself. “I love you more than drinking.”

  Stifling her own sobs, moved beyond words at the sight of Buddy crying, his mouth crooked, his nose running, his hair disheveled, she waited for him to say the words she longed so achingly to hear. And he said them:

  “I’ll stop drinking, Jane. I promise that I won’t drink anymore …”

  He spent three drinkless days without any trouble at all, his desire for liquor obliterated by this second chance with Jane. Yet, he admitted in a small part of his mind that there had to be a different solution. The prospect of living the remainder of his life without having another drink was impossible to contemplate. In his panic and desperation that night in the ear, those words I won’t drink anymore were the final weapons he had used to keep from losing her and he believed them utterly when he spoke them.

  During those three days, wistfulness descended upon him like a sad mist, although he did not have any thirst for a drink or longing for its effects. However, a certain light seemed to have dimmed in his life, as if the sun were still shining but through dark clouds. Stop with the self-pity, he told himself. Jane is your sunshine, like that old song says.

  Since he had started drinking seriously a few months before, he had become aware of articles on alcoholism and sometimes read them. Then he stopped reading them. He refused to take the tests the articles often contained, like, on the seven or eight or nine signs of alcoholism. He had flunked too many tests in school, he didn’t need to flunk any on liquor. But he became aware of the AA slogans and in those first few days of his promise, he made use of them, especially One Day at a Time and Easy Does It. He cut himself off from thoughts of the future. He concentrated instead on today not tomorrow, or next week. The trick seemed to work, at least for the time being.

  Another trick: the bottle of gin in the garage, which he had stashed away before the promise and was untouched. He had always tried to keep an extra bottle on hand, remembering the times of panic when he didn’t have any liquor in the house or no money or on Sunday when the stores were closed. (Once he raided his father’s liquor cabinet but had been disappointed to find one lonely bottle of whiskey, almost empty so that he could risk only a quick brief gulp.) As a result, he had tried to keep a spare on hand and that spare remained at this moment in the garage. Three days since he had had a drink, three days of bliss with Jane—she had never been so tender, so loving, allowing him the night before to remove her blouse and bra and kiss her breasts. Let the bottle stay untouched, he said to himself that afternoon of the third day as he plunged into his homework in his room, the volume on his CD turned up so high, the walls seem to buckle with the assault of heavy metal.

 

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