Michael Chabon

“We’ll only be gone a few days,” I said. “Absence makes the heart grow fronds, as my father says.”

“But why can’t I come?” said Phlox. “It’s because Arthur hates me. Right?”

“No, it’s because I hate you.” This did not go over well. “Come on, Phlox, no one hates you.”

“Do you love me?”

“Like the big time,” I said. “Look, it’s just me and Cleveland and Arthur. Crude jokes, poker games, sports talk, boozy sentimentality—you know, boys’ stuff.”

She frowned. I knew I was being too flip, but I felt lousy, and more than that, I think, I wanted to get away from her; to pause for a moment. I’d heard, somewhere in the past couple of days, the stealthy entrance of creepiness into my unsecured summer, a faint creaking of the woodwork, and I felt as though I ought to lie very still, not draw a breath, and listen for the something that might be there, for the next telltale footfall.

11

SEARCHLIGHTS AND GIANT WOMEN

NEXT MORNING BEFORE SUNRISE, I sat in the backseat of the old Arning Barracuda, wiping flakes of doughnut glaze from my lips and struggling to appreciate the negligible effects of a single cup of coffee. Cleveland and Arthur sang along with an old John and Yoko cassette and pointed out the windmill-shaped restaurants, the car dealerships surmounted by giant plaster statues of bears and fat men, the gunshops and gospel billboards, that were the beloved landmarks on the way to Fredonia. I sang “Hail, Freedonia,” from the Marx Brothers movie. I hadn’t driven a long distance since coming, with all my belongings, from Washington to Pittsburgh to start school four years before, and had forgotten how much I enjoyed lying across the backseat of a car with my hair hanging out one window and my feet out the other, watching the phone poles pass, listening to music, the engine, the wind passing over the car.

After we’d been twice through the Lennon and I’d slept, apparently, through Cleveland’s other cassette, there were only the sounds of the Barracuda and of Patsy Cline on the radio, coming in faintly from somewhere, and it was eight o’clock in the morning, and I watched happily the backs of my friends’ heads. We pulled into a Stop & Shop for more coffee, and then I felt like talking; I asked how long, exactly, had they been friends?

“Nine years. We met in our first year at Central Catholic,” said Cleveland. “We found ourselves what you might call together apart.”

“He means that everyone else hated us,” said Arthur.

“Speak for yourself,” said Cleveland. “I simply noticed that we weren’t like any of the other boys in that excellent school.”

“Central always looks to me like Santa’s Castle,” I said.

“We weren’t like any of the other elves,” said Arthur.

“Arthur, here, already had, I believe, some vague notion of the perverse and sinful sexual longings that would shortly make him as un-Catholic as one might conceivably be—”

“And Cleveland was already drinking a six-pack of beer a day, and smoking cigarettes and marijuana. And reading every book on the Index librorum prohibitorum. And Cleveland,” said Arthur, turning to look sadly at his friend, but speaking with the same sarcastic tone, “wrote in those days.”

“Yeah. Say, isn’t it too early for this discussion? Couldn’t we save it for such time as I am drunk enough to ignore it and fall asleep mid-reply? That reminds me,” he said, and without slowing he swerved the car off the small state highway and we stopped in the deserted parking lot of a grocery store, where Cleveland got out and went around to the trunk.

“What’s in the trunk?” I asked Arthur, who yawned, stretched, and turned to face me, looking pink and unshaven.

“Oblivion,” he said. “Oblivion is in the trunk.”

Cleveland climbed back in with a six-pack from the cooler, and by the time we reached the house on the lake, he was well into his second green aluminum fist of Rolling Rock, and though his driving hadn’t really fallen apart yet, I was glad we weren’t going any farther. The road grew narrow and crooked, the trees grew denser, and to our left I began to make out, through rare gaps in the pine and sycamore, strips of silver lake, and the striped awnings of distant houses; soon we came to a gravel drive, to a cluster of rusted mailboxes like a row of tumbledown tenements, their red metal flags hoisted and falling at all angles. As we pulled, gravel popping, into the driveway, Cleveland stopped the car, threw it into park, and got out.

“I’m going to walk,” he said. He slammed the door and set off, carrying a can of beer. Arthur and I sat a moment, watching him shamble toward the empty house, something determined yet wary in his tread. The engine began laboriously to idle. Three or four minutes passed. Arthur put his feet up on the dashboard.

“Well?” I said.

“He always does this,” said Arthur. “He’ll be back.”

“You mean we just sit here and wait?”

“Can you drive?”