Jacob awoke on the deck of a boat. The boat was hitched to a pick-up, moored in an alley. He shifted his head on the rope coiled beneath it and brought his hands to his eyes. Everything under the tarp was blue. He could hear crows through the canvas: for a moment he mistook them for seagulls. He shivered.
There was the bar, followed by a great stretch of missing time. He could see himself on Peyton’s back porch, though he couldn’t quite picture with whom. He was uncertain as to why he didn’t leave the bar with Casper and the others. They weren’t with him, at least he didn’t think they were. He wasn’t even sure why he left Peyton’s at all: he didn’t remember leaving and he probably could have spent the night. There must have been reasons.
And the boat. The boat was enormous. It wasn’t a speedboat either, or one of those little two-seaters that hit the river once a year on the Fourth. This was the real thing. There was even a door leading below deck. There was the boat he could see and there was even more of it below deck. He recalled trying to kick the padlock off in the middle of the night. He could feel the bruise forming on his heel.
He drew himself to the edge and looked down. He was a good fifteen feet from the pavement. He wondered how he made it up there in the first place.
He pulled himself up with the brass railing and, after a moment’s hesitation, was able to stand on his own. The street was empty. There were no cars and the earliest Mass wouldn’t begin for at least another hour. He tried to breathe and thought of food: a real breakfast with eggs and biscuits and coffee. He could smell it. He doubled over and vomited under the tarp. He rose again and stretched. The sky was dense and grey. There wouldn’t be a dawn: it would look the same come noon. He scrambled down the side of the boat and landed flat on the driveway. It was already late May but the mornings were still cool and he gazed at his breath as it leaked out into the air. He felt removed from the whole thing.
When he was eleven years old he began a novel titled Little Bennett Lane. It was to be the first in a series chronicling the adventures of a young British private school student. As he cleared off his desk he resolved to return to the collection of ghost stories he had planned to work on that summer. He’d get to them the minute he made some headway on the book. He began: Little Bennett Lane was eleven years old. All of his mothers friends said he was the handsomest boy they’d ever seen but the girls in class didn’t notice him. He read the sentence aloud with pride. He began a sketch in the margins, paused, and added: Neither did the boys. He stopped to sharpen his pencil. It took him quite some time. He wanted to see how fine he could make the point.
When he heard the Hutters across the street carry their argument from the living room to the sidewalk he swept the shavings aside, ran downstairs, threw open the screen door and stood on the porch. He hid his grin by looking as somber as he could. He’d rarely seen Mrs. Hutter: she was allergic to sunlight. She only appeared on the occasional evening and only for arguments. Even then she would wear a long sleeved dress, a wide brimmed hat and her wraparound shades.
The next afternoon he read over what he had written. He was so embarrassed that the back of his neck felt wet and warm.
When, after three months of stories, Raymond introduced him to his brother they looked and acted so much alike that he found it odd that they were two different people. He felt bad about it at the time, but he wasn’t surprised when, six years later, he got the call that Casper had been killed.
The photographs seemed to be leading him somewhere. He found the first, the black and white one of the kid in the highchair, under an ashtray filled with sparkplugs. Another was on the floor below the table strewn with tangled party jewelry. There were three near the knee high stack of Playboys. His palm began to sweat as he bent over to pick them up.
He was at the flea market with his mother. He wasn’t sure why he was there. He had been going there since he was ten. He went for the first time looking for baseball cards. His mother swore that there would be entire aisles with nothing but baseball cards. Even she seemed a little disappointed when they didn’t find anything. A few years later it was comic books, but all they had were old copies of Archie and Richie Rich. After comic books it was records, but he grew tired of flipping through the stacks of operas and Don Ho albums. By now he knew that the only books were old Reader’s Digests and random volumes of out of date encyclopedias (Mo-N of a fifties New World, the first four volumes of the science series that his mother used to buy every few weeks at the grocery store). He wasn’t sure why he was there and when the old woman shoved him aside to make it to the shoebox full of postcards he wanted nothing more than to sneak outside and have a cigarette on the curb.
But the photographs kept him moving. There were over a dozen in his hands when he found another on top of the collectible spoon display. It was of a middle-aged man, reclining on a slight hill beneath a tree. He was balding and, although the quality of the picture was not very good, it was possible to make out the glare of the sunlight on his scalp. His ear was cocked to the transistor radio set into the high grass. The look on his face was both serene and calculated. It was as if he knew his picture was being taken yet attempted to seem unaware of it. As if he were trying to appear to be holding back a smile, even though there was nothing to smile about in the first place.
Jacob looked up when he heard his name. His mother was across the room holding a ceramic lamp. The lamp was in the shape of a cat. She furrowed her brow and mouthed: “yes?” He smiled and gave her the thumbs up before turning back to the picture.
There was an old refrigerator on the curb, set aside from the rest of the trash. The door, removed from its hinges, slanted against it at a sharp angle. Jacob wondered if kids actually hid in there when they played bloody murder. And, if they did, if they actually suffocated. Stupid fucks, he thought to himself. He said it out loud.
“Stupid fuckers.”
He was working with Peyton. The cafe was empty and they were both smoking in front of the big window. Peyton pointed to the sky.
“You see those clouds? Those are cirrus clouds.”
“Yeah?”
“That means it’ll rain in a couple of days.”
“Huh.”
“I’ve been looking into meteorology a lot lately.”
“Really?” And then he asked, “why?”
“It’s weather, you know? It’s one of those things that are going on around us all the time and almost no one knows anything about it. There are tons of things like that.”
Jacob said, “weather.” It suddenly seemed charged with meaning.
It was one of his Peyton stories. When he would tell it to friends he’d always end it with, “and then, sure enough, two days later it rained like hell,” but the truth was he didn’t know if it actually did rain or not. Two days later he had forgotten to remember. He just thought the story sounded better that way.
The lights were on in the 7-11. From across the street he could see the pop bottles glowing in the coolers. The green cola was luminous. That morning it was brighter than anything he could have imagined.
