Read The Slide: A Novel Online
Authors: Kyle Beachy
The Slide: A Novel
the slide
Contents
For Neil Beachy and Harry Brown,
two men I wish I could have known
Now I’m gonna be twenty-two, I say oh my and uh boo hoo.
Iggy Pop, “1969”
june
one
w
hat was good about the road was that the road’s decisions were already made. For two full days I’d watched it emerge on the horizon and disappear beneath me. I saw it change colors, from black to gray to brown, and sometimes felt the seams between them, a clunk against the steady tremble. Los Angeles giving way to glittery Vegas, Martian Utah, and a blind nighttime passage through the Rockies. Then a fresh morning of eastern Colorado fading into prodigious fields of Kansan wheat, forever-sized and flat like nothing you’ve ever seen, until finally Missouri, blunt and dark, a series of brake lights to guide along the final leg. I surrendered to the road. Only once did I pick up my phone and call Audrey. After eight rings I heard her voice mail, and here I likely should have made some gesture, but everything had already been said, repeated, thrown around like rolled-up socks.
Then I was back in the driveway, engine idling, wondering just what in the shit to do now. There was a new addition to the house jutting into what used to be side yard. I could imagine my parents in the living room, quiet and mostly still, cozy within that special silence of the long-married. If I unfastened my seat belt, the car would beep at me.
Soon enough the front door opened to reveal parents silhouetted against the yellow glow of home. I cut the engine, stepped into the night, raised a hand, and smiled. Hello. The air felt and tasted heavy and wet. A hug, a hand pressed flush against cheek, and even though it wasn’t a week since we’d all been together at commencement, I sensed relief in them both. During her second hug my mother swayed and spoke quietly to the air,
our boy, our
boy, our boy.
“Makes more sense to unload now,” my father said. “Twice the hands.”
She said to make a pile of laundry and she’d take care of it in the morning. “Are you hungry? I’ve got salami.”
Car unloaded, shoes off, I sat on the counter above the dishwasher and chewed a sandwich. My parents watched. I always needed this, when they would stand as a pair, sharing the same frame.
These are my parents,
these two adults.
I am their only remaining
child
. My brother, Fredrick Alan Mays, drowned at the age of five when he chased his rubber four square ball into the leaf- and tarpaulin-covered swimming pool at the Sheldon Woods apartment complex. At the time my mother was spoon-feeding a ten-month-old me special prescription formula. My father was at work, making his way through a small mountain of legal briefs. There were no witnesses. Freddy falling onto an ancient, heavy tarp improperly anchored to the pool’s deck and becoming entangled, sinking beneath fetid off-season water while my mother ensured I was taking to the new formula. One splash, then many more as his arms flailed, little puddles on the deck, ball bobbing, Freddy sinking. This took a moment of active deliberation: I was their son who didn’t drown. To their credit, my parents understood. They remained side by side and gave me a second.
“Our boy,” Carla said, beaming as she wrapped up the rolls and the meat.
I could see my father preparing to talk. He was examining his hands, pulling his frame slightly inward, revving. Richard stood over six foot and was handsome the way people found reassuring. His hair, full and gray, embraced age without submitting to it. I watched him shrug slowly and look up from his hands.
“How’s the car running?”
“It’s a great car,” I said. “I love the car. Thank you guys, again, for the car.”
“Be sure to check the oil tomorrow. You know how to check the oil?”
“Of course, Pop.”
“Of course you do,” he said. “Well, give it a check tomorrow. And then what else? Is there a plan? You check the oil and I’ll poke around if you like, find something for you. Not to say hurry up and decide. Not to pressure. Your mother and I are just glad to have you around for a while. Aren’t we, Carla? But will it hurt to start thinking about things? No it won’t. History of the world, nobody’s ever died from giving a little thought. Not a single bruise caused by thinking things over. Really: we’re just glad to have you back. Wait—I’m in Cleveland this week. Back on Thursday. Poke around then.”
I smiled and he seemed to smile kind of, and this was good, then he nodded and looked back at his hands.
My mother moved to my father’s side. “The important thing is there’s food here whenever you want it. Chicken wings, toasted ravioli, twice-baked potatoes.”
I climbed the stairs to the second floor. I stepped into the newly redecorated bathroom and watched myself brush teeth, then spent minutes leaning onto the sink, examining my reflection. In the bedroom, I opened and closed the wardrobe and several dresser drawers. I was continually impressed by the sturdiness of my parents’ furniture, dark old wood that hinted at permanence. My poster of Ozzie Smith mid-dive hung over my bed and my sheets smelled of some theoretical sunny and breezy afternoon, the middle of a field. I lay down, closed my eyes, and breathed. Sleep, lately, was becoming an issue.
Some time later, I tossed back sheets and stood. Downstairs, I moved from one room to the next, turning corners with soft steps. Every few years my parents would hire crews of men to come and hang sheets of translucent plastic, rip up floorboards, and push walls outward. Two years ago they furnished the basement. Before that they lengthened the patio into the backyard, then they added the sunroom, where nobody ever went. The living room had once been the family room. I stood where the current living room used to end and looked into the most recent addition. The office, Richard called it. The computer room, Carla called it. I touched picture frames and ran fingers across new plaster. I leaned against the enormous desk and waited.
A timer made the rooms go even darker than before.
Back upstairs, the house grew colder and I crawled deeper into the bedding so that soon only my face was exposed. I may have been acting like a child, but in this room it was sanctioned. It was
okay
.
Audrey was on an airplane. Or she’d already landed.
Where was it. Paris.
There was noise directly above me, the scraping of some creature in the attic. Plural creatures. From inside the fabric-softened and spring-breezy cocoon I watched shadows of branches dance across the wall. Rain.
Breakfast was two eggs fried into the middle of hollowed-out pieces of toast. My mother poured orange juice, moved about the kitchen, disappeared, then came back to write onto a Post-it she stuck to the phone.
“I think there might be squirrels in the attic,” I said.
“Squirrels?”
Before retiring, my mother had been a universally loved second-grade teacher. She won annual awards and was showered with Christmas gifts by the parents of her students. It took very little effort to imagine her leading a class. That short, wavy brown teacher hair, the full-length single-color dresses, flats—her whole package was perfectly educational, a surplus of maternal energy.
“We just had a man here for bees. And now squirrels?”
When she retired, much of that teacherly vigor was diverted into her garden. In the fall she disposed of annuals and cut back perennials, covered soil with manure as one would ice a cake. She spent entire springs on her knees, dual wristbands to wipe away full days of sweat. It was her passion, basic and earthy in every way.
“How are you for cash?”
“Me? Fine. I’m fine.”
She left the kitchen and returned a few minutes later in her sleeveless shirt and denim shorts. Her purse was under the phone. She pulled out her wallet and removed an uncreased bill. She laid the bill next to my orange juice, kissed my forehead, and stepped through the side door into her garden. I walked immediately to the phone and called Stuart Hurst.
“This is Stuart.”
“Stubes. So formal.”
“Potter Mays! Home again home again. Jiggedy jigg.”
“I’m working on two hours’ sleep and would like to get out of my house.”
“Makes sense. Incidentally, this was my last night in the pool house. I’m out: onward, forward. I’ll come pick you up and we’ll drive over to the new place. Sneak peek before tonight’s welcoming event. You just wait right there.”
We’d become friends after my parents left the apartment complex and its pool behind, moving into the desirable Ladue public-school district. That first day of third grade, stepping onto a morning bus full of boys and girls I had never seen, and among all of the eyes sat Stuart the fourth grader, waving me over to his rubberized seat.
“Lookit,” he said, opening his palm to reveal a small brick of staples. He picked one off from the rest, put it onto his tongue, and swallowed. “One at a time, they go down easy. Try.”
I sat on the front porch and waited. The pool house in his parents’ backyard wasn’t more than ten minutes’ drive, plus whatever time it took to overcome his immense personal inertia. I stood and walked circles through the grass of the front lawn, my head poring over the idea of distance: the mile, a single clean figure that broke down into a mess, those five thousand two eighty feet. I stopped circling and looked at the matting of grass beneath my shoes. Audrey deemed it a terrible waste to not go shoeless whenever she could, and her feet were callused and tough for it. Then one afternoon last spring, as I was packing the car for a camping trip with friends, mine, her right foot found a stray nail hiding in some grass, and I spent the afternoon wrapping her foot, touching her hair, driving to the emergency room, and waiting for a tetanus shot because she couldn’t remember ever having one, placing lips to her hand as the needle entered, laughing as she limped back to the car. Saying
of course.
Saying
you’re welcome.
All the while the resentment building, growing, this beady-eyed and sharp-toothed troll of resentment making home in my stomach. Delirious wonder if maybe she’d found the nail on purpose, that it was all secretly on purpose. Resentment as appalling as it was amazing, a sheer force I had no choice but to embrace. I moved from grass onto driveway. I had been saying
I love you
for the past four years and meaning it every time as far as I knew. Her flight went Portland to O’Hare to London Heathrow to Charles de Gaulle. Three weeks.