“Is there anyone in this town you haven’t fucked?” Paul grumbles.
“Just because she was glad to see me doesn’t mean I fucked her.”
“So you didn’t?”
Phillip shrugs. “It’s not a fair test case. Everyone fucked Tammy Burns.”
“I didn’t,” I say sadly.
“The night’s young. Just be charming and tip well.”
Someone has selected “Sweet Home Alabama” on the jukebox. Phillip sings along, tapping his hands on the table to the little piano riff between verses. Take a hundred jukeboxes from a hundred bars in a hundred cities and they’ll all have “Sweet Home Alabama” in them. I don’t know why that should be the case, but it is. And every one of those bars has two or three assholes who will sing along at the top of their lungs, especially when they get to the part that trashes Neil Young, and then look around like they should get a prize for knowing the words, like everyone doesn’t know the words, like everyone didn’t have that classic rock friend who put it on every mix he ever made, like everyone isn’t sick to death already of “Sweet Home Alabama.”
Lately, I get inexplicably angry around pretty girls.
The girls around the bar shake themselves lightly in time to the music, pouting the way girls do when they dance, like they’re experts in something we’ll never understand. I need to stop looking at these girls. No good will come from it. You keep looking at girls like this and then one day you catch a glimpse of yourself in the mirror behind the bar, and if you’re not yet too old, you’re on the borderline, and the last thing you ever want to be is the old guy in the bar. There’s no dignity in it.
“Isn’t that Horry?” I say, looking over to a corner table. Horry is there, chatting up some hot young thing. I catch his eye and he waves uncertainly. When I look back a few minutes later, he and the girl are gone. I guess I can’t really blame him. I wouldn’t feel comfortable hitting on women in front of the brothers of the married woman I recently slept with. You need GPS to follow the sex lives of this family. I wonder if love is this twisted for everyone or if our family is uniquely talented at making such a mess of it.
Paul slams a dollar bill down on the table. “I’d like to perform a demonstration,” he says. “Phillip. Please go over to the jukebox and choose a song.”
“You get two for a dollar.”
“Then go crazy.”
“Anything in particular you’re in the mood for?”
“Surprise me.”
Phillip hops off his stool and makes his way across the crowded room. “Watch,” Paul says.
“What?”
“He won’t be able to get there and back without touching at least three women.”
There’s a girl at the jukebox, in a little black halter top, her jeans doing that thing where they ride so low on her hips that you wonder what’s holding them up. He leans over and whispers something to her. She looks up at him and laughs. And then she teeters a little bit, maybe because of her high heels, or possibly it’s the free Jell-O shots for women between eight and ten o’clock. I don’t know what makes women teeter. She grabs Phillip’s arm to right herself. It’s simple, effortless even, and the kind of thing that never happens to me. Her fingers continue to clutch his elbow as they chat. How does a simple wisecrack turn into bodily contact?
On his way back he is stopped by two girls who seem to know him. He leans in to accept a kiss from each one, his hands resting lightly on their exposed hips, just above the waist of their jeans, as he chats briefly. He’s about ten feet away from us when he bumps into another girl, graciously guiding her past him with his hand on the small of her back as they trade smiles.
“Four,” Paul says.
“Four what?” Phillip says.
“Nothing.”
Phillip looks mildly irked and then shrugs. When the world is your sexual buffet, you don’t sweat the small stuff. He takes a generous swig of beer. “So, Paul. I think it’s great you and Alice want to have a kid.”
Paul looks up at him and then down at the dwindling foam of his beer. “She’s driving me crazy with it. We’ve burned through our savings on her quest for fertility.”
“I find it interesting that you call it ‘her’ quest and not ‘our’ quest.”
“And I find it interesting that you’re sleeping with a woman in spitting distance of menopause, but I figure that’s your own business.”
Phillip puts down his beer, looking hurt. “You’re an asshole, Paul. You’re an asshole to me, you’re an asshole to Judd. I hope to hell you turn out to be a better father than you are a brother.”
“I’m the lousy brother?” Paul says, raising his voice. “You think it was just Dad who paid to keep you out of jail when you decided to take up marijuana farming? I didn’t take profits for three years so that we could pay off your legal fees. And, Judd? Don’t get me started on you.”
“No need,” I say. “I know all about your great sacrifice. You’ll never let me forget it.”
“What did you just say to me?” Paul says, getting to his feet. His stool clatters to the floor behind him.
I stand up to face him. “It was your own damn fault, Paul. You dragged me to Rusco’s house. I kept telling you I didn’t want to go, but you were going to show everyone what a tough bastard you were. I didn’t ask you to do it, and I’m sick and tired of paying for it. The price is just too damn high.”
“I think we should all just take a beat here,” Phillip says, but it’s too late.
Paul brings his beer mug crashing down on the table. He is seething now, his face red, his fists clenched. Around us, people move away quickly, anticipating a brawl. “I lost my scholarship. I lost everything. You went off to college and never looked back.” He sinks his teeth into every word, and they come out chewed. “And now you want to tell me that you paid a price? You ungrateful prick!”
“You could have gone to college. You chose to stay home and get drunk for two years. Should I have done that with you, pissed away my future out of gratitude?”
“Okay, this is good. We’re all talking here, getting everything out on the table.” Phillip.
The bouncer is suddenly standing behind Paul, giving us a hard look with his one real eye. He’s a retired boxer. There are framed clippings of his fights behind the bar. It’s anyone’s guess what kind of punch the guy might pack today, but he’s got presence, and his expression carries a certain tired wisdom unique to people who have known violence intimately. He places a hand like a meat hook on Paul’s shoulder. “Paul,” he says in a hoarse, surprisingly gentle voice. “You either need to sit down or take this outside.”
Paul nods, still looking at me, and then pats the bouncer’s belly. “It’s fine, Rod. I’m leaving anyway.”
Rod the prizefighter looks pointedly at Phil and then me, visualizing the cataclysmic damage he’ll do to us if it comes to that, before heading back across the bar. Paul throws a few bills down on the table.
“Paul,” I say, feeling remorseful. “I’ve always felt bad about what happened.”
“Just tell me this,” he says, his voice low, his anger spent. “How many surgeries have I had?”
“What?”
“I don’t mean when it happened. I mean since you moved out. How many operations?”
I think about it for a moment. “Three, I guess. Or four if you count the one you had right after I got married. The skin graft thing.”
Paul shakes his head slowly. “Eight.”
“What?”
“I’ve had eight surgeries. Skin and nerve grafts, tissue grafts, surgical pins. And how many times did you visit me in the hospital, or even call the house to see how I was doing?”
“I don’t know. A bunch?”
He holds up two fingers. “Twice. You came to see me twice. That’s it.”
“That can’t be right.”
“It’s not right, but it’s the truth.” He starts heading for the door.
“Paul,” I say. “Wait a minute.”
He turns to face me, and I’m shocked to see a tear running down his cheek. “Going to Rusco’s house was stupid,” he says. “Believe me, I spend time every day wishing I could go back there and stop myself, picturing the world I’d be living in now if I hadn’t gone. But stupid or not, I went there for you. You want to call me a lousy brother? I guess maybe I am. I’ll own up to it. But maybe you are too.”
I sit back on my stool, watching him leave. I should call out to him, stop him, now that we’re finally talking. But we are not a family of communicators. It took five shots and a decade’s worth of repressed anger just to say this much tonight. I’m tapped out, and so is he.
“Well, I think you two had a real breakthrough there,” Phillip says.
“Yeah? Then why do I feel so shitty?”
Phillip pats my back and messes up my hair. “Emotional growth hurts. It’s nothing a few more shots won’t fix.”
He disappears into the crowd at the bar. I am left alone at the table to lick the bottom of my shot glasses and assimilate the new information. You think you have all the time in the world, and then your father dies. You think you’re happily married, and then your wife fucks your boss. You think your brother is an asshole, and then you discover that it’s been you all along. If nothing else, it’s been educational.
10:30 p.m.
PHILLIP RETURNS WITH eight shot glasses jammed between every finger of both hands, another of his worthless skills. Somehow we do them all. The night takes on a kind of kaleidoscopic translucence, and I lose my sense of time and, occasionally, balance. When I come back from a trip to the bathroom, we’ve been joined by Phillip’s old girlfriend, Chelsea. “Look who I bumped into,” Phillip says. Chelsea is dressed for the hunt in a short denim skirt and a tank top that grants a generous view of her lightly freckled cleavage as she leans forward to kiss my cheek. “Fancy running into you guys here,” she says, in case I haven’t properly registered the complete randomness of this encounter from Phillip’s remark. Chelsea’s fingers dance up Phillip’s arms like he’s an instrument she’s playing. I try to catch his eye, but he looks away every time. I want to tell him that he can’t behave like this on my watch, but the shots have warmed my blood and toasted my veins, and someone has turned up the music, and to be heard I’d have to put my mouth close to his ear, like Chelsea is doing right now.
On my next bathroom trip, I see Horry making out with a skinny girl in the little nook between the men’s room and the kitchen. She’s a sloppy kisser, her tongue sliding out of her mouth to lick his lips when they separate, but he doesn’t seem to mind.
Good for you, Horry,
I think. I am drunk and lost and would very much like to be making out with someone of no consequence right now, mashing tequila tongues, sliding my fingertips over smooth, booze-warmed skin. Instead, I urinate for a half hour, reading the stall graffiti, still smelling Chelsea’s shampoo from when she kissed me hello.
When I get back to the table, Chelsea and Phillip are gone. The jukebox is playing goddamned “Sweet Home Alabama” again, and I think I’m going to be sick. The bathroom has a line, so I stumble out to the parking lot and puke behind one of the Dumpsters. I feel a little better after that, halfway to sober. The rain has finally stopped, or not really stopped, but dwindled to a fine, foggy mist that cools my burning skin. I wonder how I’m going to get home.
Chapter 41
11:15 p.m.
I
can’t recall if I settled the tab or not, but no one’s come running out after me, and just the thought of going back inside starts my stomach acid frothing, so I’ll just assume it’s all good. I decide to take a walk. The neon lights of Route 120 spread out ahead of me like the Vegas Strip. P.F. Chang’s, the Cheesecake Factory, the Pitch & Putt, Sushi Palace, Apple-bee’s, Rock & Bowl, Szechuan Gardens, and the digital marquee of the AMC multiplex, all flashing and blinking, burning pink and red streaks into my eyelids when I close them. Generations of broken glass twinkle like glitter in the pavement. Teenagers rove in loud packs that form and disperse as they move down the sidewalk. Cell phones ring, obscenities fly. Blow jobs are administered in throbbing cars in the darkest corners of abandoned parking lots. They’ve been laying pipe beneath the blacktop forever now, and they don’t bother taking down the barricades on the weekends anymore, so every few stoplights, traffic slows to a crawl, cars ejaculated out of the bottlenecks one by one, burning rubber just to make a point, since there’s really nowhere here worth rushing to. They whiz by like missiles, these cars crammed with kids exactly like the one I used to be. Once in a while you can make out their laughter above the hollow din of tires scorching the blacktop like fighter jets on a runway.
There’s a fountain in front of Sushi Palace, spraying a high illuminated geyser that changes colors every few seconds. Red, yellow, green, and violet. I stop to watch it for a little bit. A couple of kids sit on the edge of the fountain, kissing with such unabashed fervor that I have to look away.
As I walk, a silver car passes me and then quickly brakes, causing the cars behind it to swerve left and honk angrily. You don’t see many Maseratis in Elmsbrook. The car pulls onto the shoulder and Wade climbs out. He’s wearing the same suit he wore earlier and has a bandage across the bridge of his nose, a smear of purple bruising spreading out from under it. He frowns as he approaches me, picking up speed as he goes.
“What are you doing?” I say.
His punch arrives well before my worthless block can get there, landing squarely on my chin and lower lip, and down I go. There is a version of this fight in which a crowd of pedestrians grows around us as we grapple and trade punches, until I tackle Wade and we fall over into the sushi fountain, where I pummel him into submission, standing over him in victorious disgust, casually spitting some blood into the fountain. But I’m too drunk and tired to fight, so I curl up and close my eyes, prepared to absorb the kicks that will follow. After a few seconds I look up to see Wade standing above me, combing his hair with his fingers. “That was for my car,” he says.