26 Sixteen Hours Before the Disaster #2
It was one of my favorite places in Lincoln, with good fish and little coal-fired ovens in the middle of the stone tables.
You could roast your food yourself or let the server do it for you.
They had a French white there I was crazy about too, and the last time I’d been there I’d bought a few bottles from the restaurant to take with me because, for some reason, I couldn’t find it in New York.
When I got there, the guys were already seated at our usual table.
“There’s the birthday boy!” Darren shouted.
“Wait, take a spin,” Josh said, really hamming it up. “Damn, you do look older. Did you quit shaving?”
I smiled and stroked my chin. It had been two days, and already the hair was prickly. I took off my jacket and sat down.
“Does your girl know you’re in a spat with your razor?”
“Darren, I’d say of all the things his girl doesn’t know, that’s the least important.” Josh cracked up as he looked at the menu. “Should we do the same as last time? I enjoyed it.”
A brunette waitress with a pleasant face came over to take our order. My head was still throbbing and the noise, the voices, the laughter in the restaurant, the strong scent of the grills, only made the pressure worse. I massaged my temples.
“So you’re engaged. Or that’s what they tell me.”
It was Darren talking. We’d gone to high school together, played on the same football team, had the same friends, but the day I decided I’d marry Lena, I hadn’t felt like getting on the phone to spread the news.
The most sensible, logical, practical thing was just to tell my parents and Josh.
I knew they’d tell everyone else and save me from making an official announcement.
“Yep,” I responded.
“Is it because her dad’s a senator, or have you just lost your mind? You’re stepping onto a minefield.”
“Will’s a man who likes to have a plan,” Josh said, butting in and playing with his steak knife. “As long as he doesn’t have to stick with it.”
Whatever. In that moment, I could already see the rest of the night before me: They’d spend the whole dinner cracking jokes about my wedding, my engagement, and so forth, and I’d try to pretend it didn’t all bore me, and I’d drink too much, and we’d be requesting a second bottle in no time.
And that’s exactly how it happened.
“What’s next? A bun in the oven?”
“Let me make a prediction,” Josh said, raising his hand theatrically to quiet everyone down. “Twins. Just imagine.”
I flipped over my fish. Its shiny scales had turned an ashy gray.
“Sundays at the country club…”
“I think he already does that,” Josh said.
“I’ll let you both keep wondering,” I said, amused.
Josh pulled his food off the grill. He always liked everything half-raw and made fun of me for burning my food. “A man of your status should have a sophisticated palate,” he liked to joke.
It sounds banal to call Josh my best friend, especially because of all he’d meant to me. Josh was a before and after. An intersection in the middle of a long road. The line that divided my existence in two.
I had tried every day for years to be just like him.
And when I made it, and even when I surpassed him, the bond was still there.
I wasn’t blinded by loyalty; I realized, and had for a long time, that our worlds were pulling apart.
He’d stayed home, working in his family’s export company after an injury kept him off the college football team, while I lived in my bubble in New York, hung out with interesting people, and was preparing for a brilliant future.
Seeing him flounder, hearing him tell the same old stories or talk about things he had no real grasp of, like art exhibitions he’d supposedly attended, I felt strangely pleased, even if it also hurt to know he was falling behind me.
“Are you going to ride your father-in-law’s coattails into politics?”
“No interest.” I looked over at Darren.
“Are you still planning on specializing in sports law?”
Yes. That was my idea. And becoming an agent. And getting very, very rich. “You got it,” I said, arranging my food.
“Will Tucker: man with a plan,” Josh joked.
The waitress opened the second bottle. When we had finished our meal and were outside, and the late summer wind was brushing my face and I was following my friends to the parking lot thinking about how perfect life was, how nature’s proportions were beyond the grasp of the finest architect, how something as amazing as the pollination of a flower was a miracle almost beyond conception, Darren asked, “Where should we go now?”
“There’s gotta be people in the pine woods,” Josh said, pointing at my car, which was glimmering in the moonlight. “Will you do the honors? You can bring me back for mine later.”
Josh got in the passenger seat and Darren in the back. Darren rolled up a joint. I started the engine and turned back, glaring.
“Don’t even think about lighting that up inside.”
“Whoa, what happened to our friend? What did New York do to him?” Josh clicked his tongue and waited for me to play along, but I didn’t.
Summer after summer, his jokes about these things got worse.
“Chill, Darren, you’re good. And pass it to me after.
We’ll see if we can actually get this night started. ”
I heard the scratch of a lighter and stomped on the brakes.
“Shit, Will!” Josh shouted.
I looked in the rearview and said, “Darren, if you’re going to smoke, get out.”
“Bro, chill. It was just a joke.”
I took a deep breath and sped up, pulling back onto the road.
The mood was strange, and I tried to do something about it along the way, asking them about the weed they’d bought and cracking a few jokes.
It wasn’t hard. I just had to say what they expected of me and laugh at what they expected me to laugh at.
I’d been perfecting the art of disguise my entire life, to the point that the mask I’d decided to put on long ago was now fused to my face—it wasn’t made of cloth or cardboard but of my own skin.
When we reached the pine woods, there were already people there, most of them friends who still lived close by but also a few who had gone away and were back for their summer vacation.
Not to mention Jenna, with her long, blond hair in a braid and a tiny dress showing off the outlines of her body.
She stood on her tiptoes and kissed me on the cheek a few seconds longer than was normal.
We had gone out the last couple of years of high school.
“The bottles are over there,” Ash said.
Darren mixed some drinks and passed me one.
I emptied it in one gulp. Everyone was talking loud.
Too loud. I drank another. A few friends decided the time had come to race and started laying down bets.
The cars would face off on a straight stretch of road downhill from the pine woods.
At night, no one ever drove on it. Soon I could hear the horns honking and the motors roaring, getting ready to speed off.
It was already after midnight when Josh lay on one of the picnic tables where tourists went to have lunch during the day.
I had another drink. I’d had three or four in all, I don’t remember.
I lay down next to him. The sky was speckled with stars, they seemed to be elbowing their way past each other to be seen, and for some reason I imagined Dad out in the yard looking up, trying to find the Perseids, and his loneliness ate at me inside like a worm.
“Will… William… Perfect little Will…” Josh chanted.
“You’re wasted.” I laughed. I felt free and easy. “Sorry about earlier.”
“What happened earlier?”
“Nothing. Forget it,” I said.
We both recognized the tension that sometimes flowed between us, especially those past few years, but I was glad he pretended it wasn’t there. I mean, that’s what life was, right? Faking, faking some more, faking your way to death.
And when you fake enough, it ends up turning real.
“Noah’s killing them,” Ash said, excited.
“Because he hasn’t raced against us yet.” Josh stood. I put a hand on his shoulder to stop him, but he shrugged it off. “What do you say, Will? Do like in the old days, you and me, two soldiers. Come on, get up.”
“I’m drunk.”
“Will, you’re a fucking pussy. Just concentrate on going fast and not turning the wheel.” He put an arm around my shoulders and guided me downhill. “Remember the first rule of survival: Never let anyone set foot in your territory or you’re lost. We’re going to show Noah who we are.”
Josh’s rules. Sure. I hadn’t thought about them in years, not since we were in high school, but I still knew them by heart, as if they were burned into me. Don’t show your emotions. Control your impulses. If someone hits you, hit them back twice as hard. Kindness is weakness. Act like a leader.
The adrenaline was pouring in my veins like hot, flammable liquid.
And as I descended into the darkness, all my scruples went dark too.
Everything was me, me, me. There’s no drug more powerful than that feeling that you can do everything, that the world’s at your feet and you can shape it like modeling clay. That it’s yours. All yours.
That was how I felt as I got into the car.
Jenna and another younger girl were in the middle of the road acting silly, shaking their hips, drinking beer from bottles. When Noah was ready, they raised their arms and counted to three. The starting gun sounded, and I froze for a few seconds.
“Goddamn it, Will, go!” Josh exclaimed.
I stomped the pedal as hard as I could. Noah’s car was nothing compared to mine, so I’d left him in the dust in no time. Josh was cracking up, and it was contagious. Yes, I thought. Yes, yes. The famous, incomparable, beloved Will Tucker was showing everyone he hadn’t changed.
“Fucking chump,” Josh said, looking into the rearview mirror to watch Noah’s car vanish behind us. “Look at him, Will.”
I glanced in the rearview mirror for a second, just one, and when I looked back, there were two light posts in front of me. I jerked the wheel. Hard. Without thinking. I realized we were off the road when the tires sank in the swampy earth. Then I felt something hard. A thud.
There was no pain. I was floating, and everything was downy white and soft. In my head, it was snowing nonstop. And I thought to myself, Wow, snow is so fascinating.