wasted on the Bellingers’ booze. In a town where everybody knows everybody’s business and your friends’ parents know you well enough to call you down for bad behavior, it was the secret place in their lives. Out here where the scrub pines give way to mangroves they could do anything, and Fort Jude would never know. It was all about whiskey, weed and pipe dreams: five kids too young to drink and barely old enough to drive, kicked back around the keg mainlining Jack Daniels like good old mountain boys, the only thing missing was the coonskin caps.
Even when you look happy you aren’t, really, he thinks. Even though outsiders can’t see it, there’s always something wrong.
They still got together here during college breaks but they were coming from different places in their heads, and that bad last night of houseparties pushed them over the edge. They landed in a new place and nobody could say which ones stood on which side of the rift, although Bobby knew that wherever he landed, he would stand alone.
The rift widened as the four of them solidified, like puppies growing into their feet. Whatever they used to be in common was no more. Chape was always going to be a lawyer like old Judge Bellinger, but until he grew into his father’s face, they could pretend. Stitch Von Harten’s dad set him up to take over the printing business. His family started it in Fort Jude during the Depression, so Stitch could forget the dive shop and the fishing boat, whatever he really wanted, although at that point, he still believed. By the time they were twenty his head was settling into that thickening neck; he didn’t look quite like old Mr Van Harten, but it was only a matter of time, and the twins? Doomed to take over Coleman Chrysler, no wonder Darcy rammed that tree and bled his life away on Route 19. Second and third-generation businesses, Bobby thinks uneasily. That’s what makes this city great. It explains a lot.
None of which explains the problem of Brad. The Kalens had him when they were too old, and spoiled the crap out of him because they didn’t know what else to do. By the time he hit Northshore Elementary he was a gorilla; even teachers cringed. Old Orville Kalen used to go to the club in that white suit with a gold chain across the vest and if you ran into him it always came up in conversation that the watch fob was his Phi Beta Kappa key, he graduated magna cum from Yale. Brad got kept back in first grade, so he was seven when they started. They found this big kid slouched in his seat with his feet on the desk like a hard timer when their moms brought them in on the first day. He glared and showed his teeth, like, watch your back, but they did what you had to, and made friends. They used to play over at Brad’s because the house was so big that nobody cared what they did and his folks were too old to do anything about it when and if they found out. Brad’s mom kept cold Dr Pepper and a freezer full of Dove bars and there was an attic where she never came; ‘please don’t make me climb up all those stairs.’ He had a toy race car you could drive around in and a Noah’s Ark with thirty hand-carved animals that were supposed to be paired off on the gangplank, which they never were. Most of them were missing tails or legs and half of them were smashed because Brad used to make his animals fight and kill each other; Bobby saw it once, so he was never easy with Brad.
Kalen grew up handsome and stupid wild. He was an ugly drunk but they hung with him anyway because he was the first to turn sixteen and get his license, and until Judge Bellinger bought Chape the Jeep in their senior year, he was the only one with a car.
Six friends. Well, one’s dead now and another’s an alcoholic, and Bobby? He’s been better. Still, he feels the same pleasure, going in. It’s like slipping into a pair of hightops you’ve worn for so long that the canvas is like part of you, softened by wear and ripe with thirty years’ accumulation of foot smell.