“I know. But fuck,” I said again. “Can I just think this through for a minute?”
She sat on the couch while I continued to amble back and forth, trying to figure out how we could tell Cal the truth and cause him the least amount of pain. October’s eyes followed me like I was a metronome she was using to keep time.
I sat down beside her and let my head fall into my hands. “He’s going to hate me.”
“Maybe not forever.” I felt her eyes on the side of my face. “Trust me, Chris knows that what he and I are doing isn’t working. He has to be able to see the inevitable end in sight. With or without you thrown into the mix.”
But I doubted Cal knew that. It wasn’t how his mind worked. When he wanted something, he went after it, and he got it; and if something was broken, he fixed it. Failure was not a conceivable outcome for him.
A memory came back to me then. The first time I brought Cal over to Bob’s houseboat. We had only known each other for a few weeks, but we were already blood brothers. It was a Friday night, Bob had gone out, and Cal started snooping around the house, looking for a way we could entertain ourselves in the absence of guitars. He found a couple of fishing poles in a storage closet. I have no idea why Bob had them, because I’d never known him to fish or express even a vague interest in fishing. At any rate, Cal got it in his head that fishing was simple and that it would be fun for us to catch our dinner off the side of the boat, never mind that neither of us had ever fished, nor did we know the first thing about what to do with a fish if we managed to catch one.
Cal asked me what I thought we should use as bait. I looked in the refrigerator and decided hotdogs were our best option. We both stabbed big chunks through our hooks and went out to the deck.
Cal said, “It’s all in the wrist, Harp,” like he knew what he was talking about, even though he’d only heard that on TV.
I flicked my rod backward with the intention of casting it out into the water, but the hotdog-heavy hook went left and caught Cal somewhere near his right eye.
With a howl, he dropped his rod, leaned over, and clutched the side of his face. A moment later he started making this aahhh noise that sounded like what precedes the choo in a sneeze. I couldn’t see the damage I’d done, but a little blood dripped down his fingers, and I had a vision of Cal taking his hand away and there being nothing but an empty socket where his eyeball had been.
Over and over I asked Cal if he was all right, begging him to let me see his eye, but he just kept making that noise. When he finally straightened up, I realized it wasn’t because I’d blinded him, it was because he was laughing so hard he couldn’t form words.
Once he composed himself, he ran to the nearest bathroom and examined his wound in the mirror. I’d missed his eye by a hair, and the hook had carved a tiny but deep gash into the skin right below his lower lid that you can still see today if you look close enough.
“Nice job,” he said. “That’s definitely going to leave a scar.”
We retold the story to each other from our individual points of view a dozen times over the next few hours, and Cal’s version got gorier and gorier as the night went on. Right before we fell asleep, he asked me what had been going through my mind when I thought I’d taken out his eye, and I told him all I could think was that if I’d blinded him, he wasn’t going to hang out with me anymore.
It was dark and quiet, Cal in the twin bed next to mine, a small bedside table between us, but I knew he was shaking his head because I could hear the sound of his hair pulling and swishing against the crisp pillowcase.
“Harp, we signed a contract, remember? It says we’re best friends, and best friendship is bound by commitment, code, and honor. There’s nothing you could do to make me not hang out with