#15: Fireflies Return
“Sometimes the future has things so wonderful and sorta scary...that you can’t even imagine.”
(Last time, the guys stopped by Danny’s sister’s house in Iowa, and Charlie read a letter from the past.)
Ralph still wasn’t feeling totally better. “My constitution is, ah, not as robust as it used to be. Remember, Pat, when I could drink all night and bounce back the next day?”
“I remember a lot of Sundays with you passed out in bed the whole day, PL.”
Stretched out on the couch, Ralph gazed at half a glass of soda and tapped the bubbles out or let them waste away with time.
To his malingering delight, a cable channel was playing two Mickey Kent movies back to back that afternoon: two Albert Dasher films—film noir shot in technicolor. Three things made a standard Albert Dasher pic: The 70s swimsuit model Paula Brogett as Liddy Lanx, Dasher’s feisty and sultry secretary. Tumbleweed, Dasher’s orange tabby, who spent an inordinate number of scenes being stroked on Dasher’s desk or lap. And the eventual triumph of good over evil.
Ralph dreamily laid vigil at the television screen; he thought Dasher was one of Mickey Kent’s best incarnations. I caught part of The Jade Midnight with him. (I had never made it through an Albert Dasher film from start to finish.)
Dasher (his eyebrow raised): I’m just going out for a smoke.
Liddy Lanx: Last time you said that, you almost had your head blown off.
Dasher: I guess I must have lit the wrong end.
Ralph watched the scene on the tip of a sigh.
Mickey Kent had lost the boyish smoothness of youth. Instead of the lean and elastic cheek of his 1950s glamour shots, narrow webs of wrinkles formed around his lips and eyes when he spoke or squinted. The flesh by his jaw sagged. No adolescent shepherd piping songs on halcyon hills, this was a man worn by time and trial.
Dasher entered a bar, and there were four minutes of slow, steady shots: the smoke curling in the light, a woman in a blonde wig with burning eyes, the clatter of ice in drinks as the lounge singer warbled in the background. “That’s nice, isn’t it? It’s like…perfect,” Ralph said and then fell back into silence.
Staying at the house of someone you barely know can sometimes make you feel like a phantom interloper. While they’re gone, you circulate through the empty house. There’s a way things are supposed to be—how the cups should be stacked in a cabinet, where the remote control should be stowed, whether the toilet seat should be up or down. All your actions disturb that conspiracy of habits, and you try to set it right but that’s like trying to remake a collage of fall leaves after a wind has passed: it can’t be quite what it was.
Danny had happily set up his books and laptop at the kitchen table, which had also been his parents’ kitchen table. As he must have in high school, he hunched once again over that table and a giant textbook and a notebook covered with his indecipherable scrawl.
“You know, Danny, this trip is supposed to be about fun,” Pat remarked once.
Danny looked up from his laptop. “And who’s to say this isn’t fun?”
“Like the human race. I mean, you know biology. There must be some sign in the genes that studying tiny molecules is inherently boring.”
Danny just laughed.
Then, Pat’s work cellular phone rang. Like the insistent tapping of reality, it had called him throughout the day. Some scheme was afoot somewhere in the third floor of the statehouse, where Mistah Speakah ruled. “Yes, sir. I was speaking to someone in Walsh’s office, and he’s willing to play ball….Yes, about that—we could have them fax it over, sure.” Just after he hung up, the phone rang again. “Hey, Georgie, good to hear from you….What? Hey, buddy, glad you’re thinking of me, but we’re in Iowa right now—not Montana. So we’re all safe from that tornado here…”
After that call, Danny said to Pat, “I thought you said this trip was supposed to be about fun.”
“Danny-boy,” Pat said, “this is the ultimate kind of fun. Keep that in mind, Charlie. We could use you up there—but doing something real.”
“Sure, Pat.” He liked to suggest the prospect of a job somewhere on Beacon Hill—in the education department or some legislative committee or the state ethics commission (“don’t laugh”).
In the afternoon, Marnie drove up in a car pulsing with music; she said she sang along with Top 40 radio on her ride back from work as a way of “washing out” her brain. She entered the house with the antiseptic aura of the hospital as well as a distracted smile. “Jason hasn’t come back yet, has he?”
No sign, we said.
“Well, what do you guys feel like—pizza? There’s a place he loves. I’ll order some and pick them up as a surprise.”
And Jason was surprised. “Whoah, thanks, babe. It’s the little things, you know, that can turn a day around.”
Later, we played poker, like we had a decade ago. We bet with coins from a bowl they used to store loose change. Jason played with us. Refusing the offer of a beer and a seat at the table, Marnie went into the living room with a fantasy novel and some warm water with lemon. The peachy smell of the giant pink candle she lit after dinner suffused the house.
“Doesn’t this bring you back?” Pat said with a satisfied laugh. “We played on this very table, you know.”
Ralph pointed to a knot in the grain. “I remember staring at that sometimes, and it seemed to stare back like a wooden eye. It was almost intimidating.”
“Was that after his first or second pot brownie?” Pat muttered to me.
“What?” Ralph asked.
“Nothing.”
During one hand, Ralph sighed as he tossed a couple more pennies into the pot. “In a few days, Kentstock.”
“I told you, I want a t-shirt,” Marnie called from the living room.
“Oh, you’ll get a t-shirt,” Danny said.
It was my turn. I ran my fingers over my face-down cards. A king and two of clubs. There were plenty of combinations. I felt the smoothed texture of the penny’s rim on my finger.
“And it has to have his face on it,” Marnie said.
Pat laughed. “No promises!”
I tossed in one penny. Then another. Those days of before had been full of gossamer promises.
Sitting on the porch after my interest had waned in the game, I thought of those promises and those disappointments.
The screen door creaked behind me. I turned. “Oh, hi, Marnie.”
“Hey, Charlie. Tired of the game?”
I shrugged. “Just wanted to get some air. It’s nice out tonight.” The bobbing lightning bugs reminded me of other nights.
She stretched and smiled. “Isn’t it?” She sat down in the wicker chair next to me.
“You have a nice place here, Marnie.”
We talked for a while. “Remember when we were kids in high school?” I asked at one point.
She laughed. “Yeah. Of course.”
“And you’d invite me and Danny to sit with you at lunch sometimes. With your boyfriend...”
“Tyler!”
“Yeah, Tyler. And my brother would be there?” Tyler had been on the football team with Hank.
“Oh, I know. And Tyler had two lunches every day.”
“Oh yeah—that’s right! I don’t know how he could eat that. Everything they served tasted either like cardboard or a greasebomb.”
“Or both!” Marnie added.
“Or both.”
“Like the fries,” she said. “Remember those?”
Laughter spread from her to me like a contagion. “They were like soggy toothpicks!”
Marnie brought her hands together as her body rocked in its chair. “Yes!”
“You know, when he became class president, Pat tried to get them to change vendors and get fries from someone else or get a different type of fries from the same vendor or something like that.”
“What happened?”
“As I’m sure you can imagine, Pat could do almost anything he wanted as president. But, whenever he tried to bring the fries up for discussion, he was completely shot down. It was the weirdest thing. He convinced them to give him his own parking space, to let him manage all dances—he even got them to rearrange the final-exam schedule. But the fries—no way. We joked that there must have been some international conspiracy to keep the fries like that at the high school.”
“It had to be the New World Order,” she said with a smile.
“Of course.” The night seemed to grow thick with the pulsing life of the countless tiny insects. “I miss those days sometimes. Before all this happened. And life got so complicated.”
Marnie leaned forward so that her elbows were on her knees. She suddenly seemed to have the oracular-like confidence of when we first met—the insights of a fifteen-year-old that baffled my twelve-year-old brain. “You’ve always been so serious, Charlie. Just like Danny. That’s one thing you two always had in common.”
“Really?”
“Really. Look, it was great being a teenager. There were a lot of good times. But it’s so easy, looking back, to make the past seem so much better or so much worse than it really was. The past can be a trap like that. A memory’s just a memory.”
“Danny said something like that the other day—that you’ve got to recognize a fantasy for a fantasy.”
She grinned. “My brother’s a smart guy.”
I nodded. “He is.”
“And, you know, Charlie,” she said, looking into the distance, “sometimes the future has things so wonderful and sorta scary—but really wonderful—that you can’t even imagine.”
Medals
In the drawer of an old cabinet, behind receipts and pictures and newspaper clippings, my father kept his military medals. When I was six, I opened that drawer and saw their dull glint. I didn’t know if I should have seen them or not, so I turned the medals over and over again in my mind. I wondered whose they were and what they were for. After a few days of bouncing those mysterious bits of metal around the walls of my skull, I asked my parents at dinner. That night, my father sat down with me and went over each medal. Not a single syllable wavered. I could tell even then that my father had no great joy in telling me about these medals. It was a duty to tell me, and so he spoke.
The National Defense Service Medal. The Vietnam Service Medal. The Purple Heart for when a bullet ripped through his shoulder. The Bronze Star for when he had provided cover to help his platoon escape from a Viet Kong ambush.
He had been twenty years old.