K. Constantine - Pittsburgh Noir

Ronnie nodded. He’d felt much the same, although he thought it would lower his dignity to agree with Gary too strongly.

Gary said, “Imagine falling so far that you turned every bone in your body to oatmeal.”

“I’d rather not, thanks.”

“No one ever figured out what he was doing up there.”

Ronnie said, “Being a dumbass. Wasn’t he drunk?”

“Yeah.” Gary crushed the can in his meaty hand, and stared at the crumpled, sharpened edges of it as though there were coins somewhere inside. “I heard his brains were coming out his ears.”

Dwelling on this image against his will, Ronnie said, “I don’t know. I was, like, four years old. If that.” He was doing his best to keep his squeamishness to himself. He couldn’t tell how convincing he was being. He knew that Gary would run with it till they were both steeped in ghoulish stories and gross-out jokes, and Ronnie’s stomach was feeling just delicate enough from the excess of beer that he knew this might ruin his afternoon.

He was on the verge of asking Gary about his kids just to change the subject, even though he was less interested in them than he was in Boneless Bernie, but then Gary asked, “So where the hell is Mary Galetti?”

Ronnie felt his surprise as anger, and said, “Shit, Gary, do you pay attention to anything but football?” Gary looked surprised, but Ronnie was committed to being irritated for the moment. “She was on the goddamn space shuttle. Three years ago. It was all over the goddamn news: Pittsburgh’s own Mary Galetti. You know the way they do. She’s some kind of scientist.”

“Oh. No shit. You’re right. I don’t pay as much attention as I should to stuff like that.” Like at . “But I’m not a hot-shit sports writer. I don’t have an in with the papers and shit.” Ronnie waited, knowing that Gary would take care of it for him, would take the blame, even though Ronnie had been the one out of line. Sure enough, Gary went on: “My dad gets my news for me. He watches all the news shit. The local channels anyway. The Channel 4 folks.” He had a smile on his face now, a sickly one, drunk and ingratiating, and it made Ronnie feel lousy, so he took another drink. Gary added, “Those girls were behind me in school, so I never knew any of ’em, really. Except for Nia. But she never had anything to say to me, and that’s not the kind of thing my dad knows about. C-SPAN and such.”

“Yeah, well, I wouldn’t follow it so much myself except...” He stopped himself, and covered by taking a drink. As he’d hoped, Gary took over for him again, still not grasping the important thing about these women.

“Except that you nailed all of ’em,” Gary said, vicarious glee returning. “You nailed ’em by the light of the silvery atom smasher.”

He was good and drunk by the time he could sever himself from Gary and join the rest of the party in the backyard. There were almost no children, which was refreshing, but which also made the gathering oddly sedate; in his youth, Memorial Day cookouts had teemed with them. Many of the same people were present, just grown up, and most of them were childless, one way or another. He saw Lou’s daughter, his cousin Melissa, younger than him by four or five years, and waved her over. She’d always had a crush on him, or at least that was what Gary had told him a few summers ago. Ronnie had found the idea creepy, not only because of their blood tie, but because she had a jutting jaw, bad skin, and no breasts to speak of. She’d bred since then, so her breasts had more oomph to them now, but she was still homely. She greeted him with too much happiness, telling him that her three-year-old daughter was inside with the kid’s father, a man from the city who Ronnie knew he’d met, but couldn’t remember anything about. Ronnie made a slurred promise to say hello to them later, but managed to achieve his principle aim, which was to get information on the hot but faceless woman. Melissa said, “You mean Dana Asch? She just moved back in with her mom. Bad divorce. No kids.” It didn’t seem to occur to Melissa that she’d just described Ronnie’s own situation. To his delight, Melissa hollered, “Dana! You met my cousin Ronnie? He’s back now too.”

She was older than he’d thought, maybe even over forty, but she looked great, the way a lot of movie stars manage to look perfect at forty, or even fifty, sometimes even hotter than they’d been at twenty. He didn’t know what it was, maybe good bones or lucky genes. Probably just money, he thought. She looked like money too. Skin just tanned enough to look golden, hair just blond enough to look real, skin just taut enough to look like it was due to virtuous exercise, not plastic surgery. She smiled at him and his soberest thought was Come to Papa .

At first they chatted glibly by the grill, under the elated stare of Uncle Lou. They exchanged facts, some of which they already knew about each other. He learned that she’d gone to Pitt, then moved to San Francisco, gotten a job as a hospital administrator, married a doctor, and had lived in a large house with an ocean view. Neither mentioned divorce. She was enough older than he was that they didn’t share many acquaintances, despite growing up in the same neighborhood. Then Mrs. Asch yelled, “Dana!” in an old-woman voice, and Dana gave a quick smile to Ronnie, then Lou, and moved away toward where her mother sat surrounded by three or four other elderly people in loud golf clothes. Yet he felt that some subtle consent had passed between them; he kept her in his peripheral vision, and when she walked into the house alone thirty minutes later, he followed her without anyone noticing.

She was in the kitchen, looking at a picture held by a strawberry-shaped magnet on the refrigerator door.

“My mother’s black lab,” Ronnie said. “Pepper. The dog’s been dead for six years.”

“That’s sweet,” she said.

She still looked good, even when he was quasi-sober. His head was finally clearing after all the beer he’d had with Gary, and he couldn’t believe his luck. She turned to peer at him, and then her eyes broke away, darting around the room. His eyes followed hers, and he could see they were truly alone, if only for a moment. He turned back to her and then she leaned forward and kissed him on the mouth, quickly but hard, a serious kiss. She pulled back and stared at him with shining hazel eyes. She said, “No one can know. I’m ‘going out with girlfriends’ tonight. I just moved back. I don’t want my mother to know anything.”

He nodded, then asked, “Do you know the path to the atom smasher? Where it comes out by the ballfield?”

She smiled wide, almost laughing. “Oh my God. Yes.” She dropped her voice. “Two hours from now. Bring wine. I’ll bring cups. And watch out for poison ivy.”

It was like a military maneuver through a jungle. It was only spring, so the milkweed and Virginia creeper weren’t as thick as they would be in July or August. Still, the path was dark and a little muddy; if there hadn’t been a tacit ban on speaking, he would have joked that they could use a machete. Here and there they passed wild raspberry bushes; he remembered that Mary Galetti had liked to eat the ripened berries on the way up the hill.

The hurricane fence was at the top of a rise, steep like all hillsides in the neighborhood. The fence was the same, which was a shock. Even the spot he’d most often used in the past hadn’t been mended, where the green-painted metal knots only kissed the ground instead of digging deep into it. The fencing was even still bent in the same places. All it took was a hard jerk and the hole was big enough to scoot through. Nothing has changed, he thought. How weird is that? He’d brought pliers in his backpack, hoping they’d be enough to bend the wire fence to get in; he’d been praying that he wouldn’t need his father’s bolt cutters. There was simply no way he could have snuck them out of the house. Now it turned out that even the pliers were unnecessary.