Chris Adrian - The Great Night

“I guess you haven’t,” Will said, and his father told him that he should come along on a trip sometime. It would be free for him to fly, after all, and he could probably even sit in the jump seat, if he wanted. Those trips never seemed to happen, and that had been a disappointment, when Will was ten and daydreamed of sitting in the jump seat or maybe even getting to fly the plane for a little while, if the engineer and copilot should be overcome with food poisoning and his father needed another hand at the controls. But now he had no particular interest in the jump seat, or flying, or San Diego, or going anywhere but to work and to school. “I don’t think I could miss work,” Will said.

“It’s just a thought,” his father said, waving his hands as if to dismiss the notion as silly, but he added, “It’s not like the ice cream will all melt if you go away for a few days.”

“I guess not,” Will said. His father offered him a beer, holding up the half-depleted six-pack that he’d brought with him into the living room. Will took one and opened it and had a sip, which was what he usually did. His father talked for a few sentences about San Diego before he said, “I just want to make one thing clear.” There was always something that he wanted to be clear about, that he loved his wife or that he thought Will was special or that it was in everybody’s best interest when Sean moved out of the house or that getting married was the worst thing that could happen to a person or that it could be the best thing. That night he wanted it to be absolutely clear that he absolutely did not go out drinking until five in the morning with his copilot, who happened to be a lady. “Maybe it’s inappropriate for her to be in the cockpit at all ,” he said, “but that doesn’t mean there was any inappropriate behavior .” He scowled at his beer can. “Certain people can think whatever they want.” He went on for a while about how it said something about you if you could never trust someone, and how you could drive a person to do exactly the sort of thing you accused them of, how mistrust could make an innocent person guilty just from the force of violent spite, and wouldn’t that serve you right, if it did? Wouldn’t it serve the hater right, if it did? Will nodded, but it was even harder for him to pay attention than it had been with his mother.

“Are you going to drink that?” his father asked, and Will handed over his beer can. The empty plastic rings were at his father’s feet.

“Sorry,” Will said.

“Just don’t want to waste it,” his father said. “I think I’ll watch some television, now that certain people have gone to bed.”

“I’m pretty sleepy,” Will said, when his father asked him if he wanted to come, and they parted ways at the stairs, Will suffering his father’s hug awkwardly because the embrace brought a thought to Will’s mind in a heated rush and he wondered what it would be like to hug the lady.

Sean was sitting on Will’s bed upstairs, surrounded by a small collection of kitchenware and decorative statuary. In his hand he held a meat mallet, blond wood with a shiny, wicked-looking head of corrugated steel. “There you are,” he said.

“Are you going to hit me with that?” Will asked.

“Do you remember this?” Sean said. “Or this or this?” He held up a garlic crusher and a solid plaster statue of the Infant of Prague, chipped on the head. “Or how about this?” He reached behind him and produced a croquet mallet.

“What are you doing?” Will asked, because their mother had made a weapon of everything on the bed, at some point over the years hitting their father with it or throwing it at him. “Starting a museum collection?”

“I’m showing you,” Sean said. “I’m showing you what I mean, since I can’t just tell you, not in the right words. There’s still blood on these,” he said. “There’s still blood all over the place in this house.”

“I thought it was shit,” Will said.

“You know what I mean,” Sean said. “All of these”—he waved the croquet mallet around—“have been put to unnatural uses. You can’t just watch that. What I’m trying to say is that there are consequences, and that’s why you have to come with me.”

“I’m really tired,” Will said.

“You’re not listening to me. Now you’re just tired. Now you hardly think you notice it, but later it’s all you can think about. And the only thing that makes it any easier is the thought that you can take somebody else out of it. Nobody could take you out of it, but you can do it for somebody else? Do you see what I mean?”

“ Really, really tired,” Will said. Sean sighed and started to gather up the statues and mallets and trivets and heavy spoons. As he walked by he thrust his hip out to Will, drawing his attention to a piece of paper in his pocket.

“That’s a note,” he said, “to them. It explains everything. I’ll leave it tomorrow night, after they go to bed, and then we’ll just go. We’ll just get going, and everything else we’ll figure out later. Okay?” Will moved away and pushed the croquet mallet under his bed. “You don’t even have to answer now. You just need to know I have a plan.”

“I don’t care,” Will said, not turning around. “I don’t want to go anywhere with you.” Sean dropped something — Will heard the impact on the carpet — but didn’t say anything. Will waited till he was gone before he turned around. Then he sat on his bed.

He took the lady’s card from his pocket, lay back, and held it up to look at it. It was the size and shape and stiffness of a business card, but all it listed were her name and her number, as if her name was all there was to her job, or just being herself was her profession. It was after midnight, but she had said he could call anytime, and he chose to believe that. He listened for a moment to the dial tone, unreasonably afraid that his mother might be listening in, and then he dialed the number. She picked up almost right away.

“Hi,” Will said.

“Hi,” she said. “Who is this?”

“Will. From Thom Tickle’s. The ice-cream shop.”

“I knew who it was,” she said. “That was a joke.”

“Oh,” Will said, and tried to laugh but only managed a cough.

“Are you sick?”

“No,” Will said. “How are you?”

“I’m good,” she said. “I’m pretty good. I was hoping you would call.”

“Really?”

“Sure.”

“So am I. I’m glad I called.”

“Well,” she said. “Then we’re on the same page.”

“I guess,” Will said. Then she didn’t say anything for a while. Will might have been afraid she had hung up, but he could hear her breathing. He wondered if he had said something wrong. Maybe he should have said definitely instead of I guess . “Anyway,” he said.

“Do you want to come over?” she asked.

“I bet she has syphilis,” Lauren said. “You can’t go around fucking every soda jerk in Central Florida with no consequences.”

“Nobody has syphilis anymore,” Will said. “It’s like leprosy.”

“It’s on the rise,” Lauren said. “None of that bad shit ever really goes away. Anyway, you better wear a condom.”

“It’s not going to happen,” Will said. “I don’t want it to happen. Haven’t you been listening to anything I’ve said?” He had told her about the phone call, and then wished he hadn’t. He hadn’t gone over, but before Will hung up they had talked for another twenty minutes about what might happen if he did.

“She has spots on her palms, I saw them. I’ll buy you some condoms, if you’re too embarrassed.” Before Will could reply, Thom came up with a hot towel and told Will to polish away the frost on the ice-cream canisters.