Tom Perrotta - Nine Inches

At some point in the midst of this fiasco, Gus became aware of Lonny watching him from his own backyard. The cocky bastard was reclining shirtless on a lounge chair in the shade of a dogwood — unlike Gus, Lonny had retained a lean, youthful physique well into his golden years, and he liked showing it off — sipping a cold beer and casting sly glances in the direction of his garage, where he kept an air compressor that could have inflated the pool in seconds. Gus had used it numerous times in the past, effortlessly pumping up basketballs, bike tires, air mattresses, whatever. But he was damned if he was going to ask Lonny for help, and Lonny was damned if he was going to offer it. So Gus just kept on huffing and puffing and sweating, mentally cursing his neighbor the whole time. Finally, more than two hours after he’d begun, he turned on the hose and began filling the pool with water.

Well, Lonny was dead now, and the grandkids were coming for another visit. And that compressor was still just gathering dust in the garage, not doing a damn bit of good for anyone.

BALANCING THE pool box on his hip, Gus lifted the latch on the gate and slipped into his neighbors’ yard. A misty drizzle drifted across his face as he circled around the gas grill, onto the carpet of AstroTurf Lonny had laid on top of what used to be the swimming pool.

The Simmonses’ garage was detached from the house, set way back at the rear of the property. The original structure had barely been big enough to accommodate a car and a lawn mower, but Lonny had expanded it in the mid-eighties, turning the squat little box into an attractive and comfortable cottage, complete with a wood-burning stove, a stereo system, and a half bathroom.

He had conceived of the refurbished garage as a sort of clubhouse for his teenaged sons, and for a couple of years they’d actually used it that way, hanging out with their buddies, blasting heavy metal on the stereo, and turning themselves into expert Ping-Pong players. But it didn’t last; the boys got driver’s licenses, and their attention shifted to the world beyond their backyard. After his sons left, Lonny began spending more and more time in the garage himself, drinking beer and watching ball games, playing epic eight-ball tournaments against himself on the pool table he’d bought for a song when the Limelighter Café went belly-up. In recent years, Gus had often noticed the light on late at night and wondered what Lonny was up to. A couple of times this spring, he’d seen his former friend emerging from the garage at daybreak, looking rumpled and bewildered as he shuffled across the turf to his house.

Gus heard the branches of the oak groaning ominously in the breeze and couldn’t help looking up into the dark canopy of leaves that hovered over the garage like an enormous fist. Lonny had been deeply alarmed by the symphony of creaks and squeals produced by the massive limbs; he’d insisted to Gus that the whole tree was ready to come toppling over in the next big storm, trunk and all, as if it were no longer rooted to the ground.

But the tree’s still here, Gus thought. It was Lonny who had fallen, brought down by a massive heart attack during an afternoon nap in the garage. Gus would have considered it an ideal way to go — no suffering, no medical bills, no burdens placed on your loved ones — except that he’d been within listening range of Peggy’s hysterical shrieks upon finding the body and had witnessed the frozen look of devastation on her usually proud face as she followed the stretcher out to the ambulance.

The garage door was locked, but that wasn’t a problem — Lonny kept a spare key in a secret compartment at the bottom of a thermometer he’d mounted on the wall above his woodpile. Gus knew this because he and Martha had given Lonny the trick thermometer as a fiftieth-birthday gift, back in the days when everyone got along and the passage of time still seemed like cause for celebration.

THE FIRST thing that struck Gus as he stepped inside the garage was the smell of cigar smoke. Not a faint stale whiff of it but a concentrated gust, so strong that he expected to turn on the light and find Lonny leaning on the pool table, squinting at the cue ball through a cloud of grayish fumes from the El Producto clamped between his teeth.

But all he saw, when his groping hand finally found the switch, was a large open room, the geography of which was instantly, and deeply, familiar. The workshop along the left wall — the wrenches, screwdrivers, and hammers all neatly suspended from the pegboard. Some metal storage shelves full of paint cans, power tools, and miscellaneous crap. Beyond that, the old refrigerator where Lonny kept the beer he bought by the case at the Liquor Warehouse. The bathroom in the corner, just past the snowblower, which was covered for the season with a brown plastic tarp.

In the middle of the garage, Lonny had created a makeshift den, a few pieces of cast-off furniture — foldout sofa, easy chair, end table with a little portable TV on it — arranged in a semicircle around the Franklin stove. The game area filled the remaining space: Ping-Pong table, pool table, foosball. The whole place gave the impression of a finished basement that had doggedly burrowed its way above ground.

As his eyes adjusted to the light, it gradually occurred to Gus that the garage must have remained untouched since the day of Lonny’s death. He told himself to stop gawking, to just inflate the pool and get the hell out, but he couldn’t seem to make himself move. He felt a small hard ball of grief rise up from his throat, growing as it moved, then burst out of his mouth in a series of sobs that shook his whole body.

“Oh, Lonny,” he heard himself cry. “Oh, Jesus.”

FEELING A bit shaky, Gus sat down on the easy chair and tried to get hold of himself. He wasn’t sure what it was about being here that upset him so much. He wasn’t a superstitious man, didn’t believe in ghosts. Nor did he have any kind of sentimental attachment to the garage itself. Except for one long-gone summer, he had rarely set foot in here for more than a few minutes at a time.

It must have been 1989, he thought. That was the year Martha got laid off from Honeywell, and things got tense between them. Lonny wasn’t working, either. He was recovering from knee surgery and was bored out of his skull, puttering around the house all day.

For a short time — a month, maybe just a couple of weeks — Gus had fallen into the habit of joining Lonny in the garage after supper and staying for several hours, not heading home until he was pretty sure that Martha was asleep, or at least too tired to pick a fight.

What had he and Lonny done on those lazy summer nights? Watched the Yankees, drunk beer, knocked the balls around on the pool table. Listened to country music, which Lonny loved (he had driven an eighteen-wheeler as a young man and considered himself an honorary Southerner) and Gus usually hated. But for some reason, he didn’t mind it so much in Lonny’s garage, all those songs about hard luck and heartbreak, how everybody got their share.

A couple of times, though, late at night, they got to talking, man-to-man, about more serious subjects — the deaths of their parents, their worries about their kids, the everyday indignities of walking around in an aging body, what their lives added up to more than halfway down the road.

And they talked about their marriages, too, something they had never done before. Lonny complained bitterly about Peggy — how she’d let herself go and lost her sense of fun, how critical she’d become of everyone they knew, as if she’d somehow been promoted to a higher station of life. On top of everything else, their sex life had gone down the tubes. She practically made him beg for it; he was lucky if they had relations once a week.