Round Rock - Michelle Huneven [12]
AFTER his wife and son drove out of his life, Red Ray got drunk. Besotted, swacked, stinking drunk, and then some. He drank until he passed out, woke up, and started drinking again. He drank for a week, until he came upon a twilight calm in which he could walk, talk, even think, all without pain. From this dark, incorporeal state, he called Frank Jamieson, his oldest friend.
Married and divorced three times, Frank was an expert on the extinction of matrimony. Red hadn’t seen him for over two years, relying instead on the occasional drunken phone conversation. Yvette had banished Frank after his last visit, when he took Red to pick up crabs for dinner and didn’t bring him home for three days. Red didn’t even know where they’d gone. East, possibly the Mother Lode country, maybe even Tahoe. Red swore that they’d only been gone a day although Yvette and the calendar said otherwise. But that was good old Frank, skilled since childhood in the short tonic excursion.
Frank’s father died when he was seven. His mother shut herself away with a well-stocked liquor cabinet and tried to take Frank with her for company. She invented a chronic asthma for her son and kept him out of school for weeks at a time. Frank learned to escape. He memorized bus schedules. By age ten, he knew how to hop a freight train. He discovered transient camps in storm drains and abandoned houses, turning up at school filthy and hungry from these hobo lairs. Red was his sidekick. Frank had the plan, Red had the money and the clothes and the food. Even then, Frank eluded the authorities while Red got grounded or yelled at, once even suspended from school for truancy. In their teens, the two boys discovered an arroyo with several rustic cabins that mud slides had rendered inaccessible by car. For six months, they spent afternoons, and in Frank’s case nights, in different houses, entering through screens that parted at the touch of a pocket knife. They sprawled on strangers’ sofas, ate canned goods, read old magazines and shopping lists, and drank bottles of wine and Rock ’n Rye smuggled from Mrs. Jamieson’s stores. In those havens of rustic luxury, Red developed a taste for how he’d like to live and drink.
This pattern of brief escape never left Frank. At seventeen, he joined the Air Force, and stayed on for twenty-four years. How many times had he shown up on Red’s doorstep, AWOL and drunk? Yet he always gauged the tolerance of his superiors with perfect accuracy; he never saw the inside of the stockade or received more than a stern reprimand. His wives and sidekicks and the wives of his sidekicks suffered more. Whenever Frank came to town, Yvette’s love died in chunks: Frank was the proverbial bad influence, a test to the Rays’ marriage, a test Red invariably failed.
The Air Force trained Frank to be an aircraft engineer. Upon retiring at forty-one, he was deluged with offers from civilian corporations. He went through four companies in one year, claiming that civilian work lacked the military’s standard of perfection. The head-hunters soon stopped calling. Frank shed a third wife and moved back to his mother’s house. He quit shaving for the first time in his life and spent his days watching game shows and soaps and playing gin with his mother.
The day Red called, mother and son were drinking Safeway-brand vodka, eating jalapeño cheese on Bacos, and betting a penny a point. The score was 7,243 to 5,689 in Mrs. Jamieson’s favor. Frank told Red, “I can be there in, say, four hours.”
Three hours later, he walked into Red’s office. Six