I dumped some more beer down my gullet. It didn’t help. Stuffing my hands into my crotch below the bar was the only way to keep them from shaking.
She came and went like a bad radio signal for the remainder of the evening. Sometimes it felt like reception was clear, then the next time, nothing but static. I talked about our shared past, but that was cheating and it made me seem like a kid, not a man. Things had to move away from that tip. Away from my father, too.
She was now at the corner stool, talking to a guy who kept jerking his stubbled chin at me and making a dangerous face.
“Hey! You Terry’s kid?” the guy yelled down the length of the bar at me.
Ignoring him, I sipped my whiskey. I’d switched in hopes that the harder, leathery color and flavor would harden my nerve. Balderdash. Those bullshit sayings about liquid courage—they only worked if the drinker was able to completely let go. That wasn’t me.
When Irene was getting off, I walked her to her car, but really, she walked me.
“Honey, honey, you gotta hold your liquor better if you want to hang.”
The oppressive night weighed on me. My damp shirt clung to my skin.
She asked if I was okay, but it sounded like she was at the other end of a long tunnel. My head hung low as I leaned against the cool metal of her car. The door opened, and I tumbled into the backseat.
Lights flickered through the windows. From the front of the car, Irene said, “Don’t you hurl in my backseat, mi son!” Roger Miller’s King of the Road filtered out of the speakers.
“Stop the car.” I jerked up, unlatched the door, and poked my head out as we lurched to a halt. Everything gushed out of me into the gutter bordering the road. Tropical places had gutters, deep and wide. As a kid I used to straddle the v-shaped cesspools on my walk to school. A gross game of dare. If you lost, your shoes wound up covered in god-knew-what, running out in the brown water.
A bazooka joe wrapper was trapped in my throw-up. Joe’s grin and indecipherable words above his ever-jeering expression. We were in front of the cemetery where Roger and my grandparents were buried.
“I gotta go see someone,” I said, getting out and pushing open the gate.
“Boise! Where you going?” Irene said. “This is enough. Come back in this car. I’m tired. I’m going home. You can crash on my couch, but I’m not coming in no ghost-yard after midnight, you hear?”
A sad headstone read “Roger Black” along with his years of life and death. No one cared to write something meaningful to remember him by, like “Beloved Son” or “You will be missed.” Roger would not be missed, except by me. Did his Auntie Glor even miss him? I remembered our sleepovers and yelling for him to come out and play through white, metal louvers. Two powerful emotions gripped me: a longing to have my friend back and the need to piss.
Scanning the yard, I tucked into a corner and pushed up against the mildewed barrier wall. It burned a little coming out, but once it was over, I sighed with relief. Irene was so close behind me, I nearly bowled her over.
“What the fuck, Irene!” I said, still zipping my fly.
“What did you say to me? You are in the corner of a cemetery after midnight pissing and you asking me ‘what the fuck?’”
Pissing had sobered me up slightly, but I figured I should play up the drunk thing a little longer otherwise this conversation would dump into serious-ville mighty fast.
“Yeah, well,” I waved my arm over the silent expanse of greenery and death, “they don’t much care.”
She watched me a second, then shrugged. “I suppose you right. So why we here?”
“I thought you were frightened.”
“I’m not scared, but I ain’t been in a cemetery at night since I was messin’ round as a teenager.”
“So, about the time you were sitting for my parents?”
She got a thoughtful look on her face, the past running behind her eyes like a light show. “Yeah, I guess I come to the graveyard once or twice when I knowing you.”
Suspicions and questions rattled like the bones of the dead.
“With whom?”
“You wanna know who I make out with in a graveyard? Don’t remember.”
“There were that many?”
“You are a little fuck, aren’t you?” she said with a devious grin. “What you really want to know? Just ask, mi son.”
The dawning sobriety got the better of my bad judgment. There were questions you didn’t ask. They flung a relationship off a cliff. Most times, relationships wore away, the steady erosion of waves pounding against limestone, until one violent day, the rock crumbled for seemingly no reason. Between the two, I preferred slow erosion, but if I asked this question, the limestone would snap off and tumble into the sea.
“Nothing. Forget it,” I said.
“That’s what I thought. All bark. You always been all bark, Boise. You haven’t changed that much.”
“You calling me a boy.”
She shrugged and started back to her car. I yelled after her, “I’m not the one who’s afraid of graveyards!”
We were parked in front of The Manner, her car idling roughly. “You wanna come up?” I offered. My shame had no bounds.
“I like you, Boise.”
“Don’t say you like me. Don’t say that.”
“But I do,” she said, her voice getting slightly higher with faulty insistence. “I always have. You were a cute kid.”
“Here it comes.”
“I have to get home. It’s late. We’re really not supposed to even be out here.”
“What, the curfew? They don’t do nothing about that,” I said thickly. “I been out after midnight so many nights.”
“You not a woman.”
“You could ... ” My third eye watched me from above, cynical and judgmental. “You could stay here. I promise to behave. Dana stayed before, you can ask her about it.”
She sucked her teeth at the mention of Dana.
“Are
