Lost Echoes

had smacked his lips and how the wine had beaded on his lips, how he had licked at it when it splashed onto the sides of his mouth.

Harry got up and found the jelly jar Joey had drunk out of. There was just the faintest bit of wine in the bottom.

This is silly, Harry told himself. I want a drink, I can have a drink. Hell, one drink, that isn’t anything. Maybe I could go to the store, get a beer. Just one.

In Rio Bravo, the drunk in the movie had quit drinking the hard stuff, just had a beer now and then. That worked for him. He could drink a beer. It was the hard liquor he couldn’t have. A beer. That would be cool. Just one. A cold one.

Shit, Harry thought. Dean Martin was an actor. He didn’t have to get over being a drunk. He was playing drunk. In my case, Harry thought, I am not playing.

He washed out the jelly jar, in case he should start trying to drink the dregs, and went to bed. After a long while of thinking about drink and thinking about the sounds that made him drink, the faces he had seen, the pain he had felt, he drifted off to sleep.

29

So Harry, he’s doing his center-of-the-universe thing with Tad, and he’s got a lot of spare hours (drinking took up more time than he realized), and he’s spending the rest of the time going to school, studying, working, not drinking, not missing Joey, trying to find that damn center, and then, surprise, he finds the center of the universe. Easy. It’s right in front of him.

And its name is Talia.

She’s looking just two beats above movie starrish. Hot mama on a cool fall day. A dream a-loose in the world of mortals. All in white, and the light loves her. Her skirt is not that short, but looks short because her perfect legs are so long, and the white top is frilly, and her breasts, dark as if touched with cool shadow, are plenty full and plenty showing, and her face is alight with a smile, teeth so white and full an orthodontist would bow to them as if to a shrine.

It was then that Harry noticed the pack of folks with her.

Four boys, dressed to the nines, bodies by health club, clothes by designer wear, hair by stylists, combed perfect and not subject to the wind.

Harry wore faded jeans—and not fashionably faded—a loose shirt, and his hair was a twist and wisp that crawled all over his head. He was whiter than typing paper seen in a bright light. It got that way when you hid from the world.

There were a couple of nice-looking girls with Talia as well—one of them may have been with one of the boys, the other solo—but that left three guys to be with Talia. If the other girl only appeared to be solo, and was in fact with one of the other guys, that still left two.

Harry thought: Unless all the unfettered guys are gay, odds are bad for our hero.

And then Talia looked at one of the boys and smiled, and then, the universe be praised, she looked directly at him.

He felt a movement in his pants that wasn’t shifting pocket change.

“I didn’t mean to separate you from your friends,” Harry said, taking a sip of his coffee, watching her over the top of his cup.

“That’s all right,” Talia said. “I’ve wondered about you.”

“Me?”

“Sure. I’ve been looking for you.”

“You have?”

“Yes, I have…. This could be called our spot, couldn’t it?”

They were sitting and having coffee in the same place as before. “Yes,” Harry said, “I suppose it could. I’ve thought about you a lot too.”

Talia looked pouty. “If you have, where have you been?”

“Busy.”

“You haven’t been coming to class. I waited. I went by where you were supposed to be. I thought you dropped out.”

“I missed a couple classes. Been helping a friend.”

Talia smiled, and Harry thought: Wow. She left her pack to be with me. That’s pretty damn cool.

Now it was just him and her.

And, of course, everyone else in the place.

Still, it meant something, way she acted. She had to really like him, leaving her friends like that. She had looked back at the guys when she came over, before he asked her to coffee, and he wondered about that, her looking back, but, shit, you could read something into everything, and that was his problem.

Take it as it is, he told himself. Take it as it is.

He said, “You know, I don’t know if you like movies much, me, I’m a movie buff.”

“I love them.”

“But I was thinking, you know, this weekend we could catch a movie. Together.”

“Of course together.” She laughed. “We could even go at the same time.”

“Well, yeah. That was silly. Sure. Together. Could be there’s nothing good on, I haven’t checked, but we can see. Maybe what we can do is I can pick you up, or meet you on campus, and we can walk over to Dineros for something to eat, then go to the movie. Oh, and there’s this new steakhouse. Khan’s. It’s good. I ate there when it first opened. But Dineros is close, and that might be best.”

Shut the fuck up, he told himself. You’re babbling.

“That sounds good. I’m in. But I’ve got to go right now. Can we do it tomorrow afternoon? You can pick me up here.”

She took out a pen and paper, wrote down her number. She had already given it to him before, but he said nothing. He wouldn’t have minded having a collection of the number, as long as it was written with her hand.

“Call me before then. Okay? We can iron out times and when and where to meet.”

“Absolutely.”

He didn’t realize it until he had walked to his car and driven home, but he hadn’t bothered with his planned route, hadn’t even thought about it.

Just walked to his car and drove home in a stupor.

The world was spinning better, had to be. The sun was brighter and the air was sweeter. Every dog, even one with acute audio-choronological hearing, had his day.

Bark. Bark.

Harry went home and began taking the cardboard and egg cartons off the walls.

30

It was late afternoon and the sun had fallen earlier than the day before and the shadows were longer and the wind was cooler and full of smells. Tad and Harry, side by side, moved across the yard in the dim light and the windy swirl of leaves, and Harry could feel it now, the thing Tad had told him about.

A sensation of being one with it all.

And he could feel it even thinking about Talia.

It was different, thinking about her this time. It wasn’t distracting. It was part of his focus. Part of a whole. He was the world. The universe. He and Talia, all part and parcel.

Fact was, he felt as if he were king of it all.

One with nature and—

When he fell it hurt.

“Watch them roots,” Tad said. “Bunch of old roots over here near this end.”