Althea and Oliver (8 page)

“Great. Let's go right now.”

“Girl, I'm not going to book two tickets to Crete knowing that if Oliver woke up tomorrow they'd go to waste.” Althea doesn't contest this, instead admitting to its truth by staring at her feet. “Until you can stand to be separated from him, you'll have to amuse yourself here in Wilmington,” he says.

“There're only so many times I can drive through the car wash.”

“If you really want to go away, you could always go visit your mother. I'm sure she'd love to have you for a visit.”

Althea cringes at the suggestion. “I'm not visiting her until she moves to a coast. I couldn't handle being landlocked with that woman.”

Garth says nothing, unmoved either to defend or further criticize his ex-wife. Althea wonders at his restraint. There is a moment of silence.

“What do you think it is? With Oliver. What do you think is wrong with him?” she asks.

“I don't know. It's like a fairy tale, or something mythological.”

“It's too shitty to be a fairy tale.”

“Come on now, you've read the Brothers Grimm. Fairy tales are unbelievably shitty. You know there's a version of ‘Sleeping Beauty' where she's raped in her sleep? Al, you have to have a little more grit than this.”

“I feel like a sucker,” she says. “I feel like he's making a sucker out of me.”

“He's not doing anything. He's just sleeping.”

The sting of Oliver's rejection is just as fresh as it was the night of the party. “He's done plenty, believe me.”

• • •

Althea doesn't really mean to pay Valerie a visit; she's just biking around town, and when she passes Val's house, there she is on the front lawn with Minty Fresh, washing a collection of enormous pots and pans with a garden hose. They wave at Althea and call her name, so she has no choice but to stop and dismount, carefully laying down her bike on the soggy grass. An old tape deck is balanced on the porch railing, blasting a punk rock anthem replete with bagpipes and electric guitars. Valerie dries the pots and pans with a large pink beach towel, stacking them in a rusty shopping cart.

“What's with the dishwashing?” Althea asks.

“We just finished our shift with Bread and Roses,” Minty Fresh says. His jeans are astonishingly tight, like denim leggings cuffed over his combat boots.

“Since when do you guys care about feeding the homeless?”

“We thought it would be a good way to meet girls,” Valerie says. “But now we like it.”

“We get the food out of Dumpsters, bring it back here to cook, and then serve it in the park for free,” says Minty. “You should come with us sometime. Oliver's always saying that you're kick-ass in the kitchen.”

“Nicky's cooking has just lowered his standards,” Althea replies. “You feed the homeless garbage?”

“It's not garbage!” Valerie protests vehemently. “You have no idea how much good food gets thrown away just because it stops looking perfect on the shelf in the supermarket. It's beyond all reason.”

Coby emerges from inside the house. Standing on the porch, he lights a cigarette, then uses his Bic to pop the cap off his bottle of Fat Tire, oblivious as it clatters to the floor. When he sees Althea, he smiles, taking a long pull from his beer as he comes down the steps to greet her.

“Hey, Carter,” he says.

She's not expecting a hug, but here it is, Coby's skinny arms around her, and honestly, it doesn't feel all bad. He smells like smoke and sweat and freshly shorn grass—like summer, a normal summer—but she takes a step back anyway.

“Hey,” she says. “Don't tell me you've taken an interest in community service.”

“Fuck a bunch of that. I came to have at the leftovers.”

“Goddamnit, Coby,” shouts Valerie. “I told you not to drink my dad's beer.”

“He won't miss one beer,” says Coby.

“Don't leave that bottle lying around for him to find; you'll get me in trouble.”

“Am I allowed to put it in the recycling, or should I bury it out back?”

“How about you just shove it up your ass?”

“God, I really hate it when Mom and Dad fight,” Minty says.

Althea reaches for her bike. “Well, I'm glad I stopped by.”

Coby grabs her by a belt loop. “Hold up, you just got here.”

Disarmed by his urgency, she ignores the way his fingertips graze the gap between her shirt and the waist of her jeans.

Minty finishes rinsing the last pot, watered-down split-pea soup sinking into the grass. He hands it off to Valerie, then wipes his hands on his pants and tenderly checks the vertical status of his Mohawk. “We have to go, anyway. Dumpster diving at the Food Lion.”

Coby turns to Althea. “What do you say, Carter, you wanna go do something? I can toss your bike in the back of my truck.”

“Go do what?” Althea asks suspiciously.

He pauses for a minute. He looks like he's thinking, like he's digging deep, like he knows it has to be good, that if he suggests video games or something equally pedestrian she'll snort and go home and that will be the end of the story. Then his eyes brighten.

“What?” she says.

“You know what? I'm going to make it a surprise.”

Reluctantly, Althea allows herself to be led down the driveway to Coby's truck, an aged white Ford F-150 pockmarked with rust, and winces as he tosses her bicycle into the bed behind the toolbox. She settles herself in the passenger seat, which is covered in a fine layer of what appears to be silt; the cab reeks of stale cigarettes and pot. There's an empty can of Pabst in one of the cup holders. The radio is, naturally, tuned to the classic rock station, and REO Speedwagon sings “Take It on the Run” while Coby drives them farther away from the relatively civilized college town of Wilmington and deeper into what is just North Carolina. Althea snorts as they pass a pawn shop with a shiny orange banner out front that reads
WE HAVE GUNS
adjacent to a liquor store in a strip mall.

“Jesus Christ,” she says. “Look at where we live.” The more distance there is between her and the water, the more anxious she begins to feel.

They park at the end of a long dirt road. Coby reaches across the front seat and grabs a fifth of Old Crow from the glove compartment. He takes a slug and passes it to Althea, who follows suit and hands it back; then he slips it into the waistband of his pants. Together they hike silently up the road, shaded by a canopy of old elm trees. When they finally emerge, they're confronted by a hulking, skeletal structure four stories tall, with gaping holes in the brick walls where the windows used to be. Even in the middle of a sunny afternoon it's a disquieting sight, made more eerie by the silence. Althea has never seen this place before, but she recognizes it immediately from stories and pictures and the occasional newspaper article wondering when the decrepit death trap will be torn down at last.

“Is this the old meat-packing plant?” she asks.

“Yeah.”

They have to climb up to get in through the first floor. Coby weaves his fingers together and boosts her up. Althea is staggered by the inside of the gutted building. It's as vast and silent as a cathedral. The floor is covered in crumbling bricks and cement rubble, and everywhere is the detritus of decades' worth of teenage exploration—spent cans of spray paint, empty beer bottles and broken glass, cigarette butts and used condoms. The walls are covered in layers of graffiti, an explosion of neon, illegible tags, proclamations of love, the occasional pentagram. Someone has drawn a wicked mouth with yellow teeth around a gaping hole in one wall. A flight of stark cement stairs stands in the middle of the room, leading dizzily upward, M. C. Escher on mushrooms.

“Pretty cool, right?” Coby says.

Althea nods.

“I know a guy who did some serious Satanic shit out here.”

“Nobody actually worships Satan,” says Althea.

They explore the first level, rooms beyond rooms, huge portions of the floor missing so they can look directly into the chambers of the basement. Althea wonders what they were for when the plant still operated.

“Want to go upstairs?” she asks finally, eager to see more.

“Let me go first,” Coby says. “You have to be careful; there're all kinds of holes in the floor and shit.”

She follows him up, trying to keep her eyes on her feet as they navigate the precarious staircase, her tennis shoes further pulverizing the little bits of cement that are everywhere. Coby reaches back, and after a moment's hesitation she takes his hand, just to be safe.

“This place has been here for ages,” he says. “My dad's drug dealer—”

“Wait, your dad has a drug dealer?”

“He's like a family friend who happens to sell my dad pot. His name is Zorro. Anyway, he used to party here when he was in high school. Says he even knew a couple of kids who died here. The place is supposed to be haunted.”

“Minty Fresh would say it's haunted by the spirits of all the animals that were slaughtered here,” Althea says.

“Minty Fresh needs to get laid.”

There are almost no walls left on the top floor at all, just the studs holding up the roof. Coby stands at the edge, looking out over the woods and drinking Old Crow. Althea takes another drink herself, then wanders off until she finds herself standing at the top of the old elevator shaft, staring all the way down into the basement.

When they were nine years old, Oliver broke his wrist. It was a rainy day and Althea was bored, so he suggested they build an obstacle course on the basement stairs, piling up soup cans and pots and stacks of magazines until the steps were covered in debris. They were going to take turns slaloming down on a flattened cardboard box. Seeing Althea's anxiety, Oliver volunteered to go first. After delicately navigating his way to the top, he waved fearlessly down at her, then took his position on the box and pushed off. A third of the way down, the cardboard snagged on an old shoe tree they had found in Garth's closet. Althea watched from the foot of the stairs as he tumbled toward her too quickly, end over end like a dislocated Slinky, coming to rest in a whimpering Oliver-ball at her feet.

After his wrist was set and Nicky and Garth gave them their respective lectures, Althea set out to break her own wrist. She tried smacking it repeatedly with a variety of household objects—a silver candlestick, a bottle of bourbon, a heavy glass ashtray—but it remained intact, albeit bruised. Eventually she found herself at the top of the stairs, screwing up her courage.

You can watch your best friend fall down the stairs, but you won't have any idea how it feels. Then suddenly you're the one going headlong into the basement and you realize,
So this is what falling down the stairs feels like
, and it couldn't feel any other way. She didn't break her wrist, but Garth found her in a similar heap at the bottom, with a gash under her hairline that required stitches.

There's nothing she can do now, no comparably stupid thing, that will help her understand what's happened to Oliver. She misses him, but if he were awake she wouldn't be here, wouldn't be seeing this incredible and terrifying place, so does that mean she has to be sorry for any good thing that happens while he's sick?

“Don't stand so close,” Coby says, and only then does Althea realize her toes are gripping the uneven edge.

Coby is holding a brick, and for one wild second Althea imagines he intends to brain her with it, that maybe people worship Satan after all and she is meant to be his sacrifice today. Instead, Coby lofts it into the space above the empty elevator shaft, where it seems to hover in the air briefly before plummeting down to the bottom with a wickedly satisfying thud Althea can feel in her guts.

“There's more,” he says, pointing to a pile in the corner.

They throw bricks into the shaft for a while, then climb up onto the roof and sit, legs dangling over the side, surrounded by the muted lushness of the trees, warmed by the summer sun. Coby produces the whiskey and a pack of cigarettes, and they both partake.

“I wish I'd brought my camera,” Althea says.

“We can come back another day.” He wipes the sweat from his forehead with the inside of his wrist and pulls up the sleeves of his T-shirt so they rest on his shoulders. “You're not as uptight as you seem, you know.”

“I seem uptight?” Althea says, annoyed. Preppies are uptight; Althea is just angry.

He shrugs. “You used to. When I heard about how you quit the track team, just walking off the field, I was pretty impressed.”

“How do you know about that?”

“Word got around. Why'd you do it, anyway?”

Althea doesn't know if it's the whiskey, but the idea of lying seems too exhausting. “I just couldn't do it anymore. I mean, literally. I could feel it. Whatever thing I used to have, it's gone. Like that.” She snaps her fingers. “So I quit the team right there. Before anyone else could figure it out.”

“You know there's a name for that.”

Althea takes a long drag of her cigarette. “Losing?”

“Steve Blass disease,” Coby says. “He was a pitcher for the Pirates. Out of nowhere he lost his ability to throw a baseball accurately. He went from the majors to the minors, then he retired.”

“Steve Blass disease?”

“Sometimes they call it Steve Sax syndrome. He was a second baseman for the Dodgers when he started fucking up every throw to first. He got it back eventually.”

“You know an awful lot about baseball,” Althea says.

“I collected baseball cards when I was a kid.”

“How wholesome.”

“I don't know where people get the idea that baseball is wholesome,” Coby says, flicking his cigarette butt off the roof. “Ever heard of Dock Ellis? He threw a no-hitter on acid once.”

“They put that on his baseball card?”

“That's a series I'd like to see. Instead of runs and innings, list felonies and stints in rehab.”