Summertime and the Livin’s Easy

I was sitting in a verdant hotel
bar waiting for Ernest to check in. We were both getting away for the weekend
in Savannah, running from pressures unnamed. The barman, bored but
happy in his bowtie and vest, mixed up a gin and tonic for me, and I squeezed
the lime and looked around. A few people were milling around; most of the
weekend visitors had already checked out, the others were either shopping
downtown or being massaged in the spa. One half of a couple was sitting at the
bar stirring his drink absent-mindedly, and the two underage daughters of the
Someones had apparently just come from the pool and were dressed in bathrobes
and sitting in the deep, red chairs behind me, wishing they were old enough to
buy a drink.

One of them eventually bummed a cigarette off of me (“No menthols?”) and rested
her chest against the bar. She smoked indulgently and stared at the bottles of
liquor on the far wall. She messed with her hair, combing it again and again
with her fingers behind her twice-pierced ears. I could smell the cool, wet
scent that evaporated off of her skin, and suddenly I was talking to her.

“Where are you from?” I asked.

“Virginia,” she said in our familiar accent.

“Yeah? Me too.”

“Where at?”

“Uh, Solstice, it’s this little—”

“No way!” she said. “Us, too.” She gestured at her friend who was looking out
the window and rubbing her foot.

“I can’t believe it,” I said. “I don’t recognize you.”

“Well, how old are you?”

“Twenty-three.”

“Well, we are sophomores,” she said. “You wouldn’t have ever seen me.
Maybe you knew my brother. Huck.”

“Marlin?”

“Yeah. I’m—”

“Brandy? Good lord,” I said, remembering building tree forts and water balloon
wars. Huck was an old middle school friend, but we separated in tenth due to my
desire to be out of the mainstream. Brandy was always present back then, but
too young to efficiently pester for entertainment.

“Yeah, that’s right. You remember me?”

“Now I do. I shouldn’t have given you that cigarette. Huck wouldn’t like that.”

She coughed quietly and looked down.

“You didn’t hear?” she asked.

Your body flares at such a question, ready for a physical attack with words.

“No…?”

“Huck died last year.”

I choked. “What? What happened?”

“He met some woman while he was at Tech. He thought she was young, but she was,
like, twenty-seven or something, and already married. She led him on, but her
husband found out, some brute or something, and he started following Huck and
threatening him. Huck tried to break it off, but the woman was…I don’t know.
Crazy. The guy ran him down one night…found him and ran him down with his car.”

“I’m so sorry.”

“Yeah.”

I couldn’t think of anything else to say. I sat thinking. Huck was the third
person from my class who had died since graduation that I’d heard of, and for
me the news brought an end to the reactionary idea that it was some fluke, some
odd cycle that had finished in the Atlantic with Laura Gaynor the summer right after graduation. Now
the reality sat in my gut. After leaving the protective gates of high school,
any of us were as susceptible to death as anyone else. Death in school is a
tragedy, a presence lost, but after someone’s release into a greater community,
a less self-reflective population, it loses its horror and becomes expected.
Space and time unwind the bonds formed in a class with nimble fingers; two rows
away becomes two states away, and a person’s absence turns them into an
immobile figure in a painting, an impressionist face forever poised between
homeroom and civics class, eyes looking out, waiting for an observer. Then,
later, whether you pretended to hate someone or loved them intensely or just
passed them twice in a day, the words that bear their removal from real life
touch the world of the past in your mind like a knife swinging too close to
your own memory of yourself and make you doubt the distance you have crossed,
the seasons you have spent. You are relinquished to the nameless fears of a
child.

It could only continue now; the dark timeline was just getting underway. There
were ninety-six other classmates awaiting ninety-six other deaths, each one
placed farther and farther away from the point at which we were released,
marching in time away from the crudely decorated stage in the gymnasium
clutching the rolled up papers that seemed to guarantee some sort of
continuation of life…farther and farther away from each other, faces blurring,
moments juxtaposed with others, hearsay become fact, fearfully improving the
myth of our youth, anything to create a better past for those now without any
chance of a future. There would be deaths unheard of, deaths unreported, and
deaths assumed. Maybe even mine. It was a sickening feeling, and I pushed my
drink away.

The horrible thought was that the bell curve demanded some die young, some
claimed just for the sake of statistics. People my age were found dead before
they could even land, those shot down in mid-flight from branch to branch or
nest to nest and those who sought to just soar and soar and never land, falling
fast and hard, abandoning a half-completed dream, a half-realized thought, or
even a half-colored emotion for one bad choice or one bad chance. All he did
was touch an unsatisfied woman…

Eventually Brandy moved away from me, perhaps sensing that a silent ache was
all I was good for now, a feeling she had already overcome during a mild
Solstice winter. “Good luck,” I attempted to say, but my dry mouth and throat
made sticky sounds instead of words.

I didn’t tell Ernest when he came over a quarter hour later. It made me scared
to even consider talking about it. I let the conversations around the corner
and against the far wall speak glibly for me, let the distracting chatter in a
still moment take the place of thoughts in my dulled mind. So the early evening
passed, light fading through the warm windows and the rocks set into the wall
growing colder and colder as night crept up the drive, reached the front steps,
and stroked the outer walls.