The Drunken Spelunker's Guide to Plato (24 page)

Jake was different then, in that moment, than he had been before.

“You know what we have to do, don't you?” he asked me.

We got back in the car. Jake was steady behind the wheel and crushed the squirrel's head cleanly at great speed.

We stopped the car a hundred yards down the road and walked back in the sudden quiet to make sure he was dead and not suffering anymore. The other squirrel still sat by the side of
the road, not tense and poised for flight anymore—just sitting, silent and resigned.

Jake held my hand, and from then on things were different between us. For one thing, we stopped looking for death on the highways, having found enough of it. And for another thing, we had a secret now that we never told anybody else. But the most important thing was that I had seen Jake's act of terrible compassion. I had seen how he hated to do it and how he made himself do it anyway, and he could never, after that, be just another boy to me.

The next day, we went back to that spot by the mill because I felt, even though it was foolish, that we should bring flowers to what was now a grave. It took us a long time to find enough wildflowers growing by the side of the road.

“There's no such thing as heaven or hell, you know,” Jake said to me. “Gone is gone.”

“I know,” I said, but we went anyway.

The squirrel's body was stretched out on the pavement. And next to it, another squirrel lay, curled up on its side, dead. Not a mark was on its body. We covered them both with the flowers and went away.

I really hadn't paid all that much careful attention to Jake before, in the early days when he was just Danny's sidekick—always there, but still somehow apart from everyone else. But now I couldn't pay attention to anyone else. It was like all the best parts of falling in love at long last with an old friend and falling in love at first sight with a total stranger. Now Jake was mesmerizing to me. Maybe it was only the rebound from Danny. Or maybe Danny was only the prelude to Jake.

If you saw Jake around town and didn't know him, you might not think too highly of him. He washed dishes in restaurants here and there and never had much cash. He drank too much and brooded in ways that weren't pretty. He wasn't handsome in any conventional sense, and the clothes he got at the Salvation Army thrift store made him look like an accountant gone to seed. He was none too clean. Whatever romantic dreams he may once have had were long gone by then.

But if you got to know Jake, eventually he began to seem different from those first impressions. You started to see all the kindness that was in him, all the sweetness he had never lost, even with all he had been through. You could sit around in Jake's house and he didn't expect you to necessarily talk to him if you didn't feel like it. You could lie on his bed and just read a book while he sat on the couch reading, too, and if you fell asleep, when you woke up he would still be there and would smile at you when he saw that your eyes were open. On clear mornings, he would kind of stumble into the bookstore when it first opened and nobody else was around. He didn't ever say it, but he was always hoping that Rosalita would be there with Bertie. If she wasn't, he would go off for coffee at Blossom's pretty soon. But if she was, it was like someone lit a tiny candle deep inside him, and Jake would take Bertie carefully in his arms and hold her close and walk with her all around the inside of the store, talking to her about all the books and the people on the posters, and then he would walk with her all around the outside of the store, talking to her about the trees and the birds and the cars going past on Thornapple Street. Jake didn't seem quite so terribly apart then. Bertie would look at his face and babble and coo, and Jake would look back at her and answer as if she had spoken. Sometimes he told her things about Tom, stories and memories. “Now your daddy,” he would always begin, “was a very good man . . . .”

There is no doubt that the men in our little world loved each other. In their world made of the bars and the clubs and Boystown and the nighttime, the friendships among the men were powerful, and such women as managed to work our way in were always a little bit on probation, tolerated but never allowed to break the bond the boys had forged long ago during nights of mythical wildness that had happened before we ever came around. The boys had driven bad cars fast across the Mojave Desert together and had fallen in love with sisters in Mexico together and had spent nights in jail together. It was the job of the girls to listen to the tales and marvel. We had not been there.

Danny and Jake were best friends and had done all these things, the two of them together. And I had lived with Danny. But now there was Jake.

It was inevitable what would happen. In the battered morning light, ragged and rough edged from too much night, Jake and I snuck in the side door of Blossom's and huddled together at the very back table, smoking the last of our cigarettes in the slowly fading dawn. Blossom herself had seen it all too often before to be surprised. She brought us coffee and understanding.

And then Danny came in.

His eyes locked not with mine but with Jake's. It was Jake, after all, who had broken the code of men and betrayed him.

That afternoon, Danny broke up with Tawni and then went and drank at Tia's until Charlie Blue had to carry him home in a heap. Like Jake had told me long ago, Danny was a romantic man.

10

HELL

HOW BRAVE THE FREED PRISONER
must have been, coming to the end of the tunnel and stepping out into the sunlight so bright that it blinds him. It must have been like stepping off the edge of the world, unable to see, into an abyss. Plato tells us that after a whole life spent in the gentle glow of firelight, the glare of the sun is overwhelming, devastating to the senses. At first, the prisoner is dazzled by the brilliance of the light above and squints his eyes against it in pain and fear. Yet even in his blindness, the prisoner dares to step forward into the empty air.

He is at this moment braver than any of the philosophers who are waiting to greet him or any of the gods who engineered this game. The philosophers and gods know what awaits in the world above the cave. There is nothing uncertain there for them. They have nothing to fear. But the prisoner, sightless and alone, knows nothing. And knowing nothing of what will become of him, he nevertheless, after one final moment of hesitation, takes his hand away from the rough rock wall of the tunnel and,
as his fingertips lose contact with the last reminder of his whole world, walks into the void.

Yes, how brave he must have been—how much more courageous in his blindness than the philosophers and gods. Only little by little will he become accustomed to the brightness, seeing first only shadows and the reflections of objects in the water, then gradually the objects themselves, then the stars and the moon, and finally, last of all, the sun. Plato argues that the prisoner will eventually gain sight, will come to see the truth. But blindness has its virtues, too.

Jake wasn't with me when I ran into Danny at Tia's, thank God. It wouldn't have happened if I had seen him first, but I was already up at the bar before I noticed him sitting at the far end.

“Hey,” he said.

“Hey.”

There was a longish pause. Charlie Blue came out the swinging door from the kitchen, saw us, and hightailed it back in.

“How's it going?” I asked.

“Fine.”

Hank was sitting there, but he downed the end of his beer and hurried out the door without making eye contact. I looked around for the bartender, but no one appeared. Danny and I both tried to stare straight ahead, but there was a mirror behind the bar, so that didn't help. Danny developed a sudden absorbing interest in the takeout menu tacked to the wall by his shoulder. I studied the cigarette machine.

“Is anyone tending bar?” I said after a couple of minutes.

“He went to get ice.”

“Oh.”

We waited.

“In Alaska?”

Danny half-smiled but didn't say anything. He was peeling the label off his beer. We waited some more. I looked at him in the mirror behind the bar until he looked up and saw me.

“You're the one who left me,” I said.

“Not for your best friend.”

I saw the bartender peek through the little window in the kitchen door and then duck away.

“If your friends aren't allowed to date anyone you've slept with,” I said, “they're going to have mighty slim pickings in this town.”

“Don't pretend it was like that.”

We glared at each other in the mirror.

“I don't want to fight with you,” I said.

“That'll be a nice change.”

“Oh, Jesus!” I shouted. “You're the one who cheated on me!”

He turned and looked at me face to face. His eyes had the blue shadows under them that I had seen the very first time we met. He needed a haircut, and his shirt looked slept in.

“If you keep yelling like that,” he said evenly, “we'll never get a drink. The whole staff is frozen in fear behind that door.”

“Cowards!”

“Well, at least they're not fools,” he said, smiling.

“Not like us,” I said.

“No,” he said. “Not like us.”

He put two dollars on the bar next to his empty beer bottle and got up. “I guess I'll see you around,” he said.

“Yeah,” I answered. “See ya.”

He left and the bartender suddenly appeared.

“Sorry I took so long,” he said, looking guilty. “What can I get you?”

“I need about seven hundred shots of tequila,” I said. “But I'll start with one, and we can go from there.”

Charlie Blue stuck his head out the kitchen door. “Coast clear?” he asked.

“Unless you count me,” I said.

“Now that wasn't so bad, was it? Best just to go ahead and get it over with.”

“Easy for you to say—I saw you lurking behind that door like the sniveling coward you are.”

He smiled. “I was giving you privacy,” he said.

“Thanks a lot.”

“It'll be easier the next time.”