Old School Read Free

pot, things were gonna get a little thin.
    So you leave it in the pot, throw the insurance in on top of it. Not like you were a guy who was afraid of a hard decision. Sleep, you told the doc. Always had a little trouble with sleep, stress from the job and shit, and with this on top of it, if he could give you something to help you sleep. So you had a bottle of pills, a bottle of Glenfiddich, oughta do the trick. Thought of Shackleton again. Seems they found his hootch, been buried under the ice all these years and somebody’d gone and dug it up. Be nice to have a bottle of that for the festivities, a final little something, proper send off.
    Katie’s picture there on the corner of your desk. Good looking kid, only one that really still seemed to need you at all. Mike, hell, he’d come out of the womb an adult, been perfect at anything he’d ever done. Guess you’d had your years when he was a kid, taken that Canada trip, fishing up at Great Slave. You got on fine with the kid, but he’d get on fine without you.
    But Katie. Even now sometimes she’d still walk into your study, warp her arms around your neck, kiss you on top of the head. Even now sometimes, you’d be catching the Packers on the tube, she’d curl up on the couch next to you, watch the game. And you’d spoiled her some probably, mostly because she was the only one who seemed to actually appreciate it, the way she’d light up when you brought her home something nice, how happy she’d get if you were out at the mall and she’d see something and you’d sneak in and buy it while she was texting someone on her phone. How hard she’d had to work for the grades compared to Mike, how much it had meant to her when she got in at Yale. You didn’t want her losing that. Any of that.
    You open the bottles, the little plastic one, the big glass one, a handful of pills, a couple good swallows of scotch, the rest of the pills, some more of the scotch, everything going a little hazy now. That fast, huh? Katie’s picture fading. Maybe you were Shackleton after all, sailing off on an ocean of booze.
    Hold on baby. Daddy’s going for help.

 
     
     
    Pink Cadillac
     
     
    She was always on his ass about the volunteer firefighter gig. It’s not about helping people, she’d say. It’s just about drinking with the guys, just an excuse to get out of the house. Yeah, well, he was married to her, wasn’t he? Of course it was about getting out of the house.
    But it also meant he had an O2 tank and a mask. Funny how things worked out.
     
    ***
     
    So, the El Dorado. Totally cherry, a pink ’64, the wife’s dream car. Her surprise Christmas present a week or so back. Completely authentic except for the remote start he put in. Cold up here in the winter, and with the Taurus, the wife always liked to start the car from her office when she left work, warm it up. She’d hit the remote from the kitchen in the morning, too, Garage wasn’t heated, so she’d fire the car up while she got her coffee together.
    Shouldn’t do that, he’d told her. Carbon monoxide, he’d told her. Dangerous. Her family was over for Thanksgiving, he worked that into the dinner conversation, her know-it-all brother reaming her out about it pretty good, telling her what a dumbass she was. Which meant she’d go right on doing it, because if her brother told her not to stick silverware in her eye, first thing she’d do is reach for a salad fork.
    Thing is, with the Taurus? Not that dangerous. Catalytic converters, they scrub something like 99 percent of the CO out of the exhaust. He wasn’t a paramedic, but they were staffed pretty thin out here, so he rode along on some of the ambulance calls, helped out. Rolled on a 911 outside Lancaster maybe eight months back, some guy’d tried to off himself by firing up his Corolla in the garage. Burned a whole tank of gas, CO levels only got to where he wiped out his frontal lobe. Now the guy was at that long-term care dump out on 81, staring at