We Were Kings Read Free

flushed pink with the heat and he reached for a towel to wrap about her.
    The humidity had brought down upon the house a huge, muffled silence; it buzzed in his ears along with the other buzz that was the effect of alcohol and the electric lights farther down the street, the heady thrum of cicadas hidden in the trees. He closed his eyes but the darkness made him feel queasy—things were spinning and within this vertigo, images were emerging: black-ashen faces and flashing red lights, orange flames racing up the side of a building, windows exploding, glass bursting in the heat and raining down on the black sidewalk, and flames licking hungrily at the same space where just moments before there had been windows—and he had to open his eyes again. And then suddenly Lynne was there, as if she had somehow materialized out of the silence and the heat-light and the steam.
    It’s okay, Cal, it’s okay, she said to him. I’m here. I’m right here. And she was holding his face up to hers so that he might see her fully and then pulling his head against her so that it lay upon her damp, warm shoulder. He let her, feeling so weak and empty inside, as if something important and necessary—a small flame of sorts—had just been extinguished and all that remained was a whirling, black vacuum and the sense of plummeting, falling without end into that blackness. He was afraid and only now realized that he had always been afraid—years of being afraid and of trying to keep the fear at bay. Lynne’s hand stroked the back of his head, his hair plastered to his scalp with sweat. She whispered soothingly into his ear. He wrapped his arms around the warmth of her, pulled her to him, squeezed, and held on, afraid to let her go, and then he allowed her to lead him out into the street and into darkness, away from the flames and the fire and their home, the last place they would ever make love to each other.
    They came down the staircase and out into the yard amid the rubble of scorched and blistered clapboard and overgrown grass and weeds smelling of cat piss, and the dream collapsed in on itself. He could taste a sourness in his mouth, feel the sweat beneath his armpits, smell the sweet, charred scent of burned timbers. A patrol car rolled by, sweeping a spotlight at the house, and he blinked in its glare. “That you, Cal?” one of the cops called from the open window and he shouted back, “Yeah, it’s me,” and they switched off the light and he waved and they rumbled on.
    It was high tide and kids hollered as they jumped from the John J. Beades Memorial Bridge, a drawbridge over the inlet from Dorchester Bay. Cal saw flashes of them as they passed through the light cast by the lamps on the bridge and into the water below.
    “I thought I’d find you here.”
    Cal turned at the sound of Dante’s voice. He emerged out of the darkness grinning, the street a spear of light at his back. He wore chinos and a T-shirt damp with sweat. In his hand, a bottle wrapped in a brown paper bag. He held it aloft.
    “You in the mood?”
    Cal laughed. “Sure,” he said. He was glad for the sharpness of clarity that sobriety brought, but only in small doses; sometimes reality needed something to soften it a bit and blur its jagged edges.
    They sat at the water’s edge passing the bottle back and forth and watched the lights reflected in the water shimmering as ripples shuddered the surface. They looked at the kids jumping from the bridge into the water, thrashing toward the rotten spars, climbing out, and returning to the top of the bridge wall, daring one another to risk more and more dangerous spins, somersaults, twists into the water, the cars rumbling past on the narrow spans of metal behind them. It was so hot the kids would probably keep it up till midnight, till their parents called them in or the cops sent them home.
    “Seems like a long time since we did that,” Dante said.
    “Yeah. Seems like a long time since we did a lot of things. And I