Fire Year Read online

  It had been decades since I last thought about him. And so his invitation made me feel nothing more than mild curiosity. Typing those four letters—Sure—was surprisingly easy to do.

  The other email was from my brother, Ray. He came from an altogether different realm than Tag. He didn’t drink, didn’t smoke, never smiled, planned on getting rich. Real estate was his field, though he seemed to have no knack for it. He resembled the biblical brothers, the murderers, the tricksters—except he was inept and couldn’t murder, couldn’t trick. Over the years he had nursed numerous grievances against me—the love of his life had dumped him after I revealed some secret; hard liquor nauseated him because I had forced it on him as a kid—but he couldn’t get any of these charges to stick. Back then he had other tormentors too, classmates of his who occasionally dragged him out onto the playground and beat him. But he wouldn’t squeal and he even came back for more, waiting silently and blackly on the sidelines, staring out at nothing.

  I saw the martyr’s look in his eyes, though I only witnessed him being beaten once. I was in the lunchroom reading, and the headmaster, whose office was next door, popped his head out and asked me to deliver a note to his wife, the physics teacher. On my way I noticed a commotion at the far end of the quad, and Ray turned out to be at the center of it. There were three boys from his class taking turns pounding him, and as I ran up to them they stopped what they were doing and started laughing at me, the boy the headmaster chose, the boy he always chose, to deliver a message to his wife. My brother, his head twisted at a heartbreaking angle, looked up and started laughing too.

  It was the beatings that got him into karate. I never understood the connection, since I couldn’t see him relinquishing his dark power by fighting back. But at the age of forty he was still competing. In his email he told me, in a bluff tone he had at some point picked up, that he was in a tournament the day before the reunion and that I should come check it out, dude! I didn’t see why I should come check it out. I didn’t even email him back. Then he emailed me again, and this time I thought, Oh, what could it hurt?

  The tournament took place in the long cinderblock building where my brother trained. Inside the door were two flags, American and Confederate. The coach’s wife stood behind a table with Cokes, chips, and an iced lemon cake. About fifty spectators milled around and took their seats.

  The coach, a deeply tanned man with buzzed white hair, nodded at me and looked away.

  Southerners’ reputation for hospitality is overstated. This phenomenon of people I had known for much of my life nodding and looking away from me whenever I was back in town was more familiar. What happened since I moved away? I came out. Before that, everyone may have suspected, but because I hadn’t yet self-declared, who knows, I might just have been artistic. There was still hope for me, if not to become an active member of heterosexual society, then at least to remain celibate and quiet. Maybe even do something useful in the community, like play the organ at the Lutheran church. Now there was no getting around it: this was a homo they were in close proximity to.

  The coach stepped onto the mat. It was his team hosting this event, and his black gi had the same gold insignia on the left breast that was on Ray’s white one. He bowed all around and asked for Jesus’s blessing.

  A towheaded girl of maybe six emerged from a back room and everyone clapped. My brother was small—on the low end of the middleweight category—but in the generational procession unfolding it would be hours before they got to him. The little girl had no opponent. She bowed to the judges—two men and a woman at a folding table against the far wall—and then walked straight backward and bowed again. She went through her routine with care never to break eye contact with the judges or turn her back on them. It was only her final bows that freed her to turn to the audience. She smiled preciously and the crowd went wild.

  A short solid man with a blond handlebar mustache appeared. He pointed to the sidelines and said, “How can she row show men meaty!”

  Or something like that. Ray had once told me what these commands were and what they meant in English.

  Next up for my brother’s team was a black kid who looked about twenty and was growing a nice little fro. He had four family members in attendance and they sat off to themselves in the back. His opponent had a breastbone that jutted out like a Ridley Scott reptile.

  “Show many ray!” the referee barked and the boys bowed to the judges.

  The referee shouted more commands. The boys bowed in various directions in response and then finally began their bouncy little two-steps. The white kid landed a waist-level roundhouse kick and when the black kid rushed him the referee called “Yummy!” and the boys retreated to opposite sides of the mat. The referee said something else and almost immediately the white kid made the same kick. The referee pointed a finger at the black kid but let the fight continue.

  Now, rather than rushing his opponent, the black kid danced around him. The white kid kicked but didn’t connect and the black kid, fists up, moved straight toward him. The white kid backed up until he had left the mat entirely. The referee started them up again and once more there came the same roundhouse kick, but this time the black kid turned to the referee, wordlessly asking, How many times are you going to let this white boy kick me in the ass before you let me do something about it?

  Next a big dykey-looking girl with a baby face came out wearing the gi with the gold insignia, and in the back row a wispy guy in a short black trenchcoat started clapping for her.

  Finally it was my brother’s turn. He never smiled, yet he managed to have a number of expressions anyway—currently it was his down-to-business look. As he zeroed in on his competitor, a mean-looking redhead also approaching middle age, he flashed his athlete-at-peak-performance look, all of his being narrowed to a hot white pinpoint of focus. A vein throbbed in his forehead. He was in the zone and wanted you to know it.

  I had hardly gone to any of my brother’s competitions, and at those I had attended I focused on the wrong things, like whether the gi, by concealing so much, didn’t in fact eroticize what scant flesh it revealed. All I knew was that compared to what had gone before, Ray’s match was action packed, and though the referee never allowed either opponent to even think about hurting the other, both my brother and the other guy made a few good combinations of moves. They seemed like they were fighting, or at least wanted to fight. Ray grunted a lot.

  He struck me as the winner. But the judges had penalized him a point on some technicality that the coach couldn’t argue away, and so Ray finished the tournament in second place.

  Afterward, he stuck out a hand and I gave him a hug, more as a rejection of the handshake than anything else.

  “Hey, when’d you get in?” he asked.

  “Just now. Came straight here. Congratulations.”

  “Ah, I should have come in first. Just couldn’t get my ki focused one hundred percent.”

  “Your key?”

  “Hey, you want to meet the guy who won in the heavyweight? He’s a pretty nice guy.”

  He was a handsome young man named Ramirez who had a little gold cross around his neck. “This is my brother,” Ray said. “He just got in from New York City.” Ray looked me up and down. “Black must be in fashion up there. Or maybe he’s attending a funeral after this, heh-heh, heh-heh.”

  “I love New York,” Ramirez said.

  “That’s what they say,” I said.

  “I happen to like Sarah Palin,” my brother said. “They’d probably think I was an idiot up in New York City, wouldn’t they?”

  “I don’t think you’re really on their radar,” I replied.

  “But let’s say for example that I did go up there and started telling everyone how much I liked Sarah Palin, they’d think I was an idiot, don’t you think?”

  “Uh, maybe,” I said.

  “Definitely,” he said.

  “Well, now that you mention it,” I said.

  “See?” he concluded. “Now let’s go,
bro, I’m starving.”

  He took me to a sports bar with about five hundred screens showing various football and basketball games, including a few, judging by the hairstyles and production values, from previous decades. At our table I took a chair with a view of the fewest screens, but my brother remained standing. “We’ll get two dozen wings, one hot, one extra-hot,” he announced. “I’m telling you, these wings are awesome, especially the extra-hot. You like cayenne pepper, right?”

  “I’m a vegetarian,” I said.

  He winced and frowned at the same time. “Since when?”

  “I don’t know, since always. I never did like meat.”

  “But you ate it.”

  I wondered where this was heading.

  “So you’re telling me if someone put a medium-rare filet mignon with mushroom-butter-cabernet sauce in front of you,” he said with great incredulity, “you wouldn’t eat it.”

  “No, and if Jennifer Lopez shook her naked ass in my face, I wouldn’t eat it either.”

  “Well, I would,” he assured me.

  One way or another he was trying to connect with me. But I felt nothing for him, not annoyance at being provoked, not nostalgia for an idealized relationship we never had—just nothing at all.

  When he wasn’t staring at a screen and nibbling on wings, Ray was off working the room. I could see he was considered a nice guy by all. But there was something frantic about his socializing. He handed out cards to everyone he saw. He brought over a guy whose hand he had been ostentatiously pumping and said, “Hey, you remember Kirk.”

  “Kirk Reichsman,” I said. “You were one of the boys who used to beat the shit out of my little brother.”

  Kirk shook my hand and nodded. He was giving me that got-a-homo-in-my-face look, wary but curious.

  “Are you still at your place on Lafayette?” my brother asked him. “That house next door to you sell yet? Who was it that moved in, do you know? I think we need to get you behind a gate. You live in a beautiful house, don’t get me wrong, I wouldn’t tell you I could sell it for you if I didn’t believe in its showability, not to mention its salability, myself.” He pulled out a card.

  How had Ray changed since school? He had barely graduated from State, he hadn’t made any money, he still lived with our parents, for God’s sake. He had nothing now but a flat stomach and a shelf full of karate medals as armor, apparently never wondering if they were enough to make up for the past. Maybe that was the point of all the noise—not to have to hear himself wondering.

  After Kirk left, Ray said, “You know, I never meet people like you, bro, so I find it interesting to hear your opinions.”

  I sighed.

  “I meet a lot of people in my line of business that are armed and want to form a militia to overthrow the government,” he said, matter-of-factly, as if his line of work involved staging houses for Al-Qaeda. “But I tell them just go out and vote. That’s what you do if you don’t like the way things are going in this country.”

  He wanted me to know that down here he was considered a moderate.

  “I too believe it’s better to vote than to form a militia and overthrow the government,” I replied.

  He snickered, showing he hadn’t lost all perspective.

  “So I’m playing the reunion,” he said.

  “My reunion? You still have a band?”

  “It’s a paid gig,” he said, shrugging. “But I do it just as a hobby.”

  He had started playing bass and singing in a band around the time he took up karate. Just a bunch of guys he knew, practicing in the garage, playing grimly faithful covers of Southern-rock classics. If they ever had a gig, I never heard about it. Ray put up posters of the Rolling Stones and the Allman Brothers on his walls; my tastes ran to Donna Summer and Queen. It was hopeless even back then.

  Now that Ray had brought it up, I imagined the reunion in all its horror, one hour stretching into the next and the next and the next.

  “What are you doing tonight?” he asked.

  “Going to the Boat Club with Tag Kingsley.”

  He gave me a classic look of this-does-not-compute. “You? Why?”

  His head was cocked at a strange angle and I could see his face looking at me from underneath that pile of boys. It was the same look, without the laugh, that he was giving me now.

  “I didn’t know y’all kept in touch,” he said.

  “We haven’t.”

  “I didn’t know y’all even talked to each other.”

  “We didn’t.”

  “Then what the hell?”

  For once my brother and I were thinking the same thing. And it wasn’t just that Tag and I didn’t really know each other. It was also that Ray and I weren’t members of the Boat Club, our parents weren’t in society and would never have been asked to join. I felt uneasy about setting foot there, but when we made our email plans Tag told me not to worry, it wasn’t the place it used to be.

  “I’ve been trying to make inroads at the Boat Club,” my brother said. “That’s how business deals are done in this town, over shrimp cocktails and bourbon and gingers. I hear they do an appetizer that’s oysters two ways, one raw and the other baked with bacon and a little grated Asiago cheese. Topped with breadcrumbs. I’ve been trying to get myself sponsored to join, at least get invited there for lunch. Maybe I’ll come with you.”

  His want was so naked, his knowledge of the menu so detailed, that I was almost tempted to invite him along.

  I loitered just inside the door. The place was shadowy and deserted, mute and heavily decorated, like a rich neighborhood. I had forgotten the Club was on a river until I glimpsed it through a row of portholes cut into the dark wood. Scraps of dull light lay on the water but the marsh had lost its color. I looked at my watch—it was a little early but well within the dinner hour. No one was around.

  “Edward!” Tag said. “What are you doing here in the coatroom?”

  Did he think I’d ever been here before?

  “You look great!” he said.

  “So do you, Tag. Or am I supposed to call you Winson?”

  He grinned. “That is my name, you know. I don’t know how that damn Tag got started. Something about a game of tag.”

  His hair was sprinkled with gray, he had a soft little bulge around his middle, but he was still sexy. He was wearing the same clothes he had worn before—khakis and a light-blue button-down shirt. He had on Topsiders without socks and I could see his dark hairy ankles, like the thing you wake up with that proves you weren’t dreaming.

  Tag sat us at a table looking onto a jumble of yachts. A gray-haired black waiter in a white jacket came over and handed us two big laminated menus and took our drink orders. Tag put his menu down and took something out of his pocket: a squarish piece of foil, flat around the edges, with a little oblong bump in the middle.

  “It’s good to see you,” he said. “I read on your profile that you live up in New York. That must make you feel so great.”

  “Actually it does. But you know, it’s just where I live.”

  “You always did things your own way. I admired that.”

  From time to time Zora and I met up with some former classmate who had landed in New York, some lost soul who had strayed from the predetermined path—college in the South; marriage to someone from the school; a big house in the same neighborhood he or she grew up in; a kid enrolled at the school—but couldn’t find another path to embark on. It was impressive how far some of these people had strayed—one summer the Pep Club president, stabilized on antidepressants, showed up. They sought us out, Zora and me, as bohemians who had succeeded in finding another way.

  Tag, sitting here so proprietarily, was obviously not of their kind. But he wanted me to understand that although he’d stayed in town, he hadn’t followed the expected path either. His father owned all the luxury-car dealerships in town and Tag was supposed to take them over one day. Instead he had opened an eco-friendly architecture firm with his wife, who not only was from o
ut of town but was Jewish as well.

  “How long has it been since I’ve seen you?” he asked.

  Have you ever seen me? I wanted to ask. But I wasn’t nervous. I could feel the full force of me, this person I had become, filling the space of my body, who-I-was-now totally eclipsing who-I-was-then.

  “I guess it’s been around twenty-five years.” But I couldn’t keep this up as if it were normal. “Tag, did we ever really hang out before?”

  “No!” he said, his eyes lighting up.

  The waiter came by. Tag ordered a shrimp cocktail and a steak and another martini. I opened the menu. There were no prices on it. The vegetarian options were a salad and I quickly settled on it.

  “I’m glad you said that, because we didn’t hang out!” Tag went on. “And that’s exactly why I wanted to meet you here today. Because people don’t hang out with people that are different. I was just talking about this with Susan today. Did my parents even know any Jews? I mean, come on, now, what’s the big deal, y’all!”

  This incoherent speech was strangely charming, and I could see why he had been so popular. “Then what are we doing here?” I asked.

  “Well, that’s just it. They’ve embraced my wife here, and she’s just as Jewish as they come. Would you believe they’ve started to get a challah bread delivered from up north along with the lobsters and they keep it just for her, for when we come in on a Friday night? The kids love it too.”

  “Is your wife a member or is she just covered under your plan?” I asked.