Amateurs by Dylan Hicks

Author:Dylan Hicks
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781566894333
Publisher: Coffee House Press
Published: 2016-03-11T16:00:00+00:00

A steep, rain-slick staircase led from John’s cabin to a private deck on which there were two lounge chairs, a straw bench, and a wooden kiosk for shade. John had so far spent much of his vacation on the deck, reclining for hours at night, finding constellations and listening to the rhythmic chirps of tree frogs, reminiscent in a backwards way of industrial sprinklers. This morning he was up in time for sunrise, before most of the workers arrived from the nearby populated island, whose tree-covered northeast coast was visible from John’s deck. Also in view were palm shrubs and organ-pipe cacti, the sickly green salt pond at the bottom of the hill, and the ruins of a Quaker-owned sugar mill once worked by African slaves. When John said yesterday to Sara that it didn’t seem very Quakerish to own slaves, she reminded him that Richard Nixon had been a Quaker. He didn’t think that answered, since Richard Nixon hadn’t, after all, owned slaves. “But he would have,” she had said.

He swept last night’s rain off one of the lounge chairs, dried his hand on the resort’s terry-cloth bathrobe, and sat down. It was strange to be here. A few years ago he had felt slighted by Archer’s efficient upkeep of their friendship; now he missed that efficiency. They saw each other rarely, and when they did, there was an echoey sadness about their interactions. John understood now that, from the beginning, he had wanted the friendship more than Archer had, though dorm life, demanding little in the way of plans and overtures, covered that up; you sort of fell into talking, drifted toward the same party, tagged along to the boring Fassbinder movie. Still, there was an imbalance of need and affection and, naturally, an attendant imbalance of power. That’s what kept John from doing anything that might jeopardize the friendship. He never argued with Archer, not about anything serious, because he knew Archer would win, would juke him toward some illogical generalization. For some reason John was drawn to people who wanted to make seemingly simple things complicated, when all he wanted to do was make complicated things simple. Complexity could be fascinating, sure, but John more or less believed what he’d been taught in church, not the literal truth of the resurrection or whatever, but in the universals: be honest, be humble, be nice to people, really mean it when you say “peace be with you.” He wasn’t saintly at enacting those beliefs, but he was trying. Hard to know what Archer believed in, except maybe that you should do the wrong thing prudently. Like: every semester back in college, he would hire out most of the work for one of his humanities courses, employing a wheezy comp-lit concentrator to write the papers, which Archer would subject to shrewdly dilapidating revision. He was proud of his small, probably unneeded precautions, how for instance he would misuse a word in class, then insert the same mistake into his next paper.

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