The Golden Hour by Nicholas Weinstock

Author:Nicholas Weinstock [Weinstock M.D., Nicholas]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-0-062-04820-2
Publisher: HarperCollins
Published: 2006-10-15T00:00:00+00:00

I RODE WITH MY ELBOW

out the window, beard trembling in the cold wind. It had been our third false automatic alarm of the week (“smells and bells,” the guys angrily called them), and I had come almost to enjoy the shivering ride home. I watched the passing farmhouses and trailer homes, squinting at all the white roofs and white yards with their white lumps of trash. The high hills behind them were sugared as well. As a child in the city, I was under the impression that snow naturally turns brown when left out, like sliced apples. Here I could marvel at its unwreckable brightness.

I crossed the cement with the others, pulled off and threw up my gear. It was eleven-fifteen in the morning. I felt like I’d been awake for a month. “How about a brew,” said Sully with a slap, an actual irritating slap, on my back.

“Better go home.”

“Aw, c’mon.” He was drifting across the bay toward the mysterious wooden staircase. “It’s Saturday.”

“Is it?” I hung up my helmet. “Well, what the fuck.”

“There you go.”

I followed him to the base of the stairs—where we were halted by an armful of tattoos.

“Mis-ter Finelli,” Sully sang to him.

Wordless, charmless, Finelli let down his arm and moved in front of us to take the stairs first. I had the urge to ask him why he’d missed the call, and then the almost insurmountable desire to reach forward and trip him as we banged up single file. He had never said anything to me about my hosing him down in the woods. Instead that tension seethed between us, whittled sharper by his eyes, kept alive and unmentioned, it seemed, by choice.

It turned out that the staircase led to a kind of homemade clubhouse above the truck bay, although its cheerful colors and boyish spirit had been steadily drained by time. The carpet was worn flat, the Ping-Pong table folded into a broken wooden sandwich against the wall. A poster of a buxom barmaid lifting mugs of St. Paulie Girl beer had faded to a benign pink. The chipped Miller High Life mirror reflected a parade of middle-aged men, me last. Sprawled around the room on a ragged sofa and folding chairs were a dozen men, scratching their crotches and slurping their cups. Gary stood in an argyle sweater at the bar. I eyed the sweater closely. It looked to be thinner—he was clearly a smaller size—than the ones I’d discovered in my drawer.

“What’s on tap?” I asked him.

Gary looked from the handle of the beer spigot back to me. “Beer.”

“Ah,” I said. “My favorite kind.”

“Nushing bottled. Nushing imported. Me, I’m a fan of the Europeansh. You?”

“Whatever you got there.”

He clunked open the spigot over a plastic cup.

“Belgium makesh a good beer. Germany. Can’t beat the German beersh. England. Holland.” As he handed over the full cup, he said: “How goesh the training.”

“The fire training? Not bad. Test in a few weeks.”

“Few weeks already? Heck, that went fast. You ready?”

“I don’t know. Sully, you ready?”

“I’m ready,” he said beside me, indicating the beer spigot.

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