The Graybar Hotel Read online

  It was said he used to be strong. Those who knew him before told stories of how he used to show off under the bridge, how he could hang by his fingertips and traverse any of the four massive, fifty-foot-long I-beams. Some said he could still traverse the span, and in fact his upper body still appeared strong, but should he drop into the Little Wabash thirty feet below, the current would carry him away so quickly he would drown. He had lost his sense of adventure after the accident anyway—what with the surgeries, and the unfaithfulness of Sheila, his wife.

  “Not only do they mate for life,” he said, “but they’re fucking loyal.”

  Another thing to be said about Crash: during any discussion, no matter the subject, at some point he would come around to the fact that wives, and all women, were unfaithful. It was universally known among us high school degenerates that this was to be agreed with, and Crash to be given free conversational rein in general, because somewhere, hidden around the sandy yet fertile clay soil of the once–river bottoms, Crash grew the most potent marijuana this side of South America.

  The way Crash told it, five years prior, in 1981, he was traveling to Bike Week with the Flatlanders and had come across some seeds in Daytona, direct descendants of a potent strain from the mountains of Afghanistan. The weed smelled like skunk spray, could cause the uninitiated smoker to cry or vomit or both, and it cost fifty dollars for a quarter ounce—double what the usual Colombian went for. But Crash’s Afghani was worth it. Even hippies who had been smoking pot for longer than Ricky and I had been alive could get high on one hit.

  We drove back to school in Ricky’s car, a ’78 Trans Am with a shot suspension that rattled loudly over any bump, especially the bricks of the town square. The T-tops were out and a mess of burnout paraphernalia swung from the rearview mirror: a red headband, a purple Crown Royal bag holding hemostats stolen from the hospital, and a black lacy garter. Ricky had a habit of using much too much Armor All on the interior vinyl, so if you weren’t paying attention you could slide right out of the seat if he stopped too quickly.

  “How about that swan?” I asked him.

  “That’s the last swan you’ll see,” he said. “I mean, that’s the last one he’ll get. Remember his plan to grow all of his own food?”

  “That ended up as a pumpkin patch and row of okra?”

  “And the plan to build a house on stilts after we got that big rain.”

  “And then how he was going to become famous for discovering a new planet with that big-ass telescope that he watches Cindy Cleary with?”

  We got back to school just as the bell rang for fifth period. There were plenty more of his plans we could have listed: the moonshine still on a working submarine, generating his own electricity from a waterwheel built on the river. Without a doubt this was all due to the sheer power of his marijuana, plus all the free time on his hands. Now he was breeding swans because they exhibited the faithfulness and beauty he had tried and failed to find in people.

  Where had he even gotten the swan? I wondered before sixth-period American History. And, was a swan even supposed to be in a river? I had only seen them on ponds and lakes. Wouldn’t the swan fall asleep and drift down with the current, never to be heard from again?

  It didn’t matter. By the end of the day we had forgotten about the swan.

  The next week we hopped in the Trans Am, the black interior steaming from a day in the sun, and rolled down Route 45, past the tall grain silos of the Louisville Seed House, the park, down the south edge of the brick square just below the courthouse, and on to Crash’s narrow drive, past his conversion van and down the steep road of the riverbank to sit in the car in the shade of the bridge. There were half a dozen swans scuttling around the sand on the bank of the swollen springtime river.

  Before Ricky killed the engine Crash was out his back door, zigzagging down the wooden stairs on his metal crutches. He could descend those stairs as fast as an able-bodied man, though to watch him do it was nerve-racking. It was like a controlled fall, the way his feet trailed behind him like the tail of a kite. Crash crutched over to our passenger-side door and pulled a joint from the pocket of his sleeveless flannel shirt. “Fire it up,” he said. “What do you think of them?”

  “It sounds like your secret Swiss speakers going berserk,” said Ricky. Half a dozen swans were honking and hissing aggressively to one another about the Trans Am in their midst. They seemed to be hatching a scheme to kill us.

  “They’ll fight to the death for the ones they love,” he told us, and the next week there were six more, transported in his van from the egg farm seven miles south of town. The farm had twenty of them, he said, and was practically giving them away after their experiment with swan eggs hadn’t panned out. But apparently there were laws governing the sale of livestock—a person couldn’t just buy twenty of anything, but had to purchase them in groups determined by some Department of Conservation formula. They were ten dollars apiece, and by the end of April we were looking at, and listening to, and fearing, two hundred dollars’ worth of swans. Two hundred dollars’ worth of noisy, dirty, aggressive birds that as far as Ricky and I were concerned had really fucked up our quiet pot-smoking hideout.

  * * *

  The key to the beginning of the end of the swans, I believe, was tattooed on Crash’s left bicep: “Sheila” with the red outline of a heart surrounding the name. No one knows why, but it is a universal law as certain as gravity that the minute you apply permanence to anything in this world, the end begins. It was true with Sheila (and everyone else whose name was tattooed on someone else’s body), and just as true when Crash commissioned a mystical swan airbrush painting on the side of his conversion van. Painted onto the side door was a flock of galactic, time-and-space-traveling swans, some of which were coupling but most of them trailing flame from their tail feathers as they rocketed through the dark universe to distant, heart-shaped planets. The writing was on the proverbial wall.

  Of course, Ricky and I had discussed killing the swans ourselves; it was a regular topic of conversation as we cruised the country roads around Louisville. Swans would be easy targets—they don’t run from you, just the opposite, they engage intruders immediately. They may be beautiful, graceful creatures at a distance, but inside their territory they’re brash, violent, and very wild. They guard their ground fiercer than most dogs bred for that purpose. In weed-fueled ramblings inside Ricky’s Trans Am we deduced that their territorial nature is likely the reason that they mate for life: their mate, they feel, is their territory.

  Still, anyone willing could kill the lot of them with a baseball bat in a matter of minutes.

  As much as we hated the swans, we wouldn’t hurt Crash by killing them. He loved those birds, and showed anyone who came around the intricate symbolism of the swans on his van, the points of pure white in the vast, dark emptiness of space. There was a bridge in the picture, from the moon to infinity, or at least to the edge of the passenger-side door. It had something to do with bridging the gap between imagined, timeless love and the reality of that ideal exemplified by the swans. That’s what Crash said, anyway, when he philosophized about the van after two joints of his Afghani.

  The paint still smelled when the first swan died. It didn’t yet seem mysterious—a rogue swan had found its way up to the road and was struck by a car, knocked back over the edge of the bridge to the sand below. That Saturday night we had come to get Crash to buy us alcohol; we found him pulling himself and his lifeless legs in haphazard figure eights, his metal crutches strapped to his arms. His head was hanging as if he searched the ground for something he’d lost. He was grieving—killing time waiting for us, or anyone, to dig the hole, which we did. Then we got high and prepared for the eulogy by blasting “Stairway to Heaven” from his Swiss speakers pointed out his back windows. The whole scene was awkward and we were impatient for it to end. We knew we wouldn’t be getting any alcohol.

  “I don’t know what to say,” Crash said under the bridge, standing over the bird in hi
s fresh grave about two feet deep. There was not much sign of injury, except that one of his webbed feet was snapped, barely remaining attached. “His name was Bachmann, and he liked sleeping up in the corner of the bridge.”

  “Well, yeah,” I said. “I like that part of the bridge too. That shelf up there—it was cool until they started shitting all over it.”

  I could feel Ricky glaring at me, but Crash stayed focused on the grave. He coughed—to clear his mind, I guess—then he was quiet, which made me nervous. Silence always seemed so hazardous when high, and especially with Crash you never knew—he could erupt in fury or break down in tears. But he did neither. “These swans have given me more than I could ever give them,” he said. “Amen.”

  “Amen,” Ricky and I said in unison.

  Outside of their surly dispositions and the greasy green turds they left everywhere, we hated the swans for another reason. Our high school graduation was coming up, and the places to throw a party around such a small town were limited. Because we knew Crash, and because we were probably his best customers, we had begun working on him a year prior to use his property for a legendary Class of ’86 blowout. He had agreed, finally, in January—a huge coup on our part. Crash’s place was strategically located to avoid cops. Partyers could park on the square or at the skating rink and walk down—from the street there would be no signs of a party whatsoever. We had a band coming but the acoustics of the concrete bank would shoot the sound eastward, out of town.

  But then the swans had come and they were horrible hosts. If the prissy girls from our class came, they wouldn’t stay long with huge birds nipping their asses. But we wanted to throw that party more than we would ever admit to each other. On some level, we knew that the forty-seven classmates we had spent the majority of our lives with, we would never see again after that night. If asked, we would have said we didn’t care if anyone came, we never liked most of them anyway, but we did care, a lot. Somehow I think we knew when we got older we would think about them, wonder where they were, and what they had done with their lives. At least a small part of our teenage brains knew this last night was important.

  After our swan funeral, we didn’t see Crash until the next Friday, exactly one week before graduation. We’d pretty much given up hope on the party, ceding that territory to the swans. Crash sat in his wheelchair beside the open passenger door of his van. He seemed paler than usual, and more stoned than usual, staring across the road at nothing. The swans on his van seemed darker still, outside the ring of his porch light, flying toward planets that now looked dark and depressing.

  “Something’s happening,” he said. “Something’s wrong.”

  To be honest, at age eighteen my thoughts were not immediately of concern for Crash’s troubles, but about the possible rekindling of the party. He pulled a flask from a side pocket of his wheelchair and took a swig. I realized I had never seen Crash drink. I had seen him trip on mushrooms and acid, had seen him snort small dunes of various powders, even seen him shoot liquid the color of river water into his vein, but I’d never seen him drink.

  “The swans,” he said. “They caught something. First they’re crazy, and then they’re dead. One by one, they go crazy and die. The sound they make, it’s awful, man . . .”

  Now that I listened for it, I could hear. The sound was nearly human, tortured and slow, not the usual bursts of honking that we had come to hate. “Come on,” he said, and we all began the awkward trek down to the river.

  Half of the swans were scattered around, already dead, the other half lay on the ground shuddering like they were hooked to an electrical outlet. A few twirled in circles in the sand, as if trying to dig their own graves. It was only a matter of time for them.

  “It might be contagious,” I said.

  “Of course it’s contagious,” Crash said.

  “I mean to people, to us.”

  His back porch light was on, but it was still fairly dark down there. The mosquitoes were thick and relentless for our blood. I was worried about the one swan we had buried a week ago. We hadn’t used any gloves. He had died, we thought, at the grille of a car, but in light of all the disease around us, it seemed like we could be taking our last sane breaths. “Why didn’t you call someone?” Ricky asked. “A vet or something?”

  “I don’t have a phone.”

  “You’ve got a fucking van, don’t you?” Ricky said, sounding just like his lawyer dad. Ricky may have fallen far from one of the few prominent trees in town, but every once in a while—as much as he wanted to deny it—the budding executive came out, along with a leader’s short fuse for idiocy. “You’ve got diseased fucking swans in our river, Crash. Where do you think our water comes from?” He stomped off, up the bank. “Everything goes downriver,” he shouted as he reached the top.

  Crash and I looked at each other. He might be in trouble, much more trouble than any of his illegal substances could bring—here and now, people might die of diseased water. I could hear Ricky coming back down the stairs. I wasn’t going to let him yell at Crash again, no matter how much he deserved it. He wasn’t coming down to yell though, he was carrying the gas can Crash used for starting campfires.

  We found gloves in the van and wrapped our faces in Harley-Davidson handkerchiefs. We were careful not to touch the birds. We used poles fashioned from tree limbs to knock the twenty-four swans into a pile. We didn’t want to kill the living swans, especially not in front of Crash, who insisted on watching us from the bottom of his steps. But we had no choice when they wouldn’t stay in the pile. As easy as it had been to talk about, when it came time to step on their bodies and line up a clear head shot for the sticks, it was very different. They kept moving and moaning, finally Crash handed me the hatchet we’d used to make the poles. By then we were looking to get it all over with, so we lopped their heads off without a second thought. We tapped their severed, seemingly hollow noggins into the pile with the poles, like some surreal golf game. We soaked them with the gasoline, let it sink in for five minutes, and then soaked them again. Without any fanfare, Ricky tossed a match onto the edge of the dirty white pile of swans. They burned bright and fast. There was a lot of popping involved, I remember, like green twigs tossed on a campfire. There were sounds like that of liquid escaping, of internal gases roiling. Watching them, I was afraid some might explode, but they didn’t. They just burned.

  We all watched the fire as if it were any other bonfire and not a big pile of birds. Crash finished his flask with a long pull and a loud growl from the whiskey burn. He put on his crutches and ambled off toward the bridge, which was nicely lighted—almost theatrical—from the burning swans, that absurd Zeppelin lyric flickering. He left his crutches at the bottom of the concrete embankment, then dragged himself up the concrete by scooting backward on his ass. “Crash!” Ricky said, his voice reverberating in the perfect acoustics of the bridge. “We’re leaving. I know what you’re thinking of doing.”

  “He’s going to kill himself,” I whispered, more to myself than Ricky.

  “I think that’s the point.”

  “Leave, then!” Crash said, sizing up the I-beam.

  “For fuck’s sake,” Ricky said, “If he dies I’m dumping his ass on that fire.” Ricky ran over to the embankment, which was pointless, I thought. If we wanted to, we could have stopped him as he crawled up like an inchworm. But it was too late now, and I knew it was all for show. If Crash really wanted to kill himself he would, but there was no reason for him to do this in front of us now, except for the fact that he didn’t really want to die.

  Crash’s strong hands scrambled along the narrow ledges of the beam. He was dangling far above the flat sandy beach in a couple of seconds. He could probably make it across, I thought, hopefully. But as he got over the river, he lost steam. Ricky had given up, and we watched Crash dangling in the glow of his beloved, diseased swans. His legs hung like a marionette with his strings cut.

  “Everything I love,” Crash said, “turns to shit.” His shoulders b
egan to shake, either from fatigue or sobs, then, without another word, he dropped into the river. There was a splash, then nothing.

  We ran to the steep riverbank, the water three feet below. With the onset of summer the river had turned sluggish and low, unlike months ago, when it had swollen to several times its current size. In the light from the swans we spotted him when, like a pale, greasy bobber, he broke the murky surface. Ricky jumped in and pushed him toward the bank. I leaned down and pulled him up.

  Crash lay on the sand and coughed up two or three mouthfuls of Little Wabash water. He’d lost his baseball cap in the river and without it he looked like a wet cat. His long hair was much sparser than I’d imagined, and his bright white scalp underneath was misshapen and badly scarred from his accident. His shrunken legs were limp and lifeless in the dying light of the swan fire. He eventually caught his breath, and with his arms around our shoulders, we walked him over to his steps, where he sat with his head in his hands.

  There is something that happens when you hang with guys like Crash, guys who live alone, free of parents, school, and any other responsibility. They make you believe that life can be fun and amazing forever, that they’ve got it all figured out. But when you realize they don’t, when that fuck-all front crumbles and you see them at their weakest, you know you can never go back, that whatever weed is left in your bag will be the last, because the magic is gone for everyone and it’ll never seem as sweet again.