Chapter 21
"Pray for us sinners now and at the hour of our death."
T.S. Eliot, Ash Wednesday
Sunday, December 31, 1999
Ethan heard a pounding on his sliding glass door. He and Deborah, dressed for a night on the town, rose from the couch.
Atwood Nash, his hair slightly less red, his face slightly less freckled than the last time either Ethan or Deborah saw him, entered with a tall, pale girl in a black dress.
"Nice snow shoveling on that walk, asshole, we almost bailed three times."
Ethan embraced his friend in the typical masculine fashion (handshake into hug into pat on the back, followed by an insult).
"Fuck you, stumbling bitch. Man it's good to see you. How's the hockey?"
"Just fine, how's the baseball?"
"Just fine."
"Ethan, Deborah, this is Margaret."
They all shook hands.
"Excuse me, I don't mean to be rude or stupid, but weren't you on the cover of ESPN the Magazine?" asked Margaret.
"Yes, once."
"I didn't know that," said Deborah.
"What, I gotta tell you every little thing," he kissed her on the cheek.
"You read ESPN the Magazine?" Atwood asked his date.
"Well, no, but they have them in my gym and I remember seeing a picture of him in a blue uniform and it said something like, ‘quite possibly the best ever.' The girls and I in the gym thought he was cute so we looked through the magazine for more pictures and-"
"Let's go," said Atwood in a tone igniting laughter.
St. Louis was snowy, icy and just downright elementally unfriendly as Atwood drove through the sleet.
"Wow, this is weird," said Atwood. "No one's rolling up a joint, no one's lighting a joint, no one's looking for a joint. Strange."
"Why aren't you?" asked Deborah.
"Drug tests," Ethan and Atwood said at the same time.
"NC double assholes," muttered Ethan.
Atwood's parents' Range Rover pulled up to the party house of some girl named Jessica, a catalogue model who often hosted large parties.
Atwood, Ethan and their dates sat at a round dinner table. The music and people were downstairs.
Deborah had been taken aback when Ethan ignored the sign ordering everyone around back and removed a key from beneath the mat.
"You shouldn't do that?" she had said.
"I don't care," he had replied.
They found a few bottles of champagne in the refrigerator, opened them and drank from plastic cups already set out on the counter.
"To my friends," Ethan raised his cup and his friends joined in.
Jim Phelps loved his new car. For Christmas, his parents had bought him a used, silver Lexus LS. He had found a date to the New Years party in no time simply by driving all over the county and hitting on women who saw his car.
Jim looked at himself in the rearview mirror as he went to collect his date. He couldn't believe how he used to look: covered with acne, insecurities and a bad, Supercuts haircut.
At a red light, he eyed his wavy hair, dark complexion and contact covered eyes and couldn't help but smile. As he eyed his white smile, the driver of the car behind him honked his horn.
Jim's date, a little, blond girl named Sheila, had graduated the same year as he. He met her while in a Denny's on the day before Christmas Eve. She had been his waitress that night.
As they drove to Jessica's house, Sheila asked, "So, how do you know Jessica."
"I don't."
"Will you know anyone there?"
"Ethan Lee."
"How do you know Ethan?"
Phelps took his right hand off the wheel and grabbed Sheila's thigh. "I was an honors student."
"Oh."
The party had moved upstairs by the time Atwood found a deck of cards and started dealing to his friends.
The card game was very slow and oft interrupted. People kept coming up to say hello to Ethan, to ask about the baseball career. One high school student (Ethan guessed) asked for his autograph. He politely declined.
It was about eleven PM when Ethan Lee, drunk and groggy, noticed Jim Phelps in stylish wool, gray slacks, a black button down shirt and a black wool overcoat.
"Holy shit," Ethan said to Atwood. "That's Phelps."
"Who the hell is Phelps?" asked Atwood, way too drunk to focus on anything beyond his next beer.
Ethan stood up.
"Jim," he said.
Jim Phelps walked over to Ethan's table and introduced himself to Deborah, Margaret and Atwood, even though he remembered all but Margaret. Deborah was Ethan's beautiful, intelligent woman. Atwood had once borrowed and never returned some of Jim's clothes.
"Nice to meet you," said Sheila when introduced to all at the table.
Atwood Nash looked at Margaret, "let's go downstairs."
"Sheila, Jim, have a seat."
Ethan kicked Atwood's vacant chair towards Jim, who sat.
"I wanted to thank you, Jim."
"Thank me for what?" said Jim.
"Because of what you told me at the high school graduation party, I am the best damn pitcher in all of college baseball."
"Ethan," Jim rubbed his head. "I was pretty drunk and all fucked out of my head that night. I probably said a lot of weird crap I didn't mean."
"Well, I'm all drunk right now, and I'm glad I got to see you. You look good. I'm glad I have a new picture of you to throw strikes at."
"Huh?"
"Excuse us," said Deborah, grabbing Ethan by the arm.
When midnight struck, Ethan and Deborah were making love and listening to Miles Davis in Robert Lee's car.
"Baby," she said. "Let's go inside."
Deborah Van Klein didn't ask about Ethan's conversation with Jim. She didn't care. She knew her boyfriend had a good idea of what was going on in the world, but she didn't necessarily want to know about his world. She just wanted him to be normal with her.
Ethan found Atwood playing cards with Phelps and his date.
"Where's Margaret?" asked Deborah.
"Who cares," said Nash.
"Ethan, why don't you get in on the card game? Five card draw. It's Sheila's deal."
Sheila, in one of her first acts of the year 2000, dealt five cards apiece to three upstanding college students with good prospects, good backgrounds and good manners. Had she known that the three men she dealt to had murdered a combined eight people, she probably wouldn't have palmed two aces.
"Hey, remember in high school," said Sheila as she pointed to Ethan.
"Sheila," said Ethan. "Let's not talk about high school. I mean, it's not like any of that crap really mattered."
"Here, here," said Atwood and he raised his plastic cup.
"To Luther S. Dunby High," said Jim Phelps, raising his cup. "May we forget the place ever existed."
"Here, here," they hit plastic cups together.
Ethan stood up, grabbed his girlfriend by the waist and kissed her passionately.
Ethan looked out the window and saw the fluttering tail of a shooting star. The quiet moon hung low and stared him down.
"Do you see that?" asked Ethan, pointing to the sky as he spoke to Deborah.
"Yeah."
"Do you know what that is?"
"The sky."
"Nope, it's freedom and possibility and love."
Before Jim left the party, he grabbed Ethan by the arm.
"Can I talk to you for a second?"
Ethan rose from beside Deborah.
In the hallway, Phelps said, "I don't know what the hell you were talking about earlier, but if you want to hit my face. Go ahead."
"You know Jim," said Ethan, feeling very drunk. "We're students. We're gonna make money, get married, and have children and between us we've killed seven people. Doesn't that make you wonder."
Phelps put his finger to his lips.
"Life is rough," Jim said and for no good reason, repeated the words, "Life is rough."
Monday, January 1, 2000
As Ethan Lee and Deborah Van Klein slept nestled in the womb of Suburbia, a black dog escaped from a hole in a shed behind a little league baseball park. The dog charged over a frozen creek and up an icy hill as the sun tinted the eastern horizon pink.
"I hear you Lulu," griped the naked figure of a young man, who opened his sliding glass door and let the Labrador in the house.
Ethan, the winter chill against his naked body, looked out at the rising sun from his former basement apartment.
Deborah awoke and brought two sheets to her love.
She wrapped her arms around him, and in doing so, allowed them both beneath the blanket.
"Another day in St. Louis County," she said.
He nodded.
While Deborah made breakfast, Ethan watched the county awaken slowly on this holiday. He saw the lights of only a few stores. Only a few semi-trucks hurried off the highway.
The world somehow seemed right this way, not hurried or pushed, just idling. As the cooking smells of bacon and eggs teased his tongue into making saliva, Ethan Lee let a calm well up inside him, then burst, and roll over him like tarp during a rain delay at one of his baseball games. All of his senses felt relaxed and warmed. The familiarity of a life he had once lived, a life he had never really understood, softly throbbed throughout his cold soul.
Everything felt like growing up felt. The smells, sights and sensations all tingled in his memory. Comfort surrounded his senses and his past wrapped around him as easily as had the blankets covering his naked body.
Ethan Lee was home again.