Free Plan B for the Middle Class by Ron Carlson Page B

He’d just walked and something—the cold, the gash on his head, the iron hardness of the packed roadway, the glimpse of the earth growing dark—had let it all gather in his heart. For years he had thought that the weight of it, the darkest part, was his drinking. He’d wake somewhere sick and feel it around his chest like a cold hand and not be able to swallow. But after he stopped drinking, it didn’t lift. It didn’t come every day, but when it came as it had tonight, it hit with a force that left him weak.
    On their holidays when he and Helen would go to St. Johns, he was drunk by noon, usually, rum was such an easy thing to drink. You could drink it in anything, coffee, juice. You could drink it in milk, for chrissake. You could take warm mouthfuls right from the bottle.
    You could drink vodka and bourbon from the bottle too, but not in balmy weather. In the islands it was rum. Manhattan was gin. Airplanes were gin too, the stiff chemical push in the face. Clients were scotch, something that bit and then slid in Burns, he could drink scotch for weeks. He had done it. But his rules were his rules: Manhattan was gin; St. Johns was rum; clients were scotch; and he drank vodka and bourbon those nights when the rules began to float. It was vodka the time he tried to die.
    Now Burns felt the goose egg on his forehead. The blood had stopped, but the flesh was too tender to touch. He looked around and couldn’t find a landmark. Four or five buildings, warehouses or churches, stood over him. He wasn’t sure of the way he’d come and he couldn’t tell north from south. He felt drained. He turned around searching for a clue, even a snowbank to sit on, but he could only see how much, how very much, of his own life he had missed.
    Between buildings he thought he caught sight of the bonfire on the hill, and then someone took his arm. He looked down at Blazo, his grin showing the missing teeth, a man who by the wrinkles in his brown face could have been a hundred. With a firm grip on Burns’s arm, Blazo marched him to the corner, out of the shadows, and pointed at the sledding fire.
    â€œI saw them sledding,” Burns said, but Blazo pointed again. A flare of powdery red light rose in the sky and then dissolved as a wave of yellow swelled and faded. “This place,” Burns said. He felt dizzy. “These nights. This place is something else.” He stepped away from Blazo. “Thanks,” he said. “Julie’s place is that way, right?”
    Blazo nodded. He seemed to be examining Burns’s face.
    Burns started down the street and then hesitated. “I need to get to Kolvik. Soon. I need to see where Alec Burns lived, where he had a trapline. South of town.”
    â€œHe was your boy,” Blazo said.
    Above them, the sky was relentless, the random vast armatures of colored light wheeling up and then vanishing, sometimes printing themselves from nothing on the darkness like bright stains. “He was,” Burns whispered. The cold air cut at his nose as he breathed, and he could feel his pulse aching in his wound. “You can talk,” Burns said.
    â€œNot really.” Blazo quickly pointed down the snowpacked lane, and Burns saw a figure trotting swiftly under the lamplight, a dog, some kind of husky, moving as with purpose. “But we’ll go out there,” Blazo said. “Tomorrow morning. It’s going to snow, but we’ll get half a day of good weather.”
    The trailer was dark. Burns opened the door quietly and heard a strange sound which he then recognized as the violin. He felt the warmth and it made him catch his breath. He almost wept.
    As he passed through the mud room without removing his coat, he felt Molly’s nose fit into his palm in the dark. His legs were trembling. Julie was playing something sharp, full of energy and angles, it filled the space completely, and Burns saw her as he passed through the living room.