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  For Erin Caputo and Patricia Esralew

  BLOCKERS

  1.

  Tom lets a brief silence lapse before he asks, “Soooo—how is the pilgrim progressing?”

  He doesn’t mean to sound snide and dismissive—it’s become his natural way of speaking, probably from cross-examining so many impeachable witnesses—but Lisa takes it as intentional, reproves him with a scowl, then lowers her glance to quarter the potatoes. “Fine. Doing just fine,” she answers, each word sliced off clean, as if her vocal cords are moving in synch with the knife. Fine chop doing chop just chop fine chop. “Took out a couple of term life policies last May, right after he hit the big five-oh. The insurance company said he had to have a physical. Passed with honors. The usual back problems, but he’s good to go for another half century.”

  “Lisa,” Tom says, throwing a lift into the last syllable.

  She motions impatiently at the bowls and pans on the kitchen counter and says with a trace of irritation, “Have you talked to the pilgrim himself about his progress?”

  “Called him from Lansing to tell him we were on the way. And there’s some blah-de-blah, and he asks if we’re bringing any wine for ourselves, and I say no, we’ll drink sodas with dinner, don’t want to make things tough on him. And he goes, ‘No problem, dude. Not one drop since Hazelden. I’m dry as the Sahara, sober as the Imam of Baghdad.’ That’s what made the buzzer buzz. Sober as the Imam of Baghdad. Know what I’m saying?”

  She doesn’t and turns to me, eyebrows furrowed. Thick, black, unkempt, they give her a glowering look.

  “He means that I’ve-got-the-world-by-the-balls way Bill puts on when he’s bullshitting,” I tell her.

  Lisa brushes a mustard sauce on the potatoes with strokes suggestive of painting Easter eggs, then lines them up in a roasting pan, pulls a pork loin from the refrigerator, soaks it in a marinade, and returns it to the fridge. She is a tall, big-limbed woman fifteen years younger than Bill, though her slumped shoulders and the lines at the corners of her mouth make her appear closer to his age. She’d learned to endure, growing up on a hardscrabble farm downstate, but, I suppose, marriage to Bill Erickson would wear on the sturdiest woman, in the same way that friendship with Bill Erickson wears on his friends.

  Her preparations finished, she lights up, swoops out from behind the counter, shirttails hanging out of her Levi’s, coarse, rebellious hair flouncing on her shoulders, and falls into an oversize chair, flinging her legs over its arm. She sits there, puffing on a cigarette, staring out the French doors toward the lake, not saying a word.

  “Okay,” Tom says into the disquieting quiet. “This isn’t something you want to talk about right now.”

  “I was going to get into it, so it might as well be right now. He wasn’t bullshitting, not completely.”

  She gets up, goes into the bathroom, and comes back holding a small brown bottle capped with a dropper. She sets it on the counter. The label reads: ZOLOFT (SERTRALINE) 60 ML. “All right, you two, do you swear on your mothers’ graves that this stays between us?”

  Our mothers are still aboveground, but we swear anyway.

  “He was dry after Hazelden, went to A.A., but you know, all those people babbling about one day at a time and how it’s all in God’s hands—not for him.” She jerks her head at the wall above the fireplace, where medals in a shadow box hang beside a photograph taken aboard an aircraft carrier during Desert Storm: Bill in a flight suit, helmet tucked under one arm, mounting a ladder to the open cockpit of a two-seat fighter jet. He didn’t fly the plane, although the picture makes it look that way. He’d failed to qualify for pilot in flight school but had passed the test for bombardier, the “G.I.B,” as he called it—the Guy In Back.

  “But he stayed off the stuff,” Lisa is saying. “It must have been in March that he started getting these … these mood swings. He’d be his old self for a while, then the spells. Of depression. I’m not going into any details, okay?” She pauses and tilts her chin to exhale. “They were bad enough that I nagged him into seeing a shrink in Marquette. He told me that she told him that he’d been medicating himself with booze for so long, going off of it had sent him into a tailspin. She prescribed talk therapy and this stuff.” Gesturing at the bottle. “He saw her for, oh, maybe two months, then, Bill being Bill, he stopped and took himself off her meds and put himself back on his. No hard stuff but wine was okay.”

  “Knew it,” says Tom, shaking his head, as wide and round as a soccer ball and almost as hairless.

  “Doesn’t take much,” Lisa goes on wearily. “One glass he’s launched, two he’s in orbit, half a bottle and he’s on Apollo Twelve.”

  “So … Houston, we have a problem.”

  She corrects him—“That was Apollo Thirteen”—and turns defensive, offering all sorts of reasons for Bill’s modified tumble from the wagon. The Register was still in the red, and old Four-M (her shorthand for Media Mogul Myron McNaughton) was constantly on Bill’s ass to buck up the paper’s bottom line. Plus, Allison, the younger daughter, had been accepted to Stanford, so now he’d have both girls in private colleges—what the hell’s wrong with a state school?—and every dime earned from the Erickson Trust, what was left of it, and from his Navy retirement pay was going to alimony, so his ex could maintain her lifestyle out there in sunny California, and to tuitions, so his girls didn’t have to take out student loans. If it wasn’t for Lisa’s casino job, they’d fall behind on the mortgage payments, and then all this … She makes a sweeping movement to take in the house, the guesthouse, the ten acres of woodland with four hundred feet of lake frontage, rubs her palms together, and sighs, “So I guess he figured the vino would sand the edges, y’know?”

  Her lips part in a mirthless quarter smile. “Except it didn’t. Know what I did? I got the prescription refilled and started spiking his orange juice every morning, and that seemed to help,” she confesses with a brittle laugh. “He thought it was the wine doing the trick. Up to about a week ago, we were in the old rut. Nothing stronger than coffee before six, then he’d hit it and end the evening speaking in tongues and then shake off the effects like a retriever shakes off water. And all the time, I was trying to convince myself that it’s better to live with a functional drunk than a dysfunctional one.”

  She doesn’t deserve this is what I’m thinking when I ask what changed a week ago.

  “We had a knock-down drag-out. End result? He promised he’d try again. Promised he wouldn’t drink while you guys were in camp, a new start. And he hasn’t touched a drop since, sort of getting himself in shape. I’m counting on you two to see that he keeps his word.”

  Tom folds his hands on his ample belly. “Great! Looking forward to it!”

  “The meds will help,” she replies, in a reassuring tone. “They keep the black dog in the kennel, and if it’s there, it’s easier for him to resist. One dropperful. I do orange juice because the concentrate clouds water and he’d
notice.”

  “Wait a sec,” I say. “You want us to…”

  “I can’t be there.” She presses the bottle into my hand. There is in her touch an intimacy, a trust; it’s almost as if we’ve shaken hands on a solemn contract. “Squeeze the dropper, stir it with a spoon, takes half a second. He’ll never know the difference.”

  We leave when she begins to set the table, release our dogs from the back of Tom’s GMC, then bring our overnight bags into the guesthouse, a one-room, prefab log cabin too finished to look authentically rustic. The bottle in my shirt pocket has a weight disproportionate to its size. I unpack my shaving kit and tuck the Zoloft inside.

  We join the dogs, racing up and down what had once been lakeshore, across mudflats that had once been lake bottom. A long way out, duck blinds picket this year’s shoreline. Once upon a time not very long ago, you needed a skiff to reach them; now you can do it on foot, if you’re willing to slog through a hundred yards of muck. Hardly any snow has fallen the past three winters, depriving Lake Michigan of the spring runoff that had replenished it since, I suppose, the Ice Age. In the house, we’d seen yesterday’s edition of Bill’s newspaper. It carried the headline LAKE LEVELS AT RECORD LOWS. EXPERTS BLAME MILD WINTERS ON CLIMATE CHANGE and a photo of a dredger deepening the ship channel into Manitou Falls harbor. The caption reported that similar excavations were going on as far south as Chicago and Gary. That—the lake’s slow evaporation—was one of the things we’d been talking about before Tom flipped to the subject of the pilgrim’s progress.

  I’m allergic to change. I’ve been married to the same woman, living in the same house, and teaching the same courses at Michigan State for twenty-two years and hope to continue for another twenty-two. Aside from reuniting with my two oldest friends, the whole reason I come back to the Upper Peninsula every fall is the familiarity of its unaltered landscapes. No suburban sprawl, no interstates, the two-lane blacktops and woods and rivers—all the landmarks of my boyhood—are pretty much as I remember them. Now this—dry land where there’d been none in living memory. Walking where I should be wading, I get the feeling that things are out of whack, that we’re on the edge of an epochal alteration in the order of the world. I picture the lake in the distant future: an enormous ditch littered with the hulls of long-sunken ships and pleasure craft and birchbark canoes, anthropologists studying the exposed bones of drowned children, sailors, fishermen, voyageurs gone under in unrecorded gales.

  “So what do you think?” Tom asks.

  I don’t answer, lost in my vision of slow-motion catastrophe.

  He carries on. “The only thing I’d rather do less than slip Bill a mickey every morning is crawl on my bare knees over broken glass. Spells of depression? I don’t remember that that guy ever had a down minute in his life. What the hell would he have to be depressed about?”

  Mallards and black ducks, alarmed by the dogs, fly out of a pothole, wings rowing the quiet air.

  “Depressed people aren’t depressed about anything in particular,” I say authoritatively. Not that I am an authority. I’m a professor of Russian literature. My knowledge of mental disorders doesn’t go much beyond what I’ve read in Dostoevsky. “It’s a chemical imbalance in the brain, short circuits in the neurotransmitters.”

  “Yeah. I guess a lifetime of boozing would fuck up your neurotransmissions. So who spikes the OJ? Or do we take turns?”

  “Well, she gave the meds to me, so I’ll play nurse. The other stuff—making sure he doesn’t nip on the sly—we play by ear.”

  “Shit and double shit. I really hoped we wouldn’t have to play watchdog this trip.”

  “We’re not doing it for him. It’s for her sake.”

  He shambles along, hands in his pockets, and gives me a sidelong glance. “The way you look at her sometimes, I might think you’ve got a thing for her.”

  “Yeah, but not in the way you think. More of a brotherly thing.”

  “If you say so.”

  * * *

  Bill comes home about half an hour before dinner. Inside, we find him, jacket off, tie loosened, sitting at the kitchen counter with Lisa while his English pointer, Rory, licks his hand. Lisa’s clandestine doses must be working; he’s not the morose character I’d expected, after all her talk about shrinks and mood swings. “Dudes!” he shouts, and jumps off the stool, grinning, growling, calling out his usual greeting—“Buju! Shagunashee wadukee!”—which he claims is Ojibwa for “Hello, crazy white men.” He hasn’t aged, trim as ever, hair still thick, the silver in it barely distinguishable from its original platinum blond. At a distance, you’d mistake him for thirty. His splendid genes have seemingly shielded his looks from the carpet-bombing of his addiction. His eyes remain clear; there is no boozer’s flush or red map of a riverine delta in his cheeks.

  He hooks his long arms around our necks, asking, “How’s Cheryl? How’s Julie? How’re the kids? Goddamn, love ya, great to see you guys again.” He has more than the normal share of human contradictions—self-centered but generous, often considerate, sometimes thoughtless. But I don’t doubt his sincerity. He really does care about our wives and kids—no other male I know remembers to send birthday cards to Cheryl and my two boys—and he does love us, so it’s hard not to respond in kind. Harder for me than for Tom, who stiffens and pulls away from the smothering embrace. We’ve been charged with keeping Bill sober for the next week; this is no time for sentimentalism, no time to be taken in by the warm welcome, his rough charm.

  In the long northern twilight, we sit down at the table, which Lisa has set to Martha Stewart standards. She always does when we show up—crystal, silverware, china, shine and sparkle in candlelight.

  “We’re gonna have a great week!” Bill exults, presenting a hand-drawn map a friend has given him of a honey hole way back in the boonies, loaded with grouse. “We’re gonna come back with enough birds to feed the whole damn town!” Again, the good cheer strikes me as a little forced, and his filling and refilling of our wineglasses while he confines himself to sparkling water seems theatrical. Look at me; I’m in complete control.

  But his craving, like some night-blooming plant, flowers in darkness. As the evening wears on, he grows fidgety and a little irritable after Tom brings up the story in his newspaper.

  “Global warming is getting the rap for everything but prostate cancer,” Tom remarks. “Lake Michigan isn’t, for Chrissake, going to disappear.”

  “That’s not what the story said. What the fuck, are you one of these flat-earth nutballs who thinks it’s all a hoax?”

  They spar for a few minutes, then Bill does an odd thing—reaches across the table and, with an unsteady hand, tips the empty wine bottle into his empty glass, raises it to his lips, and gulps air. When Lisa brings out the cake and ice cream, he repeats the pantomime twice more, as if the motions of taking a drink might quench his need for the real thing. How, I’m asking myself, did he get through twenty years as a naval aviator? This guy who once flew through flak over the Iraqi deserts was now struggling to pilot himself through dinner. Tom and I watch to see if he makes it. Lisa launches into a story, maybe to distract us, about her dealings with the tribal council that owns the Northern Suns casino on the reservation outside town.

  “White chick came up with a marketing plan to pull in high rollers from downstate and Chicago,” she says, comically mimicking a throw of the dice. “What we get are loggers and mill workers blowing their paychecks, blue-hairs playing the slots when their Social Security checks come in. The idea is that we start with a junket to Foxwoods to see how the big boys do things. The council has to approve the funds for the trip, the whole plan. White chick gives a terrific PowerPoint. She’s seen too many movies where Crazy Horse gives the orders and his braves obey, but things don’t work that way in the real world of real Indians. The council chairman isn’t Crazy Horse. The decision has to be made communally, y’know? Consensus. But nobody wants to be the first one to raise his hand and say, Let’s do it. She tries to fire them
up. We’ll go to Foxwoods! The big leagues! Catch a few floor shows, maybe a prizefight! And they all go like this…” She purses her lips and shyly bows her head. “Not a peep. They’re, like, embarrassed? Like somebody just farted.”

  Tom and I laugh. Bill, who’s probably heard the story before, makes another grab at the bottle. Lisa grimaces like someone stabbed with a bellyache. “Darling, please…” She pushes his hand gently aside.

  Only then, blinking two or three times, a corner of his mouth twitching, does he realize what he’d been doing. “Night-night for Billy Boy,” he says, lays his hands flat on the table, and stands, announcing that he’ll see us in the morning. It’s a little past eight-fifteen.

  “I do the same thing every time I quit smoking,” Lisa says after he’s gone into the bedroom and we help her clear the table. “I get so tired of fighting the urge that all I want to be is unconscious.”

  I say, “You don’t have to apologize for him.”

  “I wasn’t. Just explaining.”

  I put an arm around her waist, and her ample body yielding, she leans into me and I hold her a little longer, a little tighter than a brother would. “Don’t worry. We’ll watch out for him.”

  “Like always,” Tom says.

  2.

  “He used you,” Tom’s mother scolded after the accident. “I don’t care what that big-shot father of his did to make things better. He used you, and what makes me hopping mad is that you let yourself be used.” She then turned to me, there on her back porch. “You, too, Paul. He uses both of you. You’re not your brother’s keepers.”

  I’d played fullback, Tom right guard, those two seasons when Bill quarterbacked for the Manitou Falls Norsemen and led us to the state championship in our division. I carried the ball on short-yardage plays; otherwise, I was a blocking back, assigned to shield our star from some slab of blitzing beef who’d penetrated the line. Like Tom and the other offensive linemen, I suffered collisions with little regard for my own health. We were all guardians of William J. Erickson, a football prodigy with a quick eye wired to a quick, strong arm. Total yardage, number of completions—he broke school records going back forty years. His talent didn’t come from effort—he never tossed footballs through spare tires in the off season, that sort of thing; no, what he had was more like the grace the ministers preached about in church.