I crumpled the empty cigarette pack and left it there on the table. Roger produced a fresh pack from his jacket pocket, tore the cellophane off and shook one out for me, patting his pockets for fire.My Zippo was back in the car, which we’d left at his wife’s house. He looked at me expectantly, his unlit smoke hanging from his chapped lips. The couple at the table next to us had gotten up and were standing in the glow of the jukebox choosing a song. When I looked at them, Roger reached across our table and grabbed the orange disposable they had left next to their half-smoked pack of Parliaments.

The lighter scratched, missed, and caught on the next try. He lit my cigarette before lighting his, then placed the lighter on our table next to the red and white pack.

“Thanks for coming to see me,” he said, exhaling.

I shook my head and pulled a hand through my hair. “Been worried about you,” I said.

He sipped his beer.

Kayleen had called me asking me to look in on him. She’s our younger sister and he always was able to talk to her. “This feels different,” she said. “He’s not even there sometimes.”

I poured myself more beer from the pitcher, motioning to his glass. He finished it and held it to the pitcher, tipping it sideways.

“What the hell are you doing,” I asked him, gently as I could.

He didn’t look at me, watched the couple move from the jukebox to the dancefloor they had carved out for themselves between the tables and the pizza girls.

“I don’t know,” he said quietly without looking at me. “I don’t know, Henry.”

What I knew was that after ten years of marriage, his ex-wife showed up again and things got weird. Before that, he was “on call” a lot more than was usual.

“You need a few bucks?” I asked.

Before I finished talking he had already said No, was lighting another cigarette.

Then he looked at me dead in the face.

“I think I still love her,” he said.

“Elaine?” I said. “I thought she was long gone. What about your kids? What about Sal?” I asked.

“I know. I know,” he said, tapping ash into the ashtray.

I looked up at the bandbox, which had turned on when the jukebox started. Barbie led the Kens in a John Coltrane number.

“I love them. And Sal, too.”

When he met Sal his current wife, he and Elaine were still together. They were three years into their marriage, and already things didn’t look good for them.

“Does she know Elaine’s back?”

He shook his head without looking at me.

The Kens and Barbie had gone still and the couple returned to their table laughing. The man pulled a crumpled bill from his pocket and tossed it onto the table. The girl picked up the Parliaments and they left arm in arm.

“Mom and Dad don’t know either,” he said. I knew he was telling me this in confidence, the way he did when we were kids. I’d wake up in my room in the dark when I felt his weight on the bed and he wanted to talk. He would sit there, watching me sleep, until I felt his presence and would wake, groggily rubbing my eyes, to listen to him.

This was more serious than bullies on the playground or a bad grade in a chem lab.

“Oh, Jesus, you’re not doing this, Rog. Tell me you’re not doing this, man.”

It was as if we were sitting in the dark of my room again. He started talking.

He was talking, and it was almost as if I wasn’t hearing him. Pizzas were delivered to tables, were eaten. Bodies passed in front of us on their way out into the rain, or shaking water from their coats as they walked into the steam of the restaurant. Another pitcher of beer appeared on the table. The orange lighter clicked and lit cigarettes.

“I didn’t want to tell anyone,” I heard him saying. “But it’s eating me up and I knew I could trust you. And yeah, actually, thinking about it, I could use a little help.”

“How much,” I asked.

“Six hundred,” he said.

“Holy Christ, Roger. Six hundred. What for?”

”I owe the regular bills, and on top of that, I owe the check cashing place five.”
I didn’t ask him why he was cashing checks. The ash of my cigarette had grown long in the ashtray and I reached for another. Roger stood and walked out the door. I grabbed the pack.

Tony shot me a look from across the bar and I shrugged, grabbing matches on the way out, forgetting the orange lighter on the table. Tony knew I’d be by tomorrow and that I was good for it.

It had stopped raining and the neon shone crazily on the wet pavement in the dark, blurred by beer and talk. Roger stood smoking, looking up at the Y-Bridge, his back to me. I stood behind him, lighting my cigarette with a match. He flinched a little when he heard my boots scraping asphalt behind him, but did not turn to me.

“You remember driving home after Mass? Down Howard and back into the Falls, when we were kids? Before the Bridge?”

“Yeah,” I said.

“I was just thinking what it must have been like for Grandma, living in North Hill here, after the viaduct crumbled but before the bridge.”

“Cut off from everything…” I offered.

“No. Not cut off. Protected. From the city, from temptations.”

He was quiet, hands jammed into the pockets of his work pants. We stood there in the wet silence of the city, smoking. I waited for him to speak, but he didn’t.

“Roger, what are you going to do?” I asked.

“You know, when they built the Y-Bridge, this neighborhood changed. That’s when things got cut off, I think. Now the only excitement a lot of these folks get is a jumper in their front lawn,” Roger said.

I shivered and flicked my cigarette. “What are you going to do, Roger?” I wanted to help him, but did not know how. Not now. Not this time.

“I’d like to watch this bridge burn. When I was at Fort Lost in the Woods, they taught us how to blow up bridges.”

He had shut down, then. Talking in the abstract.

“I can get you some cash by the end of the week,” I said.

He just kept staring up at the bridge.

“What about the papers Sal served you?”

“She doesn’t mean it. She’ll be back.”

And I knew he was right. And I knew his heart wasn’t in it. And that he felt paralyzed and impotent and unsure. And that he would keep on like this. And that we couldn’t reach him anymore, that he was a stranger.

I didn’t know how to talk to him anymore, and just stood there in the dark waiting for a body to fall from the sky.

Been busy framing and matting paintings in preparation for the July show at Zoë. More to come on that front soon.

In the meantime, sold a print of the below photo. Which makes me think I’ll do a photo exhibition soon. Probably in November at the latest.

–John Dendy