Spring came again, but after a few weeks of it, winter returned suddenly with a strange storm. In the morning when I left for school, I saw a new bud completely encased in ice, and three dead birds whose feet had frozen to the telephone wires. This was the day Arnold Becker gave me the message that Bobby wanted to see me. “Right away,” Arnie said. “This afternoon. And just you. None of your girlfriends with you.”
In the old days Bobby and I used to climb in and out each other’s windows, but this was for good times and for intimacy; I didn’t even consider it. I went to the front door and let his mother show me to his room as if I didn’t even know the way. Bobby lay in his bed, with his puffy face and a new tube sticking into his nose and down his throat. There was a strong, strange odor in the room. I was afraid it was Bobby and wished not to get close enough to see.
He had sores in his mouth, his mother had explained to me. It was difficult for him to eat or even to talk. “You do the talking,” she suggested. But I couldn’t think of anything to say.
And anyway, Bobby came right to the point. “Do you remember,” he asked me, “that day in the McBean cellar?” Talking was an obvious effort. It made him breathe hard, as if he’d been running.
Truthfully, I didn’t remember. Apparently I had worked to forget it. I remember it now, but at the time, I didn’t know what he was talking about.
“Bonnie Prince Charlie,” he said, with an impatient rasp so I thought he was delirious. “I need you to go back. I need you to bring me a bottle of whiskey from McBean’s cellar. There’s a unicorn on the label.”
“Why do you want whiskey?”
“Don’t ask McBean. He’ll never give it to you. Just take it. You would still fit through the window.”
“Why do you want whiskey?”
“The unicorn label. Very important. Maybe,” said Bobby, “I just want to taste one really good whiskey before I die. You do this and I’ll owe you forever. You’ll save my life.”
He was exhausted. I went home. I did not plan to break into McBean’s cellar. It was a mad request from a delusional boy. It saddened me, but I felt no obligation. I did think I could get him some whiskey. I had some money, I would spare no expense. But I was underage. I ate my dinner and tried to think who I could get to buy me liquor, who would do it, and who would even know a fine whiskey if they saw one. And while I was working out the problem I began, bit by bit, piece by piece, bite by bite, to remember. First I remembered the snow, remembered standing by the tree watching the cellar window with snow swirling around me. Then I remembered offering to shovel the walk. I remembered the footprints leading into the cellar window. It took all of dinner, most of the time when I was falling asleep, some concentrated sessions when I woke during the night. By morning, when the sky was light again, I remembered it completely.
It had been my idea and then I had let Bobby execute it and then I had abandoned him. I left him there that day and in another story, someone else’s story, he was tortured or raped or even killed and eaten, although you’d have to be an adult to believe in these possibilities. The whole time he was in the McBean house I was lying on my bed and worrying about him, thinking, Boy, he’s really going to get it, but mostly worrying what I could tell my parents that would be plausible and would keep me out of it. The only way I could think of to make it right was to do as he’d asked and break into the cellar again.
I also got caught, got caught right off. There was a trap. I tripped a wire rigged to a stack of boards; they fell with an enormous clatter and McBean was there, just as he’d been for Bobby, with those awful cavernous eyes, before I could make it back out the window.
“Who sent you?” he shouted at me. “What are you looking for?”
So I told him.
“That sneaking, thieving, lying boy,” said McBean. “It’s a lie, what he’s said. How could it be true? And anyway, I couldn’t spare it.” I could see, behind him, the bottles with the unicorn label. There were half a dozen of them. All I asked was for one.
“He’s a wonderful boy.” I found myself crying.
“Get out,” said McBean. “The way you came. The window.”
“He’s dying,” I said. “And he’s my best friend.” I crawled back out, while McBean stood and watched me, and walked back home with a face filled with tears. I was not giving up. There was another dinner I didn’t eat and another night I didn’t sleep. In the morning it was snowing, as if spring had never come. I planned to cut class and break into the cellar again. This time I would be looking for traps. But as I passed McBean’s house, carrying my books and pretending to be on my way to school, I heard his front door.
“Come here,” McBean called angrily from his porch. He gave me a bottle, wrapped in red tissue. “There,” he said. “Take it.” He went back inside, but as I left he called again from behind the door. “Bring back what he doesn’t drink. What’s left is mine. It’s mine, remember.” And at that exact moment, the snow turned to rain.
For this trip I used the old window route. Bobby was almost past swallowing. I had to tip it from a spoon into his throat and the top of his mouth was covered with sores, so it burned him badly. One spoonful was all he could bear. But I came back the next day and repeated it, and the next, and by the fourth he could take it easily, and after a week he was eating again, and after two weeks I could see that he was going to live, just by looking in his mother’s face. “He almost died of the cure,” she told me. “The chemo. But we’ve done it. We’ve turned the corner.” I left her thanking God and went into Bobby’s room, where he was sitting up and looking like a boy again. I returned half the bottle to McBean.
“Did you spill any?” he asked angrily, taking it back. “Don’t tell me it took so much.”
And one night that next summer, in Bryan’s Park with the firecrackers going off above us, Bobby and I sat on a blanket and he told me McBean’s story.
• • •
WE FINISHED SCHOOL and graduated. I went to IU, but Bobby went to college in Boston and settled there. Sex came between us again. He came home once to tell his mother and father that he was gay and then took off like the whole town burned to the touch.
Bobby was the first person that I loved and lost, although there have, of course, been others since. Twenty-five years later I tracked him down and we had a dinner together. We were awkward with each other; the evening wasn’t a great success. He tried to explain to me why he had left, as an apology for dumping me again. “It was just so hard to put the two lives together. At the time I felt that the first life was just a lie. I felt that everyone who loved me had been lied to. But now — being gay seems to be all I am sometimes. Now sometimes I want someplace where I can get away from it. Someplace where I’m just Bobby again. That turned out to be real, too.” He was not meeting my eyes, and then suddenly he was. “In the last five years I’ve lost twenty-eight of my friends.”
“Are you all right?” I asked him.
“No. But if you mean, do I have AIDS, no, I don’t. I should, I think, but I don’t. I can’t explain it.”
There was a candle between us on the table. It flickered ghosts into his eyes. “You mean the whiskey,” I said.
“Yeah. That’s what I mean.”
The whiskey had seemed easy to believe in when I was seventeen and Bobby had just had a miraculous recovery and the snow had turned to rain. I hadn’t believed in it much since. I hadn’t supposed Bobby had either, because if he did then I really had saved his life back then and you don’t leave a person who saves your life without a word. Those unicorn horns you read about in Europe and Scandinavia. They all turned out to be from narwhals. They were brought in by the Vikings through China. I’ve read a bit about it. Sometimes, someone just gets a miracle. Why not you? “You haven’t seen Mr. McBean lately,” I said. “He’s getting old. Really old. Deadly old.”