Bridge of Sighs

leapt up onto the same bench and announced that from that moment forward, everyone on this team was his brother. Noonan had to look away because Perry’s entire back was a moonscape of angry purple pimples, bigger and angrier looking than those on his ravaged face. “I’d lay down my life for you guys,” Perry proclaimed, his eyes brimming with tears. “Even you, Marconi,” he added, getting a laugh.
    Their old animosity had gradually leaked away over the course of the term. Perry attributed this to the fact they were teammates, Noonan to Mr. Berg’s class. Though Perry still embraced the role of class contrarian and general knucklehead, no one had profited more from the readings and discussions of honors English. Ironically, Noonan thought, that class had become more of a team effort than the Tanners, though Mr. Berg would have scoffed at the idea.
    “And I know something else,” Perry continued, hitching up his jockstrap. “I know you’d do the same for me.”
    This, thankfully, seemed to be addressed to the whole team, which absolved him of making a similar declaration that would’ve been insincere in the extreme. But when Perry hopped down from the bench, he clasped Noonan on the back of the neck with one big paw and drew him forward until their foreheads touched. “I meant what I said up there,” he told him.
    “I know you did,” Noonan said.
    “Back in September I wanted to kill you, man,” he admitted, and unless Noonan was mistaken, the memory was still fresh enough for some of that old desire to flare again, the grip on the back of his neck tightening. Then it relaxed, one emotion trumping an equally bogus one. “But now we’re brothers. Forever.”
    “Okay, then,” Noonan said, trying to pull away, although it was apparently too soon for that.
    “You know what we should all do tomorrow? We should go down and enlist. Keep the team together.”
    “Sort of like a suicide pact,” Noonan said.
    “We could kick some ass over there, this team,” Perry said.
    “Or,” Noonan said, “we could just plan to meet right here every year for homecoming.”
    Perry, considering this less lethal option, seemed to think it needed some punching up. “Sort of like, no matter where we are, no matter what we’re doing, no matter how much it costs, we drop everything and somehow get back here. Prove to Coach we’re still a team. That we remember this day.”
    “I like it,” Noonan said, and he did. He particularly liked the fact that it would give them all a full year to forget this day, this pledge and the emotion that inspired it.
    Out in the parking lot, after he’d showered and dressed, Noonan saw a man leaning against his motorcycle. For safety Noonan had parked it between two school buses. Dec inspected the bike at least once a week for scratches and dents. He seemed happy enough that somebody was getting some use out of it, but that raised the possibility of damage. “You know this fucking thing’s a classic, right?” Dec kept reminding him. “They don’t even make Indians anymore. The company’s gone out of business.” So he always parked out of harm’s way, and he didn’t allow people to lean on the bike either, like this guy was doing. That Noonan didn’t immediately recognize him as his father suggested his sensory apparatus had returned to normal. Either that or it didn’t work on his father.
    “Nice game,” his father said, offering him a cigarette, which he declined.
    “I didn’t see you there.”
    “I was, though.”
    “Whereabouts?”
    “I’ve been to all your games.”
    “Bullshit,” Noonan said—not anger, just an opinion his father could take or leave.
    Leave, apparently. “You know a place called Nell’s?” he said.
    “On the Lake Road?”
    “Meet me there, I’ll buy you a beer.”
    “I’m not eighteen.”
    “I know how old you are. And that you’re sleeping in that rathole above the Rexall and tending bar at Murdick’s on Sundays.”
    “I’m supposed to meet my friends.”
    “Meet them after.”
    “Why?”
    “Why not, son?”
             
     
    N ELL’S SAT five miles out of town atop a hill at the end of a steep, unpaved road. It appeared to have been built in stages, the early part of brick, then added on to in clapboard. Noonan remembered the original restaurant as being prosperous, its parking lot always full of cars back when he was a boy, but since then it had fallen on hard times and had changed hands again and again over