Fever

    Here’s a story your grandfather never told you. When we were young, we had to make our own fun. We didn’t have the technology there is now, but our communication and common sense more than made up for it. We thought the world was ours for the taking – our playground was a railroad, our pool was a fish-filled pond. At least, that was how my friends and I saw it.

    At age twelve I had two friends named Pete Lovell and Rudy Connolly. Rudy’s real name was Christian, but with all that red hair and those blue eyes there was nothing to call him but Rudy. Pete was a tall, quiet kid with blond hair and dark brown eyes. Although he was quiet he wasn’t slow – he had a good sense of humour, which you could see most clearly when he had an idea and his eyes came alive.

    We didn’t come from great homes, and that’s part of what brought us together. My father was a police officer with rugged, handsome good looks that women loved to fall in love with. He was always home late, and always left early – sometimes I think he purposely avoided me, and the more I think about it the more plausible the idea seems. My father was a man who wanted adventure and mystery, and he didn’t change till the day he died, at age seventy-eight, of a heart attack. My mother, on the other hand, was a French woman with dark, curly hair and large dark eyes. She never worried about her figure, which was understandable – at forty my mother still had more looks then women half her age. At forty my mother had also had more affairs than most women would have in their entire lives, but I guess that’s not important… not really.

    Pete didn’t have a dad. His mother was a worried, rail thin woman who couldn’t have been more than thirty, despite the premature wrinkles. She raised him single-handedly and I think she did the best she could under the circumstances. Pete didn’t talk about it, but from what we managed to pick up his mother wasn’t particularly ‘close’ to her family. She worked two jobs, one at a restaurant called Tilly’s and one as a cashier for a supermarket… and still she managed to bake Pete chocolate chip cookies for lunch. If that’s not trying your hardest, I don’t know what is.

    But I don’t really mean to talk about myself, or about Pete. What I want to talk about is Rudy. Rudy came from an Irish family, which came with the stereotypical drunk – but in Rudy’s case it was his mother. She was a thick, busty woman with fiery red hair and eyes that were always either sparkling with drunken rage or over-the-top good humour. It was never a gray area with Rudy’s mother, which was good in a way. You always knew where you stood with her. She could be a mean drunk, though, and as the years went by she turned mean more often. His father was a firefighter and, ironically, had married the one fire he couldn’t tame. According to the gossip I snatched up, before he had married her, Rudy’s father had been a jovial, broad-shouldered man who would give you the shirt off his back. Years spent dealing with his wife’s quick temper had aged him quickly, and having a child had worsened the situation. Rudy’s mother was usually too busy drinking to deal with her son, and Rudy’s father was so exhausted that Rudy was usually left to his own devices.

    Physically, Rudy had inherited the best of both worlds, with his mother’s beautiful red hair and his father’s broad shoulders. Even at twelve you could see that he wasn’t going to be a bad looking kid, but Pete and I both knew that no rational, sane girl would ever look twice in his direction. There was something wrong with him and in him, and although it was nothing that you could pick apart and analyze, all together there was something that was missing or something that was there in too much abundance. He wasn’t burdened with intelligence but he had a kind of cleverness, which I always related to a weasel’s – he seemed to know, somehow, when something would happen and he had intuitions about things he might’ve gotten caught for. I still remember the burning fever that he got sometimes, and I thought then and now that if I ever saw that in another person’s eyes I would get away from them as soon as possible.

    Sometimes I wonder what it would have been like if we had just left Rudy, or maybe if we had never met him. The worst thing about that fever in his eyes was that it was contagious.