Dunk

Fiction by ​​Charlie Malone

He looks the same. Eighteen years ago we had been in a band together. I moved out west, married, climbed some mountains, had kids, lost a great job, found a terrible one, gained weight, and moved back home to take care of my parents. I reached out to him and asked if he wanted to meet up and he enthusiastically agreed.  
 
Walking into the coffeehouse, I saw him right away. Tall, thin, and bursting with frenetic energy. He was the heart of our group. Derek sang. I played bass—poorly. We churned through three or four drummers. Lynch wrote the songs and played guitar beautifully. I’ve only met a handful of people who radiate creativity the way Lynch does. I always think of them as charmed. I feel swept up in his presence the moment he stands and embraces me. He wears skinny jeans and a Henley shirt that highlights his lean muscles; everything fits him naturally even as we creep closer to forty than twenty. I often consider the possibility of a genetically superior subspecies of artists that live among us--men who women swoon for and who men, well, swoon for all the same.
 
I tell him about where we’ve lived, he’s curious about Boulder and Fort Collins, he’s interested in Portland. He asks questions that I don’t quite know how to answer: Are Christians accepted in Colorado? Is the marijuana industry destroying the work ethic of working class people? I feel a weird distance creep between us. I stutter a bit. I cycle through the memories and faces his questions bring up. The space between his questions and these experiences deepens the more I try to answer. I feel that long, flat drive across Nebraska stretching and stretching towards infinity.
 
I think to myself: He’s never really left. I ask him about his work. He hates it. Nightshift, metal stamping. He’s dated the same girl on and off since high school. She has a kid and a drug problem from a failed marriage with someone else. He needs to smoke and asks if I want to join him. I don’t smoke anymore but I stand with him outside.
 
In the sun, his hair looks thinner. He appears to be made less of muscle and more of bone. The seams on his shirt are frayed. I catch myself seeing him differently, painting him into the texture of the small town our band pushed against and that I fled from under the excuses of graduate school and career. He takes a long drag of his cigarette and his cheeks sink. Can I talk to you about something else that’s been bothering me? He asks. Sure.
 
He asks if I’ve been to Monterey Bay, I haven’t. He asks if I have heard of the Bishop Experiment. I haven’t. He says this guy, Tom Bishop, would calculate the curvature of the earth. He’d look across Monterey Bay and see people 33 miles away when they should be blocked by the bulge of the water. It bothers me that we were taught one thing in school, he says, but everything I see in the world, the flat surface of Lake Erie, the horizon, always at eye-level—everything tells me we were lied to.
 
I let go of any idea that we might play music together again and suggest we go back inside. I need a refill of coffee. I need a beat before responding. I think about those words: we were lied to. In so many ways I agree. Our small public school was collapsing between expectations and a lack of support. I never agreed that art and music were expendable. I no longer think Andrew Jackson was awesome or that the crusades were noble enterprises. While we were skeptical then—and I consider myself skeptical now—I don’t believe the world is flat, and I am not interested in defending this stance. I order a cappuccino, not because I like them, but because they take a while and are noisy to make. He doesn’t want anything.
 
When I rejoin him at our table. I try to change the subject and ask him if he has talked to Derek. He tells me that I can’t argue with his evidence. In spite of the caffeine, I feel tired. I feel sick. I hesitate. I tap my foot and ask him if he is really serious about this.
 
He tells me about ships being swallowed by perspective on the horizon and a hot air balloon pioneer.
 
I tell him I’m not really interested in these ideas and want to know about his girlfriend, Joy, and her kid. She used to come to our shows. I want to know if he still plays guitar.
 
He tells me he always thought I had an open mind. He quotes Einstein, something about a mind being open to new ideas always being bigger. The way he lands on “thought,” the way he emphasizes the past tense, I realize we’re in an argument that I have no interest in.
 
I regret admiring Lynch. I regret time I’d spent wondering about him over the years. I regret moving back to this shitty town. I tell him it was good to see him and I stand up.
 
Fucking sellout. He drops the boyish fighting words. I want to laugh. I also want to kick him in the nuts.
 
Is this what you do now, I ask, you pull all this bullshit off the internet and argue with people about something that doesn’t matter?
 
It does matter. They’ve been lying to us. They’re discrediting the church and God’s teachings. You’re buying into all this NASA NAZI $30 Billion propaganda.
 
I don’t think that’s what’s happening. You know my father worked at Plum Creek and John Glenn; you know my grandfather was an engineer on the Apollo Missions. We could talk about anything in the world, and this is what you want to do today?
 
Do you think you’re better than me just because you graduated and moved away and traveled the world?
 
No, man, until right now I thought you were better than me in every way since the day you were born. I want to say “but” and rip him a new one, instead I walk out. Before I get home, he’d emails me three articles from the Flat Earth Society which I deleted. I want to call Derek.
 
•
 
I go home and see Alison with the look on her face that suggests if I don’t help her find an outlet for the kids’ energy they will all explode.
 
Let’s go to the Natural History museum and play on the circle downtown, I offer.
 
We walk among the dioramas that haven’t changed since I was a kid. I repeatedly I grab Liam’s sticky hands as he tries to smear the glass of each and every exhibit.
 
We walk through the hall of dinosaurs. I remember that my favorite at his age was the brontosaurus that turned out not to be dinosaur, and then maybe it was again. I try to remember the story when Gwen becomes fascinated by a fossil fish. Its head is like armor including bones orbiting the eyes. It has sharp jaw bones in place of teeth. There is something haunting and intimidating about it. The thickness of the skull gives it a sense of invincibility and complements its nickname, Dunk. Gwen says Daddy, it’s cute.
 
I remember being here with my father and I tell them the story he told me. I crouch down and wrap my arms around each of them. They still feel tiny, boney, full of motion. I tell them back in the sixties grandpa had worked with the road crews before joining the Air Force to help pay for his car. I tell them he was there when they found Dunk. I tell them the ground below the highway was layer after layer of history turned to stone. That their digging went millions of years back into time. I try to paint a picture of young men working hard in the hot sun chipping away at all the shale to make way for a road and finding Dunk and many many other fossils, right here in Cleveland. Liam asks if there are more fish like Dunk in the lake? I start to tell him no, but see the coelacanth fossil nearby and say, you never know. Alison elbows me in the ribs.
 
I had forgotten that there was a planetarium. I ask Alison if we can do it. She looks to the kids. Gwen has just climbed into the stroller and Liam is crawling under a bench picking at some gum. I reach down and take his hands again. She says they are getting squirrely and we should probably take them out for some fresh air. I tell her it feels important. She just looks at me and flashes an expression that is a presentiment of exasperation or argument.
 
Ollie Lynch thinks the earth is flat. It just pops out.
 
Gwen needs a diaper change, she says and lifts my daughter into my arms. I am always shocked at her lightness.
 
After the costume change, then?
 
No, she says, next time.
 
I want them to see the constellations, to see a supernova, to learn about the solar system. I know she’s right. I stop to buy a mobile of the solar system in the giftshop to hang in their room.
 
When the kids fall asleep on the ride home, I bring Lynch up again. She listens as I rant. I describe betrayal, disappointment, try to make connections to everything wrong with the world. I talk about politics. Lynch becomes a symbol of evil. And, because he was such a close friend, he becomes a symbol of something else. I try to explain that he dehumanizes himself. It isn’t my judgement. At this point in my story, I am struggling to explain to her why it matters and why I’m not wrong to be hurt by this. Eventually her silence makes me feel self-conscious. I’m obsessing, aren’t I?
 
Yes, Eddie, and to be honest, I’ve never met Ollie, and I don’t really care or know why this bothers you so much. Don’t you have any other old friends in town?
 
•
 
I call the landline that still runs to Derek’s house from the poison-ivy covered telephone pole to the wall-mounted phone in his mom’s kitchen. Is that Eddie Dolby? She answers.
 
How did—?
 
Caller ID, Honey. I heard you were back in town. I didn’t think we’d be hearing from you.
 
I was hoping to get in touch with Derek. It’s been a long time. I was just thinking about him and felt like it was time.
 
I’m glad to hear it. It’s a shame that you stopped talking in the first place. He lives in Boston now, I don’t know if you knew that.
 
She gave me his number and said they still have spaghetti on Thursday nights. I thank her and called him right away.
 
I just had the most fucked up conversation with Ollie Lynch, I say. I am about to launch into the whole story without greeting but panic that maybe Derek is a flat-earther too. I stammer for a few moments.
 
Is this Eddie? What the hell?
 
We settle into a familiar pattern of conversation. I tell him about Lynch. He laughs, and says he stopped talking to him not long after I left. Says he started to get fundamental. None of the sourness that I expect over whose fault the band break-up was comes up. He is exasperated as I was at this anti-science, anti-intellectual streak in our culture. He cites Newton and lamented the irony of Lynch quoting Einstein. All of Einstein’s work, literally all of it, only works if the earth is a sphere. He talks about the observability of Copernicus’s experiments. He talks about visiting Kepler’s rooms in the Klementinum in Prague. He says, wait, didn’t your family work for NASA? He says he is coming home in a week to visit his mom and we will drink some Italian wine in honor of Galileo.
 
I forgot how quick he was. How knowledgeable. How fun. He asks me how it was to be home, I tell him I am not sure yet. He adds the following thought: You know, at this point we spent half our lives together and half our lives apart.
 
•
 
He suggests we meet at the orchard. His sister runs it now and has started making wine and some craft beer—predictable or redundant in most places, but a novelty here. We meet after dinner, they’d taken his mother out, gotten her drunk, put her to bed early. We walk and talk. He shows me the brewery process and shop. He hands me a bottle to carry and we set out into the familiar rows of trees.
 
In the new part of the orchard all of the trees are small, tightly grouped along irrigation lines, and bursting with fruit. We help ourselves. Derek explains why Jonagolds were his favorite hybrid and at the same time genetically inferior. They are sterile, they can’t propagate on their own, and they are terribly susceptible to disease.
 
In the old part of the orchard the trees are tall, some of them have died and snapped. Some still flourish, umbrellaing out spectacularly in the dusk. Dead limbs poke out from twisted trunks. Unpicked apples cover the ground among the tall grass. I put my hand on his chest to stop Derek and we watch a doe pluck leaves from a tree. I realize I haven’t touched him in half my life. Kids wrestling, fighting, helping each other climb sandstone cliffs--all of that thoughtless intimacy gone.
 
He rolls his ankle slightly stepping on an apple it the tall grass. I do the same as I turn to help him and stumble. My right hand presses a rotten apple into pulp. It smells like cider and deer piss. My left hand waves the wine wildly in the air. I set the bottle down. I pick an apple off the ground. It does not feel solid. I throw it at fence post and surprise myself with solid contact. The sphere explodes.
 
Remember when we had apple fights back here? I ask.
 
Yeah, you had a heck of arm. You also didn’t always throw the brown ones. You’d slip an unripe apple in with the rotten ones.
 
I’m sorry, I know that hurt. I was a dick, this is something I’m coming to terms with. When we were little the rules were simple. When we got older, and threw the apples harder, there was more going on. I think I was jealous when you started dating what’s her name—I pretend not to know—Shayna.
 
We were young. It seems you grew out of it.
 
Maybe, but it’s probably my fault the band split.
 
Probably. But, Eddie, it’s not like we were going to record a real album and make a career out of it. To be honest, I don’t think about those days too often. You were always a bit more—he searches for the right word before choosing--sentimental than me.
 
I look over the rolling hills. The last blazes of orange bounce off clouds in the west. A train sounds behind the trees. I forgot how beautiful it can be here. Derek chucks an apple at the post and misses. I pull a swiss army knife from my pocket and open the wine. We take turns throwing apples and sipping wine from the bottle. The sweet taste washes over the tongue and falls shallow—it tastes like a hangover. We ignore tomorrow morning and drink.
 
I start apologizing for our adolescence again and Derek becomes quiet and prods at apples in the grass with his toes. I recognize his expression is what my face must have looked like when I met up with Ollie. Dusk sweeps over us and color starts to drain from the landscape.
 
Do something for me, I say—hit me with an apple. I spread my arms out and stand in front of the fence post. Throw it as hard as you can. It will balance all that shit out and I’ll let go of the past. Of course he declines. Of course I egg him on. In a sarcastic, juvenile tone, and completely out of context I call him a sellout. We laugh, but he picks up an apple.
 
I close my eyes and hear the trees rustle in the breeze, I hear the wind like a wave come out of the forest, across the cornfield shaking the yellowing stalks, and then silence as it glazes the irrigation pond and open yard before sweeping my face. An apple buzzes my ear, and by the sound of it, it was a solid one. I take a breath and taunt him. Before I finish the sentence it hits me hard in the thigh just above and beside my crotch. My leg stings. I double-over reflexively and rub the spot with my hand. The apple was solid and did not break. Another one, soft, and tossed less forcefully splatters on the crown my head. I begin picking it out of my hair with one hand, rubbing my thigh with the other. Saying alright, alright when a solid one kicks the air out of my stomach and drops me to my knees. I suck at the cool air and see Ollie drawing on his cigarette. His cheeks hollow. The pain in my gut is the same. I see the look of concern on Derek’s face wondering if he went too far.
 
There is silence until I start laughing. Better? Derek asks. He holds out the bottle for me.
 
The balance in the universe is restored, I answer.
 
Let’s go home to our families. He suggests, I agree. On the way back he picks a very round Braeburn from the new orchard and mutters, a near sphere on a sphere among spheres.
 
I tell him that it is good to be in the universe with him and that is all we say about Ollie. He gives me a hug as we part and agree to meet up when he comes home once or twice a year.
 
• 
 
I am not drunk, I tell Alison when I get home. She shrugs and says that she might be. After putting Liam and Gwen to bed she’d stayed up waiting while watching the kind of trashy reality show that she feels ashamed of when I’m home. She turns it off. 
 
So, are you getting the band back together?
 
Not likely, I say as I slump next to her on the couch. She asks why I smell like fermented cider, and she finds a piece of brown apple skin in my hair. I just say we went to the orchard.
 
How was Derek, is he a flat-earther too? I appreciate Alison’s gentle way of mocking my obsessiveness. I tell her so. She tells me to take a shower. I get up and feel my thigh throb. As I reach the stairs, she asks if I think we will be happy here.
 
I tell her that I think so. But, the truth is, that I don’t think so.
 
 •
 
I get a long email from Lynch a few days later. I’m at my parents’ place and read it off my phone while my dad is out at his woodworking group and my mom turns in for her medicine-induced nap, I consider deleting it before I start reading, after I start reading, after I read the first conspiracy-filled paragraph. I hesitate and ask myself if I want to try to understand.
 
He writes: We felt like we were capable of contributing to the world and you talked about school and college as holding tanks. You called them places for young people to burn out their desire for change and take on debt that would force them to buy into a capitalist system.
 
This did sound like something I would have said twenty years ago. I again consider not reading this, even though he appeals to my ego by quoting me to me. I set the phone down next to the sink and read while I do my parent’s dishes. I feel close to a younger version of myself in a number of ways.
 
I thought you were right and I began to look for all the ways the government scared or enslaved us. I found this tension between faith and politics. I came to see God as a path toward freedom, a way to check and challenge a system of consumption. I know you see religion as a partner in ignorance, but believe me there’s another side to it.
 
I splash water down the front of my pants and all over the phone. I dry it on a dish rag and get half a piece of farfalle noodle on the screen. I know my parents are eating carbs and butter for every meal and ignoring the doctor. I turn back to Ollie’s email. 
 
I follow his thinking and get caught in what I see as huge gaps in reasoning. I disagree with him, but I think I am starting to understand him. His vision of the future swaps political or social authority for religious authority. He sees his faith as a revolutionary power. I am confronting a twisted and contradictory version of my own naive ideas about revolution that I argued for sweaty in humid Ohio evenings. Fireflies, warm beer, lust, and angst. Sentimental ideas I hadn’t revisited in years. He needs some things to be true and some things to be false. Lynch has spent the last decade cultivating distrust in school, government, science, and difference.
 
I never felt more shitty than when our grades came out each semester in high school. I worked hard, I showed up, I tried. Nothing we did seemed relevant to the world. Outside of music and art, none of our classes meant anything to me. I got messages that the things I was good at didn’t matter. They pushed me off to vocational programs and I learned outdated skills to perform a job that requires no skills at all. You guys took AP English, Calculus, all that college prep stuff. They celebrated your abilities. When you and Derek split…
 
I had always felt like the end of the band was about a divide that grew between me and Derek. Dozens of slights and jealousies layered on top of each other like sediment. Back then, I was an exposed cliff and an open wound. Every mistake in practice was an insult. It was sheer immaturity. It was how I navigated the change in friendships that had to come. I never realized Ollie was the one who was hurt most by the inevitable.
 
Scrolling ahead I see hurtful words and the phrase “azimuthal equidistant projection.” I don’t write back.
 
•
 
With the kids at a sitters, Allison and I drive the length of town. Three country blocks. Gas station, convenience store, florist, veterinarian. Pizza place, pizza place, Subway, gas station, empty lot. A landscape nursery across from a landscape nursery. A trucking company. A concrete plant. A gravel pit. A diner. A butcher. Three used car lots. A gas station, a gas station, an ice cream parlor. We stop for ice cream. I know it will make me sick and her happy.
 
While we wait for my cookie dough swirl and her cone I pull out sheet of paper headed: Things We Need To Be Happy Here. A line divides the page so each of us can built a list. You go first, I say. We’ll take turns.
 
Travel, she writes. I think to live here, I need to get out of here.
 
Let’s buy our own place with land.
 
Perfect, then my next item is a horse.
 
I do not like this idea but I agree. All right. A garden.
 
You, home on the weekends.
 
Memberships to the Art Museum and Natural History Museum.
​
She gives me a sarcastic approval. We slip into dreaming and laughing. We get into the car and slip past the edge of town, the please come again sign. I slip a Rancid CD into the dash, she turns off the radio. Over the last few weeks I had occasionally felt the urge to drive west again. I wanted to pack up my family and drive for days until the landscape excited me. Away, like a miswired homing pigeon. Today I turn north, not wanting to get too far out of town. I see a dirt road; memory kicks in. The old metal gate still lacks a lock and we pull into the woods. Alison looks at me but doesn’t say anything. I park. We kiss and I hold her gaze for the first time since we’ve moved her. Thank you, I say.
 
We step out of the car and I lead her up to the edge of the quarry. There are still old mill stones scattered in the woods, pocked, grooved, scarred. I run my hands along the round edge of one. I trace the square hole at its center. The water is turquoise in the shallows, royal at its depths. Somewhere along the way I learned that the Bernhagen family, who has run this quarry for generations, mined sandstone from the Permian and Mississippian Age. I wonder if Kenny Bernhagen still runs the company. I walk along the edge of the precipice. I try to get comfortable with my fear of heights. Toeing the edge, I tell Alison we’re looking back in time more than 300 million years. She tells me she doesn’t care. I don’t start talking about all the fossils.
 
We sit, our legs dangle. She says we still have two hours before we have to pick up the kids. I scoot next to her and she accepts my arm across her shoulder. You are not the same person you were when you were eighteen. Contrary to the evidence of being here at this old quarry again. I never met that guy, that raw nerve of insecurity and competition.
 
I think I got scared, I confess. I feared that moving here would limit what the kids might grow into. Meeting with Ollie—it was like I was confronted with the possibility of what I would have been like if I never left. It had little to do with him, and probably nothing to do with the shape of the planet. I felt like all of the ways I’d grown, all that I’d learned about myself might collapse or implode in on itself. I think I suddenly felt tenuous in a way I hadn’t in years.
 
I put my hand in her hair. Let’s go home.
 
Not yet. She stands up and tugs at my hands. We find the spot where the stone wall remains near flush down to the darkest waters. My grip tightens around her fingers. We look down at the light on the water. Before I am ready, she jumps. My arm goes straight and before I become an anchor, I jump. All that time, all those generations, all those fossils, all that history blurs. I feel both weightlessness and the pull of gravity at the same time. We splash into the deep blue; air bubbles rip towards the surface. I feel heat leaving my body. My heart pounds. I feel the familiarity of this place. I feel colder as we go deeper. She laughs bubbles. I feel at peace, hovering. We kick our legs. The light scatters around her.

Charlie Malone 
​
Charlie Malone grew up in Northeastern Ohio, headed west to the Rockies, came back to the Great Lakes, and has loved all of it. Charlie's chapbook of poems “Questions About Circulation” is forthcoming with Driftwood Press as part of the Adrift Chapbook Series. He edited the collection A Poetic Inventory of Rocky Mountain National Park with Wolverine Farm Publishing and has work recently published or forthcoming in Hotel Amerika, The Best of Boneshaker: A Bicycling Almanac, and Saltfront. Charlie now works at the Wick Poetry Center at Kent State University.