The Grievers by Marc Schuster

the last place on Earth he wanted to live. The solution most civil servants found to this dilemma was to take up residence in the northernmost part of the city—north of North Philly and west of the Northeast in neighborhoods like Chestnut Hill, Manayunk, Germantown, and Roxborough—the same part of the city where Billy had grown up.
    “Do you know what time it is?” Dwayne asked when we arrived on his doorstep. “I’m working nights this week.”
    “I told you he’d be cranky,” Neil said. “The man needs his beauty rest.”
    Dwayne stood, unamused, in his doorway, wearing nothing but a tattered brown robe and fuzzy blue slippers. In the two years he’d lived in the house, he only invited us inside once, and that was to move furniture. Since then, he’d painted the walls and had carpets installed, so whenever Neil and I visited, Dwayne stopped us at the door lest we track mud all over the place like a couple of wild animals. Holding up a pizza box, I said we brought lunch, but he only opened his door wide enough to join us on the front steps.
    “It’s cold,” he said, opening the box. “And you took a bite out of it.”
    “I got hungry,” I said. “Listen, we need your help. Can you show us how to get to the Henry Avenue Bridge?”
    “No way,” Dwayne said. “Bad idea.”
    Radio towers loomed over his house, red warning lights flashing in the gray, gloomy sky.
    “I just want to look,” I said.
    “Trust me,” Dwayne said. “The view is terrible.”
    “I’m not talking about the view,” I said. “I’m talking about closure.”
    “Closure? Please. Morbid curiosity’s more like it.”
    “Morbid curiosity, then. I want to see it.”
    “You crossed that bridge to get here,” Dwayne said. “Isn’t that enough?”
    “We did?” Neil said.
    “No,” I said. “I don’t think so.”
    “Christ,” Dwayne said, lifting a cold slice from the box. “Where’s the car?”
    If I were a considerate friend, I’d have let Dwayne take the front seat, but the part of me that let him squeeze into the back of Neil’s Pontiac with my balloons and my giant dollar sign also told me it would be funny to force his knees up to his chest by pushing the passenger seat as far back as it would go. Still in his bathrobe, Dwayne called me an asshole, then grunted directions at Neil between bites of cold pizza.
    Dwayne was right, of course. I was an asshole and probably still am, but the voice that told me it would be funny to crush Dwayne’s knees with the passenger seat also told me that my brand of assholery, if such a thing exists, was the good kind, the kind that let guys like us push each other around and call each other pussies and make jokes about each other’s mothers even when they were dead or dying of unspeakable diseases. Crushing Dwayne’s knees was like breaking his balls, I told myself. It said I knew I could fool around with him, knew that deep down he had a good sense of humor, and knew most of all that he could take it. If there was anything four years at the Academy had taught me, it was that the best way to tell my friends I loved them was through torture and abuse. But as we neared the Henry Avenue Bridge, I remembered that the lesson was completely lost on Billy.
    The evening commute was hours away, but the avenue was already heavy with traffic as Neil parked his car and we walked the hundred or so yards of tree-lined sidewalk that led to the bridge. If anyone on the force saw him out and about in his bathrobe, Dwayne complained, it could mean his badge. They’d arrest him for indecent exposure or, worse, force him into counseling if the wind happened to blow his robe open at just the right moment.
    “Quit complaining,” I said. “You had plenty of time to change before we got here.”
    “Into what?” Dwayne asked. “I haven’t done laundry in weeks.”
    “And this is my fault?”
    “Maybe I was planning to do some today.”
    “I’m sure of it,” I said.
    “I’m saying maybe