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Some ten stores away, a goggled man stepped out of one of the stores, looked in my direction, and waved.
“Down here!” Greg shouted.
It didn’t surprise me that he’d be working on a Saturday. He’d always been something of a workaholic, as well as a hustler.
Greg and I’d had our ups and downs over the years, but we never stopped being friends. I didn’t have anyone from my high-school days that I kept in touch with, having moved from school to school depending on which foster home I was billeted with at the time. But I saved up my money to attend UConn, the University of Connecticut, and it was there I connected with Greg.
Back then he mostly went by the name his parents had given him: Gregoire. He figured college might be a good time to trade on his French name—his mother, from Lyon, had fallen in love with his father, an Albany native, when she’d come to America in her late teens as an exchange student. As a kid, he’d always gone by Greg because his classmates made fun of his real name, mispronouncing it on purpose, calling him “Greg-Wire.” But once he got to UConn, he went back to it, thinking it gave him something of an international flair. “Sounds sexy,” he told me back then.
“Yeah, well, not to me,” I said, and always called him Greg.
We’d met in some engineering classes we shared, and I soon saw in Greg the characteristics I lacked in myself. I was cautious where he was adventurous. I gave careful deliberations to the consequences of my actions while Greg was impulsive. I remember once, signing up for courses, picking ones that would complement my engineering classes. Math, physics, stuff like that. Greg was on the same track as me, but seconds before making his final selections he learned some hot student from Sweden he was desperate to bed was taking a poli-sci class, so he signed up for it. Didn’t give a rat’s ass about politics, but oh, how he wanted to sit next to that girl in the lecture hall. The joke was on him. At the last minute, she dropped the politics course for one in environmental science.
Greg wasn’t just adventurous. I saw him as fearless. He was the one who’d sneak into the college pool after hours for a midnight swim, who’d drive his dad’s car, when he had it for the weekend, at high speed over a small hill in the hopes of catching air, who’d take a running leap off a cliff’s edge into a quarry reservoir, who once kept a VCR that had literally fallen off the back of a truck that had been making a delivery to an electronics store. He had, in a word, balls.
While his impulsive nature ebbed some as he got older, there remained a youthful spirit. And there was also, I believed, beneath the bravado and playfulness, a good soul. Greg had been the one who kept an eye on me after Brie vanished. He was the one who had found me passed out, fully clothed, in that bathtub.
“Man,” he said to me at the time, “you have got to get your shit together. I am not going to let you do this to yourself.”
It was a wonder, in many ways, that we had remained friends.
We had once been business partners. We ran a contracting company together, but in the months before Brie’s disappearance we’d lost out on several jobs that could have turned around our fortunes. We decided, in the wake of those failures, to dissolve the company and go our separate ways.
Greg had kept himself afloat, in the years since, jumping from one contracting gig to another, usually offering discounts to clients who were willing to pay in cash. And if things got slow, he’d try something totally different, like spending a month working on a fishing boat, or joining a road construction crew. (“College prepared me well for flipping a sign from stop to slow,” he told me over a beer one night.)
Greg had the edge over me on impulsiveness, but it was that very trait that sometimes got him in over his head. And I was the one, he was willing to concede, who could think fast enough to rescue him. Like the time, a couple of years out of college, we were bar-hopping in Hartford and Greg, with about ten beers in him, took an unprovoked swing at some guy and knocked him out cold just as a police car was pulling into the parking lot. There wasn’t time to organize an escape, so I took a swing at Greg, bloodied his nose, and told him to drop.
When the cops wandered over and took in the scene, I laid it all out for them. The other guy swung first, broke my buddy’s nose, and Greg had but a second to land a punch of his own.
I got him out of there before the other guy came to. Good thing we’d settled our tab in cash, so there were no credit card receipts for the cops to use to follow up. To this day, Greg’s nose had a slight tilt to it, thanks to me.
Now, as I closed the distance between us, I saw Greg had one of his trademark cigarettes between his lips. As part of his image back in school, he started buying imported French tobacco and rolling paper to make his own smokes. The elaborate ritual of it became part of who he was, and it was a habit he had never lost.
Hanging from his arm was a cordless reciprocating saw, one of those Uzi-looking gadgets with a powerful cutting blade that stuck straight out the end of it like a tiny bayonet that moved back and forth at the speed of light.
“Good to see you, man,” he said, setting down the saw and tossing away that last millimeter of his cigarette so he could throw his arms around me.
“Same,” I said.
Greg looked a little thinner since I’d last seen him a month or two ago. His face and neck—with about two days’ worth of whiskers on them, as always—seemed more drawn, the skin hanging somewhat under his chin. His gray hair was thinner, too, but he was still a handsome guy, even if he did look closer to fifty when I knew he had only just turned forty.
“Sorry you missed Julie,” he said. “She really wanted to meet you.”
“We connected as I was coming in,” I said. “She new on the scene?”
Greg shrugged. “Five, six weeks, I guess. She’s great, heart of gold. She’s working on making me a better person.” He grinned. “Who knew I needed improving?”
“So what the hell are you doing here?” I asked.
“I’m the hyena feeding on the carcass,” he said with no small measure of pride. “They’re going to rip this whole place down soon, and I worked a deal with the company that’s going to do it to have a few days in here to get some very usable shit. There’s hundreds of dying malls across the country. Victims of online shopping, the loss of anchor stores that’ve gone tits up, and then you throw in a fucking pandemic on top of that. Malls can’t cut it.”
I shook my head, marveling that these were this huge structure’s final days. I went over to grasp the railing that overlooked the lower level, taking in the view.
“I wouldn’t lean against that, if I was you,” Greg said. “I’ve already started taking out some of the bolts securing it to the floor. I can repurpose those a hundred ways. On a balcony, around a deck.”
I stepped back. “I saw your truck. Looks like you’ve got a pretty full load already. Mannequins?”
He laughed. “All kinds of places will buy those. Last trip, scored some store signs. Like, a McDonald’s, a Baskin-Robbins. People snap those up, hang them in their rec rooms. You know the huge shed I’ve got behind my place? Gonna cram as much into that as possible.” He was digging into his pocket for papers and a small pouch of tobacco to make himself another cigarette. “How’s things going with Jayne?”
