Between Wrecks (11 page)

Almost every night I pretended to be tired and went to my single bed and stared at the ceiling until Frankie came in. I feigned sleep, and he said things to me like, “You want to see the hair on my balls?” or “Wake up and look at my extra finger.” If I ever need to go to a psychiatrist today, I can pretty much direct him or her back to those days in my life to prove why it's important that I be untrusting and paranoid.

Frankie would get in the bed, I would keep my eyes shut tight, and then it would sound like a small fan rotated against his sheets. I was eight years old, in 1968, understand. No one in Chuckatuck had ever clued me in to the nuances of masturbation. I only peeped my eyes open once, that I remember, when Frankie kind of groaned out “Rosalind” one night and I thought my mom was in the room.

Maybe my on-again, off-again depression stems from poor Frankie's story. Of course I said to him that summer, “What does your father do?” and “Where does your father live?” and so on, even though my parents had told me not to ask about him. They said he'd died before Frankie could even know who the guy was. But it took about one-too-many times of Frankie saying, “The reason why we never catch fish is because they see your ugly face, Pisspants,” before I reeled in my line and said, “So did your dad take one look at you and then run away?”

“My father died in Korea. He died on the very last day of the Korean War,” Frankie said. “That's why you never see me eating with chopsticks.”

I left it at that. I didn't know much, but I understood that a father dying in a war was not a good thing to ask about. And because I didn't remember our life in Florida, I thought that maybe people down there perhaps ate with chopsticks often. Maybe they used chopsticks to pick apart all the hammerhead sharks they'd caught on such things as string, grass blades, and magnolia blossoms.

I felt so bad about asking—and now I understand that Frankie was smart enough to use this opportunity to work on my guilt—that I said, “I'll find a way to get Mom to take us to Virginia Beach.”

To be honest, I never wanted to admit to Frankie that my mother didn't know how to drive. I'm sure there were a number of mothers in America back in the sixties who never learned. At the time I never thought about how perhaps it wasn't such a smart idea to live way out in the country with a child alone, not knowing how to drive, while one's husband spent most of his life at sea.

“I'm beginning to wonder if I fucking packed my bathing suit for nothing,” Frankie said. He slapped my back a few times, which kind of hurt. “You might not be all that bad, little bastard.”

So we went home, and I said, “Mom, why can't we drive to the beach? Frankie can drive. We don't have to tell Dad about it. He won't know.”

I thought I was going to get some long-winded explanation as to why we weren't allowed out of the town limits. This occurred while Frankie and my father nailed a two-by-four across two pine trees in the back yard, ten feet up, so they could kick field goals. I expected my mother to say, “We can't afford the gas,” or “There are hitchhikers out on the back roads waiting for people like us,” or “You'll get sunburned, and then the next thing you know you're flaking skin everywhere and I'll have to change your sheets more often.”

She said, “Okay. Just don't tell your father. Seeing as he doesn't ever come home for lunch, there's no way he'll ever know.”

Why didn't he come home for lunch? I wondered years later. Why did he even work for his cousin Marvin, seeing as merchant seamen made some money, and my father bragged about how he usually doubled his salary in poker games aboard the ship.

That particular night we ate Hungarian goulash, and sat together without saying much. We watched
Gunsmoke
, as I recall. It was the one where Festus explained why he never learned how to read, and he told a long-winded story about how a guy named Mose in the Bible wanted to get across a river to the other side, which ended up being about Moses and the Red Sea. During a commercial my father said, “Hey, Jerry. Amy Vanderbilt's parents gave her a carton of expensive, embossed stationery for her birthday. Who's the first person she wrote and why?”

I thought for a while—I thought perhaps this had something to do with Festus not being able to read—and then I blurted out, “A thank-you note to her parents, because she was into etiquette and all that stuff,” after the commercial had ended and the program restarted.

My father said, “It took you long enough. Thanks for making I miss what the Marshall just said.” See about that passive-aggressive thing?

Frankie said, “What a bitch.”

“I got another way to kill someone,” Frankie said while we drove down to Virginia Beach. I sat in the back seat. We had to drive ten miles in the opposite direction so as not to pass Marvin's Texaco. My mother sat on the front bench seat in the spot where she sat when my father drove, which, in retrospect, might've been a little too close to the middle. She sat so close to Frankie that my friend Charles and I could've also sat in the front seat, probably without touching elbows. With all that bragging Frankie did, he wasn't much of a driver. I kind of expected him to hit eighty miles an hour, but he pretty much drove about forty, jerking the steering wheel left and right an inch or two every second. The only time he spoke—my mother gave directions—was when he said he was used to driving a manual four-speed. He said that his mother had a Fairlane, but he'd be getting a Mustang once he got back to Jacksonville, and found a job, et cetera.

“I got another way,” Frankie said. “I'll tell it later.”

I looked over at the space beside me. We'd brought a picnic lunch of ham sandwiches, and my pair of fins and mask and snorkel. We brought towels, and suntan lotion that smelled like coconut, and one of those cheap Styrofoam ice chests filled with ginger ale, Coca-Cola in six-and-a-half-ounce bottles, and six cans of Schlitz my mom more or less stole from my father's cache out in the garage.

When I tell this entire story—I've probably told it to my wife a dozen times, a couple of my coworkers once or twice, and my mother's second husband once—every one of them says, “I see what's coming. Frankie gets drunk and y'all have a bad wreck on the way back home.”

And I always hold my hand up and say, “Nope.”

I don't know if Freud or Darwin ever wrote about human beings who're drawn back to the water, but I seem to have been one of those people. Whereas most animals, complying to evolutionary urges, want to be on land, I always wanted to go deeper into the water. We got to the beach, and I jumped out of the car without even asking if anyone needed or wanted help with the ice chest. I ran barefoot down the hot, hot sand, got my feet into the tide, and sat down on wet sand in order to get my flippers on. I wet the mask's rubbery gasket for a better grip, put it on, and shoved the snorkel in my mouth. I took in a deep breath and dove in. I paddled my feet better than any amphibian ever invented, and stayed down close to the sand. I would tell people later that I saw starfish and sand dollars, a horseshoe crab or two, and other things.

I found an old asphalt road that must've been covered by one of the hurricanes years back, and barbed-wire fences, and the very tip of a mast that might've been from one of the pirates' ships. I saw the ghosts of drowning victims, schools of jellyfish, scattered gold and silver coins, sea glass that had congregated into SOS formations, globs of oil that may or may not've leaked from my father's tankers, and the skeleton of President Kennedy, though I knew this couldn't have been true. I mean, I knew that none of it could've been true, outside of maybe the mast tip. Maybe I held my breath too long, to the point of hallucination.

No matter what, I surfaced, faced seaward. I came up out of the water—probably not that far from the shore, but at the time it seemed as though I'd swum a good quarter-mile—and looked out, I imagine, in the direction of Bermuda. There were ships out there, though I saw none. There were dolphins or porpoises—I still don't know the difference—writing cursive loops atop the swells.

And then I turned around.

Maybe, because of the distance, I couldn't tell how close people sat next to my mother and Frankie Hassett. Maybe he had a secret to tell her, and that's why he leaned in toward her ear. My mother seemed to giggle, from my vantage point in the ocean, or maybe she had eaten one of the ham sandwiches and gotten some white bread stuck to the roof of her mouth. I could see his right index finger pulling away the fabric of her two-piece top, in order to see what body part he thought made the best bait down in Florida.

Maybe the slap I saw my mother plant across Frankie's face wasn't really as hard as it looked while I bobbed offshore.

“What you do, see, is you kill a goddamn bastard, and you stuff his or her body in a duffle bag. Then you go over to one of those motels that aren't but one story high, you know. You go ahead and park in the parking lot in a way that none of the maids can see your license plate. Then when they leave one of the doors open—they leave the doors open all the time, going from one room to the next—you take the body in, and lay it out in the bed, and pull the covers over it. Then you drive away real fast, you know. That maid will go back in and say, ‘I forgot to make the bed!' And then she'll find the body. And then the motel manager will call the cops, and they'll spend a ton of time trying to see who was in the room the night before, and then that guy will end up getting charged.”

Frankie said all of this from the back seat. My mother drove. I'll give her this: She drove faster than he did, and she didn't shake her hands back and forth on the steering wheel as if she shook Jiffy Pop.

My mother looked into the rearview mirror and said, “Does your mother let you curse like that around the house all the time?”

I opened up the glove compartment. My father always threw his spare change in there. No one paid attention, so I took out two quarters and a dime. Frankie said, “Oh, give me a break. Don't act like you've never heard anything like that. Rosalind. Ros.” He reached up to touch her hair. She leaned forward. I turned in my seat and slapped his hand away. He said, “Brother, I believe I'd think twice before I did anything like that.”

I said, “It's a proven fact that only stupid people curse, 'cause they can't think up any other words!” In between I kind of hyperventilated. I said it all as quickly as possible, and it kind of came out in a high voice that I wouldn't be proud of. My second-grade teacher, Mrs. Breland, used to say this kind of thing all the time to a poor kid named Ricky Cogburn who probably suffered from Tourette's Syndrome. Later on in life I would realize that some prude made that little dictum up, because I have met, over the years, cursing geniuses. I said, “And fish aren't attracted to nipples, either, for your information.”

My mother stepped on the accelerator. When we got to Marvin's Texaco, she told Frankie and me to stay in the car. My father came and stood outside the service bay. He nodded more than a few times, shook his head sideways, shrugged his shoulders. He handed over a newly opened bottle of Coca-Cola to my mother, and she drank from it, then handed it back. In the car, Frankie said, “Your parents are square, man. This whole place sucks. This entire situation sucks.”

I learned not to hold my thumb inside my fist when punching someone in the nose. He yelled out “Fucker!” but held his bleeding nose and started crying. And he was gone that night. My mother and I watched
Daktari
together and ate popcorn. My mother snapped off half a pain pill and gave it to me for my broken thumb. When my father returned, he said he had dropped by the union hall after taking Frankie to the bus station, and that he'd be boarding a tanker in the morning. My mother pointed at the television and said, “Look, a trained chimpanzee.”

Maybe she pointed to my father. We never saw him again.

TONGUE

I can't speak for all car rental agencies, but where I work there's more to it than having your flight canceled, getting pissed off, deciding to drive from Charlotte to Atlanta or Baltimore or Cincinnati or Nashville or Memphis, then coming down by Baggage Claim to talk to either good-looking Norleen or Frankie, showing a valid driver's license and getting the keys to an Economy or Compact car that you later complain about being too small, or not having any acceleration, even though that's what you ordered as opposed to a van or Buick. I can only make assumptions and predictions. I've been here six years plus—which, as far as I'm concerned, is the exact amount of time it takes at almost all jobs before the Assumption and Prediction phase can kick in. I've got a five-year service pin I've worn for fourteen months and two days. I have five-year pins from a few other places, too, none of which are car rental agencies. But they were places where I got to see how people acted. They were places where I noticed how we, as humans, don't have much in the areas of truth, patience, cleanliness, or forgiveness. Before inspecting rental cars before they went out and came back, I'd worked in insurance, and then in retail, and then in hardware. Five years, five years, five years. Before that I went to college. Growing up, my father made me sell encyclopedias door-to-door like he had done back when people actually bought encyclopedias. I can only make an assumption—I have no proof—but I guess that my overall view and distrust of people started during the encyclopedia days. You wouldn't believe how many people stopped buying right after volume D, just because they didn't like the way Jefferson Davis got portrayed. They said they didn't want to get all the way to volume L just to find some lies about how great a man Abraham Lincoln was according to the biased encyclopedia writers and researchers. A B C D, A B C D, A B C D—I'd like to know how many households in South Carolina have only those World Books up on their shelves above the television.