by Roy Freirich
For a still moment, each seems to dream of it, until Sam reaches quick and hard to pull her close as if for solace, for some last fleeting purchase when all is slipping.
From behind them, beyond their row of low dunes, sounds near: more Sleepless, shouting, always, approaching.
Sam lets go as the teenaged kid, Tay, glances back. “We need to go. I kinda hit some guy in the head with a board, they were hassling Cort. They’re pretty pissed off.”
Sam indicates the Boy. “We need to go, too. They think he started it all. I need to get him off this island.”
Tay glances at Cort, as if to have her vouch for this man bearing another’s child away. But Cort asks Sam, “Tonight? But, how? Are you sure you—”
“Come with us.”
Cort thinks, demurs: “No. My mom’s crazy, but she’s still my mom.”
Tay takes her hand. Sam gives him a brief appraising look, seeing the watchful stillness of him, beyond his years. “Okay, then, you two had better go on.”
Cort and Tay nod, hesitate. And then he tugs gently on her hand and they start off, into the trackless future like sweet, hopeful newlyweds.
Sam calls out to them, softly, “Hey, know where I can find a boat?”
They stop and look at each other.
−−−
Sam and the Boy skirt the lurid last bonfires surrounded by sweating red-faced men and hollow-eyed women, running beyond the dunes and the island’s big, oldest summer homes, passing the great distances of ocean rolling and sliding in the dark, the whisper and thunder and breath of it, vast, living.
One home looms hugely from a dune’s crest, beach steps littered with confetti and party hats, plastic cups strewn. In the circle of light from a candle, a couple in soaked formal wear sits on separate benches, sagging slumped and gazing with dull eyes out at nothing.
A small, dark rectangle obscures the gleam of the ocean ahead, like a sentinel’s desolate outpost, guarding the last approaches to nowhere. As they near, the boat shed door yawns open, creaking softly in a fetid breeze from the ocean, a parody of welcome.
The Boy looking on, Sam shoves the creaking wooden doors wider to see the little sailboat there on the trailer, half-hidden by tarp, mast stepped and lashed.
He looks from the boat to the surf, a hundred sandy yards away.
Suddenly, a voice turns him and brings the Boy’s hand drifting upward, as if to ward off this Sleepless in a tattered bathrobe, spongy ear plugs, sleep mask pushed up on his forehead. The cheesy stink of dried saliva drifts from his mouth, sweat stiffens his matted hair. He points a flashlight in one hand and a pistol in the other. “Pills. Now. Before they find me. I know you’re that doctor.”
The pistol he holds looks like the chief’s—the Navy-issue heavy Walther he carried on the beat in his belt and holster, so absurd with his khaki Bermuda shorts. The pistol trembles, the Boy trembles, the world itself with the possibility that seems now a certainty: death, pointless, just when there finally seemed to be one.
Sam lifts his hands, palms out, stepping ever so slightly sideways away from the Boy.
“I haven’t got any, I swear but . . .” His voice trails off as he sees it: the safety is still on. “Even so . . .”
He flashes out a hand and grabs the gun away in one quick smooth motion, surprising everyone. They stand there, blinking at each other.
“The safety’s still on.” He thumbs it off, with a heavy metallic click. “Now it’s not.”
Aiming now, the gun a black improbable thing in the foreground, a blurred shape that makes people afraid. His now, their deliverance.
The man shoots his hands up, cringing, nodding enthusiastically.
“Drop the flashlight. Find another place to be.”
The man smiles and does both, fleeing into the dark.
27
Sam moves quickly, finding some gas in the boat’s little outboard, but no jerry can anywhere to top it off. Lines are coiled in the fo’c’sle, the mast is lashed across the cockpit from bow to stern, and the stepping hardware looks simple enough.
His little body tensing in fear, a sound like a whimper escapes the Boy as Sam lifts him into the bow.
He bends again to lift the trailer hitch, and the weight staggers him like a living thing pulling downward. He drops it again, bends at the knees, lifts again, just enough to roll the sailing skiff almost through the doors before his shoulders and back give. He lets it drop again, still a hundred yards to the water’s edge.
In the bow, the Boy trembles and cringes, eyes downcast, unable to lift his gaze forward to the sliding vastness.
Sam winces, a stab in his side, thin and blade-like.
Too heavy to lift, too hard to believe that a single human effort can change all that has sped so quickly and relentlessly into such chaos. But another foot of wheeling this trailer will bring him and the Boy and the boat a foot closer to escaping. If only the feat can be repeated, again and again. It doesn’t bear thinking about; looking up to gauge progress can only disappoint.
Keep your head down, pull. Drop the hitch.
Breathe. Lift. Pull.
A breeze has begun, warm and dank and gathering strength out of the darkness. The Boy lifts his head at it but turns away trembling again from the rush and roar ahead.
Lift, pull, into this last struggle against the strength of the earth pulling him and the boat downward forever.
Why look back? It can’t be at the sound of footsteps, because what sound is there to make by even a hundred cresting the loose, dry sand of the dunes behind them?
But he does, to see the hundred or more Sleepless gathered at the ridgeline around Fleisher and Andrew, watching, silent. More gathering.
“We can make it, we’re good,” he tells himself and the Boy. We cling, against everything.
Head down, just pull again, over the long beat of believing the mob will turn and shrug and go their separate ways to lie waiting, each for their own sweet, private darkness to return. If only it could be.
He tugs the pistol from his cinched waist and turns in a single motion to fire at the first wave of Sleepless, winging one who goes down shrieking, his tee shirt blown into a hole in his shoulder, a confusion of cloth and blood. The others pull up short, some cringing, others eyeing him and one another, muttering senselessly:
“Whoa. I’m out.”
“What up, doc?”
“Just do right, man. You go, everyone gets it.”
The Boy quivers there, between the sea that took his mother and these Sleepless who believe he’s to blame.
Sam tightens his grip on the gun, takes a quick step and aims point blank at the throat of one, a beefy middle-aged tourist with slicked hair and smudged skin nearly black below his hollow eyes.
“You. Pick up this hitch, pull it. Now.”
Fleisher steps from the crowd now, lids heavy, blinking. “He’s not going to kill anyone. Or he would have.” He staggers sideways, rights himself with a chuckle, stumbles again with something between a sigh and a laugh.
Emboldened, a few from the crowd venture closer.
Sam backs up a step, gripping the Boy. Will Fleisher pass out before he exhorts the mob to murder? It’s all guesswork: the near-asleep and the Sleepless, as blinded by shadows as by light, lost.
Fleisher goes down on a knee, head bobbing, but lifts a hand to point at Sam. “Him—don’t let—”
Now. When choices narrow from a maze to a single narrow hall to a door he opens by lifting the gun he holds in his own hand and firing. Here, now. The blast somehow flat and echoless, factual.
Fleisher’s eyelids flutter as blood erupts in a flung, twisting rope from the side of his head. He collapses sideways into the sand.
No thinking now, just point this amazing, heavy black object at someone else. They all cringe away, terrified—those who aren’t flat-out r
unning.
Quickly, Sam steps to another cowering back stunned, pressing it against this one’s ear. “You. The trailer.”
Eyes wide enough to burst, the man nods convulsively, eagerly. He rushes to hoist the hitch end of the trailer, strengthened by adrenaline.
Shouting spins Sam to point the gun at still another, a younger, aggrieved Sleepless jumping in impotent fury: “Do you know what you’re doing? Do you have any idea?”
Who wouldn’t wonder? It’s not an unreasonable question, after all.
Too late, no thinking now. Sam points the gun again at his conscripted helpmate. “Move it.”
The trailer tilts back, the wheels turn slowly over the sand. In the bow, the Boy kneels, eyes wide at the surge and hiss, the slap and gush of the darkness leaping and collapsing ahead, a darkness to engulf them all, and the light of days.
Behind them now, the mob has backed up halfway to the dunes, shouting accusations of cowardice and betrayal at one another.
The cold uprush shocks Sam’s calves, a gust of spray stings his eyes. Before the bow, the Sleepless man gasps beneath the burden of such weight. Sam grabs his shoulder and pushes him away.
The man flees, sobbing or laughing, splashing through the knee-high wash.
Another wave collapses, and the seething shallows deepen enough for Sam to yank the gunwale sideways and float the boat free. Pushing now, harder, out and deeper as the Boy tries to hide himself in the bow.
Sam hoists himself on, rushing to tilt the outboard motor back, blades in the water. Gasping, a stitch like fire in his side, he yanks the starter cord.
Nothing.
A new wave catches them and pushes them back, almost grounding them. Sam loops the cord around his fist and yanks again.
The motor coughs, sputters, catches, roaring to life. The little boat leaps forward, and they smash bow first through a breaking wave. Soaked, bent, the Boy opens his mouth twisting wide and soundless, so dark in the pale roundness of his face as they head out into open sea, past the surf.
Sam secures the tiller and rushes to hold him hidden from the plunging tumult of the waves as they pull away.
Behind them, the Sleepless stand silently, eyes gleaming in the dark.
The Boy shivers and Sam pulls him closer as they push on, free.
−−−
Kathy knows her way along the edge of town from childhood, cutting through the narrow yard between a utility shed and a fenced easement, continuing on to a girlfriend’s bungalow. Gail, who worked breakfast shift with her before she quit, was never Kathy’s friend exactly, but on this night a door locked behind her and a couch and blanket are nearly all that’s required.
Her tears have begun, finally, quietly, almost contemplatively. Why did she waste these months with a man whom tragedy made so indecisive, equivocating? Gail had been jealous and derisive: “Good luck, too big a fish to throw back. If you even have him on the line.”
She wipes the wetness from her eyes with a soft laugh at herself. Treacly self-pity: no place for it now.
To her left a few yards away, the shadows seem to gather into a sideways oval, hovering. Kathy steps closer, slowing, drawn, and sees it’s a deer, one of the island’s hundreds, at once quivering and still. Its round liquid eyes glint with a distant light, a stray reflection of a star, or some human trace, a far torch or beach fire. It lifts a hoof, sets it down, looks away and back, chary and breathless, suspended. So silent a creature bearing its shape into the world with barely the stirring of a blade of seagrass, or a mark on the sandy hardpan.
She remembers the rough press of her father’s cheek against hers, his breath faintly rank from gin and cigarettes, his hair from sweat, as he held her up to see a deer like this one. The air hung heavy and dank, flown by fireflies as the creature regarded them, bobtail twitching. Out of the dusk, others seemed to materialize, a shy bevy stepping forward slowly to stop and step again, hopeful and wary.
“You can’t feed them.” Her father’s voice returns to her. “Or they become dependent and die.”
When she arrives at Gail’s little guesthouse bungalow, Gail is gone, or refuses to answer her door, but the passing night no longer seems to threaten, a climax of fury abated, exhaustion beginning.
She walks on, habit leading her to an accustomed spot, affording a vantage of the longest stretch of boardwalk, anyone coming or going, fleeing or returning. She sits in a shut doorway and leans back, imagining them safely out to sea, making straight for Greenport, safe but lost to her now: the man she might have loved had he loved her better, and the Boy who in a dream might have been their own.
28
In the last dimness, Cort and Tay linger outside to whisper, the boards of the porch soft and damp beneath their feet. Slowly, her mom’s windows give back pink light, blurred with dew.
What is there to know, to believe about ourselves, after so many became more vicious and heartless than animals, who after all at least are innocent?
To have ever worried about who said what, who looked how at who, or texted what, to have ever lived by the fickle judgments and murmurs and glances in the cinderblock hallways at school, what girl was that? To have ever for a second hated her own mother, to have laughed at her sadness, to have rolled her eyes in disdain, who was she?
If there is a way forward to choose, to turn from the twisted faces and fires still flickering in the blink of an eye, the shouts still echoing and the stink of char, his touch and his voice begins it.
She lets a small, careful hope begin to bloom inside, unfolding, urged by the lightest brushing of his fingertips across her cheek, his leanness just inches away from the whole length of her as they stand wordlessly watching each other, his gold-flecked eyes giving her back to her new self.
Words seem like a new language too, and his sound like music at first, his voice rough and soft at the same time, almost a melody. “Don’t go in. Stay out here with me awhile. I’ll watch over you.”
How can she not? She nods, speechless. They lower themselves to the damp porch, to lean in one another’s arms against the cedar siding of the wall. He brings his lips dry and sweetly to hers and they kiss shyly, as if for the first time at the end of a first date, in another life, before the end of sleep.
#
The island has grown quiet with the long fading of the dark, as the numbness of exhaustion has driven so many off by themselves to sit in doorsteps or on benches, or in the soft sand stupefied by the slow, sure failure of thought and speech. Angers forgotten, the will to threaten and harm has fled, replaced by the weight of a greater terror: that each will suffer the vertiginous daylight again and again, the interminable sea, the thrum and beating of their blood in their own dying hearts without respite.
−−−
Dale Coop partied hardy, his posse giving a surfer queer and his slut a scare until Hespeth started whining and Nicky Z bitch-slapped him, joke, but Hespeth round-housed him, bamm, side of the head and Mindy and Dave got into a fight, over who knows what, but so what anyway because whatever. This fucking day now.
−−−
Elise Herkimer from Shirley, Long Island, has wandered back to her room in the share house where these two SUNY sorority pledges, one engaged and the other at least supposedly serious have hooked up like total round heels with guys who look like muscle-head Jersey Shore clones—orange from tanning lotion, trimmed little beards, cheap gold chains and steroid pecs. No one notices when she walks in; they could be all dead, so motionless and blankly staring at nothing, barely breathing. The chlorine stink of cum, the dead ashes of cigarettes. The loose flattened breasts and lipstick-smeared mouths half-open as if about to remark. The stillness of it all like a painting no one should’ve ever painted, that no one would ever want to see.
−−−
Carl Beineke remembers pajamas with feet, blankie, teddy bear. The blue sheets with white clouds. The carousel lamp
that threw the shadows of animals. The little yellow nightlight.
−−−
Denise Obermeyer has had a second thought but can’t remember what it is.
−−−
For a while, motionlessness has been a good way to nearly tolerate the pain of the light. Pete Keegan keeps his eyes on his hand there at the other end of his arm, so far away, resting on the sand becoming warm beneath it. Grains sticky on his cheek. He needs to get up now, though, and find some shade and cover his eyes with something, and his ears, to stop his mind, mostly, from thinking thoughts that go nowhere and his nowhere thoughts about them, wife daughter job house, his life like an image in a mirror image of an image in a mirror, but how will it stop unless he stops it?
Just telling the arms to flex and hands to hold onto the ground so the legs can get underneath. Standing, wobbly fun. One foot, two foot. Funny. Walking.
In the sand, a shard of broken amber bottle.
By the house on the dune, a child’s swing made of rope.
The ocean, opening.
#day_eight
1
The sea is glass out here, rose and gray, the sky’s mirror.
Sam and the Boy sit parched and slumped in the bobbing stern, in the blooming of so much light, the skin around their eyes like the bruises of the beaten. Dew shines slick on the rails, too mixed with last night’s salt spray to sip.
In his too-big mildewed life vest, the Boy listlessly watches the still water, and Sam dares to flick his cell phone on yet again, as if this time it will bring their last connection back to life.
