by J. J. Murray
“You just sort of stole it.”
“Yeah.”
“From Sayville?”
“I think so.”
“Are you sure?” This boat could be my ticket across.
“Yeah. Sayville, rhymes with navel.” She giggles again. She and her friends are beyond tanked, stumbling out of the water like a scene from Night of the Living Dead. The corpses in that movie didn’t laugh nearly as much, however, and some of the corpses were prettier.
“Uh, were there a whole bunch of little red wagons along the docks there?”
She squints up at me. “Yeah. What were they for?”
Stolen from where the Charon Ferry docks in Sayville. “The children of Sayville love their little red wagons.”
“Oh.” She frowns, then smiles. “Hey, where are the hot guys around here? We want to par-tay!”
And you’ve come to the right place. I smile. “Uh, try Le Lethe.” I point toward Green Walk. “It’s usually crawling with hot guys who love to par-tay. Ask for Henry.”
“Is it a disco? I love to dance.”
“I’m sure you can do a lot of interesting things at Le Lethe.”
“Thanks, man!” She turns to her friends. “C’mon! The men are this way!” She steps closer to me. “Are you coming with us?”
“Uh, no.”
She pouts. “Why not?”
Because I’m thinking of stealing the boat that you stole. “Um, I’m afraid I’m gay.”
She blushes. “Oh. Sorry.”
“Don’t worry about it.”
I wave at them as they whisper their way to Green Walk, and as soon as they giggle around the corner, I check the fuel gauge on the runabout—half a tank. Since the first half a tank got them here, I ought to get back okay. I put my carry-on and laptop inside the boat, remove my socks and shoes and roll up my pants.
Then…I steal a boat from Sayville, which rhymes with “navel,” by pushing it out into Great South Bay and climbing in as soon as the boat floats free. I paddle into the darkness until I find the first navigational buoy, turn over the engines, and cruise at half-throttle from buoy to buoy, their lights leading me across the foggy bay, quoting Whitman as I go: “But O the ship, the immortal ship! O ship aboard the ship! Ship of the body, ship of the soul, voyaging, voyaging, voyaging.”
Twelve miles, sixty minutes, and a hundred glances at the fuel gauge later, I find an empty slip near some gas pumps at the Sayville marina, secure the boat, and get out.
“Gas pump’s closed,” a deep male voice says from the darkness.
I look all around me and see no one. “I’ve got plenty of gas. Thanks.”
A flashlight beam hits me in the face. “Where have you been at this time of night?”
I shield my eyes and squint at my interrogator. “You mind not shining that in my face?” The beam travels from my face to my feet. I see my ashy toes staring up at me. Shit, my shoes are still in the boat. I look up and see a policeman blocking my way off the dock.
I knew today would be a bad day.
Note to self: If given the chance to donate sperm, take it.
“That your boat?” he asks as he shines the light on the boat.
I shake my head. “No.” Think fast. “Sir,” I add. Jesus, help me here.
“No? Whose boat is it then?”
“I don’t know, sir. You see—”
“Those your shoes?” I see my shoes and socks illuminated by the flashlight.
“Yes. You see, a group of drunk women—” His radio squawks, and I freeze.
“Found it,” is all he says into his shoulder microphone. “Let me see some ID.” I hand him my Pennsylvania driver’s license. He holds it up beside my face. “Long way from home, aren’t you?” He hands back the license.
“My original home’s up in Huntington. That’s where I’m headed.”
“Yeah?” He smiles while I nod. “Go on with your story.”
I am probably the world’s worst liar, so I tell the truth. “I have spent the last few days at Henry Milton’s place on Green Walk in Cherry Grove, and if you call there, you’ll either get Henry, who’s gay, or a woman, Cece, who’s not gay and who wants me to donate my sperm to her so they can have a baby.”
The policeman doesn’t blink. “What’s the number there?”
I give it to him, and he writes it down on a little notepad.
“But I didn’t want to donate my sperm to her,” I continue.
“You didn’t?”
“No. Cece is very beautiful, but I’m in love with someone else who I haven’t seen in twenty years, so I went out to the pier and saw this boat”—I point at the boat and look longingly at my shoes—“and it was filled with drunk women, and they nearly crashed into the dock over there.”
“Did they?”
“Yes, sir.”
“Where are they now?”
“I directed them to Le Lethe where they could do some dancing and meet some hot guys. They wanted me to come along, but I told them I was gay.”
The policeman laughs and shakes his head. “You have anything else to add to your little story?”
“Well, then I decided to return the boat to where it rightfully belonged.”
“And save yourself a nine-dollar ferry ride in the morning.”
“Uh, that, too, but mainly to save myself the sixteen-hour wait until the next ferry arrived.”
He smiles. “How’d you know this is where the boat rightfully belonged?”
“Because of the red wagons. The girl I spoke to told me about the red wagons.”
“Have you been drinking tonight, sir?”
“Nothing but Coca-Cola, sir.” Sobriety has its price, too.
His microphone squawks again. “Hold on a minute.”
“Can I get my shoes?”
“Sure.”
He follows me to the boat, repeating my story into his microphone, the threat of a chuckle escaping his lips, and I retrieve my shoes and socks. I sit on the dock and put them on while he finishes relating my story, ending it with, “Make a few calls, okay?” He laughs and shakes his head. “For your sake, I hope all this is true.”
“It is. I’ll even pay for the gas I used.”
He squats beside me. “Are you even gay?”
“No, I’m not even happy.” He doesn’t respond at all. “I’m a writer. Henry Milton is my editor.”
“And you sent those girls to Le Lethe?”
“Yeah. Kind of a punishment for stealing someone’s boat.”
He shrugs. “Might not be a punishment.” He stands. “Sit tight. I’ll be right back.”
Half an hour of watching my feet dangle above the turbid water below, the policeman returns. “Amazing, but your entire story checks out.”
I stand and dust off my pants. “Can I go now?”
“Sure.” He laughs. “They caught them trying to swim back. Can you believe it?”
“Amazing.” Anything at all can happen on Long Island. I dig in my pocket and come up with a crumpled ten. “I’m sure I owe more than this for the gas, but I’ve only got a credit card.” I hold out the bill.
“Don’t worry about it. You, uh, got a car?”
“Yeah.” I point at the parking lot. “It’s up there.”
He tips his hat. “Well, have a good night.”
“Thanks.”
I pocket the ten and trudge up too many stairs to the parking lot, putting my carry-on and laptop into the trunk of the Nova. When I slump into my seat and turn over the engine, the fuel gauge barely nudges past E.
I’m running on an empty stomach driving a car on empty. I smile in spite of all the emptiness, recline the seat, and try to take a long nap, my head empty except for the dream of Ebony.
“The mind knows only what lies near the heart,” the old Norsemen used to say, and for the few moments before I fall asleep, Ebony is snuggling up to my heart.
8
“A silly man,” the old Norsemen also used to say, “liesawake all night, thinking
of many things. When the morning comes, he is worn with care, and his trouble is just as it was.”
I didn’t sleep a wink.
I feel the windshield of the Nova, and it’s definitely cold out. An unseasonably warm October has turned into an October of old gray tumbleweed clouds screaming under a fence of red sky fingers squeezing a vibrant blue canvas—quite a cartoon palette, as if Walt Disney’s still at it. I turn on the radio and learn that the temperature is to drop steadily throughout the day. That ought to keep me awake. A biting wind rattles the car, reminding me that Long Island is as flat as a pancake—
The thought makes me hungry, but I can wait until lunchtime at Friendly’s, my favorite place to eat after church twenty years ago.
The engine turns over, the fuel gauge dips, and a little red light comes on. I have less than two gallons of gas, and a search of the radio dial reveals that I have few stations to choose from that play my favorite music. I find “Crocodile Rock” on one station that turns out to “only play oldies, twenty-four hours a day.” My generation’s music is soon to be Musak, soon to be doctor and dentist office rock. When ELO’s “Evil Woman” begins, I pull out of the parking lot and find a gas station, its prices higher per ounce than the cheap beer inside. Cruising out of Sayville, I hear the final strains of “Stairway to Heaven” followed by ten minutes of commercials. No music by black people on an oldies station? You couldn’t have had the 1970s without black musicians. I turn off the radio. The only radio I need is the sound of this car’s tires getting me to my honey. God, I miss my Mustang. This is muscle car weather for sure. A country song takes shape as I hit 97 North:
I’m ridin’ along in my rusty Nova,
all busted up cuz she said it’s ov-uh,
wish I had me a four-leaf clove-uh
to wish me luck to find my love-uh…
What white people do for fun when they drive in wimpy four-cylinder cars…
Once I hit 495 West, I start seeing swarms of traffic and all those signs again: Lake Ronkonkoma, Hauppauge, Commack, and Dix Hills. I remember a story about an eight-year-old girl kidnapped in Half Hollow Hills back in ’74, where the kidnappers released the kid but didn’t get the $50,000 ransom. That kid must have been something else. The story served its purpose, though. None of us ever wandered too far away from home after that.
After hitting Melville and getting on 110, I stop at Larke Drugs. My back, which hasn’t felt right for months, can’t take it any longer, and I need a refill on my muscle relaxers. I place my order using the empty bottle. “I’d like this refilled, please.”
“I’ll need to see some ID,” the pharmacist says, “Bob” emblazoned on his smock. I hand my license to Bob. “Pennsylvania?”
I nod.
“Can’t get muscle relaxers there?”
“I’ve just relocated.”
“Oh. So this isn’t your current address?”
Another nod.
“You have one?”
“Just put…Huntington Yacht Club for now.”
He raises two pencil-thin eyebrows. “Phone number?”
“Don’t have one yet.”
“Hmm. Might be a while. You have your insurance card?”
Thanks to COBRA, I have had an insurance card for coverage from Edie’s cushy job with the Pittsburgh Arts Council for close to five years now. It was only supposed to last for the first eighteen months of our separation, but somehow I still get my dentist’s visits and prescriptions paid for.
I hand Bob my card, then wander down an aisle, checking out a row of cold medicines without alcohol. Where’s the fun in that? The Captain used to make me chugalug Vicks 44 when I was a kid, and I’m sure he took a few hits, too. While I’m staring at foam plates and Dixie cups—my future good china and glassware on the Argo—Bob motions me over to the counter.
“Your policy has been cancelled, Mr. Underhill. Sorry.”
Either Edie quit her job and frolicked back to Daddy Melton’s millions, or someone at the healthcare provider figured out how to count to eighteen. “Oh. Um, what’s full price?” He tells me, and I gasp. Ouch. Groceries for a week cost less! “Okay.”
“Go ahead and fill this?”
“Might as well.”
I sit in the waiting area and ponder a sign that reads: ASK THE PHARMACIST. Ask him what? What’s it like to know everyone’s medical problems? It almost makes him the prescription priest. What I would love to ask: Have you ever made a mistake and given muscle relaxers to a Methodist or codeine to an evangelical Christian?
Or even birth control to a Catholic?
I guess it’s possible, maybe even probable that Edie was on the pill. I never looked at those healthcare statements, but a real Catholic married for ten years with no kids? Even her gay brothers are still squirting them out. The Meltons are a very fertile family. And what if we had succeeded and had a boy for me and a girl for her? Not likely. We probably would have had twins, both platinum blond, both girls, both saying “Mummy.” What a nightmare.
Would I have made a good father? What childless man can say “I would have been a good father” with any sense of honesty? Unless he has been a father or has been raised by a decent father, he has no idea. I have no idea what makes a good father, and I haven’t exactly had the proper training to become one. All I can say is that I would have liked to have had the opportunity to be a father, and I would have raised my child or children the exact opposite of the way I was raised. I might have kept the sailing on Saturday part. Those were sometimes special.
After half an hour, I play “What is he or she here for?” as folks stream in to fill their prescriptions. The large woman with the high hips and bedroom slippers—has to be something for gout. The bleary-eyed man with the dripping nose and the hacking cough—has to be an antibiotic of some kind. The frazzled woman with the four kids racing around her—got to be Quaaludes. Or speed.
Another twenty minutes. What is Bob doing? Does he have to log each pill’s serial number into the computer or what?
I stretch and walk the aisles again, perusing the section for back pain. I wonder where my old hydrocollator is. That hot, moist heat would cure my back for sure. I know I lost it in the settlement. Edie and her periods. A hot water bottle was just too “common” for her to use.
I sample several pamphlets—“Protecting Your Child from Drug Abuse” and “Kids and Drugs”—and sense a pattern. But why put these pamphlets near the counter where their parents are getting their legal drugs? “Generic Drugs and You” is interesting. It seems they have a generic for everything these days. “Growing into Growing Older—Hot and Cold Weather Hazards for Older People” depresses me, but I’m not as depressed as the guy next to me finding the empty section of Nicorette products, scratching at the metal shelving as if he can magically produce an overpriced box of gum. Crashing planes have a way of stopping folks from smoking, I guess. I pick up “Muscle Pain Slowing You Down?” and whisper, “No, this pharmacy is!” I drift to the “male birth control” section and see, geez, forty-eight different kinds of condoms. I can only imagine the research done to arrive at such a large selection. I imagine some man or woman using a ruler to take measurements. Or would they just take a man’s penis and cover it with plaster of Paris to make a mold? Who gets these jobs? I try to imagine the first question in an interview for such a job: “What qualifies you to measure the length and girth of a man’s penis?”
After over an hour of stupid thoughts, I have had enough. Maybe sleeping on the Argo will cure my back. I have a good, stiff bunk there. Maybe I don’t need the drugs. I’m sure it’s just stress.
“Prescription ready for Underhill” crackles from some speakers in the ceiling.
I pay for it anyway and plan to use the muscle relaxers only as a last resort. After all, pain is good.
It means you’re still alive.
I resume my journey up 110, passing Gourmet Wok Kitchen, to Friendly’s, where I devour a Fishamajig with fries and guzzle two chocolate Fribbles just before
the lunch rush. The waitress can’t believe anyone can eat that fast. Ah, grease and sugar, the food of the gods.
Traffic slows me through Huntington Station, which I swear only exists for the purposes of the Long Island Rail Road. This is a strange town to me. This is the place where a newlywed man killed his wife on Christmas Eve, stuffed her into a Hefty bag, and then pretended to search for her with his concerned neighbors. Yes, Fitzgerald’s crime-infested Long Island still festers: Amityville, where Butch DeFeo, Jr., shot to death his father, mother, two brothers and two sisters in ’74 because he heard “voices”—
What’s this? Filene’s Basement? Bloomingdale’s? Saks Fifth Avenue? Since when has Huntington been chic? My, how the Walt Whitman Mall has changed. Walt’s birthplace and museum are hidden behind a stockade fence where Walt’s Tree supposedly still lives. Crowded out by Eddie Bauer.
Am I getting closer to or farther away from home?
When 110 becomes New York Avenue, I’m finally in Huntington. I pull over to a Bank of New York and get a cash advance off my Discover card. I only take out a hundred, hoping that Xando isn’t as exotically priced as its name. Then I sniff the air. Something about scents that drive my memories wild.
Huntington, which will be 350 years old in 2003, is the only city that has been denied all-American city status four times. That ought to make Buffalo Bills fans feel right at home here. It is the past home of Fort Golgotha, where the British used headstones for baking bread, the bread sporting the inscriptions of the deceased on the bottom of each loaf. The American Legion Post once picketed Charlie Chaplin here, which tells you about Huntington’s sense of humor. Huntington is a city that is only fifty-five miles from Manhattan with fifty-one miles of shoreline and five harbors and seven pizza joints on Main Street alone. Huntington shellfish (little neck, cherry, and chowder clams) are shipped daily to New York City’s Fulton Fish Market and have been distributed nationwide since Colonial times. Yeah, my hometown, home to segregated burial grounds at Huntington Rural Cemetery and home of singer Harry Chapin, who died at age thirty-eight on the Long Island Expressway. I wonder if anything has changed in twenty years in this conflicted town.
