by Ralph Bowden
*****
The next time I woke, it was definitely morning. The sun was well up, and outside was very bright, thanks to the snow cover. My guest was still heavily asleep in full body contact with me, though through my long johns, and whatever she had on, probably the same. She was slid down so far, all I could see was the top of her head. Very strange to be sleeping with someone I knew absolutely nothing about. Even commercial sex with a prostitute usually provides more opportunity for personal interaction. Of course, that’s not what this was. I had no interest in sex with this person. I’ll have to admit the warm body contact was nice and possibly could be arousing under other circumstances. These present circumstances were by no means right, however. Too much baggage, too many hangups. I had come to the beach for the solitude to resolve problems, not to acquire more.
Immediate issues were pressing. I needed the portapotty, but it was cold in the van, colder still outside. I had only my union suit on, and the prospect of wriggling out of the sleeping bag where a warm body was wrapped around me presented all kinds of disincentives. I had to face the bladder, though, and do what I had to. My guest came to a little as I squirmed around to the zipper side of the sleeping bag and let myself out. Pants from yesterday were still damp. I had to scrounge up a grubby spare pair, and a different flannel shirt and sweater, since the jacket from yesterday was still damp too. I didn’t bother with socks, or lacing up my boots for the short run to the portapotty.
On the way back, I stopped at the power box where my extension cord was plugged in. I pulled the plug and reset the breaker. It held. I blew on the plug and tried to wipe possible moisture off with my sweater, before plugging it back in. I heard the heater in the van start up. Maybe it would hold, maybe not. I dashed back to the van, slid the door, and jumped in. She was awake now. I saw a mop of dark hair, and between it and the sleeping bag edge, dark eyes peeked out. She wriggled away from the zipper side and started to throw it back to invite me in. But I had clothes on now.
“Oh,” she said, when she realized I was not coming back and why. The disappointment in her tone was clear. I felt it too. But the heater was quickly warming the van and there was really no good excuse to resume our body contact.
“Couple inches of snow out there,” I commented. “Lot of ice under it. Clear, cold, no wind.” I felt the dark eyes watching me intently.
“The beach will be amazing,” she said.
“Sure will. Do you have any dry clothes?”
“Maybe in the duffle.”
I pulled open the bag and felt the underwear on top. “Seems dry. What do you want?”
“Shirt, pants, socks. How about warming them on the heater first?”
I found a flannel shirt like mine and dry pants, though I had to root around in some underwear first. This was rather intimate. Despite having spent the night with her in a sleeping bag, I harbored a little old school reserve that younger people probably wouldn’t recognize.
While her clothes warmed, I found dry socks for myself, put them on and laced my boots.
“Breakfast?” I asked.
“There are some more energy bars in my cooler. I’ll take one. And help yourself, though what you’ve got is more wholesome.”
I handed her a bar and took one myself. They were almost frozen.
“What about your kayak?” I asked.
“Nothing I can do about it,” she said, as I handed her the warmed clothes. “Time to check out the beach.”
I made coffee and gobbled some cereal as she finished putting together a cold-weather outfit and ran to the portapotty. She was back quickly and drained the cup of terrible coffee. I added a second sweater to my ensemble, a dry towel for a scarf, an old flop fisherman’s hat, and gloves. We left together, wordlessly, trotting out the path to the beach.
It was indeed a fabulous sight from the boardwalk dune. She sat on one rail. I sat across from her and we just looked, still wordlessly.
Ice and a little snow coated the dunes and their grasses, which had collapsed under the weight. The tide was nearly high and where the surf ran up to the icy sand, it steamed into a line of fog all up and down the beach. The ocean looked exhausted after yesterday’s exercise. No more chop. Slick swells – no more than one or maybe two feet high, and widely spaced, several seconds apart – slid in and broke on the sand lazily. There was a light offshore breeze, enough for gulls to swoop, dive, and rise again steeply against a sky that was still pale morning blue. No clouds anywhere over the vast sweep of the horizon. Nothing else either. No ships or boats. No people. No vehicles. It was already too late in the day for any sunrise color, and the dune shadows were short. I had looked at the clock as we left. Nine thirty. We had missed what would have been the intense glory of the post-storm sunrise, but it was still pretty impressive. To me, at least, and, I gathered, to her. After a few silent minutes, all she said was “wow,” quietly.
“Yeah,” I answered. After a few more minutes, I was conscious of the cold rail on my bottom, and the need to be moving. “Walk?” I said, and held out my hand.
She took it before I realized what I had done, and we started off down the beach on the thin line of hard sand just below the high tide line. She kept my hand as we walked side-by-side, adjusting our paces and strides to each other. If anything, this was stranger than pooling our bodily warmth in a single sleeping bag. That was born of necessity and no other options. There was no real need for this now. But it felt natural. This time, we were pooling our mutual appreciation of the empty, winter beach. It was a narrow passion, far out of the main stream. In a way, it was not too surprising that we both had it. We were both here, after all. What else could have drawn us? Whoever else we were individually, we had the beach in common, and for the moment, that was enough.
Nelson Furniture Manufacturing Company
Swoozey gave up for the night. It was full dark now. Traffic had petered out to hardly anything along this rural route, and nobody’d pick him up this late, looking like he did. Time to find someplace to hole up. His feet were soaked and sore. The old boots leaked, and his worn out socks just bunched up and rubbed the blisters raw. Going any farther was out of the question. This was old farmland, and there should have been barns, sheds, or chicken coops, but he hadn’t seen anything for the last couple miles. Last night, he’d slept in a culvert, which wasn’t bad, but he needed a bridge or something to get under now, since it had been drizzling or more all day.
A car went by. Swooze didn’t even bother to stick out a thumb. Ahead, its lights showed a weedy old road with a rusty sign over it leaving the highway on the right. It had to lead to something, and from the looks of the road, whatever it was would prove to be abandoned.
Swooze limped toward it. The sign was pretty bad, but he could make out some of the letters at least. “Nels . . Furniture Manuf. . Co . . any, Inc.”
Okay, that might do. Pretty clear nobody had been this way for awhile, so Swooze turned in and almost immediately ran into a high chain link gate. It had been bent and dented by cars or trucks bashing it. They hadn’t got through, but the hinge side post was bent over enough that it had pulled away from the wire fence mesh on that side. Swooze thought he could probably squeeze through. Was it worth it? He could see nothing beyond where the road headed down a little and merged into the blackness. If it was an old factory of some kind, maybe there’d be a guard shack he could hole up in. So he took his backpack off and set it through the gap before wriggling through himself.
The old blacktop was so broken up and crumbly that tall, woody weeds with prickery stalks and bristly seed pods grew up through it. Swooze made his way along, feeling with his feet. The only light bounced off the bottom of the low clouds. It probably came from the motels and quick stops of the interstate intersection which he’d been hoping was closer than it proved to be. Back on the road, he’d been hearing interstate traffic ahead, to the south, for the last couple miles, but it still wasn’t close. Sound carried too well in this kind of still, wet, October air.
It might turn cold any time. Swooze should have been in Florida by now, and would have been if that guy in the last town hadn’t offered him a job helping him clear out and tear down his old barn. It’d been all right for a couple days, but by the third day the guy was getting bitchy because the work was going so slowly. “Aw, shit, I’ll just burn it down,” he’d finally decided. Swooze was glad enough to be on his way again with $85 in his pocket for food.
The weeds pulled at his sweater and backpack, which he had to carry high. He still couldn’t see anything ahead. Chances are they’d torn down the old furniture plant long since. There might still be something lying around he could get under, though, so he pushed on through the weeds and brush.
Finally, up ahead he could make out some kind of looming structure, blacker than the surrounding blackness. Big, not just a little ramshackle shed. Surely there would be a covered loading dock or walkway, an outbuilding, maybe, even just an overhang. The drizzle was starting to thicken up again into real rain.
The roadway seemed to veer right, around the building, probably to a parking lot. Surely there would be a front door, though. Swooze cut off the disintegrating blacktop and pushed toward where he guessed it might be, hoping for a porch of some kind. He tripped over a curb and then his feet found a solid surface on the other side, a wide concrete walkway, he guessed, and clear, with no weeds or brambles. It was hard to judge distances in this darkness. He hadn’t thought he was that close to the building, but suddenly he practically bumped into it at what was surely the main entrance.
No porch, but apparently no door either. So Swooze stepped inside, out of the rain. This was probably a kind of lobby, or reception area. Fine. Too bad he had no light of any kind. The last time he’d pulled out a cigarette, his lighter didn’t work. It was real dark in here. Looking around, he could just barely make out what appeared to be an opening to a slightly lighter area, probably a doorway out into the plant. He could only see it looking to the side, a trick he’d learned back when he was working on the ore boats on the Great Lakes. Sometimes it got pretty dark out on the water, and the only way you could spot a light through the fog was not to look at it.
Swooze managed to open his backpack, eat a couple candy bars, and spread out his two blankets on the old carpet. He had no idea what time it was, but he was tired, his feet hurt, and it was time to be off them. On the floor, he felt around in his immediate vicinity, but found only some old papers, nothing that would do any better than his backpack as a pillow. This was hardly the Ritz, but Swooze had slept in worse places. He pulled off his boots and soggy socks, massaged his feet, lay back and soon drifted off.
Sometime later – he had no idea how long – he must have rolled out from under his blanket. The cold air on his feet and legs had waked him. Outside, the rain had stopped, but it was still pitch dark. He could see sky through the front opening, and clouds scudding across it, but that was all. There was some breeze, even in here, and it was colder than when he’d come in.
Before groping around to straighten his blanket and wrap up again, he had to get up and wiss. That’s probably what helped wake him, too. Stepping from the main entrance he could see a little more. This really was a big old factory. Odd that it had just been left like this.
Drained out, Swooze went back to where he had left his blankets. They weren’t there. Nor was his backpack. On hands and knees, he groped around the whole area where they had to be, finding nothing. It made no sense. Shit. They told him at the VA rehab place that’s what would happen if he ever went off his meds. “Disorientation syndrome,” they called it. He’d either forget where he was supposed to be going, or, if he remembered that, he’d get lost trying to get there or trying to get back. Twice, he’d gone AWOL, not because he wanted to, but because he didn’t have a clue where his unit was. Things just didn’t work right when he was having one of his spells. He didn’t hear voices, like some of those other nut cases, but he couldn’t count on anything making sense, and sometimes things that did make sense turned out to be his imagination. Episodes like this led to paranoid panic attacks, and increasingly bizarre behavior that finally got him a medical discharge.
Once out of the service and rehab he’d improved on meds, enough to hold a job and lead a normal life for a while. But a ‘normal life’ sucked. It was almost as bad as the military. A steady job, a girlfriend, and a kid with her felt like the brig. He was a free spirit, a travelin’ man, not the type to be tied down. So he’d left, three years ago. The meds ran out soon after, but the shrinks were wrong; he’d been fine ever since, though there was definitely something wrong here. He knew he’d left his blankets and pack somewhere ten or twelve feet in from the front entrance. He could be a little off, maybe – it was very dark, after all – but not that much. He had to find his stuff or he could forget sleep, cold as it was.
So he stood up and shuffled all around where he knew he’d come in and settled down. He was careful. His bare feet were sore enough without being cut up stepping on broken glass or anything sharp. Using the open front door as an orienting lighthouse, he spread out gradually in a kind of grid, as best he could tell, covering every part of the room, even places where he knew he hadn’t left his stuff.
The room was quite large. It had probably served as a product showroom as well as a lobby. Outside of the few papers on the floor, some rumpled-up places in the carpet, and bare spots where the carpet felt as if it had been ripped up off the slab, he found nothing of interest as he shuffled back and forth from wall to wall. The opening he’d seen where a little light came in seemed to be the entrance to a hall rather than a doorway to another big area with windows. He could see nothing down it except the faint light where the hall probably turned toward a window. Swooze didn’t need to explore that way. His blankets and backpack couldn’t have run off by themselves.
Or could they? The hall seemed to be the only other way out of the lobby or showroom where he was. If some creature, like maybe a raccoon, had carried off his stuff, that’s the only route they could have taken. Swooze was standing right beside the front entrance when he stepped out to wee, and would surely have noticed anything coming out carrying his stuff.
The only other possibility was that whatever or whoever had gathered up his stuff was still in the room and moving around to avoid his search. But he would have heard any movement, and why would an animal do that? The few candy bars in his backpack would be the only attraction, and he would certainly have heard them being ripped open. All right, so it didn’t make sense. Maybe he was having one of his spells. He’d just have to sleep it off and wait until morning to spot his stuff. No sense getting all up tight and losing it over anything right now. He was freezing. Maybe that was the problem: cold brain.
He had to find a way to warm up. The only possible cover would be some carpet. He shuffled to where he had remembered finding ripped up edges. Ripping up another large chunk wasn’t hard. The old carpet was pretty rotten. He rolled a smaller chunk into a kind of pillow. Backing up to one of the inside walls away from the front door and breezes, he bedded down again. The carpet cover was stiff and heavy, but big enough he wouldn’t roll out from under it. It took a while to drowse off, but eventually, when he heard nothing but a few lazy-sounding late-season crickets and the distant interstate traffic, he slept.
