by Brad Barkley
THE EXTENT OF FATHERHOOD
AT night the scrapers come. They rumble like dinosaurs to snatch me out of sleep. I sit up with the goosedown bag damp around my knees, moist hair in my eyes, and lean back with a cigarette against the boardwalk to watch them. Their headlights fire the sand and burn mist from the air; moths circle in the light. Beneath me, the ground quivers with the weight of five-foot tires. The machines feed in pairs on the waste of beachgoers: cups, plastic bottles, abandoned blankets and styrofoam surf boards. They churn and sift the sand, swivel their heads and run shiny with spray. In the dark the ocean is tar, molten, running into a tar sky, surging to melt away beach. The men who work the scrapers are invisible inside the plexiglas cabs. I wave at them anyway, wave at the machines chewing at surf’s edge, eating footprints. They follow me like stray dogs. They have a taste for the footprints I leave.
When they go they carry away their rumble, leaving tire ruts and clean sand. The noise of the ocean returns, the string of foam on the breakers glows faint blue in the dark. My fingers burn with the cigarette, and I toss it away. Tired by an ache in my shoulders, I slide inside the bag, settle my head in a cobweb space beneath the boardwalk. My sore joints gorge on sleep.
I have a system in doing things. I am not random, not a hobo or a bum. The Assateague Island National Park lets me spread my bag on swept pine needles and sleep with the sounds of backwater streams, wild ponies scratching through brush. A seven-day limit is imposed; they don’t want people living there, where families vacation in pop-up campers. After a week I hitch across the bridge to Ocean City, and sleep up next to the boardwalk where the wind and scrapers can’t get me. Shelly’s tape deck moves with me. I cart it back and forth between the beach and the campground, listening to the one cassette I kept, Dylan’s Blood on the Tracks. If the batteries go, I’ll chuck the whole thing into the surf.
When I left I took a sleeping bag stuffed full in the toe with winter clothes, the jeans and sweat shirt I’m wearing, the book Shelly gave me. October is here, stirring up overcast days and cold breakers, giving me worry over whether I took enough to wear. The girls in the Dutch Bar have thrown flannel shirts on over their bikini tops. All of the amusements are boarded up with plywood.
Mornings pull me back into bright sky and sweat. Overhead, gulls swirl and float, diving at sand fleas. The beach is not crowded this early in the day, this late in the year. A few old people sweep the sand with metal detectors. Spandex surfers test the waves. I smoke, pull on my shoes, roll up the bag and stash it, turn on my tape and hum along. I appreciate the sound of my voice.
I eat dinner at the Paul Revere. In the waiting area, a young couple take pictures of each other locked head and hands in the wooden stocks. I sit and order tea, then make slow movements around the salad bar, reaching under the plastic guard for cherry tomatoes, chicken wings, captain’s wafers. For ten minutes I stuff my mouth, then leave without paying. Dishonesty. Stealing. Not things I would want to teach my boy.
After dinner I end up at the Dutch Bar, spending what I’ve found that day on the beach, pocket change left on blankets. I lean next to some wiry kid, nineteen or twenty. He reminds me of the boys I used to instruct in my Industrial Welding course at Lincoln Technical College, slouched kids with long hair, black T-shirts. He starts talking about motocross racing and brands of beer. I look up and see that is what is on the TV, dirt bikes and beer ads. There is no sound, just the cycles spewing mud. He talks almost without stopping, a long stretch of words then his smile popping up regular as road signs. His teeth are the size of baby teeth, wet and sharp, like they belong to some fast little animal. He tells me his name is Tesh, and lets me win two racks of eight-ball.
I go to the bar to order more beer from the girl in the flannel shirt, and look up to see the motorcycles. Instead there is News 11, a blond woman mouthing words. The screen fills with blurry photos of men’s faces, and the caption reads, “Wanted for Delinquent Child Support.” I wonder if Shelly has thought about giving them my picture, then realize she has probably destroyed them all. I kept one picture of the three of us, smiling in front of a Christmas tree. The camera cut off the tops of our heads. The picture marked my place in the book.
“Can we watch something else?” I ask the girl.
She looks up. “Squeezing the bastards,” she says.
For a while I carried the book in the toe of the sleeping bag, but one night I slept out drunk, looking at the pictures, and the next morning it was gone. I’d slept down the beach, away from the boardwalk, and woke up in the dark with the tide inching into my lap. The book was not there. Around me were the tracks in the sand, where somehow the scrapers had missed me. I’d slept through the grind of their engines, their prongs raking the sand.
“What’s your story, man?” Tesh asks.
“I could be on TV,” I say. “I’m wanted for delinquent child support.”
He shakes his head. “Man, that’s kids for you.” He smiles again with his sharp teeth, pushes his blond hair off his forehead. His flat nose veers off to the left, like a boxer’s. I can’t imagine that he has any children.
“Where do I cash a check around here?” Tesh asks me.
“Try Dough Rollers Pizza.” I’ve eaten there before, on buffet night.
“Show me where.”
“Just down the boardwalk. Can’t miss it.”
“Show me. I’ll buy us a pitcher and a large pepperoni. I need a drinking buddy.”
The pocket change is nearly gone. My stomach rumbles and squeezes. Yesterday I left the island; I never wait for them to tell me. Wind off the ocean is cold, full of mist. Here there are no pine trees to break it up. The cold weather makes me think about Billy and Shelly, about where they might be living now, who might be teaching him to ball his fists, to count to ten. Shelly gave me the book on Father’s Day when she was seven months pregnant. It had been four months since I left my job at Lincoln Tech, after burning my hand on a braising rod. By then the hand had healed, leaving a thin, pink scar.
The title of the book was The Extent of Fatherhood, by Dr. Samuel Beckworth. Shelly sat on the arm of my chair, pulled from my fingers the book I had been reading. “Enough history,” she said. The spine of the new book gave a little crack when I pulled open the cover, the pages crisp as new dollar bills. The chapters had titles like “The Mechanics of Nurturing” and “The Emotional Tightwire.” I kissed her, patted her stomach, and read the first lines: Good parenting is often simply a triumph of desire over bad technique. This desire is born of love, and is as old as humankind itself. The book snapped closed in my hand. I shut my eyes and let a feeling like a sick hangover wash away from me. The words were there, ideas meant to fit inside my head, but these few I’d read jammed me. I was an expert at bad technique; desire died on the couch watching game shows, drinking cheap beer and fingering burn scars. This baby, the rise in Shelly’s dress, felt like a test I could either pass or fail, and failing it would prove me to be funneling away instead of—as my father said when he got me drunk—full of lost-dog hope and jerky movements. Every Sunday morning, after I’d tossed the classifieds, Shelly said, “You need to work on your self-image.” I told her she sounded like a TV psychologist.
It would be easy to think I forgot about Dr. Beckworth’s book, put it in the bottom of a shirt drawer, but I didn’t. I dog-eared that book studying the pictures in it—grainy black and whites showing fathers and children together. A man fishing with his daughter, dancing with her standing on his feet, trying on hats in a store. Father and son bowling, reading stories, sleeping in a rocking chair. Everybody was happy. I looked at those pictures every day, pasting together a scrapbook in my head. Ignoring the words was the easy part—I imagined them as being written in some language I couldn’t understand, like cave scratchings or Dead Sea scrolls. Shelly would come home from her job where she soldered wires together on an assembly line, and I would be there on the couch, making up pictures of myself with my boy-to-be. In them, I wore cardigan sweaters and nec
kties and Hushpuppies, we had a nice living room with a stack of National Geographics on the coffee table. Then Shelly would find me and we’d argue over my not working. She’d rub her back and not let me do it for her. I would go to a bar and bounce a check to buy more beer. When we were first married, she thought it was cute that our work was so similar; she called soldering “baby welding.” I thought about that while I drank the beer. Shelly kept soldering wires right up to the day she went into labor.
Tesh offers me a cigarette from his pack. I take it, then say, “I guess I’m pretty hungry.”
“Thirsty too, I bet.”
I laugh and blow smoke up toward the TV. I try not to drink on beach nights. It is part of my system of doing things. If they find you drunk asleep on the beach, the police will run you in instead of just running you off. But this is the coldest night in the three months I’ve lived here. The tin-snap of winter chill hangs in the air, and makes me realize that the summer smells of boardwalk fries and suntan oil are gone. The buoy that marks the entrance to the inlet clangs like someone hammering ice.
Before I direct Tesh to Dough Rollers, I go to check that my things are still stashed beneath the Eskay clock on the boardwalk at Fourteenth Street. I notice a crowd on the beach, a cluster of heads and arms. Boys elbow each other in a circle, moving in the pale evening light. I walk toward them, and they scatter. There is no one else on this section of beach; the lifeguard stands are empty, tipped over on the sand. A ring of footprints marks where the boys have been. In the center of it lies a horseshoe crab.
Some nights I stay up to watch them, dozens of the king crabs pulling out of the tide onto the sand. I don’t know where they go, what they are headed for. They move blindly, squarish and helmet-gray, inching forward like small machines. They look like the first things that ever rose up out of the ocean. In daylight, the surfline is littered with shells where the breakers have swept the crabs into the rocks. Their shells are like shards of stoneware. They will cut your feet if you let them. I take the live ones out of the sun, dangle them by their tails and toss them into the water.
This one is not crawling. It is on its back, stuck through with a steel butter knife; its spider legs swipe at the knife. I bend down and see small letters stamped in the steel: STAINLESS U.S.A. Some boy has pocketed the knife from a hotel coffee shop. The crab smells of salt and blood. The legs are rigid as toothpicks; they tick against the metal, the hard shell scratching curves in the sand. I push the knife, and it is solid. While I watch, the black legs stop moving.
Dough Rollers is done up in a merry-go-round theme. All around us, bright plastic horses are frozen in mid-gallop. The pizza warms me and the beers go down easy. Tesh wipes his mouth with a paper napkin, then shoots the napkin into his empty beer mug. He goes to the bar and gives the man some money for a case of beer and a pizza to go.
“Come on and drink with me back at the room,” he says. I begin to worry he is up to something, but then he says, “Come meet the old lady. I’m always dragging home strays.” He laughs. I have trouble imagining him with an old lady, the same way I can’t see him with kids. He seems comfortable being alone, seems to have already acquired an old man’s habit of drinking with strangers in bars. Outside we stand on the boardwalk and the wind slips the seams of my clothes. I say, “Okay.”
His old lady is a dark-haired girl of sixteen or seventeen who tells me her name is Tina.
“Tesh and Tina,” I say. “That’s cute.” She laughs and slaps me on the shoulder. I like her right off. She’s plain in the face, with muddy brown eyes and thin lips and no makeup. She wears her hair long, and has a hefty bosom that makes her seem chunky somehow. We sit around a folding card table, drinking beer and smoking. The tangle of covers on one of the unmade beds starts to move and shift. I jump, and Tesh and Tina laugh at me. From beneath the covers appears this little girl, about ten, with curly hair so blond it is nearly white. She looks at me with pinkish rabbit eyes and blinks.
“My niece” Tesh says. He bends and plugs, in his, tape, deck, turns up the volume on Rubber Soul. It is music I haven’t heard in a long time. We listen to “Nowhere Man,” and I tell them it is my theme song. Everyone laughs. Tesh tells me his niece is named Becca. She grins and walks over to shake my hand like I’ve just sold her a car. Tesh gives her a can of beer and she takes a long pull from it, then burps and giggles.
“She’s young for beer,” I say. Tesh shrugs.
“No, I ain’t,” Becca says. “I’m an orphan.”
“You are not.” Tesh taps her on the rump and looks at me. “We’re watching her a couple weeks while my brother-in-law and his wife sort out some things.” I remember that phrase from the lawyers, and know it means trouble. Paul McCartney is singing; I wonder if I could show Becca how to dance standing on the tops of my shoes. We keep popping beers, pulling off slices of pizza.
The TV in the corner is on and again the sound is turned down. I watch for a couple minutes, expecting news to come on and the blurry faces of the men to reappear, thrown in with motocross racing and beer ads, then gone again. It seems to me that a thing can come back as quickly as it goes away, but on the screen there is only a wrestling match—people wearing masks, slamming each other around. Tesh and Tina watch it and start wrestling in the space between the two beds. They are out of breath and laughing before they sit down again. It makes me happy to see that, the kind of knock-around thing people do when they feel good with one another. Becca is laughing too, from the beer, I think. She gives a high-pitched little girl squeal, like a cheerleader in junior high.
“How old are you?” I ask her.
She sticks out her chin. “I’m thirteen.”
“She’s eleven,” Tesh says. “But she’s getting ‘em.” He tweaks her on the chest, where fleshy bumps slightly raise her T-shirt. Tina slaps his hand. My ears turn hot, and I have the impulse to reach across and hit Tesh in the face.
Tina puts her hands on her hips and throws out her bosom like Mae West, and says, “I guess early bloomers run in the family.” Everyone laughs at her joke, and I’m grateful to her for making it.
Becca puts her hands where in a few years her own hips will be, pushes out her chest, and begins prancing around the room wiggling her butt, saying, “early bloomer, early bloomer,” over and over in this throaty, piano-top voice. I want to tell her to stay a little girl, not to be in too much of a hurry to grow up and find trouble, to find men and greedy love. Even as I think it she makes herself back into a child, throws out her pale arms and begins twirling, spinning a loopy circle with her head tossed back and eyes closed.
The pizza is gone and the beer half warm. I hear wind shake sand against the storm door and window screens. The music plays while our eyes shift between a dog food commercial on TV and Becca twirling herself into dizziness and giggling. On her feet are these little lacey-top white ankle socks, picking up the grime of the carpet as she spins, turning herself to the point where she has trouble standing, her face shiny happy as she staggers near the beds.
“You’re gone to crack your skull,” Tina says. Tesh nods his head in agreement. My brain tells me Get up and catch her before she falls down, but my legs are too heavy with beer. I tip up a bottle to hide my eyes.
Becca sits on the floor, flushed and sweaty, still giggling. She looks up at me and says, “What’s wrong with you?”
It is a question I can’t answer. I remember when Shelly asked me the same thing. I sat counting the candy bars inside the vending machine in the waiting area of the emergency room. They sent us there to sit after they carted Billy in for his magnetic scan. The technician told us the big magnet could rip the car keys right out of our pants’ pockets. I wanted to keep searching out what came next, so I wouldn’t have to go back and think of anything already past. I rubbed at my shoulders, trying to get the feel out of them. All evening I’d sat in a vinyl booth drinking beer and making up scrapbook pictures in my head, then had come home and lifted Billy up on my shoulders, holding his feet in my pal
ms, spinning him around the room. Shelly was shouting, “Stop it, Mitch. He’s too young. He’s only a baby.” But I heard him laughing and laughing, and I closed my eyes so that everything went purple and the spinning felt warm and liquid and made sound come from my mouth. The small heft of Billy on my shoulders felt as good as anything I’d ever known, and I wanted to tell Shelly. She was a shadow in my turning, a voice around me, circling me like a moon. Her sweet perfume was the odor of the dark behind my eyes, the smell of the heft of Billy on my shoulders. She was shouting and I moved inside my eyes when Billy’s laughing came through louder, the rounded edges of it broke off into a sound like a tearing of his lungs. I moved and opened my eyes as the room shifted behind Shelly and there was a dull thump like something dropped on wet sand, then Shelly was screaming with her hand over her mouth as I was still gathering the words to tell her how good everything felt, and I ended my turning and saw the swipe of blood on the beige wall above the thermostat. Shelly moved to the phone and dialed.
In the waiting room I watched people put money in the vending machine. Shelly sat beside me; I felt her watching me. A man across the aisle held a bloody T-shirt and a broken yardstick. I had been in this emergency room once before, when I burned my hand. As I sat remembering that, the doctor came out in blue paper clothes and said Billy would be just fine. Shelly cried and shivered and held the doctor’s hands. I was happy, but somehow the fact that he would be fine made what I did seem all the more foolish.
When the doctor left, Shelly smoothed the thighs of her jeans and said, “I don’t want you around him anymore.”
I shook my head. “You think that now,” I said, “but it’s not what you really want.”
