The Outer Cape

by Patrick Dacey

  Andrew screams not to drop him.

  “Don’t look down,” Robert says.

  But as soon as he says this, Andrew looks down at the muddy water and marsh grass and sharp rocks below.

  “Dad, what are you doing?” Nathan shouts.

  “Pull me back,” Andrew pleads.

  “I’ve got you, Bud,” Robert says. “There’s no reason to be frightened.”

  Robert tightens his grip, his fingers pressing against the muscles between Andrew’s ribs.

  Andrew’s body goes limp.

  “Dad!” Nathan shouts, moving closer.

  Finally, Robert pulls Andrew up over the railing. He and Nathan run to the car. Robert stays by the railing a moment longer. He smells the foulness of the marsh, tastes the salt in the air.

  Once back in the Wagoneer, he looks at the boys sitting in the rearview. Nathan has his arm around Andrew, who has been crying. Robert starts the car.

  “Let’s get some candy,” he says.

  * * *

  After the boys choose their assorted candies from the wicker baskets along the shelf in the red penny candy store on Main, Robert drives through the Meadowbrook subdivision with the windows down, at peace in the smell of the dry dirt in piles, the yellow glaze of sawed trees, the foundations spread in the dug holes. Money is bulldozed land, poured concrete, railroad ties and two-by-fours, Sheetrock, posts and beams, brick, shingles, sod, shrubs, and doors waiting to be fitted into their hinges.

  Inside the model home, Robert brews a pot of coffee so the house will smell like morning, like home. He spreads out the housing guides and the daily papers: the Globe, the Wall Street Journal, and the Boston Herald. He places a tray of raspberry and cheese Danishes by the coffee and eats one while looking out the back window to where a cardinal used to perch on a limb of an oak tree the previous spring when he’d just gotten the permits to start leveling the land. Now, the cardinal is gone.

  High on candy buttons and Pixy Stix, Nathan and Andrew run through the half-framed houses and down into the dug holes where the foundations are to be built. The two of them, he knows all too well, are priceless advertisements—healthy, good-looking, happy, and white.

  His inquirers today are mostly boat shoe– and cloth belt–wearing men and women in their early thirties, looking to settle down, to subject ambition and passion to memory.

  “I wouldn’t think of raising my sons anywhere else,” Robert tells the Wheatons, a couple he met two weeks earlier. Sharon, the wife, is two months pregnant. Robert leads her to the plush blue couch in the living room. The husband, a young advertising executive named Jim, follows behind, then steps in front of Robert and turns toward the bay window, rubbing his chin and looking out at the stumps from the leveled trees.

  “I love how open this room is,” Sharon says. She said the same thing last time.

  Jim looks at his wife wearily. Then his eyes shift to the side, to no exact point; though, Robert knows, Jim has most likely felt that sudden, abrupt end to his past life.

  * * *

  The elation Robert has always felt after making a sale is kin to power and a sense of being untouchable. His mood, though, is quickly depressed by the fact that his sons have no idea what he does for work, and Irene only seems to care about the money, or else she might say something stupid, like, “When you’re happy, I’m happy.”

  What does being happy have to do with anything? he thinks, driving back to the house, the boys half-asleep in the backseat, a check for five grand folded neatly in his pocket. It’s not about being happy. Successful people aren’t happy. Sure, they have moments of remembering what it was like to be happy, but otherwise, they are action seekers. The more the terms are complicated, the more risk involved, the more alive they feel. It’s an addiction. They are sources of power looking to plug in.

  This is how his new relationship with Candice Dunning becomes useful. Around three o’clock in afternoon, as during most afternoons over the past month—when the open house for the model home finally closes—Robert drops the boys off and drives back to the subdivision and calls over to the Dunnings’, asking Mike to look at a piece of land off-Cape.

  Robert waits a half hour, then calls the Dunning house again and tells Candice to come by the trailer.

  “Naughty boy,” she says.

  “Bring lunch,” he says.

  They are always so hungry afterward.

  They like having to be quick. It makes what they are doing easier to forget. Her hair is blond and curly and wild, like the hair of a lioness’s collar. She undresses, then flattens and folds and hangs her clothes over two separate chairs. Dust leaps into the light and floats there. They are tall, athletic people. They don’t make love; they fuck. Standing up, he behind her, a leg wrapped effortlessly around his calf. He grabs hold of her hair and smacks her ass. She commands him to do it harder. She calls him “Daddy.” She says, “Harder, Daddy.” When they are through, her skin is blotchy and loose. She dresses, then brushes her hair. Robert holds his come in his hand. There’s a towel under his desk.

  Afterward, they eat turkey sandwiches and pickles, and neither of them talk about the sex. Robert is past the point of caring about his performance. Even if the sex is strange and violent, and not at all very good, they enjoy the secret of the act, which is the driving force of his seeing her in the first place—the childish hush-hush reexperienced, looking away from each other once it’s over, unable to fully process what has happened, sensing the lingering consequences.

  Candice leaves easily, kissing Robert’s neck, his lips, poking his nose with the tip of her finger. Her smell is on his fingertips. He pushes open the windows of the trailer, grabs a can of lavender scent from his desk drawer, and sprays it in all four corners of the boxed-in room. In the model home, he washes his face and brushes his teeth. Later, he will go to the gym, steam and shower, return home a different man. He will sit at the dinner table with Irene and the kids and try to listen intently as each of them takes turns convincing Robert of the difference between a necessity and a desire, and the afternoon affair with Candice Dunning slips back into the small box of regrets that sits alongside the box of justifications.

  NINE

  The day Robert had returned home from his post in Germany, he’d found his mother sitting in the dark smoking cigarettes and drinking rose-scented wine.

  “Where’s Dad?” he’d asked.

  “Your father, well…,” she swirled the wine around in her crystal glass, “… he went belly-up. I think that’s the phrase he used, or belly-down? I’m not sure either makes much sense, the way you die, floating on water or facedown in mud. Anyway, we’re broke, honey, end times, Nixon, Ford, the whole country’s a mess, pack your bags, I’ll come back for you … those are the sorts of things he was saying on his way out the door. That was two weeks ago.”

  Robert sat and, for a moment, felt the calm of a house without his father’s presence. But it wasn’t right. The sharp truth of the matter was that without his father he had no reason to fight against the many versions of him he had encountered in his thoughts and dreams. Sometimes Red was kinder than he had remembered. He kissed Robert’s forehead and said good luck and pinched his ear. Robert looked forward to spending time with that man.

  “Do you have any idea where he might be?” he asked his mother.

  “My guess? He’s in that awful apartment of his in Boston. The one he thinks I don’t know about. I’ll get you the address.”

  Robert’s Boston had consisted at that time of ideas instigated by his father’s dinnertime sermons. There was the Garden and not much else. Streets like the tentacles of a sea creature, flanging out toward the cars on their way to more peaceful destinations, pulling them back to the heart of the Common where preservation was more important than innovation, and the creature laughed at any proposed change, unless of course you were proposing a new rule or amending an old one. Robert remembered his father hoisting him up on his shoulders in the rafters of the Garden, smoke curling aroun
d his head, the giants like dwarves on the hardwood court below, K. C. Jones, John Havlicek, Bill Russell, the black and white and green, dancing in balletic arcs across the floor, and the red-faced, beer-swilling onlookers, yelling at the top of their lungs to pass the damn ball, get it into the post, let that sweet-toothed nigger slam it home. Driving the old Buick back to Wequaquet after a game, his father often said, maybe to himself, “It’s such a simple idea. Put a ball in a hole and get a point.”

  Robert had realized even then that the old man believed he had been born too late, that all the simple ideas in this world had been thought of and the only real way to make it was to complicate them so the future would not look so redundant.

  The door to his father’s apartment had been left partially open. Robert pushed it forward with his forearm, fearing the worst: the back of his father’s head blown out. But the three rooms in the apartment were empty, and the cabinets bare and the bed neatly made. Only the stale smell of cigar smoke told him Red had been here recently. In the fridge was a block of cheese, a half gallon of milk, and two bottles of beer. Where the carpet met the kitchen floor, Robert saw a sparkling diamond earring. He picked it up and placed it on the counter next to a chewed-down pencil and a two-day-old copy of the Herald.

  Outside, a heavy snow had begun, small prisms of light glimmered around him. He buttoned up his coat, bowed his head, and forged down the street.

  There was a bar at the corner of every block. What would he say to the bartender? Have you seen a man who looks like me but shorter, aged thirty years with thinning hair and a crackly Boston accent? Wasn’t that man sitting at the end of every bar with quarter drafts from here to Brighton? After a shallow search he went back to his car and ran the heater and swept the snow off his windshield. The rich white flakes kept the day alive and suddenly the city seemed small and easy to navigate.

  He’d searched the North End, the Leather District, even a few cheap dives in Chinatown, before turning onto Tremont Street, driving slowly past the prostitutes in their colored leggings and fake fur coats, shouting at him as he passed, “Warm me up, Sweetie!” Then to the South End, with the boarded-up duplexes and bums frozen in a tuck. He drove back up toward Boylston, where he remembered the old man outside a place one night after a Celtics game, a bar called the Tam, in the Combat Zone, his father flushed red and raging, pulling a man outside by the collar and hooking his head in his arm until the man handed over an envelope. Robert liked to believe his father had connections to the mob. He was in off the boat and had both a notorious temper and a spirited kindness to those he considered friends. But, looking at the bar now, the hookers in their heels slipping out the front door, men in long coats smoking by the curb, naval cadets with big mouths and not much money, he knew the mob, Irish or not, wouldn’t be caught dead around here. His father was a gambler, he’d won, and he didn’t want to have to drive up to Boston the next day even if the rule was to wait until the following morning.

  The thought that his father would be inside was too obvious to ignore. But where else would a drunk go when everything around him was on fire? Hulk-like and straight-faced, Robert navigated through the crowded dive. He described his father to the bartender.

  “Might as well be asking me to point a finger in the crowd,” the bartender said.

  In the piss-stained men’s room, Robert patted his cheeks and neck with cool water. Then he searched his coat for a cigarette but had none. From the hall leading back into the barroom, he guessed it would take him a half hour or more to get through the crowd, and instead he turned back and left through the door to the alley. A few busboys squatted near the dumpster, smoking. A bum moaned softly each time they flicked a bottle cap at his head. The pavement was slick underfoot. Robert slid forward, trying to stop himself from colliding with the bum, but tripped over the body and landed on his forearms, tearing the cheap fabric of his coat. The busboys laughed, said something to each other in Spanish. Robert turned over. He recognized his father’s jacket: a brown wool overcoat with cashmere inlay. The coat was thrown over the body like a blanket. The left side of his father’s face pressed into the snow.

  “Dad,” Robert said.

  Robert rolled his father over on his back, then stood behind him and bent down as though about to move a piece of furniture, shoving his arms up under Red’s armpits and getting him to his feet. Either Robert had gotten a hundred times stronger since being overseas, or Red’s body had degenerated that much faster with the booze and bankruptcy.

  “Red.”

  “That’s what they call me.”

  “You’re as light as a woman,” Robert said.

  “I’m not no broad,” his father said, his words degenerated with drink.

  “I didn’t say you were. I said you felt like one.”

  “Plenty of big, potato-eating broads in this city.”

  Robert sat his father down in the passenger seat and put the coat over his hunched body. His father’s head bobbled as they drove over chunks of freezing snow toward the apartment.

  That night Robert lay on the couch under the lone extra sheet he’d found in Red’s closet. He hadn’t been able to sleep. The sheet smelled like his father’s aftershave. He heard a knock on the door, a key rustling in the lock on the other side, a woman’s voice, “Shit, shit, shit, shit,” the keys falling to the floor, heels clicking down the hall.

  In the morning, Robert went into his father’s bedroom, where Red was fast asleep, a slight smile across his lips. Robert put his hand to his father’s forehead. He felt warm. He pulled up the plain, wooden chair and sat beside him for a while. He guessed your dreams didn’t care where you slept, in a king-size mattress with Egyptian cotton sheets or on a twin bed under a stiff wool blanket.

  * * *

  When Robert knocks on the door to Red’s house, the old man’s second wife, Blanca, answers, slightly annoyed, it seems, that there is no servant to do it for her. Blanca is a big Swede with silver hair, pasty white skin, and too much makeup. She wears sunglasses and smokes long cigarettes, and he can’t recall her ever once smiling in the fifteen years since she’s been married to his father.

  “Your papa’s in ze tub,” Blanca says apathetically.

  “Is someone watching him?” he asks, though not as defiantly as it came to him in his mind, as he’s still trying to process the foreign yet welcoming touch of Blanca referring to his father as “Papa.”

  “He won’t let ze nurse in,” Blanca says calmly. “He claims she giggle at him.”

  “He could drown, Blanca. Don’t you have any sense?”

  Robert’s parents had divorced when he was in his midtwenties. No one cared about it but him. He was too old for sympathy by then.

  Robert moves past Blanca with a childlike huff and knocks on the bathroom door.

  “What is it, honey?” his father says. He calls anything he loves honey, man or woman or animal.

  “It’s Bobby.”

  He can smell the old man’s cigar.

  “Are you smoking?”

  “It’s fine. The doctor says to indulge once in a while.”

  “There’s nothing fine about it.”

  “What?”

  “I said there’s nothing fine about it.”

  “Why don’t you come in already? My peace has been permanently disturbed anyhow.”

  His father comes from a time and place where men were constantly pressed up against one another, where nothing was private and they worked and ate and bathed in the same stinking rooms. Women were not allowed. All boys of that time knew the male body much better than the female. They still had the capacity for falling in love at first sight. “I fell in love with your mother at first sight,” Red had told Robert soon after his divorce was final. “That’s how little I’d actually seen.”

  There’s a tray attached to the sides of the tub that holds an ashtray and a cup of tea. Shaving cream foam spots Red’s face and neck. He has missed the hairs high up on his cheeks. His once thick, squat legs are now bony
and bluish. His chest heaves as he exhales a dark cloud of smoke, the hair between his sagging skin like spun sugar, and the hair left on his head the remnants of a bird’s nest loosened and swept away in the wind. To get this close to his father feels to Robert like moving toward a giant projector screen; where at first he believes he might see the character much clearer, the face begins to blur and becomes unrecognizable.

  Robert is the only one in the immediate family still close enough to witness Red’s day-by-day descent. His younger brother, Brian, lives off-Cape in the western part of the state. His sister had gone to Amsterdam when she was twenty-two and never returned to the States. She’s married to an unsuccessful Norwegian artist named Frederick. Robert rarely speaks to either of them anymore. Sometimes he wonders if it’s better that he remembers them alive and healthy, than how they might be now, how they might end up later.

  “Dad, you need a mirror,” Robert says, unfolding the razor.

  “I know my face,” the old man says.

  Robert nicks the hairs beneath the bones under his eyes. He wipes the blade with a washcloth and presses the flat back of his hand under his father’s chin and runs the blade up his neck.

  “The neck is the hardest part,” his father says softly. “My hand shakes.”

  “It’s not easy with these old razors. You know they put out a much better product nowadays.”

  “Oh, yes. Yes, I’m sure they do.”

  Robert makes clean, even strokes up to the chin, the foam peeling away like a pear skin.

  His father grabs Robert’s wrist with a sudden, unaccountable force. He wants to say something. Spit gathers at the corners of his lips. His eyes begin to water. His body clenches. He lets go of Robert’s wrist and relaxes back into the tub.

  Robert hesitates with the razor and looks at his father’s clouded eyes and the thin, wet lather on his face, then continues scraping the last hairs under Red’s chin. The tobacco in the cigar crackles. Robert flinches and nicks his father. The small cut bleeds wickedly, but his father has his eyes closed now, doesn’t appear to have felt a thing. Robert dampens a towel and puts it to his father’s neck, then takes Red’s hand and guides it to the towel to hold it there.