Swimming with Bridgeport Girls

by Anthony Tambakis

  “You gotta play this straight. Trust me.”

  I followed him up to the roof. The party in the ballroom was in full swing. I couldn’t help but peek in. Everyone I ever knew was there. Traitors in evening wear, every last one of them. Warren led me outside. It was 8:40 P.M. The rooftop was empty. We went over toward the ducks’ penthouse. They all had their ties on. They were like the other traitors, only with webbed feet. I hated all of them.

  “Listen up, Ray. This shit’s settin’ off in twenty minutes. Now gimme your phone. I’m gonna film you,” Warren said.

  “Why?”

  “ ’Cause you can’t be runnin’ out here like it’s some damn movie. They’ll have you in bracelets in five seconds. The chief of police is in the ballroom right now. So’s the mayor.”

  “Tell me what to do,” I said, handing him my phone.

  “You’re gonna ask to talk to her. Then I’ll take the video downstairs. They’ll probably fire me for this, but it’s a bullshit job. I got my license. I can always deal blackjack in Tunica for the rest of the summer.”

  “Blackjack,” I muttered.

  “You ready? We don’t got much time. This needs to be convincing.”

  “OK, so what? I pick up a duck and threaten to throw it off the roof?”

  “What the fuck you talking about?”

  “Bad idea. It’d just fly away with its stupid bow tie on.”

  “It’d drop like a stone, man. These ducks don’t fly.”

  “Really? Then maybe it’s a good idea.”

  “It’s a bad idea,” he said. “You’ll look crazier than you already look.”

  “True. What if I went to the edge and threatened to jump unless she talks to me? She knows I’m afraid of heights. It could be effective.”

  “You on something, brother?”

  I didn’t answer. Did I really have to?

  “OK. You don’t threaten the ducks, and you don’t say you’re gonna kill yourself, either. That’s helicopters all over again. It’s the opposite of where I need your head at. Just be as normal as possible. Just say you wanna talk to her for five minutes and then you’ll leave. Be sincere. Do not do anything crazy. We’re runnin’ outta time. I can’t do multiple takes.”

  He held up the phone. Hit record. Pointed at me.

  “Hi. I know I shouldn’t be here. I’d—”

  “Hold on. Take your sunglasses off.”

  I did. He got a look at my black eye.

  “My bad. Put ’em back on,” he said, pointing the camera again. “G’head.”

  “Hi. It’s me.” I looked at Warren, who gave me a thumbs-up. “I just want to talk to you for five minutes. I have something important to tell you. I’m not going to do anything to the ducks. That good, Warren?”

  “I’m still filming.”

  “Sorry. Warren will be delivering this message. He’s a good kid. Please don’t have him fired. He shouldn’t be dealing blackjack. Dealing blackjack is depressing. Anyway, please talk to me, OK? It’s important. Thanks. Oh—don’t you think he looks like D’Angelo Barksdale?”

  Warren rolled his eyes. Raced off. I walked over and looked at the duck setup. It was bigger than some apartments I’d lived in. I gazed out over the river, then turned and looked at the altar. Walked under the canopy. Set the duffel bag down. I thought about what a simple affair L’s and my wedding had been. How happy Lucille was, her red hair freestyling, her gown cut low, as always (if I had a buck for every Lucille cleavage joke I ever made, I could have bought the Kinder House ages before). I remembered how she’d pulled me aside afterward and told me that while I might have lost one mother, I had gained another. She held my face when she said it and made me look her in the eyes. Of all the adults I’ve known since I was a boy, she loved me the most. I missed her terribly. I felt like if she were still alive, none of this would be happening. She could have counseled L. Talked sense to her. Hell, maybe if Boyd Bollinger had ever gotten a look at Lucille, he would have lost interest in L. They were the same age, after all. What was so hard about staying in your fucking lane?

  I heard the door to the rooftop ease open. Warren stepped out, and for a moment, my heart sank. He had failed to convince her to talk to me. But then who came lumbering out the door but my dog? Bruce was wearing a black vest with a pouch on his back and came running, or what passed for running for him. He wasn’t moving that well, if you want to know the truth. I dropped to my knees to love on him, and then I looked up to see none other than L walking through the door and out onto the roof. She nodded at Warren (man, was he good), and he closed the door.

  She walked toward me wearing an off-the-shoulder gown. Her new short hair was silky and perfect. It would have been the most breathtaking sight imaginable if the dress she was wearing weren’t intended for another man. But still, there she was, an inscrutable look on her face. She seemed peaceful and not at all angry, though that didn’t seem logical. I stopped petting the dog and looked up at her. It was all I could do not to cry at how beautiful she was, and where we were, though I knew that I had a job to do, and not much time to do it, and any negative or morose thinking was not going to help me. It was time to pull it together. It was time to bring it all home.

  THE MAN WHO NEVER WAS

  July 17

  . . . Boyd and I watched an interesting documentary on a famous Australian known as the Somerton Man. He was found on Somerton Beach, just south of Adelaide, in December 1948. They call it the Tamam Shud case. There was a scrap of paper found in a pocket of his suit with that Persian phrase on it. Tamam Shud means ended or finished. The page was torn from The Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam. A local man found the book in his car with the page missing and what looked like code written in the margins. Investigators have tried to piece together the clues to who this man was for decades, but they’ve never been able to. It reminded me of Mom and that lousy movie she loved to watch with R. I cried for an hour after. I miss her so much I can’t breathe sometimes . . .

  LOOKING BACK, I SEE THERE were a lot of times I might have realized that things were slipping away. That’s obvious to me now. Of course, when you’re in the shits, and you’ve dug yourself a serious hole, it’s difficult to get a good vantage point on things, since you’re, you know, in a fucking hole. And it’s hard to find a way out of the hole, because you’re the one holding the shovel that got you into it in the first place. Maybe another kind of person would have just told the truth, asked for help, but I was never that kind of person. I was the person who kept digging and hoping there was something useful at the bottom of things.

  By the time L called and said I should come down to Myrtle Beach to see her and Lucille, I had been gambling hard-core for months and was at least $70,000 in debt, not counting the back-and-forth with Bing Buli. She told me to fly, but I figured it would do me good to drive, get some road between me and the hole, and I must admit that it felt nice to roll the windows down and hit the highway in the middle of the night. I had made that drive down 95 so many times with L over the years, and it was nice to remember those trips, with Bruce shoving his head out the window and me and her blasting tunes or listening to books on tape and holding hands. I thought about it the whole way down, how she’d put her bare feet up on the dash, the way she’d hold her skirt up to the breeze, how the sun would shine on her face when she napped. For a long while, I stopped worrying about my predicament and just thought about how much I missed her and how good it would be to hold her again.

  I figured I owed Bruce for the Prince and Pawper sentence, so he was along, the old traveling pro at my side. He slept through the MasonDixon but perked up when we hit North Carolina. That was where L loved to stop and load up on fireworks, which I did myself, filling a shopping bag with all manner of Roman candles and shower cones that I envisioned all of us shooting off on the beach once I got down there. It’s a long, long stretch through North Carolina, but Bruce shoved his face out the window the entire way. I think he knew he was going home somehow. He was probably hoping for a re
turn to Atlanta, or maybe even the Athens barn where he was born, but he would take Myrtle Beach, though he was afraid of the ocean and had made a career of mad dashes for the shore, thinking about taking the plunge and then retreating, barking at the waves in a long-running personal beef, as if making a racket would change the fact that he was a sweet but cowardly dog.

  By the time I got to Myrtle, Bike Week had taken over. Route 17 was choked with hogs, grizzled riders revving their engines and raising all manner of hell. They had completely taken over the Lakewood campground and places like the Iron Gate Saloon, where leather-clad rednecks congregated in the parking lot, sprayed beer in the air, and listened to local bands covering the bulk of the Lynryd Skynyrd catalog. It was complete mayhem, and Bruce wanted no part of it. He got down on the floorboard and buried his head under the passenger seat.

  I stopped at the Inlet Square Mall to buy some presents, though I didn’t really know what to get and wound up buying a bunch of board games. It took me forever to get to Lucille’s place on account of the bikers, who were spread out three wide across the road and inching along like they didn’t have a care in the world, their old ladies on the back of their motorcycles in tank tops and bandannas. I must say, they looked like they were having a good time.

  Lucille lived in a one-level prefab home near the beach that she liked to call “my trailer,” even though it wasn’t really a trailer and it had a nice little deck on the front. Heck, it even had some office space in the back, though she stored so much junk out there that you couldn’t do any writing in it (not that I ever did any writing in Myrtle Beach, or anywhere else, for that matter—I had given up that pretense once I got a little celebrity). L was annoyed that I had driven down and not flown, like she suggested, but her face lit up when she saw the hound, and watching her reunited with Bruce on the porch was something to see. I had to wait until they were done wrestling around to get a proper greeting of my own, which ticked me off a little, although she was always an animal fanatic and you could find yourself getting in the neighborhood of ignored if there were dogs around. And horses—forget it. You didn’t exist if a horse was anywhere nearby.

  Finally it was my turn, and she hugged me and kissed me like we hadn’t seen each other in a million years, which we hadn’t. Everything felt perfect, like it always did with her, and I was overwhelmed by the feeling that what we needed to do was stay in Myrtle Beach with Lucille and never go back to Connecticut. Just leave everything behind and live down south again. I could toss my cell phone in the ocean, and that would be the end of it. Nobody would ever find us that we didn’t want to find us. I know that sounds naive in this day and age, but I really believed it in the moment.

  Out on the porch in the twilight, life seemed to make sense again, with Lucille’s neighbors all waving hello to me and the dog running circles around L and her standing barefoot in front of the screen door, her long legs easing dreamily out of cutoff denim shorts. Her beauty was astounding. If it weren’t for the encroaching mosquitoes and the distant and ominous rumbling of motorcycles, we could have stood out there forever.

  Lucille was sleeping when I went inside, and I threw my bag in the guest room where L and I always stayed, though she was living in that room now, and it seemed strange to see her things organized all over the place. I didn’t like it. But then I thought about my things mixed in, and all of us there together, cozy as cubs, and the feeling that we should stay overtook me again.

  As I looked around at what I decided would be my new room, L opened the bag of board games. “What are these for?” she asked.

  “I figured we could all play some games, since the girl’s cooped up. Brought some fireworks, too.”

  “She’s not cooped up, Ray. She doesn’t have the measles. She’s dying, fifteen feet that way.”

  “Nobody’s dying,” I said. “That’s ridiculous.”

  “What’s ridiculous is you bringing board games and fireworks to a funeral. Did you bring a suit?”

  “What do I need a suit for?”

  She looked at me in a way that I had never seen her look at me. Anger flashed across her face, then it went away. She ran her hand across my cheek. “Beautiful boy,” she said. “You can get one from the mall. Come on, let’s take Chicken Little to the beach.”

  I didn’t want to take the dog to the beach. I wanted to lie around with L. But the minute Bruce heard the word beach, he went into psychotic mode, and that was that. I was starting to think that I should have left him at the Prince and Pawper, or maybe Dawn’s, since he was jamming me up all over the place. I thought that he had a lot of nerve going ballistic when he heard her say beach, since all he ever did was embarrass himself down there. He had no shame whatsoever, that dog, and he was acting like it was their reunion, not ours. I said “Maybe you’ll get in the water like a real dog” to him, to cut him down a little, let him know that he was rubbing me the wrong way and needed to step back and let me have some alone time with my girl, but he wasn’t fazed and kept up his nonsense like I hadn’t said anything at all. I guess when it comes down to it, he was as in love with her as I was.

  The next morning I was sent into Lucille’s room. L told me not to get her riled up. She said it was the first time her mom had asked for a hat, and L didn’t like that. I asked her why Lucille wanted a hat, and L told me she didn’t have hair, and when I said, “Really?” she said, “Just what exactly does the word chemotherapy mean to you, Raymond?” in that voice I wasn’t at all getting used to.

  I was a little cranky as it was, since the stupid motorcycles never shut up all night, and L let Bruce sleep in the bed, and I got exactly no sex whatsoever, and was never in the ballpark of getting any. I polished off a cup of coffee and went in to see Lucille. She looked smaller and older than I had ever seen her, even though she was wearing a lot of makeup and had a knit hat on her head that looked like those things people put on teakettles. She always had this huge mess of red hair, and now all she had was this ridiculous hat. I didn’t like it and was very uneasy. I was already out of sorts from the night before, like I said, and those fucking bikes had started up again in the distance.

  I went over to her and kissed her, did what I thought was a pretty decent job of acting like she looked fine, and frowned when the exhaust pipes got louder than usual.

  “The Grim Reaper’s revving his engine,” she said.

  “That’s not funny,” I said. “It’s just rednecks making noise.”

  I walked to the window and saw Ed Cole, Lucille’s neighbor, washing down his golf cart. It was gorgeous out. Normally it would have been a perfect time to take a drive over to the batting cages. Get in some cuts.

  “Whatcha thinking about, handsome?” she said, and her voice sounded smaller. It was all I could do not to cry.

  “The batting cages,” I said, even though before I went in the room, L had said, “And don’t start talking about the batting cages or nonsense like that, you hear me?”

  “Can I tell you something?” she asked. “Come, sit next to me.”

  I went over to the bed and sat on it. Over in the corner, poking out of a box, was a picture of Lucille and her dipshit of a third husband, Randy Sparks, a golf pro who had run off to play some low-rent tour in Japan and taken along a girl from the Inlet Square Applebee’s who most certainly was not there to caddie. You only had to meet the guy once to know it was going to be a disaster. It was the kind of luck Lucille had in men, and she joked about it all the time, since that’s the kind of person she was. You’ve never in your life met anyone who could laugh things off like she could. There are a lot of kinds of people in the world, but for my money, I’d say Lucille’s kind is the best to have around, and I think that’s what people would have said about me before everything happened and they collectively decided that my jocularity was masking more troubling character traits.

  “Of all the things I’m going to miss, can you believe that’s one of the big ones?”

  “What is?” I said.

  “Goin
g to the batting cages with you and playing 100.”

  We played this game called 100 where you were awarded a certain number of points for a hit that the others determined to be a single, double, triple, or home run based on its trajectory and velocity. The thing that made the game entertaining was trying to argue whether you were being treated fairly by the judges in between pitches flying in at you. The easiest way to get L off her game was to give her a single on a clear double and watch her nearly get beaned trying to argue the call like a lawyer. There is no telling the number of laughs we had at those batting cages.

  “We’ll go when you get better,” I said.

  “OK,” she said, and grabbed my hand. It was all bones. I looked back out the window.

  “What’s going on out there?”

  “Ed’s washing his golf cart.”

  “Him and that cart.”

  “You know I would have come earlier, except she said not to,” I said. I was feeling guilty. It was hard to remember what I had been doing all those months. Gambling and the casino and Dawn and Penny’s apartment seemed a million miles away.

  “I know, honey. This was an important time for us. It’s meant a lot. It’s funny. You have a child, and you take care of it, and then one day it’s taking care of you. You wonder where all the time in between went.”

  “I guess,” I said, though I didn’t want to think about that. I looked at the wallpaper instead. I never noticed how ugly it was. It looked like someone had shot a pelican at close range. Everything in the room was depressing. Especially the bones in her hand. And the hat. And her voice. It all reminded me of Howie Rose and the time I went to visit him after he had fallen out of the tree and gotten paralyzed. I remember his mother gave me this Encyclopedia Brown book to read to him. It was the longest afternoon of my life. All I wanted to do was get out of there and ride off on my bike. And there I sat in Lucille’s room, just wanting to get out of there and ride off on that golf cart. I felt bad for a second. It seemed like a person should grow out of that kind of thing.