The rest of the page had been tramped into the remains of a candy bar, but it wasn’t important. Dan got up to go out. He turned off the overhanging gooseneck lamp, walked out into the night and down the street to sit in a favourite haunt, the Express Lounge, a place where people moved fast enough to burn out their lives in a matter of weeks. He sat down to a rum and coke and very loud juke-box reggae. Why would someone like Barry Walker have singled out Daniel Alger to be such a paradigm of the wasted life? It didn’t seem fair. And yet it was Dan who had gone looking for reasons behind Walker’s death, wanting to write about the great, dead, unhappy poet.
A young Hispanic woman walked in carrying a bundle of something. All the Blacks and Whites and Puerto Ricans sitting at the bar turned to look. She ignored their attention. Instead, she slowly marched between the rows of tables, looking for something, someone. Near the end of the long tunnel-like Express Lounge, she found Daniel staring up at her. She was maybe sixteen. Her dark eyes revealed fear and pain. Daniel almost thought that she, too, was about to pull out some instrument of destruction and do him in. Instead, she put the bundle of blankets on the beer-soaked table, knocking off a heavy glass ashtray. Then she turned and fled.
Daniel undid the blankets slowly, as if he was prying apart the petals of an unfurling flower to get to the centre. He knew what was there. The baby was sound asleep until Daniel’s finger stroked its cheek. As it awoke, it cried a loud, single wail that overtracked even Peter Tosh. The music stopped and the bar went dead silent.
A Black man nearby, sipping a tall glass of something green, turned and said, “Hey, man, ain’t you ever heard of contraceptives?”
The place cracked up. They all gave him one good laugh and then turned back to whatever they were drinking — all except one short, fiery-faced Puerto Rican who stood up, angry, ready to come after Daniel on some ethnic principle. But his buddy grabbed him and pulled him back to his beer. “Give the brother a break,” he was advised. “The man has personal problems enough.” And after that they all ignored him. Daniel discovered that letting the child suck his finger kept it quiet; so together they made their exit as quiet as could be.
The kid wasn’t his. He had never seen the girl before. She had picked him out, a young white man who obviously had not grown up in the neighbourhood. He was her long shot that her kid might stand a better chance. (The dead poet’s least favourite student.) In his apartment, the baby boy slept peacefully. He put the child into his own bed, the only soft piece of furniture in the place. Next, he changed the kid’s diaper, putting on a clean dish towel. Finally, Daniel went to sleep himself on the floor.
When the kid woke him up at five in the morning, Daniel succeeded in getting the baby to drink some lukewarm evaporated milk; then he took him for a ride in his old Mustang. He took the Cross Bronx Expressway to the Major Deegan and then went east, out the Long Island Expressway to Jericho. He was going to ensure that the night deposit left with him would end up in a safe place where it might gather the most interest. So he picked a ritzy neighbourhood in Jericho. A sign on the freeway took him toward a recently built community hospital with immaculate lawns and tasteful contemporary architecture. Dan pulled straight up into the emergency entrance. Having kissed his foster son one final, gentle peck on the forehead, he walked in through the front doors, found a starched nurse at the desk and said simply, “I think he’s looking for a good home.” Then Daniel ran out the front door and sped off into the anonymous suburbs before a security guard could be called, before anyone could ask a pertinent question, and before anyone in Jericho would know that the child was from the Bronx. It had been important for the kid to have a clean break. No one would ever trace him back to the Express Lounge.
On his way back into the city, Dan found himself stuck in the morning snarl of traffic headed for work. He hoped now that, whatever happened to the child, he wouldn’t end up like these automatons in their automobiles stalled all around him. Two hours later he was back in the comfortable squalor of his Bronx neighbourhood. In front of his apartment house, the season’s first cold snap had prompted some local truants to build a fire in a trash can, and they stood around enjoying the flames while listening to music blast from a gigantic portable radio with a cracked speaker. Daniel went inside and, for the first time in months, dug out his surfboard. He carried it down and tied it on top of his car with a piece of rope.
“Check out the white dude,” said one of the kids. “He thinks he woke up in California.” Daniel smiled at him, sat in his car and turned the key on. But he realized he was forgetting something. He ran back up to his apartment. There, he gathered up the Barry Walker journals and all the notecards for his thesis, shoved them into a grocery bag and bounced back downstairs and out into the street.
He poured the entire contents of the shopping bag on the dying flames in the trash can. “Just thought you could use a little extra fuel.”
Far Rockaway beach on a fall day can be surprising decent. The crowds gone. The sea, despite the raw, smelly wastes dumped down its throat, tries to pretend it is as it always was, and the chilly north wind makes lively three- and four-foot waves look like miniature pipelines. Daniel parked by a gargantuan condominium block, untied his board and ran across the boardwalk past the old men playing checkers and some teenage girls sniffing glue out of paper bags. Up above, jets thundered in low, ready to land across Jamaica Bay at Kennedy Airport. They seemed like dark, intelligent birds, skirting low and big enough to cast awesome shadows over the sea and skyscrapers. The water was still over sixty degrees, and the sandbar offshore was the place to sit and catch wave after wave on a fine fall day like this.
The best part of it, Daniel realized — after ten fine tuckdown, scrunched-up little snappy rides — was that he felt hollowed out and clean. Out of breath, he sat for a minute to let the comforting rhythm of the sea and the sun’s warmth overwhelm him. He had almost shut out the annoying rattle of descending jet planes when he heard something else. A thunder that was so deep, so loud and so violent that it seemed to be coming from everywhere at once. He looked around, but the sky was empty even as the roar grew in intensity. It was deafening and unlike anything he had ever heard. It just kept growing, a low throaty growl that made Daniel cover his ears as the noise reached painful thresholds. And then it finally struck him that this explosion of sound might be the last thing he would ever know. He looked toward Manhattan, fully expecting to see the first mushroom cloud that would signal the end. He was sure this time it was happening. All those other false alarms he had wondered over as a kid were nothing compared to this. And yet everything around him seemed perfectly normal except for the deafening blast. What exactly would it be that he would feel in the next minute? Suddenly he remembered the baby, out there in the purified, sanitary world of Long Island. On his drive to Rockaway, after the fact, he had named the baby Joshua, just so he could forever hold the name as well as the face in his mind. Now, after all the bad luck that Joshua was born to, after the glimmer of hope, the kid would be blown to dust like the rest. Stupid ironies. It was the one thing he couldn’t shout out of his mind. He really didn’t have the slightest grief for the rest of civilization, but he felt deeply saddened thinking of the loss of that one tiny life.
Daniel sat bolt upright on his board, still waiting for a shock wave to hit him as he looked to the northwest where the centre of the city lay. But instead the roar kept growing from behind him. From out at sea, it crawled down on top of him until he felt that he could hardly breathe. Then the sky went dark, and something was above. The largest jet he had ever seen. It seemed about to slice off the tops of the condos on the beach, this gleaming white scalpel, but it passed and was moving on, descending, preparing to land at Kennedy. The sound died away.
On the boardwalk, the men were still at their games of chess. Daniel could hardly believe that he had been so naive as to trick himself into such a melodrama. He had read about the protests concerning Concordes lan
ding at Queens. Now he knew why. Even though his end-of-the-world epiphany was a private one, he felt foolish. A supersonic Concorde tooling down to land on a routine flight. Now that the protesters had given up, such earthshaking noise was routine stuff. He paddled to take off on a steep, brownish wave that was about to go critical; he slipped off his board on take-off. The nose of his board went to the bottom and so did Dan. The feisty wave turned him upside down and pulled him along inside the white turbulence before letting him go. Daniel came up, retrieved his board and paddled shoreward. He had lived through the end of the world, and that had been enough for one day.
Paddling out into the Nova Scotia surf, Daniel discovered that the waves were bigger than he had realized from shore. Seven pushing eight feet. Overhead. A savage North Atlantic storm had formed them four hundred miles from here. Now the storm system had passed on, and, in its wake, it was sucking the cold air down to the coast from the north. The frigid seawater inside his wetsuit was beginning to warm up. He dunked under the scalloped lips of critical incoming waves to push himself through the line-up to the outside break. The effect of the new cold water pouring into his suit was intoxicating. Opening his eyes again, Daniel was overcome by the purity of the sea here, the clean air, the empty, perfect waves. He missed nothing about New York. He was glad that his life in the United States was behind him. Canada had been good to him. His life had fallen into place. And here in Nova Scotia he was very good at his work. He felt that he was doing something worthwhile. He dove off his board just to clear his senses again, to get more fresh water inside his suit and feel the bite of the clean, cold sea.
He let the first set of waves pass by, then saw something more tempting on the horizon. An even larger batch of seven-footers advancing one after the other like living walls of water. He let three pass by before paddling for the fourth one, balancing on his knees and dipping deeply into the sea.
He was moving straight into the headland until the wave caught him; and he was up, turning right and tracking down along the face of a long, vertical wall, the wind cracking in his face and the sound of the tube collapsing all around behind him, just inches beyond the tail of his board. He was fading further back in to the throat of the wave as it broke faster, harder, catching up to him until he lost control. The wave snapped him off his board, over the falls, down into the shuddering mass of white water. He was pushed under and jerked in a hundred directions at once. His wetsuit hood was ripped off. The intensity of such cold seawater against a warm skull made his head pound — something like an explosive, exaggerated hang-over. He’d felt the pain from the cold before, the ice-cream headaches, but this seemed so much worse.
Daniel wanted up. He couldn’t have been more than a few feet from the surface, but the white water kept rolling along, pulling him into deeper water rather than into the rocky shoreline. He was caught by the boiling, maddening tonnage of sea, moving horizontally, unable to change his vector, unable to surface. It kept him down like an angry monster’s paw. He needed air but knew he had to keep his mouth shut tight. Reason was there. Go slow. Don’t panic. He had been there a hundred times before. Just relax. But as he tried, he felt his stomach go into a knot. He was about to puke and still he couldn’t pull himself up out of the white water that whipped him around like a broken stick. He fought back the vomit and silently screamed to himself: Relax! It would be over in seconds.
Surely he had only been under for less than a minute, but in the cold water of a Nova Scotia winter, seconds expanded exponenti-ally into minutes, hours, lifetimes. The panic kept jumping back in. It seized him that time in a way he couldn’t deny. It arrived like a loud, black noise. He squeezed his eyes tighter, trying to make it go away. Now Daniel was starting to see colours. Black gave way to purple, then red. His mind was crowded with confusion: a thousand screams and a howling, desperate conviction that this time was not like all the others. And still the sea kept pushing him down.
But just as quickly as the panic had started, it shifted to something else. Sadness. Soon it would be all over. Not just him. Everything. Up until now, everyone he had known had been fighting the losing battles. Everyone but him. The mother of the drowned cook. The mother of Joshua. Gloria, hopelessly lost from childhood. All those other midnight callers. And Barry Walker, digging his own grave with his poetry, trying to coerce Daniel with insults from falling into the same trap. A new colour came to him — he was surroun- ded by a muted blue. It was a quiet place, a sad place, and he was ready to breathe now, with water all around. Yes, he was ready to breathe. Instead, his arms shot out from his side, his feet kicked at the churning water. This time, the wave let him go.
He was up, gasping, coughing, trying to pull the light of the sky back into all the colours of darkness still swarming inside his skull. He breathed air, titled his head back and found himself floating. The wetsuit would keep him up on its own until he could find his arms, his direction, his strength. More white water pounded behind him and on top of him, but it failed to pull him down. He was being drawn toward the inlet and into the channel, but that didn’t worry him. Once he recaptured his strength, he could easily swim across to the shallow reef and then walk his way back to the headland.
Daniel was thankful that his body had somehow pulled him up even after his mind had called it quits. Instinct over intellect.
They were all probably right — his friends who had told him he was crazy to go surfing in the winter. Alone. In fact, he suddenly realized that he would never be as “crazy” as he once was, never as free. He felt as if the detachment and privacy that had once been the source of his strength was now gone. In its place was a feeling of great need. It was the saddest thing he had ever known.
The Town
BREAKAGE
The half-consumed bottle of wine rolled around under the back seat as he slowed to a stop at the light. Cheap wine, a gallon of it. What in the world had he been thinking when he had put down his five bucks on a whole jug of this foul-tasting stuff rather than buying half as much of something decent? “Tastes a little like Kool-Aid,” she had told him. And in truth Denise had been right. Wayne was always a sucker for buying something cheap. And rather than just ditching the rest of the booze, he let it roll around under the back seat. He could have dumped the stuff in the river that night, where it would have been right at home with all the other pollutants meandering down toward the sea.
He half expected it to break. Imagine the smell of a couple of quarts of rot-gut burgundy permeating the inside of the Chev. He’d never be able to take his mother to church in the car if that happened. He’d probably have to hammer a couple of nail holes in the floorboards just to drain the stuff off. But still there was always the hope that he’d get another chance with Denise. Maybe tonight. If he had the strength, he’d ask her just as soon as he got back from his lunch break. She was the only thing that made the upcoming afternoon at the nursing home seem bearable.
The light changed, Wayne let out the clutch and began to move up behind the Plymouth in front of him. It was such a short light that he didn’t want to have to sit through another three-minute wait to get across the highway. But the Plymouth stopped abruptly, Wayne hit the brakes, heard the wine bottle bump against the front of the seat.
“Jesus.”
But it hadn’t broken. He missed the light.
Out on the highway, a dog was trying to cross from the other side, totally unaware of the onslaught of speeding cars. Two swerved to the right, almost nicking each other, but a third driver, pushing it a bit over the speed limit, couldn’t plow up the pavement with skidding rubber quickly enough to stop. He caught the dog with a dull thud and then, deciding there was nothing for him to do, sped on. The rest of the traffic just continued to flow as if nothing had happened.
“Damn it!” Wayne screamed into the windshield as he involuntarily smashed his fist into the horn rim, breaking it clean off the steering wheel and sending it flying in his lap, then bouncing o
nto the floor. He pulled a quick jerk up on the parking brake and then jumped out of the car and ran onto the highway. It was hard to tell if the dog was dead or alive. There was blood coming from his mouth, and the eyes looked funny. Some sort of a mutt, but a family dog, with a collar and tags. He picked up the creature ever so gently, amazed at the tide of cars still racing past, just barely avoiding him, blowing their horns, cursing him even, as if he had no right on the highway. He stood there for a few seconds, getting his bearings.
One car coming in his lane saw him at the last minute and had a hard time changing lanes, almost swiping a bus that was booming past. The guy in the car was shouting something at him. He was pissed off. Couldn’t the bastard see that he was just trying to save the poor beast? But he was right in a way. There was no place for anything living on this road.
Two girls waiting for a bus were yelling at Wayne to get off the road. He walked toward them slowly, as if in a dream. The dog was still unconscious, dead maybe. That wasn’t for him to decide. Wayne stepped up onto the curb. The light changed. Cars were crossing. Somebody was yelling for him to move his Chev, that it was blocking the road. People in a hurry. Everybody trying to get back to work before lunch break was over. It turned his guts.
“Do you know where there are any vets around?” he asked one of the girls. She looked familiar. His biology class?
Dance the Rocks Ashore Page 15
