by Lee Thomas
Wanderers close in on her from all sides, shuffling eagerly in a tightening circle. I think she should turn around and run, build up enough momentum to break through the encroaching mass, and I wonder where her people are and why she’s alone in the middle of the street. I make it to the door and fumble with the locks, momentarily confused by the knobs and bolts and the chain.
I need to reach her, need to help.
I throw the door open and step onto the porch, moving as quickly as my legs will allow. The wound no longer hurts, but it feels as if I’m walking through a pool of gelatin. Relativity makes each step an eternity. Erica sees me and screams for me to hurry, and I want to hurry. I want to help. I briefly think of an iron bar and how it should have been in my hand, except the crowd closes on her, and there isn’t time, and I’m compelled forward.
I reach the back of the mob and without concern wade into its midst, throwing my shoulders from side to side to clear a path. Ahead of me, I see Erica’s face, but a decaying hand clutches her hair, and holds her tight by a fistful of carrot-red strands knotted in its palm. She cries out to me. David has run away, and it’s too late to help her, and I have to help David, but I continue forward, striking out blindly to clear my path to her.
Then she is gone, dragged to the ground as numerous bodies crouch and bend, ripping at her clothes and her skin, and I feel I am too late, but I continue to her, and at her side I find room between a man who shakes his head furiously to rip away a piece of her thigh, and another man who chews hungrily on her left breast, and I kneel down and run my fingers over her bare belly, reveling in the velvety sensation of her. My nails hook into her skin and lines of red open like hungry lips.
I lean down and sink my teeth into the meat and my mouth fills with sensation not flavor. The flesh sends waves of warmth over my tongue and down my throat and into my nervous system until the chill is gone, and only then do I realize how very long I’ve suffered the cold. And it occurs to me I am no different from those who crowd me and shove and push for their morsel of heat; we are of a single philosophy, united. Not long ago, I was alive and alone, and now, having shed the detritus of the individual, I find camaraderie in the single-minded horde, and I know each mouthful brings me closer to them.
I tear at the small wound and shovel bits of skin and fat and muscle into my mouth and each grinding of my teeth stokes the fire in my veins. Fingers, painted thickly with blood, gratefully dig, snagging on viscera and shredded tissue, and I want to go deeper, to hollow this thing out, and I want to be small, so I can climb within and swaddle like an infant held by a radiant crib of ribs and flesh, never again to feel the cold, existing forever inside, where it’s warm.
Nothing Forgiven
You drive south on Kingsley. At your back, the funeral of an uncle and the irritation of the family home, chatting uncomfortably with the strangers you call mom and dad and Aunt Lois. Beyond the windshield low buildings approach—shops and restaurants—all pasted against a sky of granite. Like familiar melodies, long unheard and thought forgotten, memories of youth return, rising from the houses, the road and the street signs marking familiar intersections. So much about the city is different, but even more is the same. After thirty-three years, details you thought long eroded emerge in sharp relief, chasing you from one landmark to the next.
Long ago, you made a promise, swore you’d never return to this place. What you did here—what you allowed to happen in order to escape—was just too much to accept. You put the events down to dream, to delusion, to a mind soused with liquor. You saw things that could never be. And for many years, you blocked it out entirely. Jody. Bobby. They were hardly considered over the years. Now though, with your promise broken and the past’s topography rising, they return, joining you in the car like phantom passengers.
A pang of guilt cuts your stomach. You search the row of low buildings for a bar, hoping to numb the ache with a shot of single malt. The drive to Newark is long enough without the company of such needling companions. You certainly don’t want them sharing the flight back to Dayton, back to Susan.
Your wife is already furious with you. She resented your desertion, reminding you time and again that you couldn’t afford such a trip. The house needs a new roof; the toilet leaks, needs replacing; there is mould in the basement. Right up until you left for the airport, she reminded you how many times you claimed to hate the city of your birth. But you know her concern isn’t for you. These days, it never is.
You can’t blame her. How can you? The accident was such a terrible thing. An evening run, a reckless driver. An active, beautiful woman paralyzed, the prisoner of a wheelchair. Her emotions were bound to be as broken as her spine. And though you can help your wife adapt to the physical limitations of her new condition, you are helpless to stop her depression, her anger, her fits of destructive rage.
After three years, you are as much a captive of the accident as Susan.
You go to work, come home. You try to make her comfortable, endure her irrational outbursts, her phases of black despondence, sometimes weeks long. The settlement is spent.
Your lawyer was lazy, taking an insufficient sum, and the bills keep coming. Month after month, check after check, you never seem to make a dent.
Susan was right; you can’t afford this trip, but you need it. You need to experience something beyond her disapproval and the pile of bills on the kitchen table. Yes, you hated this place. Returning was simply an excuse, a location away from the woman you love, because being with her hurts so damned bad that you thought it would kill you.
You tell yourself Susan will be okay. Her sister is taking care of her for a couple of days. They get along well. Susan is likely grateful to be rid of you, despite her protests.
Across the street, its sign glowing in the fading evening light, you see a bar. One drink, you think, just something to sand down the edges.
In the bar, you sit on a stool, watch the bartender shake a martini. You run your drink order over in your mind as if you might forget it, though it hasn’t changed in over three decades: scotch, neat.
But when the bartender, a young man with a shag of dark hair, leans on the bar and asks, “’Can I getcha?” you say, “Gin and tonic.”
Jody hates the smell of whiskey.
The ache in your belly redoubles, and you squeeze your eyes closed, holding back the memory of a beautiful girl. Jody wants to be remembered, wants you to remember her, but you aren’t ready. Not yet. Not here.
You drink quickly and order another. The taste of gin is like blood on your tongue, reminding you of pain, but you drink until the second glass is empty.
Head lighter and belly heavier with gin, you walk out of the bar into the fading evening light. It will be night soon, another night on the circuit. But no, the circuit is broken. Your parents railed with age-thin voices against the new buildings—a sewage treatment facility, some other construction—that now rise on Ocean, blocking off the street that was an integral part of the loop. Some of the bars remain, certainly the boardwalk.
You wander to the corner and turn left. There is plenty of time before the flight.
As a kid, you spent weekend evenings walking up and down Ocean, taking energy and joy from the cruising youths and the pulse of rock and roll beating between the ribs of the shore side bars. When you were old enough to drive and owned a car of your own, you joined the thundering parade on The Circuit.
Round and round.
You cross Ocean Avenue, walking with uncertain steps toward the Boardwalk while trying to remember how you felt on those long ago nights. You imagine cars and chrome, conjure crowds of people, their faces blurred and dull. You struggle with the mental film, but it will not focus, and nothing else about those years emerges. Even Jody and Bobby are absent for the moment. Too much time gone. You are a father now, a grandfather. It doesn’t seem possible. Your children are older than you were the night you left this place. Your daughter’s wonderful son is nearly a year old.
For a w
hile there, only a handful of years, you considered yourself to be on the easy side of life. Your children were educated, had families of their own, and you and Susan still had good money in the bank. The promise of retirement and comfort was already whispered in your ear. Then, Susan was run down, and then the hospital, the therapy, the wheelchair. The endless stack of bills.
Round and round.
On the boardwalk, you stop and look around to see the people, the stands displaying novelties and food, the glowing lights. You hardly remember leaving the bar. The pedestrian crowd is sparse, but you aren’t surprised. It is a weeknight, just past dinnertime. An overweight couple in matching bright red Hawaiian shirts eats ice cream, leans on one another affectionately. Two boys count the coins in their palms in front of a booth that sells sunglasses. Groups of people in silhouette wander in the distance. Against the side of a hot dog cart, a young couple embraces, kissing each other with the desperation of juvenile passion.
Oddly, you notice little else. The odors and the sounds of this place elude you, as if you bear witness to the performance of ghosts on a make-believe set. You sniff the air, but receive no olfactory cues. You listen, knowing that there should be voices, music, electronic accolades from the arcade machines. You strain to hear something, so that you can feel a part of this place again. Finally, a rhythmic pulse creeps into your head. It pumps and crashes and hisses. You turn away from the booths. Your steps rap on the boards in time with that distant beat. At a railing, you stop, clutch the banister. Through the darkness a filmy white line breaks on the shore. Then, you understand. The ocean is calling you, leading you back to this dreadful landmark.
And there, only twenty yards away, a familiar face waits. Your heart trips and stutters. You leave your place at the railing, cross to a steep set of wooden stairs and descend to the sand. Jody stands on the beach, hardly changed at all. Her strawberry blond hair drapes over narrow shoulders. At her back, waves pound the shore, crashing and shushing. For a moment it feels as if nothing has changed. More than thirty years crease and fold and slip away. You smile a moment before the fear turns your blood to shattered cutting ice.
She can’t be here.
You look back at the Boardwalk, at the lights and the people meandering over the planks. Your mind grows hazy, buzzing with a distant powerful drone. You look back at Jody, standing motionless on the beach.
“Please,” you say, taking a step back.
Don’t leave. She’s why you came back.
You want to run, but something holds you on the sand, facing Jody. Your mind fills with images, one lying over the top of the other so that none are clear. A single voice, like the teller of a story or the singer of a song, accompanies the images. It is your voice, only calm. Its lulling timbre and rhythmic cadence are strange, but what it says is familiar.
You belong here. You belong to the shore, to the waves, to the muscle machines that howl in the night.
For all of your failure to conjure the past only moments before, it comes crashing back. The sand buckles. The cool darkening air shimmers.
You…
You drive north on Ocean, crawling with the highway knights sitting low on their Harleys; checking out the machine-head toughs sporting chrome and revving their Hemis to the heavens. The girls in their bellbottom jeans and broken-zippered boots giggle and wave, then cover their bright angel faces with long fingers tipped in watermelon paint. Streetlight and stars concede to the parade of headlights. Motor perfume, thick and grimy, mingles with the scents of the grilling meat from Boardwalk shacks and the spirits in throat. Clouds of salty mist hang over all. On the left, young rock-and -roll, just hitting puberty and all the more cocksure and wild for it, rages in wooden shacks where the cools gather to fill their heads, their hips and their feet with honky tonk hymns written by low class priests, singing of Gods made in their own image. To the right, past the Boardwalk, off in the darkness, the waves play out a rhythm silenced by the thunder of engine and guitar but felt in the soul and lap of every man and woman on the circuit. Sidewalks team with shag-haired boys and straight-haired girls, each of them half a beast hunting to make themselves whole before daylight. In the street, muscle machines and mom-and-pop coaches crawl along the avenue.
You make a left and then another, down Kingsley. Left again. Round and round. Always chasing the closest horizon, measuring freedom by gas gauge and the remains of a gin bottle.
Night whispers promises, drawing her children to the loop, and their orbit—circles upon circles—is gravitational, pulling the innocent in and keeping them close.
Parked in the lot, your Chevy part of the herd, you pull a bottle from under the seat. You open it, make your wish and release the juniper genie into your mouth. The gin bites. You hate its taste. But the smell of whiskey makes Jody sick, so you drink this. A small sacrifice. One of hundreds. You make another wish, take another hit.
In the arcade, amid the popping squeals of the pinball machines, lights jumping, Richie and Mike plan a drag. They call each other pussy and dork and fag until the deal is set. They wait for their girlfriends to come back from the john, still posturing like gladiators beneath a coliseum crowd. Three little girls, with barely enough rack to support their halters, cheeks slashed pink with mothers’ rouge, race by, looking terrified.
Pinballs clang and crack, trying to escape. Their reward is another paddle whack, another bumper shove or a fast descent into darkness.
You stand with a smoke in your mouth, looking hard and bored like it’s all just another moment—one of millions—that will come and go with no more meaning than the striking of a match. For some it’s a pose, a mask handed out in school for all of the shore boys to wear, but for you it’s the way of your face. You are hard. You are bored. High school is a year gone, the diploma nothing but a piece of paper shoved in a drawer under mom’s carton of Pall Malls. The nights come. Round and round. The night dies. You haul sofas for Mr. Lombardo so that the Joneses and the Smiths have comfortable places to sit before going home to your parent’s tattered Sears couch. You sit there and wait until one of the Kingsley Boys calls or Jody is finished at the bookshop.
They used to mean the world to you, closer than family. Knowing you’d be with them made you ache with a comfortable lust. Now, that longing is for something different, something distant, something beyond the promise of the night. But Jody is off work, and the night comes. Round and round.
The gladiators Richie and Mike puff out their chests in greeting to their girlfriends now back from the john. Mike drops his smoke on the cold tile floor and crushes it under a boot toe. They will race. One will lose. Neither wins because tomorrow will be the same. These carousel horses can never claim victory.
You leave the arcade and step into the street where the herd of Camaros, Firebirds and Barracudas roll. Tinny music pumps from speakers to greet the growling engines, the shouting voices and the muffled concerts of the shore-side troubadours in an orchestra of soul and steel. Jody waits for you by The Pony. You’ll meet her. She’ll talk about her day and want you to talk. But it’s all been said. Recounting your day is a familiar song, pounding at your ears. All chorus. No verse. You’ll hate her for making you sing it. Then, you’ll walk back to the lot where your car waits. In the backseat, Jody will open up to you just like she’s done every Friday for three years.
She used to be the cure for your disease. Now another symptom.
To the north, a distant and welcoming darkness and you know that if you had once, just once, gone straight instead of turning left, you would be someplace else. For the hundreds and thousands of miles driven, you wonder where you could have gone.
“Please,” you say to Night, hoping she’ll understand and grant the wish you’ve whispered so often, the one you tell your pillow with gin-foul breath.
You nearly made it out. Phil lived in Delaware. He had a spare room. Knew about a warehouse that needed hands. Jody wanted to go, wanted to see the rest of the world. But her brother plucked the dream from her
. Bobby, with the shore to his back, went face down in the waves, chasing a bottle of Jim Beam with a shot of the Atlantic. Jody used you like a shrink, like a nurse and like a priest, her lips spilling guilt and agony to your shoulder. For her, leaving was forgotten. But still you could go somewhere beyond the circuit where the streets were clean and quiet and life meant a little more than horsepower and neon.
Then you blew a rod, dragging for laughs with Hoyt Decola. Your freedom machine needed repair, so the money you had went up like smoke. The charred dream that remained just more litter for the boardwalk.
Along the crowded sidewalks, you march with concrete boots. People walk and stumble by. Some look at you, recognizing breed, a single face on a hundred bodies. You stop and turn to the wall, check for cold-eyed cops and pull the bottle from your pocket: another miserable shot with the promise of miracles.
Jody waits in front of The Pony. Her hair is strawberry straw hanging like curtains to hide her shoulders. She holds a cigarette to her lips, staring over the line of cars to the sky above the ocean. On her pink t-shirt, your name is written in rainbow-colored letters baked on the fabric. Hip hugger denim caresses her thighs, then erupts into bells that tent her feet. Through the wall behind her, The Jukes beat out a song that makes a man at Jody’s back bop.
She wraps her arms around your neck, kisses you. Wants to know where you’ve been.
You slide an arm around her waist, tell her something came up.
Jody wants to know about your day and you shrug. Normally, you’d sing that song just to make her feel better, but tonight you can’t bring yourself to it. The night is different. Everything is the same, and you tell yourself that the difference is in your head, but you feel it. Something. It pulls at your gut.
