Mr. Tall

by Tony Earley

  “How you met.”

  “Oh, yeah. Dead bodies. So, anyway, one day I was on the beach with my little sister, probably hoping we’d find some more Spam, and we saw a body bobbing around out in the surf. Naked and that dead white, I don’t know if you’ve ever seen that color. The fish and crabs had been at it, but we’d grown up around a pier and seen stuff like that. So we just squatted down and watched it because we didn’t have anything else to do. You couldn’t tell if it was German or American.”

  She tilted her head at the old man.

  “Just then he rode up on his horse, all handsome in his Smokey the Bear hat and told us to stay with the body until he got back. Well, pretty soon the tide started coming in and the body started to float away. I didn’t want him to be mad at me when he got back, because I thought he was good-looking, so I waded in and grabbed it by the ankle, and every time a wave lifted it up I pulled it toward the beach. Eventually I got it far enough up on the sand that it wouldn’t wash away. My sister just sat on her ass the whole time and didn’t help me one bit. You couldn’t make her touch a dead body, but she would gut a shark and not think anything of it. Now she lives in Phoenix.”

  “How old were you?”

  “Fourteen,” she said. “He came back with his buddies and a truck and talked to me and found out where I lived, and we started sneaking around together. I’d climb out the window. My folks didn’t like it, but you put a teenage girl on an island with a bunch of Coast Guards and what do you think is going to happen? He said he would come back after the war and marry me, though, and he did. I’ll give him that. His people had a motel in St. Petersburg, a big pink monstrosity called the Del Moroccan, and when we got married they set us up. He wanted to get out of Florida, be his own man, and I never really wanted to live on the mainland, so we came back to Nags Head. There wasn’t much here then. We were the only brick motel on the island. The tall sign was his idea. I thought up Wade-n-Sea.”

  The old man snorted through his nose.

  “He wanted to call the place the Del Conquistador,” she said, “but I thought it sounded like somebody’s name. Hey, look, everybody. It’s Dale Conquistador. We were busy as we could be for a long time. Filled up all season. The same people came back every year. They would have kids and then their kids would grow up and have kids and the roof would blow off and we would put it back on and everybody would come back the next year.”

  “It sounds like you’ve had a nice life,” Darryl said.

  “You hear that?” the old woman said. “He says it sounds like we’ve had a nice life.”

  The old man waved as if swatting away a slow-moving mosquito.

  “This one here,” she said, “he always had to have a new Cadillac, and he always had to have a fast boat, and he always had to have some little waitress tramp of a girlfriend, and in the winter when we went to Florida he had to be a big shot at the track, throwing money around, leaving big tips.”

  The old man raised his chin and gazed levelly at the old woman. Darryl couldn’t read his expression.

  “Big, shiny Cadillacs,” the old woman said, shaking her head. “He hates a Japanese car as bad as he hates a German. He thinks the Japanese are in cahoots with the Mexicans. Oh, and the Chinese. They’re in on it now. Is your car Japanese?”

  “Swedish,” Darryl said.

  “You hear that? He says that car is Swedish.”

  The old man lowered his head.

  Darryl leaned toward the old woman. “If you don’t mind my asking,” he said, “how did you two stay together?”

  The old woman blinked at him and twisted slightly in her chair. He had asked the question he shouldn’t have asked until the end of the interview. He was losing his touch.

  “That’s kind of a personal question,” she said. “What’s the matter? You and your wife not getting along?”

  “No, ma’am. Not really.”

  “Well, since you’re so damn curious, let me tell you the secret to a long marriage. If you want to stay together, then don’t leave.”

  “That’s it?”

  “That’s it.”

  The old man nodded.

  She put her hands on her knees and stood up. “You hear that?” she said to him. “Tide’s almost in.”

  Darryl hadn’t noticed the boom and shush of the surf until the old woman mentioned it. He wondered how that was possible. He turned and looked toward the wing of rooms barely visible between the parking lot and the ocean. “Wow,” he said. “That sounds close.”

  “It is close,” she said. “We’ve lost four hundred feet of beach since we built the place. In the early years, when the tide was out it took forever to walk to the water. And now,” she said. “Well, now it’s time for me and him to go inside and turn off all these damn lights.”

  When Darryl walked by the wheelchair, the old man grabbed him by the wrist.

  “Your car,” the old man rasped, “is shit.”

  Darryl was sitting on the rear bumper of his car when the Wade-n-Sea sign blinked off, followed seconds later by the pool lights. The wing on the other side of the parking lot vanished into the fog, save for the indeterminate yellow glow of what Darryl knew to be the safety lights underneath the covered walkway. The darkened rooms fronting the sea disappeared entirely. Darryl walked around the car and placed his hand on the doorknob to their room, but he couldn’t make himself go inside.

  He followed the safety lights from his wing to the abandoned wing and then felt his way from door to door until he found the breezeway to the beach. He dragged his fingers along the rough brick wall of the tunnel as he moved unsteadily toward the pitch-black roar of the surf. When the wall ran out he stepped off the concrete walkway and pitched forward into the air. Before he had time to yell he landed face-first on wet sand and somersaulted onto his back. The warm froth of a dying wave immediately gurgled around him. He leapt to his feet and jerked his cell phone out of his pocket and held it over his head. It wasn’t until the next wave slid up over his ankles that he lowered his arm. His neck hurt and his face felt scraped up. He placed his hand on his chest and checked the thrash of his heart for premonitory irregularities. When he opened his phone the illuminated screen seared an afterimage of levitating rectangles onto his retinas. Satisfied that he wasn’t dying, Darryl clambered up the four feet of dune he had just tumbled down.

  He found himself not at the entrance to the breezeway but at the open door to one of the abandoned units. Sand had spilled several feet through the doorway and Darryl followed it across the threshold and into the room. The air inside was still and sour, its odor a mixture of mold and the pungent smell of fish and mud left behind after a receding tide. The surf sounded as if it were going to break on top of him. He felt a little giddy with fear. He forced himself to take another step. The carpet beneath his bare feet was wet and clammy and gritty. It was the darkest place he had ever been. He leaned into the room and waved his arms around in front of his face. “William?” he whispered. “We mean you no harm.”

  He opened his phone and held it at arm’s length with the screen facing out, as if it were a torch. The room was empty. No beds, no nightstand, no dresser, no round table and matching chairs, no television secured to the wall by a bracket, no folding luggage rack with its ratty webbing—everything had been taken away. He knew that Cheryl had never set foot in this particular room, and never would, but the fact that this room was so similar to the room in which she now slept, or didn’t sleep, and that it was ruined and empty suddenly flooded him with despair. He moved to the spot corresponding to the place where Cheryl’s bed would be in their room. He flipped the phone shut and sat down on the floor. Once, four hundred feet of white beach had lain between this room and the ocean, and now only a fragile berm of sand separated the room from that same ocean’s inexorable lifting up and dragging away. He knew that the nor’easters were coming, if not this winter, then the next. You couldn’t blame the ocean, of course; he understood that. The ocean itself possessed no intent, no peac
efulness or fury, save that ascribed to it. The problem was that a boy from Florida and a girl from Salvo had chosen to build something in its way.

  Darryl and Cheryl had once published a newspaper, and they had once had a little girl, but now the newspaper was gone (although, somehow, a cruel facsimile of it still appeared daily in their paper box, poorly written and riddled with typos) and the little girl had grown into a young woman whose face only two days ago had clouded over with scorn when she opened her door and saw them. Darryl lay back on the dank carpeting. He patted the empty spot on the floor beside him. He had begun to shiver in his wet clothes. “My car,” he mumbled, “is shit.”

  Cheryl’s cell phone rang a long time before she answered it.

  “Darryl?” she said. Her voice was warm with sleep, mercifully drained of danger. She might throw the other shoe at him once she had had a cup of coffee, but he was in the clear for now.

  “Hey,” he said.

  She yawned, and he heard her sit up in bed. “Where are you?”

  “I’m not sure. I fell into the ocean.”

  “Are you all right?”

  “I wish we had our newspaper back,” he said.

  “I know you do.”

  “I wish we had our newspaper back and I wish you were pasting up the front page and I wish we had a good picture above the fold and I wish Misti was under the light table.”

  “We can’t do anything about any of that,” she said softly. “That’s all gone, baby.”

  “Then what are we going to do, Cheryl? Please tell me, because I honestly don’t know.”

  Cheryl drew in a deep breath, held it a beat, then let it out. He pictured her with her eyes closed, holding a fistful of her hair straight up in the air. When she opened her eyes and let go of her hair, she would be ready to face whatever needed to be faced. He had been married to her for more years than he had been alive before he met her. It was a fearsome mathematics to consider, a number unrolling day by day toward some finite but unfathomable edition. They had gone to print together 4,864 times. They had spent their youths compiling a record already sliding from the realm of the public into the realm of the historical inside a morgue of microfiche drawers in the Argyle library. Their daughter was going away from them in exactly the expected ways. Darryl held himself perfectly still.

  “Okay, College Boy,” she said finally, “here’s what we’re going to do. In the morning, we’re going to eat a big breakfast. Then we’re going to go to Virginia Beach and find us an interstate pointed toward home. After that we’ll just have to see. Does that sound good, Darryl? Because right now that’s all I’ve got.”

  In all the years he had worked with her, Cheryl had never worried about the next paper until it was time to lay it out, and she had never met a deadline she was afraid of. For his part, whenever she yelled, “College Boy, get your worthless ass back here and bring me some copy!” he had always produced, even on the deadest days, copy enough to bring her. It was the only way he knew to make a life, the transfigurative ordering of event into story, something he could not do without Cheryl. What good, after all, is editorial without production? He stood up and turned in the darkness toward where he remembered the door to be.

  “That sounds good enough,” he said. “Let’s run it.”

  Mr. Tall

  ON THE FIRST SATURDAY in January 1932, when she was sixteen years old, Plutina Scroggs married Charlie Shires in her father’s house beside the railroad track in Weald, North Carolina. That morning she bathed her mother and wrestled her into a white nightgown trimmed with lace bought specially for the occasion. (A stroke had rendered Mrs. Scroggs mute, bedridden, and, so far as anyone could tell, senseless as a pillow when Plutina was eleven years old.) Both her older sister Henrietta and her father believed Plutina to be betraying them—not necessarily for marrying Charlie Shires but for moving away from Weald, leaving them shorthanded with an invalid to care for—and quietly but pointedly made their displeasure known. Her father refused to speak to Charlie that morning and despite the bitter weather sat alone on the front porch without a coat until the preacher called him in for the ceremony. At the last minute Henrietta decided that their mother couldn’t be left alone for the fifteen minutes it would take Charlie and Plutina to say their vows and eat a piece of cake and chose instead to sit at Mrs. Scroggs’s bedside, melodramatically stroking her hand.

  Before Plutina left she went into her parents’ bedroom and kissed her mother, but not Henrietta, good-bye. Henrietta’s unforgivably bad manners on what Plutina insisted was the happiest day of her life added yeast to the grievances and recriminations and snits that had bubbled between the sisters for as long as Plutina could remember. Plutina swore to herself that she wouldn’t write Henrietta unless Henrietta wrote first.

  As Charlie and Plutina were leaving the house, Plutina heard the window of the front room slide open a crack. Out of sight behind the winter curtains Henrietta began to wail. Her father looked at Plutina and said, “I hope you’re happy.”

  “I am,” Plutina said, perhaps a little more haughtily than she would have liked, considering the solemn nature of the occasion. At that moment her most troubling secret was that she loved her father more than she loved Charlie Shires.

  To Charlie her father said, “All sales are final, son. Don’t try bringing her back.”

  Charlie nodded curtly and said, “Don’t come looking for her, neither.” Then he picked up her suitcase and they made their way along the duckboards down the muddy street to the train station.

  Plutina’s father worked for the railroad as a switchman, and she had grown up riding the train (as far as Asheville to the east and Murphy to the west) but she had never before ridden it as a married woman. Charlie took off his coat and placed it between them so that they could hold hands underneath it. She was too embarrassed to look at him for very long at a time, so she stared out the window at the river and the muddy fields and the houses and barns tucked up against the gray mountains. She thought, with some degree of wonder each time the train passed a farmstead, married people live in that house, and married people live in that house, and married people live in that house. She felt as if she had been granted admission into some benevolent, secret society to which almost everyone belonged but of which hardly anyone ever spoke.

  The flag wasn’t out at Revis so the train didn’t stop until Corpening, where it took on coal and water for the long climb to Uptop. Plutina had never thought much of Corpening as a town (as a native of Searcy County she patriotically preferred Weald, which in her opinion had the nicer courthouse) but when she stepped off of the train the shop windows of the town seemed brighter, its sidewalks more crowded, the errands of its inhabitants more urgent than anyplace she had ever been, including Asheville. A taxicab honked at them when they tried to cross the street. Charlie pointed at a brick hotel with a revolving door and grinned and jabbed her in the ribs with his elbow. She shook her head because she honestly didn’t know what he meant. (And when he said, “If the train was going to be here awhile me and you could check in,” she still didn’t know what he meant.) He led her instead to a noisy diner filled with men who kept their hats on inside, where they sat at the counter beneath a blue cloud of cigarette smoke and splurged on a lunch of egg salad sandwiches and fried potatoes and Coca-Cola floats, a meal that Plutina decided was easily the best one she had ever put in her mouth.

  They didn’t talk much going through the gorge, but then nobody else in the car did, either. Something about the gorge always made people hush. To Plutina’s eye the cleft between the mountains west of Corpening had never looked wide enough to contain both the railroad and the thunderous, pitching river that roiled along beside the tracks. Most of the scary stories she knew were set there—tales about robbers and train wrecks and hangings and feuds and Indian war parties and men you encountered walking along the road in the moonlight who vanished as you approached them. Conversation in the car didn’t pick up again until the train huffed over the grade at Uptop
and started down the other side. Ordinarily the exhilaration she felt on leaving the gorge behind would have set Plutina talking as well, but when her ears popped at the top of the grade she suddenly understood, with the clarity of revelation, that for the first time in her life she would not be turning around in Murphy and heading back to Weald. She had thoroughly and permanently left home.

  Much to her surprise, she found that she not only missed Henrietta but felt awful about abandoning her. Truth be told, Henrietta was long-waisted and flat-chested and hard to get along with, and wouldn’t have had an easy time finding a husband worth having under the best of circumstances. But now, because Plutina had allowed the only boy ever to chase her to actually catch her, and had bolted without a second thought from underneath their shared responsibilities, Henrietta was pretty much damned to the spinsterhood to which everyone had always feared she was fated—unless of course Mrs. Scroggs drastically picked up the pace of her dying, which, five years into the process didn’t seem likely. (Both the Scroggs girls were good cooks and diligent nurses and under their care in the years since her stroke, Mrs. Scroggs had not only stayed alive, but developed the appetite of a baby bird.) As the train descended toward the valley floor—a valley cut by a river whose name she didn’t even know—Plutina became convinced that if she traveled one mile farther away from Weald she would start crying and never stop. How could she have left her family behind so callously? Why, if her mother came down with pneumonia and died because Henrietta couldn’t turn the poor woman without help then Plutina would not only be a bad sister, she would also be a murderer. She leaned to one side and studied her new husband’s reflection in the cinder-ticked window. He looked like a murderer, too. (Or at least a murderer’s accomplice.) Oh, Plutina, she thought, closing her eyes, the world on this side of the gorge suddenly too hard and ugly to contemplate, you are a hussy—which is exactly what Henrietta had called her when she announced that she was marrying Charlie Shires and leaving home.