Tumbledown

by Robert Boswell

  Alonso’s mother dresses him in beach sandals, loose trunks, and an oversized Padres shirt, clothing that will permit him to masturbate without disrobing. Rhine wears a swimsuit ordered from a special website for sun-sensitive people. It is long-sleeved and has leggings that reach his ankles. It is one piece and basketball orange, except for the trunks, which show a blue sky filled with white clouds. Rhine cannot wear flip-flops due to the unhappy post that separates the big toe from the remainder. He opts for black rubber boots. Vex wears jeans, motorcycle boots, and the butt-faced elk T-shirt. He has only agreed to come in case there is a breakdown on the road and repairs are needed. His tools are in the trunk.

  Barnstone has described the outing as a personal expedition, which means she has to pay for the gas herself but permits her to avoid the Center’s guidelines for field trips. There is no way she could have gotten permission for an official trip to the beach, and yet she cannot understand a facility near the ocean that allows no provision for such excursions. It makes no damn sense. She naps while Andujar drives, and she does not understand they are crossing into Mexico until Mick and Maura are already on the other side and there is nothing to do but follow.

  A bright morning at the adobe house in Tucson. Jimmy is ten, and Pook stands at the door to Jimmy’s room holding a milk carton. He fills the entire doorway. Light in his hair. Larger than any mere man. Pook holds the milk carton at his waist and with both hands. He holds the carton as one might hold a camera with a waist-level viewfinder. He carries it as one might carry a trophy or a severed head or the ashes of the beloved. He carries it as one might carry a fishbowl filled with water, a single goldfish swimming uncertainly in the waves.

  Jimmy is making his bed. He has to make his bed each morning before he can go outside to play. Rules. His mother’s rules. Billy would already be waiting on the porch. The Dog would be panting beside Billy on the couch. The multitude of cats would be awake by now and greedily ignoring the human world. But it all has to wait while Jimmy makes his bed. The sheets are white. Sunlight from the open window lights the sheets as they float over the mattress, as if in slow motion they float down—and the thousand dust motes in that slash of sunlight, like a glimpse into another universe.

  Pook enters the room slowly, awkwardly. Pook enters the room hesitantly, clumsily. Pook enters Jimmy’s room with the ponderous movements of a deep-sea creature clodding about the shore. He bends his head apologetically, now clutching the milk carton to his chest as he makes his way to the bed. He sets the silo upright in the center of the ivory plane and shoves his hands in his pockets: a milk carton on a single bed covered with a white sheet. The carton casts a long shadow on the bed, longer than the carton is tall. The shadow dips over the side and touches the floor.

  Jimmy tosses his pillow so that it sails over the milk carton. It lands crookedly, partly against the headboard, a relaxed pose, as if it is a living thing and sitting up. His mother might paint that pillow, Jimmy thinks, the way it landed, how it seems to express its personality in its pose. Not his father, though. It is not his father’s kind of painting. The empty milk carton rocks with movement of the mattress, the vibrations from the falling pillow turning it slightly, but it does not fall over. Jimmy bends closer. It’s just a milk carton, the local dairy, red lettering on the white, waxy carton. Whole Milk. Pasteurized. Homogenized. Vitamin D.

  Jimmy says, “Is there something you want to show me?”

  Pook frees a hand from his pocket and points. Dirt rims the nail of the pointing finger.

  Jimmy Candler crooks himself even more to examine the milk carton. He puts his hands on his knees and lowers his head. He hunkers like an umpire behind home plate. He hunkers and stares. On the back of the milk carton is the picture of a child. This child disappeared from a Florida trailer park several years earlier, a tiny boy wearing a shirt with sea horses and dolphins. (Two years later Pook will paint this shirt from memory, but it will no longer be a shirt. It will become wallpaper in what has to be a room, the sea horses transformed into unreal chess pieces, the dolphins with wings like mythological creatures, a great wall of repeated images, such perfect mistakes that they all but erase the cheap shirt worn by the vanished boy.)

  Pook’s dirty fingernail scratches at the waxed photograph. His voice is a gurgling whisper. He says, “Idn’t that me?”

  When the three vehicles finally park and turn off their engines, Mick experiences immense relief. In order to drive at a reasonable speed he had to skip his meds, of course, and yet he has found the ocean and it’s a perfect day, a perfect stretch of shore. Though it’s true that the sand seems to vibrate as it kneels beneath the uncontrolled fury of the waves. And the curl of the beach, slithering out of view, reminds him of other disappearing things, like the thread of a thought or a dream that vanishes when you turn over in bed. And for several moments the entire landscape ticks like a clock—or like hot automotive engines in the oceanic breeze. Oh, he seriously doubts that this is the spot he went to before, where the grunion turned the coast silver, but he has gotten them to a deserted beach, and that pleases him.

  They set up camp, unpacking and erecting Rhine’s elaborate screened tent, which requires of everyone thirty minutes of earnest, stake-driving labor. After the tent is eventually upright and secure, Vex yells, “I’m taking my boots off, goddamn it.” Barnstone reclines in the shade of the tent, while Rhine, who looks like an exotic sea creature with great orange limbs, walks to the edge of the water but does not go in. Violet and Maura stay in the shallows with him, Violet encouraging him to wade up to his knees and Maura mocking his ocean wear. Billy Atlas, beer in hand, and Karly, who looks surprisingly skinny in her white bikini, make their way through the water. Billy moves his arms rhythmically, and Mick understands that he is demonstrating to Karly how to swim. (What Mick feels for Karly is less attached to her now. It is like his love for his father, which has not diminished in size or intensity, but no longer applies in quite the same way to the man. One day his feelings for Karly and for his father will be entirely free of them, he believes, ribboning through people and objects in the world, turning them bright and golden. For now, he tries not to pay too much attention to Karly.) Vex shadows Billy and Karly, walking along the edge of the water in his jeans and long-sleeved shirt, yelling things that no one can hear. Andujar kneels at water’s edge to feel the wet between his fingers, as if to check that it’s really there.

  Which leaves Mick and Lolly to swim out and then float back in on the short boards he found in the garage from the old days when he loved body boarding. It all comes back to him, the mechanics of it, as well as the timing, the knowledge of which waves to ride and which to let pass. Lolly is new to it all and follows his lead. They practice on a few low waves before he leads her to deeper water. They lie on their boards, the rolls of water lifting and lowering them, and it is impossible not to think about the size of the ocean, how inconsequential they are, tiny specks that cannot even stay afloat without Styrofoam planks. Lolly’s thong shows off her beautifully rounded cheeks, and though she occasionally flicks at the bit of material attached to the center cord, it seems determined to display her ass.

  Seeing her bottom—pretty much all of it—seems like an astounding thing, and at the same time, the ocean thinks so little of them, Mick feels that his head is clearing. Or it may just be the water in his ears. He laughs out loud, and Lolly turns to look at him, her wet hair flat and pushed back, and there is about her face a quality of the rodent (one of the nicer rodents, Mick quickly amends, not a rat but a pleasant ferret, perhaps) and yet when she smiles and asks him why he’s laughing, the teeth, that white screen hidden behind those plush lips, eradicates the image of the rodent, and he cannot respond to her because there rises behind them a wall of water and it is time to stroke and kick, and he indicates as much to her, and the great body of water expresses with this single wave the heightened spirits of all mankind, Mick thinks, as they ride up the curl and fly weightless in t
he crest, side by side, and Lolly is calling out happily, and then she is pulled under while Mick rises higher still in the ocean’s gaping mouth. He crashes, too, at the end, scraping his chest against the sandy shore, but he is on his feet quickly, steadying himself against the incoming rush of water. He yanks the wristband that tethers the board to him and sends it whirling in the direction of the beach. Only then does he notice that the others are no longer there—the elaborate tent and parked cars, the crowd of people in the shallows. Some current has taken Lolly and him away, and there is no time to think about it.

  He calls Lolly’s name, a silly gesture in the face of the ocean’s ability to swallow sound. She has not come up. He wades out, looking for her mop of blond hair, but he sees instead the board pop free of the water, fly for a moment, and then splash down, its tether attached to nothing. And too far out. It means that the wave has driven her down, has pummeled her down, has hammered her into the ocean’s unforgiving floor.

  He swims. His body takes over. Thoughts leave him. He is no longer thinking too fast or too slow, and here at long last is the secret: to quit thinking altogether. He swims. His body knows just how far, and as he prepares to dive, he sees a flailing hand and adjusts his submersion, moving to his right, grasping the hand, and the woman comes with it, coughed up and coughing, his arm around her waist, sliding over her bare chest—she has lost the top of her bathing suit, which would have certainly undone every trace of clarity for him at any other time, but he does not consider her breasts, just holds to her slick body and swims with a single arm toward shore. She coughs seawater into his hair, and then, while he still swims with her, she vomits into the ocean, which carries it off and away from them. A wave sends them under and when they bob up immediately after, she throws her arms around his neck and clutches him fiercely, which makes it impossible to swim with anything but his legs, which he discovers are powerful, frogging out and back, and the ocean itself—mercurial in its desires—helps them along now, and when he sends down a tentative foot, his big toe touches bottom and then the ball of the foot and then he is walking, with this blond creature still draped about his neck, and a wave hits their backs and sends them sprawling, one on top of the other. He is up quickly and she, slowly, her bikini bottoms low on her thighs—the ocean is denuding her—and she makes no effort to pull them up, a dark chimney of hair at the fork of her legs. He takes her hand, but she will not settle for it, and he lifts her into his arms and carries her to dry land, where they both lie exhausted in the sun-baked sand.

  The full extent of his fatigue hits him when his head touches the warm sand, and in a few moments he is asleep, a blessed dreamless sleep, and when he wakes she is tugging down his trunks. She crawls on top of him, kissing his mouth, offering her breasts, and then he is inside her and she is rocking over him, and again his body has not forgotten and knows what to do.

  When they are through—rutting is the word that leaps into his head—she lies beside him and says, “You saved my life.”

  He isn’t so sure. She was near the surface when he reached her, and the next wave would have tossed her again in the direction of shore. He tells her as much, and the words come out just as he wishes for them to. Maybe it is the body’s relief after sex or it is his enormous fatigue, but his mind cannot race. He lies still and lets the sensation flood through him, the sensation of clarity. This is it, he tells himself, this is the way he was, his former self at long last. Exhaustion permits him to settle into it, exhaustion slows his thoughts, weights him with sanity, which if he does not move, does not let himself be distracted by the naked woman, he can hold onto, and this leads his sensible mind to understand that sanity, too, is a prison.

  Lolly doesn’t accept his argument. “You saved me,” she insists. “I would have drowned. I’d be dead. Can you imagine?”

  She has been imagining, he understands, and it has turned her on, being naked and alive and almost dead on a warm beach and a perfect day in a foreign country with a handsome and damaged young man. Sex is called for to complete the picture, and he is merely that completion, the handy, penis-endowed hero, and he feels suddenly that he under stands her well, too well, as if she is a window and so easy to look through that he can barely concentrate on her actual self, her naked self, leaning over him now, with the frizzing hair and maybe beautiful but maybe ferretlike face, and his tenuous hold on his former way of being slips away.

  He is sunburned and he doesn’t like her hand on his thigh. Where are Maura and the others? He will have to watch the waves and determine which way it was that they drifted, and almost immediately upon gazing at the water, he spots Lolly’s bikini top, stranded on the beach by the fleeing tide. He rescues it and hands it to her, then retrieves his trunks. He runs out to rinse off the sand. When he returns, she is dressed in her tiny clothes, some gray marks on her abdomen, like ghostly fingers, and he has a moment to think that maybe she had an abortion, and then he points in the direction from which, he is pretty sure, they came.

  Before Lolly and Mick return and Lolly’s story of nearly drowning dominates the conversation, Violet lies on a towel talking to Patricia Barnstone. She has brought a guitar, which Violet quite passionately hopes she will not play. While the others amuse themselves in the water, they exchange histories, the basic premises of their lives, and then they revisit them to include the crucial details.

  “I like my life,” Barnstone says. “I’ve been alone a lot of it, but that’s permitted me to do things I never would’ve done otherwise. I don’t claim it’s any better than the traditional route, but it’s all mine.”

  “My husband, at the end, could not speak,” Violet says, “could not turn his head. You’re going to think I’m awful, but at the end, I wanted . . .” She doesn’t finish.

  “I don’t think you’re awful,” Barnstone says.

  “I had a dream about Arthur.” Violet was once again on the porch of the Congregation of Holy Waters Museum, perched on the swing at twilight, when something brushed against her leg and simultaneously she smelled his breath, the particular odor of Arthur’s breath, not a pleasant smell but so specifically him. And there he was, slouched behind the swing, his hands in the pockets of his worn corduroys. This image of him was so real that her sleeping self believed in him, understood that the illness and death had not been permanent after all. She smiled at the folly of the misunderstanding—of course Arthur was alive—and made room for him on the swing. He nuzzled her neck, which chafed her skin. He needed a shave. When he spoke, the voice was precisely Arthur’s. He told her how much he liked American television. Violet didn’t respond to the comment, saying instead, “Are you happy with me?” She understood what she was asking of him—she wanted him to say that she had treated him well while he was dying, that she was sufficient to the chore of giving him up. “The comedies specially,” he replied, “that comedienne who pretends she’s happy all the time—what a talent!” Violet doesn’t describe the dream in any detail, only how real it seemed and how her dead husband would only speak of television. “He hardly ever watched television,” Violet tells Barnstone.

  The sound of the ocean covers their silence, and they douse themselves anew in coconut-smelling lotion. Violet had looked for Barnstone when she visited Jimmy’s office. That was three days past, the same day that her brother moved out of the house in the Corners. She has not seen him since the office visit, and they haven’t spoken. There was no mistaking the painting. Her big brother stared out at her, his body merely an outline, those scraps of paper behind him, as they had hung in his room—except in the painting they had days of the week scrawled on them, abbreviated and misspelled. Why would he add the days of the week? She wondered but she could not guess. For Pook, as far as she had ever been able to tell, every day was the same as the next. There is no way to explain any of this to Patricia Barnstone. Violet doesn’t even understand it herself. She closes her eyes and listens to the waves.

  After a lengthy silence, Barnstone
says, “What do you think of your brother withdrawing?”

  Her eyes open. “What do you mean?”

  “Taking his name out of the hat. He had the job sewn up. That’s what it looked like to the rest of us.”

  “To become director?” Violet asks. “He withdrew?”

  “I’m sorry. I’m speaking out of turn.”

  “I can’t believe it.” She sits up abruptly. “My god.” When Jimmy left the house, he told Lolly and Violet to stay. He needed to do some thinking, he explained. Lolly—and Violet, too—assumed that he was getting cold feet. Violet can’t say that she has missed him, exactly. The house is so much quieter without him, and Lolly is almost bearable if there is no man around.

  Barnstone’s revelation provides a new slant on her brother’s departure. Perhaps he is ashamed. Violet knows enough about his finances to understand that he cannot continue his manner of living without the promotion. He may be humiliated, as well he should be. It’s a national disease, living beyond one’s means.

  “He hasn’t been to work the past few days,” Barnstone says. “I assumed you knew.”

  Violet says, “He hasn’t told Lolly.”

  “Maybe he wanted to wait until after this outing,” Barnstone says. “Spare her or something like that. I shouldn’t have said anything.”