I’m going to remember that wave the rest of my life!
He recalled it a dozen times that day — and half a dozen that night; and even a few the next day. But within the month its sound and look had melded with so many thousands he’d seen, both outside where Barb worked and from the Harbor’s docks and marina and local beaches, from places among the trees that looked over the sea, some in leaden storms and some on glass clear mornings, neither that first nor any other could retain its specificity.
[5] IN THE CHEVY with Mike, they watched the pickup pull from the lot — it was painted two, possibly three, blues, with some orange on the front fender — with black marker (SHIT &) and silver gaffers’ tape (DYNAMITE) across its tailgate (REFUSE), and all of it dusty. A chain rattled at the gate’s side. Eric wondered if Mike had seen it back in the truck stop lot. But, as they followed onto a path that took them into coastal over-growth, all Mike said was, “I can’t believe your mama not only leaves her damned door unlocked down here but would announce it to everybody in a goddam public restaurant in town! But — hey, I dunno — maybe Diamond Harbor is that kinda of place.”
Six yards ahead, country slow, Dynamite’s pickup moved forward on the dirt path. The taped tail gate jounced and swayed.
“What you gotta go back to the city for?” Eric asked. “You gonna see Doneesha?”
Beside him, uneven ground joggled the wheel in Mike’s dark hands. “Yep.” (It was Kelly-Ann, actually. But Eric didn’t need to know that.) “See, I told her I’d drop by when I got back. I’d really like to say hello — since it’s the weekend.”
“Oh.” Both proud of his knowledge — incorrect as it was in detail — and at the same time uncomfortable with what felt like Mike’s betrayal of Barb, Eric thought: yeah, sure you did. But he did not say it. Then — the thought came with his greater relaxation — wasn’t Eric himself deceiving both his parents with the truck stop men?
Or was he?
Mike grunted. “Barb probably don’t want me goin’ up to her place ’cause she got some damned boyfriend at home and sittin’ in her kitchen right now, who she don’t want me to run into and cause no ruckus — ”
“Oh, Dad — !”
“Not that I could give a fuck!” Mike looked over. “Hey, I’m sorry, son. I shouldn’t be talkin’ like that in front of you, I know…”
Since, whenever Mike and Barb had been together for the last half dozen years — or even talked on the phone — the moment they separated Mike did talk like that, Eric’s protest and Mike’s apology were more habit than true upset. But now Eric knew, for the first time — the knowledge was both new and surprising — Mike’s motivation was guilt.
He hadn’t a year ago — or even three weeks back!
Mike didn’t put on the air conditioning. But, beside Eric, the window dropped into the door.
After two miles of turning paths, mostly unpaved, the house where the pickup slowed sat halfway up a thickly grown pine slope on a cinderblock foundation. Starting as a trailer, it had been enlarged with a fair-sized room built off the back. When they walked up to the porch — Eric’s “room”—an outer door was hooked closed inside: they could see the latch through the screening. At the other end of the building, in the blistered siding, at the top of the built-out wooden stairs the kitchen door was unlocked.
Mike, Dynamite, Shit and Eric got everything except the Bowflex into the house and onto the porch in ten minutes. When he was walking out, Eric glanced into the living room, to see, on a shelf beside the sofa, three bottles of Heaven Hill near an oriental tin lamp (Eric recognized it from his Florida visit — another thing he hadn’t thought about in a year).
One bottle was half empty.
Wondering how much Barbara was drinking, Eric returned to the kitchen, where, just stepping barefoot out the door, Shit glanced back.
“See.” Outside, Mike rubbed his forehead with the heel of his hand and said, more or less to Eric: “That’s why I spent so much time packin’ the car this mornin’. It unpacks at lot faster that way.”
“Now, there, Shit,” Dynamite said to his nephew, who had ceased to be Morgan as soon as they’d gotten off from the Lighthouse — though the twice Dynamite had called his barefoot helper that, Mike hadn’t seemed to be paying enough attention for it to register. “This man here knows somethin’ you don’t. About packin’. And he just learned it to you, too. Now you know it.”
And Shit was grinning as much at Mike as he was at Eric. Shit’s grin seemed so intensely sexual Eric had a brief panic — were they going to put the make on Mike, too? But that was crazy…
Then, one at either end, Dynamite and Eric carried the re-boxed Bowflex into the house, Eric going backwards, Dynamite going forward and giving grinning grunts: “Left — no, right!” (The first two confused Eric, since they were Dynamite’s right and left, not his — but then he switched them in his mind.) Eric backed along the hall, and onto the porch. As Dynamite’s side bumped a doorframe, and he moved over to get it past, with a smile on his unshaven face as though he were inquiring about the operation of an eccentric sex toy, he asked, head cocked and looking lackadaisically at Eric, “What the fuck is this goddam thing, anyway?”
“Um…” Eric got the cardboard more firmly in his right hand, which was beginning to sting. “It’s just an exercise…thing.”
“Oh.” They set it down over by the wall in front of the screen. The rolled up carpet swatch was already there behind it. Dynamite shook his head a little, as if there was no understanding city folks. They walked out together.
After looking around the quiet trees, at the sparse clouds, or listening to the crickets, Mike said, himself easy and smiling, “Hey, it’s nice here. You guys is lucky to live someplace like this.”
Dynamite took a long breath of the pine-rich air. “We think so.”
Was it the landscape or just the minutes of labor that had relaxed Mike? Or even that Shit, however light-skinned, was black? (Somehow, that made Eric happy, too.) Turning now, Mike said: “You guys won’t take no offence if I get on my way?” Or was it only getting away from Barb? “It don’t sound too…friendly, I know. But I got to get goin’—there’s some stuff I gotta do back in Atlanta.”
“Course,” Dynamite said. “You got your business to attend to.”
By now Eric was positive Mike’s city engagement was pure improvisation. A thought Eric had first had with glassy clarity at fifteen returned to him, equally clear now, days shy of his seventeenth birthday: Barb and Mike were both always inventing tiny deviations from the precise truth that had no other purpose than to upset the other.
“Not at all,” Dynamite said. “Not at all. His stuff’s inside — now that’s Eric. Right?” (Eric thought: Teeth or no teeth, Christ, he looks good.) “We’ll run him back to his mama at the Lighthouse.” Shit — and Dynamite, too — smiled at them both.
“Good-bye, Dad,” Eric said.
“Good-bye, boy”—then Eric found Mike hugging him. He hugged his father back, hard. A breeze rose among the pines, and Eric thought: It sounds like the…
“Down here by the sea, you’re gonna enjoy it,” Mike said, “and I’m gonna miss hell out of you.” The hug tightened. “I really am.”
Eric thought about saying, Then why don’t you stay? But he was too curious — even eager — to know what would happen once Mike left.
And, among the trees, the sound of a wave stilled. But it was merely breeze.