Between Wrecks (10 page)

I got up from the table. I looked down at Cavity Sam and raised my eyebrows. Would my own nose one day turn so red? Would a real surgeon look into my cavities at some point and exclaim, “Well, this explains some things.”

What would happen to me if I got sent to a normal foster family? I wondered.

The caseworker stood up and didn't laugh. She said, “I don't want to say that I have the gift of soothsaying, Cush, but I'm thinking you and I might run into each other before long. Do you like martinis? You seem to be the kind of man who could make a perfect martini. After listening to the kind of shit and lies I come across daily, a perfect martini or four settles me down enough to feel like there's hope for the real world.”

She took off her glasses again and opened her lids. I stared. Ms. Perkins eyes weren't pink, of course, but a pale blue on par with an abnormally bright sky, or a venerable ex-coquette's perfectly sculpted hair, or the weakest visible veins rippling across the dugs of a shirtless crone. Uncle Cush said, “Let me walk you out to your car.”

I sat in the kitchen alone for an hour. I thought how, metaphorically, the heart was an organ much bigger than skin. It's what I thought, I swear—maybe because I'd read too much Flaubert by the time I was fourteen. Maybe because I'd seen hearts still beating in fish and deer, long after the skin quit twitching. I felt good about not saying, “I knew you were going to say, ‘I don't want to say that I have the gift of soothsaying,'” seeing as I hailed from a tribe of con men, visionaries, hoydens, liars, quick-tempered reactionaries, contrarians, and hard-working near-anarchists, thus having visionary status myself. I considered looking out the window, but didn't want to see my uncle's truck bouncing up and down, or no truck at all.

BAIT

Although both of my parents insisted that he'd been my good friend—that somehow I must've forgotten him when we moved to Norfolk when I was six—I couldn't place Frankie Hassett when we went to pick him up at the bus station. I mean, I pretended that I knew the guy, but if he'd've been in a line-up with circus freaks only I wouldn't have known my supposed good friend, who was now sixteen years old.

“Shake hands with your good friend Frankie,” my father had said, pushing me out of the depot's waiting room on Monticello Avenue.

I said, “Hey, Frankie,” but he walked past me and shook hands with my father, saying, “Hey, Mr. Ecker. My mom says hey, and thanks for having me.”

I got all caught up looking at the bus driver and his cool uniform with the greyhound on it, but thinking back on everything, I believe my mother stood off to the side, neither hugging Frankie nor shaking his hand or even acknowledging him. Maybe they greeted one another civilly after my father asked me to pick up Frankie's duffle bag.

We got in my father's Oldsmobile and drove home, which at the time was way out in the country but today, I imagine, is part of Norfolk's city limits, or at least part of the metropolitan area. We lived in Chuckatuck, some thirty miles away. Every time I met anyone
not
from Chuckatuck—Little League games, or the time I represented my school in the state spelling bee—they made fun of my hometown. It got to where I just kept saying I was from Jacksonville, down in Florida, no matter what. My father was a merchant seaman who worked mostly on oil tankers, and he probably spent six or nine months out of the year out on the water. My mother didn't work. I'm not sure what she did during the day, but she didn't go off somewhere to take shorthand, or write on a blackboard, or serve food with hush puppies on the side, I know that much.

In the back seat, Frankie said, “So I can drive a car now, Mr. Ecker. Did Mom tell you? If you want, I can drive this car.”

I don't know if it was the truth or not, but my father said, “No can do, Frankie. My insurance agent won't let anyone drive this car but I.” My father used “I” all the time, usually wrong. He said things like, “Between you and I,” and “That goddamn boatswain pointed at I and told me to hurry up,” and, “That's for I to know and for you to find out.” I'm pretty sure that somewhere down the line growing up he got corrected for misuse of pronouns, and made a decision to use “I” at all times, hoping he'd end up above fifty-fifty percentage-wise.

Frankie tapped me on the arm and whispered, “When they're asleep, we'll go out for a spin, Jerry.” He said, “Hey, you remember that time we went fishing down at Fernandina Beach and I caught that baby hammerhead shark? That was cool. Let's you and me go fishing every day when I'm here.”

I said, “Yes,” though I didn't remember fishing down there with anyone. My father turned the radio on. It might not be true, but I remember his singing along to “I Wanna Hold Your

Hand.” How could he even know this song? Certainly they didn't have transistor radios that picked up Beatles' songs way out in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean and beyond. And how would I ever forget someone standing next to me with a baby hammerhead shark on the end of his fishing line? If anything, I should've been scarred for the remainder of my childhood and beyond from the nightmares that would emanate from such an experience.

Frankie reached up and touched my mother's hair. He said, “Hey, Rosalind.”

My father turned into the driveway of a shingle-sided shack about ten miles from our house and said, “We're home!” like that. Then he laughed in a way that I'd only heard later in horror movies, put the car in reverse, and continued homeward.

When my father didn't work the tankers he helped out at a Texaco gas station owned by a cousin of his named Marvin. I had come to believe that we moved from Jacksonville because Cousin Marvin needed some help, but now understand that, perhaps, Frankie's mother began making some demands, my own mother made some ultimatums, and so on. No matter the truth, in the summer of 1967, when Frankie Hassett stayed with us, my father left the house each morning in order to change oil in customers' cars, or fill them up with gas, or sit around and eat Lance brand cheese crackers while drinking Coca-Colas. My mother said things like, “You guys get out of the house and leave me alone,” so Frankie and I walked over to a nearby pond and fished for bream and crappie.

“I know the perfect way to kill someone and get away with it,” he said that first week. He lit an L&M cigarette that he'd either stolen from my father or somehow gotten at the service station that was on our way to fish. “Here's what you do. You kill the bitch, and then you take the body over to some other bastard's house. Maybe it's somebody you already hate. So you get in the house, and you put her dead body in the bed. Then you go over to a pay phone and call the cops. See? You tell the cops, ‘I heard a gunshot last night,' and give them the address. Cops go there, and the next thing you know, the guy you didn't like is getting arrested for murder.”

I think I said, “Cool,” or “Uh-huh,” or “A lot of people think there are cottonmouths around here, but really they're just water snakes.” In my mind I tried to think about how to use curse words correctly, so that it sounded realistic.

Frankie wore Brylcreem or Vitalis in his hair, which wasn't really what anyone else still did, even in Chuckatuck, outside of my father and his cousin Marvin. Most people my age or older let their hair grow out, and dreamed of the day when they'd be a conscientious objector. I spent most of my time raising my eyebrows in order to feel my bangs near my eyeballs. We stood there staring at our bobbers. I said, “How long are you staying with us?”

“There aren't any jobs back in Jacksonville. Fuckers. I told my mom that I wanted to go get a job. Seeing as I can drive and all, I figured I could get a job working construction or goddamn something. You wouldn't believe how big Jacksonville is now. It's about doubled since you were there. But Mom said there were no jobs for me and said I had to come visit y'all for the entire summer.”

The
entire summer
, I thought. Even then, as a little kid, I understood the concept of
Are You Kidding Me?
I had this friend who lived down the road named Charles, and I didn't want Charles to ever meet Frankie. Frankie cursed too much, and I didn't want to be considered guilty by association. Charles's family went to church, we didn't, and I was already on edge about lying to my friend about where we went on Sunday mornings—I made up a place in downtown Norfolk, a church where no one else in my neighborhood or school would go. Again, I was eight, and Frankie sixteen. I said, “We start school here like the first week of August. I'm going into third grade.”

Frankie pulled on his cigarette and flicked the butt into the pond. “Fish like fucking cigarettes. They dig cigarettes. One time I was fishing down at St. Augustine and I put a cigarette butt on my hook. You know what I caught? A goddamn crab. I took that thing home and my mom boiled it up for supper. We had boiled crab and French fries for supper. I didn't tell her that I caught the thing with a cigarette, which happened to be a non-filter Camel, what I normally smoke when I'm home.”

Maybe his littering inadvertently turned me into majoring in Environmental Studies, which got me the job at the Department of Health and Environmental Control down in South Carolina, which gave me enough time to stand around while well water got tested to think about my mother and father's strange relationship.

I said, “Really?”

He said, “Ask your mom if she'll take us down to the beach.”

I had always had two single beds in my room, for some reason. What only child had two beds? Sometimes I slept in one, sometimes the other. My mother urged me to so she wouldn't have to wash the linens but every other week. In retrospect, it's not all that bad of an idea. Maybe my parents planned on having a second child. If they had a third, maybe we could have bunk beds, plus a single cot, I don't know. I imagine the two beds came as a set, and that particular set was the only thing on sale at whatever store they found them. My father—again, gone for at least half the year—had this thing about not getting ripped off. At Christmas time he wouldn't string lights out on our gutters until the week before the twenty-fifth, because he didn't want to give the electric company extra money. On top of that, he made me help him out in the front yard, in the cold, one of us hunched down by the outlet and the other standing at the end of the driveway. We lived on a curve. He left the Christmas lights unplugged until, say, I saw a car approaching. I'd yell out, “Now!” and he'd stick the business end of the extension cord in, lighting us up. When a car's tail lights disappeared around the bend, I'd say, “Okay!” and he'd unplug the things again. Or we'd switch positions, and he'd use nautical terms like “fore” and “aft,” which made no sense, instead of “now” and “okay.”

When my father got back on his ships, my mother kept just about every light on in the house. She said it would keep burglars and rapists away. But she always went and opened the drapes wide open, for some reason, which seemed to work against anyone trying to dissuade all drifters passing through Chuckatuck.

“I don't think there are any fish in this goddamn pond,” Frankie said about five minutes after throwing our hooks in. “I know one thing: These sons-of-bitches don't know the bait they're supposed to bite. Down in Florida, the fish will go for anything. Fatback. Crickets. Bread balls. Bacon. Baloney. Hell, I've caught more fish down in Florida using a bare hook than I have here using y'all's nasty-tasting worms. Cigarette butts, like I've said before.”

It would take about five more years before I would learn to say to people like Frankie, “Who invited you here in the first place? Go on back home and go fishing with your stupid hoop cheese.”

“I guess you're cool enough to know about this,” he said, putting down his rod. Frankie walked over to some brush twenty feet from the lake's edge, and uncovered a plastic bag. In the bag he had a
Playboy
magazine that hadn't survived humidity very well. The pages had fanned out somewhat, making it look thicker than a dictionary. “I didn't want your mom finding this in our bedroom, so I snuck out one night and hid it out here.” He opened the pages and showed me a fold-out and the parts of a woman I'd never seen before. Well, he showed me pages that
once held
photographs of women's parts I'd never seen before. Frankie placed the magazine down, stood up, pulled out his wallet, and said, “I tore out their nipples and keep them in here. Watch this.” He took a piece of glossy paper, the size of a quarter, and put it on his hook. “Down in Florida, all the fish are attracted to pictures of girls' nipples. Especially snapper.”

I said, “Goddamn.”

He said, “Don't you go tell your mommy about this.”

I said, “Goddamn.”

“In starts and fits come farts and shits,” Frankie said for no reason I could figure. He laughed. He cast his hook, caught nothing, and deemed my hometown's fish blind.

I had never wanted a school year to begin again as much as I did between second and third grades. We'd go fishing, catch nothing, then return home. Frankie and I would stop at Marvin's Texaco on the way back, always, and sit around. Or my father, Frankie, and Marvin sat around. I usually found myself attracted to the service bay, which was a giant hole in the ground with a metal ladder attached to its wall. It was my job to go down there, spread plain old sand on the oil spills, then sweep it up. I have never understood acoustics, but somehow everyone's voices upstairs resonated down to me. I guess Marvin and my father thought Frankie old enough to hear dirty jokes, and look at those racy calendars, and so on. For most of that particular summer, those three guys talked about neighborhood cats.

We'd finally walk home, my father drinking a can of Schlitz along the way, and then sit down to eat Hungarian goulash, which seemed to be my mother's specialty. Or we cooked hot dogs outside in a fire pit. Sometimes we went out in the back yard and threw a baseball around. Looking back, I felt pretty sure that Frankie threw the ball way over my father's head on purpose, and while my father trotted off to retrieve the thing Frankie would wander over to me and say, “Have you asked your mom about the beach yet?”