I'
m another of those quiet ones that nobody ever notices.
For some that means nothing but fear and harassment, being bullied and ostracized through school and beyond.
They go to the grave gratefully, hollowed out and less than a shadow.
But for others it's a gift that allows them to glide into the right place at the perfect time, to surround themselves with protection and slip away, when necessary, without notice.
I was a little of both, and it worked against my nerves on certain nights, driving the others around.
Dan and Betty were squeezed into the front seat of my '62 Chevy and Jude and Wes were laid out and lying easy in the back.
The stink of their cigarettes would never get out of my cushions.
They were all drinking from beer cans in foam holders, splashing my seat covers.
Nobody had offered me one because they knew I didn't drink, but it would've been nice if somebody had been thoughtful enough to pick up a six-pack of ginger ale and toss it into the cooler too.
I didn't mind much.
I didn't mind anything much, really.
I'd made an ally out of indifference and it came in handy.
We were heading out on Ocean Parkway past the public beaches and the nightclubs on the water.
Every now and again we'd hit a pocket of heavy traffic made up of BMWs, Caddies, and Ferraris, the beautiful people all congregating at some action hot spot where they'd wait on line hoping to be recognized by one another.
Finally the cars and lights faded until we were the only thing moving out towards the point.
Betty sat in the middle, between me and Dan, and occasionally her fingernails would rest against my leg.
They were painted blue with little gold designs of them, just pointed enough to cause my nerves to tingle through my jeans whenever we hit a bump in the road.
Dan's window was open a crack and the wind blew her blonde hair up against my neck.
She was ultra-cute in that non-intimidating way, and when she angled her chin towards me and I saw the side of her face, my chest would hitch to the left.
Then my pulse would settle again and we were back where we belonged.
As always, Wes had already drank too much and it was hitting him pretty hard.
He was mean to begin with and got even uglier with every can he consumed.
He'd flunked out of his junior year in college and his parents wouldn't let him back in the house.
He'd been a low-level star on our high school football team, and he'd had just enough of a chance to make it if he'd applied himself.
He didn't.
He was cut from the college team early on and had never fully recovered from it.
I'd had to help him find an apartment and a fair paying job, hunt up a decent car for him and lend him enough money for a down payment and his first month's rent.
It was one of the few times he'd looked at me with real respect.
I'd been on my own since I was seventeen.
For all my efforts, Wes was still coming apart.
He couldn't handle the loss of his moderate dream, even though he'd done nothing to maintain it.
I could see the fibers of his being snapping one after the other, and sometimes I wondered how many he had left before he completely unraveled.
Wes let out a belch that made all of us gag.
"Do you ever get so fed up that you've just got to stab some son of a bitch four or five times in the chest just so you can eat your breakfast in peace?"
Dan gave a bark of laughter because it sounded funny, actually, to hear that sort of shit while cruising down the route with the
sawgrass
tilting towards the fender.
Dan had stabbed a kid in the leg with a protractor once, back in the tenth grade, and he'd been forced into therapy for a couple of years.
It was either that or
juvie
time.
It hadn't helped.
I looked up into the rear view and tried to lock eyes with Wes, but Jude was on top of him, snuggling or sleeping, with all her reams of red hair splayed out across his body.
She was frightened of him but she loved to be kept on the edge, terrified and bruised, so it worked out just fine.
"I think I know what you mean," Dan told him.
"Yeah.
You're just trying to get to work and you've got five minutes to spare and there's this hole in your stomach.
No way to make it to lunch without sucking down some of that cheap quick crap they got in those Styrofoam trays, with the little plastic forks always breaking so you.
Not enough syrup in those little packs they give you.
Some old blue-haired biddies squawking about senior discounts, and a couple of punks talking tough shit in the corner.
You're sitting there trying to eat a Mega-
egga
-bun and hash browns, and then that, you know, that feeling—"
"It's a swirl of blackness," Wes said, "that sort of starts spinning at the back of your brain.
The pain begins but it doesn't mean anything at first, it's just the same sort of twinge you've had to deal with for years."
"It is?" Betty asked, smiling.
"Maybe it's time for that
orthoscopic
surgery, let them look around in there, check the cartilage out."
She thought he was talking about his knee again.
He blamed his failed football career on a knee injury that didn't exist and she liked prodding him for it.
Wes didn't take offense, but he crawled deeper inside his own anger.
It made him warmer in there, closer to his fires, and he began to sweat.
This was still only a joke to them, just the alcohol talking, but I knew that thrum in his voice.
I'd heard it many times before in my father.
Jude licked the threads of sweat off Wes' neck.
His molars clicked together.
"Sometimes you wonder what the hell you would do if—"
"Yeah
yeaah
," Dan urged, with a sort of praise the lord rhythm going now. "Uh huh."
"—if your head ever cleared and all the noise receded enough—"
"Yeah, uh huh …"
"—for the world to show up in colors—"
"Uh huh,
yeahh
…"
Dan was chuckling, pissed off about goddamn plastic forks.
"—instead of—of—"
Sure,
I thought.
Wes let the sentence die off and nobody picked it up.
I knew the next words should've been something like…
instead of through the bloody tint of rage
.
Ineffectual drama.
The banal and commonplace ache of ordinary decay.
It had been my father's pain as well.
He'd begun several business ventures with the glitter of gold in his eyes, and as each one tumbled down around him he took further solace in the bottle.
It had been his own father's story as well, and for all I knew the narrative went back fifty generations of quiet men.
He walked through the house with whiskey on his breath, staring into reflective surfaces but hardly ever the mirror.
It wasn't his defeats and bankruptcy that killed him at fifty, but the knowledge that despite his best efforts he'd sat back in his lounge chair to become nothing more than a cliché.
Jude muttered to Wes and he mumbled back, and soon they drew the blanket over themselves and began to play around clumsily.
She squealed and squeaked, and his teeth kept grinding.
Dan lit a cigarette and rolled his window down further, shaking his head and lost in the strained mood that now filled the car.
I snapped on the radio and let the soft melody of Sam Cooke's start to raise my hackles and take me out of myself.
Betty snapped it off and said, "Christ, no more oldies, all right?
There's nothing but oldies stations out this far.
Toss a tape in."
I didn't bother because all my cassettes were oldies too.
She took a hit off the cigarette and let the smoke roll out slowly between her lips, blowing it down across my lap.
The three of us stared ahead through the windshield as though fate would lunge up ahead and show us something besides sand and rock and saltwater weeds.
More or less, this had developed into a weekend ritual, and I didn't see it coming to an end any time soon.
Wes would murmur his failures and frustrations in the back of my car.
Jude remained defined by his disappointments, without an identity of her own.
She was only an extension of him and that black swirl he'd mentioned.
It didn't bother her much either.
She hardly ever spoke or voiced an opinion.
Certainly not one that went counter to Wes.
Betty and Dan were different.
You could see it in everything they did, even now.
He deferred to her in all instances, and it bothered the hell out of her that he was so soft, but not enough to end their relationship.
She wanted a sap but was revolted by his sappiness.
She occasionally looked at the side of my face.
Temptation is nothing more than ability to fantasize.
Betty had an imagination.
I'd been biding my time, in a way, since the seventh grade, hoping she'd eventually become aware of me.
Perhaps it would happen.
I pulled up to the point and everyone poured out of the Chevy.
Jude unfurled from beneath the blanket and I saw that her lip was bleeding badly.
It made sense.
Wes didn't need soft words and tenderness, he wanted something to kill.
Dan and I carried the cooler down to the rocky beach beneath the abandoned lighthouse.
No one used the old shipping lanes anymore and the shore had eroded so severely that a commission on safety finally closed the lighthouse.
Another twenty feet of land despoliation and the whole thing would slide into the sea.
The night had a chill to it but not the kind that slices you to the bone.
Moonlight crashed down on us, illuminating the point until it was nearly as bright as morning.
Betty kept closer to me than usual and Dan noticed.
I wondered if he'd release some of his hurt and hate on me, come launch himself in my direction with those ham hock fists clutching at my throat.
He used to carry a knife, just like Wes, but I wasn't sure if he did anymore.
Maybe he wanted to stab somebody in the heart five times too.
Maybe he thought I'd bothered him too much while he tried swallowing down his Mega-
egga
-bun.
The little insanities eventually added up.
Jude's mouth wouldn't stop bleeding.
She'd gone through three tissues already, balling the bloody ones at her feet.
She sneered and the red ran over her chin.
I had a first aid kit in the trunk that contained a bottle of hydrogen peroxide and a septic pencil.
I got it and kneeled in front of Jude, cleaned her wound and then used the pencil on her.
It had been my father's.
He'd never quite learned how to go from shaving with a straight razor to a safety razor and he used to tear his face up all the time.
She seethed and spit.
"God damn it, that thing hurts!"
But it did the trick and stemmed the flow of blood.
Two of Wes' teeth marks could be seen clearly, including the jagged edge of his broken left canine.
With forensics they would've nailed him in five minutes.
"Ah, shit, it still burns.
When's it gonna stop?"
"Just be glad he helped you," Betty told her.
"I am, really."
Yet she didn't say thank you.
That was all right, I didn't mind.
Betty had given me the nod and that's all that mattered, for the moment.
We all had our stations.
Jude was a chew toy.