Between Wrecks Page 8

  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 thi
s,” 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?”

  Almost every night I pretended to be tired and went to my single bed and stared at the ceiling until Frankie came in. I feigned sleep, and he said things to me like, “You want to see the hair on my balls?” or “Wake up and look at my extra finger.” If I ever need to go to a psychiatrist today, I can pretty much direct him or her back to those days in my life to prove why it’s important that I be untrusting and paranoid.

  Frankie would get in the bed, I would keep my eyes shut tight, and then it would sound like a small fan rotated against his sheets. I was eight years old, in 1968, understand. No one in Chuckatuck had ever clued me in to the nuances of masturbation. I only peeped my eyes open once, that I remember, when Frankie kind of groaned out “Rosalind” one night and I thought my mom was in the room.

  Maybe my on-again, off-again depression stems from poor Frankie’s story. Of course I said to him that summer, “What does your father do?” and “Where does your father live?” and so on, even though my parents had told me not to ask about him. They said he’d died before Frankie could even know who the guy was. But it took about one-too-many times of Frankie saying, “The reason why we never catch fish is because they see your ugly face, Pisspants,” before I reeled in my line and said, “So did your dad take one look at you and then run away?”

  “My father died in Korea. He died on the very last day of the Korean War,” Frankie said. “That’s why you never see me eating with chopsticks.”

  I left it at that. I didn’t know much, but I understood that a father dying in a war was not a good thing to ask about. And because I didn’t remember our life in Florida, I thought that maybe people down there perhaps ate with chopsticks often. Maybe they used chopsticks to pick apart all the hammerhead sharks they’d caught on such things as string, grass blades, and magnolia blossoms.

  I felt so bad about asking—and now I understand that Frankie was smart enough to use this opportunity to work on my guilt—that I said, “I’ll find a way to get Mom to take us to Virginia Beach.”

  To be honest, I never wanted to admit to Frankie that my mother didn’t know how to drive. I’m sure there were a number of mothers in America back in the sixties who never learned. At the time I never thought about how perhaps it wasn’t such a smart idea to live way out in the country with a child alone, not knowing how to drive, while one’s husband spent most of his life at sea.

  “I’m beginning to wonder if I fucking packed my bathing suit for nothing,” Frankie said. He slapped my back a few times, which kind of hurt. “You might not be all that bad, little bastard.”

  So we went home, and I said, “Mom, why can’t we drive to the beach? Frankie can drive. We don’t have to tell Dad about it. He won’t know.”

  I thought I was going to get some long-winded explanation as to why we weren’t allowed out of the town limits. This occurred while Frankie and my father nailed a two-by-four across two pine trees in the back yard, ten feet up, so they could kick field goals. I expected my mother to say, “We can’t afford the gas,” or “There are hitchhikers out on the back roads waiting for people like us,” or “You’ll get sunburned, and then the next thing you know you’re flaking skin everywhere and I’ll have to change your sheets more often.”

  She said, “Okay. Just don’t tell your father. Seeing as he doesn’t ever come home for lunch, there’s no way he’ll ever know.”

  Why didn’t he come home for lunch? I wondered years later. Why did he even work for his cousin Marvin, seeing as merchant seamen made some money, and my father bragged about how he usually doubled his salary in poker games aboard the ship.

  That particular night we ate Hungarian goulash, and sat together without saying much. We watched Gunsmoke, as I recall. It was the one where Festus explained why he never learned how to read, and he told a long-winded story about how a guy named Mose in the Bible wanted to get across a river to the other side, which ended up being about Moses and the Red Sea. During a commercial my father said, “Hey, Jerry. Amy Vanderbilt’s parents gave her a carton of expensive, embossed stationery for her birthday. Who’s the first person she wrote and why?”

  I thought for a while—I thought perhaps this had something to do with Festus not being able to read—and then I blurted out, “A thank-you note to her parents, because she was into etiquette and all that stuff,” after the commercial had ended and the program restarted.

  My father said, “It took you long enough. Thanks for making I miss what the Marshall just said.” See about that passive-aggressive thing?

  Frankie said, “What a bitch.”

  “I got another way to kill someone,” Frankie said while we drove down to Virginia Beach. I sat in the back seat. We had to drive ten miles in the opposite direction so as not to pass Marvin’s Texaco. My mother sat on the front bench seat in the spot where she sat when my father drove, which, in retrospect, might’ve been a little too close to the middle. She sat so close to Frankie that my friend Charles and I could’ve also sat in the front seat, probably without touching elbows. With all that bragging Frankie did, he wasn’t much of a driver. I kind of expected him to hit eighty miles an hour, but he pretty much drove about forty, jerking the steering wheel left and right an inch or two every second. The only time he spoke—my mother gave directions—was when he said he was used to driving a manual four-speed. He said that his mother had a Fairlane, but he’d be getting a Mustang once he got back to Jacksonville, and found a job, et cetera.

  “I got another way,” Frankie said. “I’ll tell it later.”

  I looked over at the space beside me. We’d brought a picnic lunch of ham sandwiches, and my pair of fins and mask and snorkel. We
brought towels, and suntan lotion that smelled like coconut, and one of those cheap Styrofoam ice chests filled with ginger ale, Coca-Cola in six-and-a-half-ounce bottles, and six cans of Schlitz my mom more or less stole from my father’s cache out in the garage.

  When I tell this entire story—I’ve probably told it to my wife a dozen times, a couple of my coworkers once or twice, and my mother’s second husband once—every one of them says, “I see what’s coming. Frankie gets drunk and y’all have a bad wreck on the way back home.”

  And I always hold my hand up and say, “Nope.”

  I don’t know if Freud or Darwin ever wrote about human beings who’re drawn back to the water, but I seem to have been one of those people. Whereas most animals, complying to evolutionary urges, want to be on land, I always wanted to go deeper into the water. We got to the beach, and I jumped out of the car without even asking if anyone needed or wanted help with the ice chest. I ran barefoot down the hot, hot sand, got my feet into the tide, and sat down on wet sand in order to get my flippers on. I wet the mask’s rubbery gasket for a better grip, put it on, and shoved the snorkel in my mouth. I took in a deep breath and dove in. I paddled my feet better than any amphibian ever invented, and stayed down close to the sand. I would tell people later that I saw starfish and sand dollars, a horseshoe crab or two, and other things.

  I found an old asphalt road that must’ve been covered by one of the hurricanes years back, and barbed-wire fences, and the very tip of a mast that might’ve been from one of the pirates’ ships. I saw the ghosts of drowning victims, schools of jellyfish, scattered gold and silver coins, sea glass that had congregated into SOS formations, globs of oil that may or may not’ve leaked from my father’s tankers, and the skeleton of President Kennedy, though I knew this couldn’t have been true. I mean, I knew that none of it could’ve been true, outside of maybe the mast tip. Maybe I held my breath too long, to the point of hallucination.