Baltimore Stories: Volume Two
Nik Korpon
Smashwords Edition
Copyright 2011 Nik Korpon
Smashwords Edition, License Notes
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Author’s Note
Some of these stories were published long ago (relatively speaking) and some in publications that evaporated into smoke. Some are from very early in my writing, and though I’d approach them differently now, I think it’s important to see progression. I like them all and wanted to give them a chance to be seen, to be read. None have explicit connections to Old Ghosts, but feel like they should. There’s also an excerpt of the upcoming novella that spawned all of these giveaways.
Thank you to all of the editors for believing in them (or letting me dupe them into believing.) Thank you to you, for reading this collection.
‘Cobwebs and Dead Skin’ is an excerpt of the novella By the Nails of the Warpriest (OW Press, September 2011) and was originally published in Dirty Noir.
‘The Reindeer Incident’ originally published on Do Some Damage.
‘List #2’ originally published in Everyday Genius.
‘The Mourning is the Dawn of our Love’ originally published in Gold Dust, Issue #14.
‘Pugs’ originally published in Colored Chalk, Issue #5.
Stories
Cobwebs and Dead Skin
The Reindeer Incident
List #2
Currents
Pugs
Cobwebs and Dead Skin
When the act of remembering becomes illegal, the artifacts that remain tell the stories our unconscious wants to submerge.
Motes of dust float in the manufactured light. Muted explosions from outside, bombs maybe. I creep along the edge of his tenement hallway. Most people walk down the center and, over time, work some of the nails loose. The easiest way to avoid being caught while stealing someone’s past is to pretend like you don’t have one. Imagine you’re not human and eventually you won’t need to imagine anymore.
Inside his apartment, I take small, soft steps. Clothing scattered around the room, cut to rags and stained with soot water. A mattress and sheet pocked with holes in the corner. Turned sideways in the middle, is a spool that used to house industrial wire, a plate with a few pieces of silverware on top. The wilting dandelion perched in a can is so sad I can feel my heartbeat slow. Two slivers of coal clack together in my pocket. The old man snores in rhythmic waves. This’ll be an easy job.
My fingers hover over faded pictures and yellowed notes stuck to the wall. The man snorts himself half-awake, mutters, then rolls over and resumes snoring. His hand nudges a green-and-white striped mug. I inhale, bite my bottom lip. Hanging alongside a newspaper clipping of two children is a piece of brittle paper, a funeral card, looks like. I remove the photograph tacked beneath it.
A log cabin. Two men stand on either side of the doorway. The photo paper is old, a style I don’t see except in antiquarian bookstores. The men are smiling the way fathers and sons do. My mouth goes dry, a fist in the back of my throat. I blink my eyes a couple times. Their arms rest on a symbol nearly two feet wide in the center of the door, patterned with familiar lines. Some type of Nordic writing along the border, probably telling who’s in the picture, when and where. I wipe dust from their faces, look at the funeral card, hold the two together and feel a phantom blade in my gut when I recognize the boy as one of my old soldiers. James was his name. The old man sleeping behind me is a shriveled, sadder version of James.
I pull a slip of paper from my pocket to check the address, check it again, make sure I’m in the right place. This is deliberate, it’s got to be him fucking with me. The Boss, that motherfucker will answer for this. I take a long breath then resign myself to the job.
Kneeling next to his bed, I lay out my kit on the night-table. Two cloth squares and one pipette of iodine. A needle, an empty vial, a round bandage. And the two slivers of coal.
His hair is thin and the temple is easy to find. A drop of iodine on the tip, the needle slides in without a bite. A little probing till I find the memory cortex. His eyelids flutter like there’s a flurry of ashen moths trying to beat their way out. Fingers claw and twitch. A wire oscillating fan pushes hot air around the room. Slowly, the vial attached to the end of the needle fills with milky liquid. I shift him onto his side to help it flow faster.
Outside the window, The City throbs faint crimson. If a red sky at night is a sailor’s delight, but the red is the flames of the Barrio that never stopped burning and we haven’t seen direct sun in years, then what the fuck do sailors know? This heat is tactile: instead of rain, we get condensation, a languid humidity that chokes the air. Each day we’re convinced it’s the day the smog will break, the day real light will cut through. Each night, we go to bed thinking tomorrow. Tomorrow will be the day.
As the vial passes the 10ml mark, his twitches become more violent and it takes both of my knees to hold him still. I press my thumb against his carotid artery until he falls limp. Memories seep from his temple, drip by drip. Something reminiscent of church bells rings out, but it might only be shots from home-modified weapons. In the distance, in the crack between a factory and its smoke stack, I can see the dull glimmer of Regent Pond, the pagoda next to it where the first congregations of The Struggle against The Party gathered.
‘Who the hell are you?’
I spin around, almost pulling the needle from the old man’s skull. A silhouette in the doorway, clutching a bag in his arm.
‘Get away from him.’ He has the kind of voice that accompanies a face painted with scars. There’s no wavering in it, but the timbre is higher than his bulk would suggest. He takes a step forward. ‘Get that out of him. Now.’
‘Just calm down.’ I realize how obnoxious that sounds. I know a man will kill for family without a second blink. Hand behind my back, I keep the vial level and the memories draining. It feels heavy, almost full. ‘There’s no problem here. Just be calm.’
The bag falls to the floor, spilling a survivalist cornucopia: two oranges, a chunk of bread, half a bottle filled with dirty brown liquor and a sprinkling of jagged metal shards. He takes two quick steps forward, a gash where his left cheek used to be, and fuck me if the genetics in this family aren’t strong: This man is no one if he’s not James’ father, the one pushed James to join The Struggle. I nudge the old man’s head back so the needle won’t snap and let my jaw go slack as the father’s fist kisses my mouth. It’s been some years since I felt something like that, not since the dying days of war, and the fucker might have a glove full of iron rivets. I stagger along the wall to keep the scuffle away from the bed. Rub the white dots from my eyes, and I look up just as he pulls something from his waistband. A flare gun, probably retrofitted.
The trigger clicks and I flinch.
Nothing.
He smacks the handle and I duck then he fires again and a hundred tiny metal bits speckle the wall behind me. He charges, wielding something small in his left hand. I step to the side, sweep his leg and use his own mass to send his shoulder through the wall. Before I can inhale, I find myself with a knee on his throat, ready to turn his weapon against him. The handle of a garden spade, sharpened to a blunt spike and reinforced with rusted metal.
His face is the picture of repentance. Eyes beg for mercy. Nostalgia sloshes around me: a man’s life, adapted weaponry, violence in the air. It’d be so easy to kill him now, it wouldn’t even be sneezing, but my face must project abject horror because the father scrapes a wooden comb across my eyes. I roll away but he’s on me before I can sit, hands wrapped around my neck. His finger placement is wrong, though, and I’m able to swallow, to catch my breath. To say, ‘Be calm,’ before I clap my palms against his ears. He rears back and I pounce, cinching the crook of my elbow against his windpipe.
With one twitch, I could sever his spinal column. With one hard squeeze, I could pop his eyeballs from his skull. With one well-executed yank using the right pressure point, I could remove his skull.
Five seconds and he’s docile as a baby bird. I set a pillow under his head then lower him to the floor, my fragile oath sworn at the end of The Struggle still intact. He’s not on The Boss’ list, not in the usual demographic I hunt either, but I’m sure there’s some sick fucker who wants to see what this man knows. I use my extra vial, fill it before he wakes.
I shove the father’s memories in my pocket with the funeral card and photograph, place the old man’s in the package for The Boss, then gather my kit and remove every trace of being here. Pulling the slivers of coal from my pocket, I stand between the two men, debating which one to anoint. The old man did nothing to deserve this, but I understand the weight the father carries, sacrificing his son by proxy. I lay the coal on the father’s eyes, whisper be well into the old man’s ear, then slink away. The two lie as quiet as an abandoned catacomb, full of cobwebs and dead skin.
The Reindeer Incident
It really wasn’t supposed to go down like that, hear? It’s just, well, a man can only be pushed so far before he’s bound to spring back. And, brother, I told that fucker that I’d spring, and spring like God’s guiding my hand.
‘And just so you understand where I’m coming from, his daddy’d been trying to beat out the missus and me for years. Probably since, well lemme think, at least since Eisenhower was down there. You’re a young-un, so mind, back then there wasn’t this whole spectacle gaggle of geese there is now. ‘Miracle on 34th Street’ and what-all. Back then, we’d just crack some Bohs and have us some neighborly rivalry.
‘Anyway, somewhere round ’64, ’65, things changed. Can’t remember exactly how it happened, but some money was laid, the stakes was upped, some decorations was tampered with. Huh? Course it was that sonbitch. Look, I ain’t the type of man to lose, but when I lose, I’m a man. I don’t go round no one’s house in the dark of night and stick pins inside the electric socket to blow out someone’s lights. Someone’s ass get turned to fried chicken that way.
‘What? Of course there was retaliation. I won’t strike first, but sure as shit I’ll strike back. Well, I waited till they were out shopping for their little one—the one in question, today, that is—then let myself in the back and gave their candy canes a little extra attention. Big Dick wasn’t none too pleased.
‘From there it just kind of, well, escalated. What do I mean by that? Let’s put it this way, the right kind of fiberglass insulation looks a whole hell of a lot like fake snow. One year you remove most of the screws in the gutter, the next you tarpaper some nails to the roof. A few years later, you’re spraying down the herd of plastic reindeer with acetone and to even the score, you get back on the roof with a can of black paint. You wouldn’t know it if I didn’t tell you, but when you got an illuminated ‘Peace’ over ‘Season’s Greetings,’ just cover up some of them lights, and sure you gotta look at it for a little, but you get one gander and all you see after that is ‘penis,’ five feet tall across your neighbor’s porch.
‘Shit, why’d you think we call ’em Big Dick and Little Dick when their name is George and Junior. What, about Little Dick? Yeah, I’m getting to it. See, you need to understand the basics of the situation so you understand the severity of response.
‘It was all in good fun, or close enough. And we had our rules. We never touched any of the Nativity, being good Christians and all, and we understood when something was over the line.
‘Anyway, after the fiberglass incident, things cooled out for a while. We were both getting on in years and thought an unspoken truce—’cause neither of us would concede to the other—would be best for our families. So we quieted down.
‘Till this year, that is.
‘I first caught Little Dick messing around with my decorations two winters ago. Childish stuff, you know, but there was a certain amount of fecal matter that pushed it from juvenile to what-the-fuck. I got Big Dick on the phone and read him the act. Next Christmas comes round, same shit—literally and figuratively—but worse. I ring up Big Dick again, threaten him this time. Little one’s creating a biological hazard, I tell him, breaking our cease-fire.
‘That? Nah, none of that was him. He’s a fucking sociopath, but that’s from those hoodrats been coming round here as of late. I mean, who thinks that KISS makeup looks good on our Lord and Savior? Sure, I got my dick wet to them a few times. Who the hell hasn’t. But chopping off the Blessed Virgin’s head and putting it in the cradle with baby Jesus? That’s just something I can’t step to.
‘Now, you might be one to say, “Hell, you monkeyed with their reindeer. How can you get mad about yours?” And you wouldn’t be totally wrong, but when I melted Rudolph and his friends, they was just those pieces of shit you bought from Caldor. You know how long I had to wait in line for mine? Animatronic reindeer ain’t cheap neither, specially when they’re brand god-damn new this year. That Japanese poly-whatever it is feels like real fur, and they got some supercomputer in their brain-pan so they make random movement, like real reindeer. These sons of bitches are top of the line.
‘So you understand why, when I walk out of the house this morning and see Little Dick balls deep in my reindeer’s butthole, you see why my first thought is grab my gun and tag the son of a bitch. Hell, way I see it, boy’s lucky I aimed for his leg. It all goes back to what I was saying about the principality of the whole situation, officer, about knowing what’s what. Some things should just be understood.
‘You can’t fuck a man’s reindeer and not expect to get shot.’
List #2
Ten-penny needle.
Fourteen-gauge fishing line.
Skin that stretches like rose-colored silk.
A metal skull, thunking against my kitchen table.
Her other cheek.
Articulated joints that moan and creak.
The one in her wrist that catches and almost tears through.
A small styrofoam cooler filled with dry ice and organs.
Two fists of incense sticks.
Fringed edges of her gangly legs, sheared away by a jersey wall.
A soldering iron with a twist of smoke.
A clutch of red, yellow and green wire.
Six fuses of varying colors.
A pink and white stargazer lily, dried and spritzed with lacquer, left over from her mother’s.
Two cases of paper towels.
Rolls of masking tape, a complementary cream to her skin.
Eight bulbs from an old thread of our Christmas lights.
Half a bat of fiberglass-free insulation, also left over from her mother’s.
A case of WD-40.
Two-hundred twenty volts to help her stand.
A wobbling gait that could be from her soccer injuries.
A shuffled step that could be from too much studying.
A crookedly-held elbow that could be from her grandmother.
A splash of freckles that could be sprayed oil or too much sun.
A cool whisper that could be pneumatics.
A slight wink that could be seizing.
A ______ ___ _____ that could be her mother’s.
A hole in the face that could be recognition.
A slash in the skin that could be a smile.
A thin, brittle hope that it could work this time.
The Mourning is the Dawn of Our Love
I look at the life monitor.
Beep.
Beep.
Beep.
Beep.
Spike. Valley.
Spike. Valley.
I turn my head back towards my grandpa, holding my grandma’s hand in his, raising it to his mouth, whispering softly into it. Maybe he thinks the vibrations of his words and lips will send a tremor to her nerve sensors, send electro-chemical signals to her brain, tell her I love you, Madeline. Keep fighting baby. Keep fighting. Don’t give up Madeline. Stay with me honey. Please don’t leave me. Please don’t leave me.
My eyes trace from his lips up her wrinkled arm, punctured with IV tubes, a canal map of veins running the full length. From her arm up to the divot at the base of her neck where her clavicles meet, the tip of her surgical iceberg sticking out in a half-inch scar, remnants of an earlier heart operation. Up to her face, much paler than it had been two days before when we played canasta at her kitchen table.
A light clamped to the shelf over her head, the only illumination in the sterile room. It drapes a milky pall over her face, exaggerates the shadows cast over her sunken cheekbones and makes canyons of valleys. The shadows quiver as her lips part: exhale, inhale, exhale, cough, inhale, choke, inhale, exhale.
The official diagnosis was a strand of medical jargon that sounded Russian; fifty-three letters long, all consonants but for four vowels and a hyphen. Grandpa translated it for me—she’d suffered her third stroke, though none had been this severe, and was now searching for her life in the uncharted abyss of a coma.
He called me yesterday morning, wailing, trying to tell me between gasps that I needed come to St. Edward’s because something was wrong with Grandma. Three hours, five traffic jams and two near misses later I was perched on a burlap-upholstered chair in her hospital room amidst a carnival of beeping monitors and LCD screens. The wheeze of her respirator, a gentle undercurrent that will drown me if I listen.
The television in my apartment is still on. My Playstation still paused.
My knees burn from lack of use. My body hasn’t left the chair for two days except to go to the bathroom, help him to the bathroom and get us food. The entire world has shriveled into the palm of our hands, resting on the back of hers.
‘You okay Grandpa? Need something to drink or anything?’
He doesn’t respond, only moves his lips and pulls the rosary one prayer further in their hands. I lean back and close my eyes. Twenty minutes later, his voice startles me upright.
‘June 27th, 1932.’
I wait for him to continue. He doesn’t.
‘June 27th, 1932, huh, Grandpa,’ I say, hoping to elicit an explanation. He moves his lips and pulls their prayers.
I laugh a little. He started this two years ago. Initially, we thought he was talking to himself. Gram and I used to joke with him, told him he was getting senile. But now I think he’s telling stories in his head and doesn’t realize words are leaving his mouth.
‘At the general store on Calvary Street,’ and he stops again.
‘Wow, that’s amazing Grandpa,’ rolling my eyes a bit. It’s been a rough two days for him, so I have to give him a bit of leeway.
I look at the life monitor.
Beep.
Beep.
Beep.
Spike. Valley.
Spike. Valley.
He turns to look at me, head cocked, and finally answers. ‘That’s the first time I ever saw your Gram.’
‘Oh,’ dribbles from my mouth.
Four long, self-conscious breaths of trying to think of anything—not even anything poignant, just anything—to say and he saves me from my embarrassment. He passes her hand to his other, and walks me to 1932. Past the cramped aisles of a diminutive general store on Calvary Street, where a tall Georgia Peach with chestnut curls serendipitously knocked him over as he was stocking soda in a cooler. Past the tree where they’d play canasta and whistle with sweetgrass between their thumbs until the summer breeze turned cool on the napes of their neck. Past the pond, where he’d lead her, blindfolded, and read aloud her favorite excerpts of The Great Gatsby, each character with a different demeanor, and hide until her drunken father had passed out.
*
He pauses for a minute, looking down at Gram, and I can see his eyes glass over. I start to get him tissues, but he waves a dismissive hand and runs his cardigan sleeve across his eyes.
I look at the life monitor.
Beep.
Beep.
Spike. Valley.
After he composes himself, I ask if she came in to see him.
‘Nah, she didn’t know me from Adam. Just wanted some pop. I told her later that she’d come in to meet me but hadn’t realized it at the time.’ He tries to chuckle, but the weight of it is too much and it collapses on itself.
We sit in silence, save for the beep of the monitor and soft wheeze of the respirator. In the two days since we’ve been at the hospital, we haven’t said much to each other. But it’d never seemed awkward, not until now. All of the scenes and questions scroll through my head like animated newspaper headlines on the side of a building. The obvious ones: how will he handle all of this, where will he live, how long will this last, will we lose our Gram? Then the ones that tear like fish hooks through my chest, the ones I might never have a chance to find answers to: if he likes the crust on pizzas, whether he puts water next to his bed at night, what time his favorite TV shows are on. The things that he’s so accustomed to. The things I don’t know.
‘She certainly was a great lady,’ I hear my discomfort say. I think he knows that I didn’t say it, and doesn’t acknowledge the comment. I dig the rubber tip of my right Converse into the arch of my left, stare at the floor as if I was staring through it and watch my subconscious arrange the flecks on the tiles into different shapes that begin to look like music notes mimicking the score of the last two days. Spikes and valleys. Syringes and antiseptic. Reheated meatloaf and catheters.
I should say something. I should stand on my chair, speak in an authoritative pre-Technicolor tone and recite passages worthy of Orson Welles, passages about how Death is a celebration of life and we need to remember what a great woman She was and that we should live out our lives joyously to keep Her spirit alive. But the truth is I just want to feel my Gram. I want to feel her wool sweater against the side of my face as I sleep head-in-lap on her couch and she watches Bob Vila. I want to feel the slippery smoothness of her cow-print dishes as she washes and I dry, to feel her warm, water-swollen hands on my cheek as she play-slaps me for a smart-ass comment, her wrinkled neck in the crook of my arm as I—very gingerly—pretend she’s stuck in my sleeper hold.
I look at the life monitor.
Beep.
Spike. Valley.
I feel my arm hair stand at attention.
I feel my eyes match my Pop’s.
I can’t handle this.
*
A cough from down a long stone hallway, cold and damp and weaving from World War II Georgia to a hospital ward in Baltimore, ricochets to my ears and I jolt up in my seat. Blinking the nap from my eyes, I see my Pop, spittle, tears and spent prayers mixing at the corners of his mouth.
I take a deep, deep, trying-to-process-everything breath. Hand to my mouth, I bite my index finger, try to keep my mind focused on at least something. Flecks in the tiles. The steady tone of the LCD screen. Wheezing respirators gone silent.
I stare at my Pop. My eyes follow down his arm to his hand, squeezing hers so hard it turns an unnatural white and shakes flaccid in his. Her chin: bobbing slightly side-to-side, out of syncopation with the rest of her body. From her torso to his face, pressed into her neck. His chin: becoming epileptic, beyond the control of his muscular system. He turns his head to me. Someone shot a tiny BB in the top corner of his façade of decorum, and the spider web cracks slink across it at the rate of comprehension. He looks at me and blinks, shattering the glass over his eye, cascading through the wrinkles in his cheeks. I grind my teeth into my lips.
I look at the life monitor.
Currents
An onshore wind blows over a head-high wave as Jacob sits facing the Atlantic, his elbows wrapped around his knees. The windsock tethered to the post of the 48th Street lifeguard chair can’t hold its grip anymore. Its strings break and it sambas down the beach. A chance gale blows Dumser’s hamburger containers, Candy Kitchen ice cream cups and spoons, purple condom wrappers and sand that stings like hail from northern Ocean City almost to the southern Inlet.
Jacob looks down the beach: 42nd is still breaking nicely; 57th has blown out; and the dredging they did last spring has ruined 35th. He drags his tongue over his wind-burned lips and juts his face to the dimming sky; he can taste hurricane in the air.
He scoots over to his longboard and runs his palm along the side rails, rounded beautifully as her hip, and over the rosewood colored deck. His hand lingers for a minute over ‘The Old Soul’ written in Parkinson’s cursive in front of the fin. He puts his eye to tail-level and follows the mahogany pinstripe, slender as her Hepburn-wrist, which runs from tail to nose and straight into the ocean. Every plane and curve of the board brings back the touch of memory.
Though he hasn’t surfed it in a year and a half, his longboard is the second most valuable thing in the world to him.
One hundred yards out from the beach, the break collapses on itself. Normally, Jacob would be skipping up and down the beach with excitement at a hurricane swell. But now the moths in his gut flap their guilty wings up almost to his Adam’s apple, before he swallows them back to his churning stomach. A picture from Surfer’s Journal washes through his head; a circle of nine surfers on their boards, hands held around the ring, floating up and over the same thirty-foot swell that had drowned another surfer the previous fall. He unwraps the Sticky Bumps and moves the bar with a slight pressure in circles, and practices holding his breath until his lungs catch fire. The wax builds slowly. A few times he scratches his left knuckles hard with his right thumbnail to keep himself focused and not let his mind drift back to her face.
*
Kirsten was already on her second pot of green tea when the arctic burst of outside pushed a dusting of an early blizzard along with Jacob through the door of Grasshopper. She wore the same red and black sweater as yesterday, and hunched over a dilapidated chapbook two chopsticks high, held open by an empty Asian-style black teapot accented with gold filigree. Her hands cupped the handle-less matching mug. Her black pea coat hung damp over the back of her chair. He trickled to the back of the quiet dining room, taking off his wet gloves, and slunk behind her, raising his hands to her bare neck.
‘If you put those ice blocks instead of your lips on my neck, your ass will become well acquainted with my foot,’ she said without looking up, smiling into poetry and paper, her mahogany bob cut nestling her cheeks.
He stopped short, weighed his options, and went with the lips.
‘You are smarter than I give you credit,’ standing and turning to face him with a smile that made his teeth sweat. She put her face into his, then startled back, ‘My god, you’re freezing,’ replacing her face with her mug-warmed hands.
‘Sorry I’m late. The T from Emerson, you know,’ he said as he draped one of his jackets on the chair and sat down.
‘No worries,’ she smiled. ‘There’s more tea coming in a minute.’
He looked down at her chapbook, at the red and black slashes and circles through couplets and words scribbled in margins.
‘How much more do you have? Coming out tonight, right?’ He poured himself a mug of tea, cupping the warmth as his hands changed shades from Arctic to Savannah.
‘All depends. Where is “out,” and how much have you finished of your projects?’ Jacob blew steam from the mug. ‘I will take that as “not very much Kirsten.”’
‘It’ll get done, don’t worry. Let’s go out. Let’s celebrate,’ he said.
‘Celebrate what, exactly? Jacob these are our senior projects. As in, the end. Fin as you and your film-fag friends would say. We don’t graduate in the spring with everyone else, remember? Celebrate after we’ve handed them in. Fuck, we’re celebrating in San Diego in, what, six days? How many more hours do you have to edit?’
Fifteen or fifty dribbled through the hand covering his mouth, pooling in his palm. They sat silent for three sips of strong, clouded tea.
‘Okay fine,’ he blurted, taking her elegant wrists into his palms. ‘We’ll stay in.’
‘No,’ assertively, ‘I will stay in and keep reading. You will go to the film lab and finish your goddamned projects. Don’t make me call your mother,’ she said jokingly, he hoped. ‘Then, after you’re done,’ blood rushed to her ochre speckled cheeks as she tried to conceal a self-conscious smile by dipping her head down to her black mug, ‘we can stay in.’ She looked up at him looking at her. ‘Okay?’
He sucked his lips into his mouth and gave his best interpretation of thought.
‘Alright,’ returning her smile. ‘So are we eating or what?’
She wielded a chopstick like a dagger before he could finish.
*
Jacob finishes the last circle at the tail and looks at the stub of wax barely bigger than half a shot glass, then throws it on top of his bag. A section not waxed well enough catches his eye; slivers of mahogany cut abstracted bobbed hair in the wax. He jumps up, knees cracking, grabs the stub and rubs it onto the board until his finger nails scratch marks in wax, then walks down to where ocean and beach meet to test the water. In the corner of his eye, he sees a flicker that for a blink looks like Kirsten and him playing beach soccer in San Diego, instead of a flock of seagulls chasing food down the beach.
Standing in the soft flow of dead waves, he looks up and down the deserted beach again, watching the tiny blob that is the only other surfer out, sitting in the lineup around 62nd Street, waiting for a wave. Jacob imagines him with a bob cut awkwardly maneuvering a board for the first time, then looks down to his ankles at a group of circling minnows. He slashes his feet at them and walks back to his board.
The wind blows a little harder, making it more difficult to change into his wetsuit while he wraps the towel around his waist and cinches it between his bellybutton and lowest rib. He coerces boardshorts from his bony hips to the sand then begins to pull dry neoprene over seawater-sticky legs.
Two minutes of swearing and struggling and he zips the wetsuit closed, then pulls out a cigarette. A quick fashioning of the towel into a windbreak and Jacob sits, watching. The breeze catches the exhaled smoke as his toes mindlessly dig tiny trenches. He stubs the cherry into the trench, tosses the filter into the small front pocket of his bag then picks up his board and walks back to the water.
The light current ambles over his toes and pushes sand, changing and reforming the topography of the ocean floor bit by bit. He lets his board float alongside him, his palm nestled around the rail, as the part of the skull behind his ears bristles with anxiety, obligation; redemption. The sandbar sixty feet out calms the thrashing ocean to a docile shorebreak, floats his board gently up and down like pelvises on a spring night.
*
The black couch looked infinite enough in the shadows of Jacob’s shoebox apartment to consume both of them. Canary and scarlet washes flickered over Kirsten’s face. His hand traipsed from her smooth hip, over each of her defined ribs like sand ridges, and up to her jawbone, resting where jaw and cheek met.
‘Kirsten Hepburn, what am I going to do with you?’
She exhaled a little laugh. ‘Besides the obvious?’
She eased her way up as he reached his arms behind his head to the desk and searched for the phantom glass of water. Her skin turned a milky pale blue in the streams of mid-Spring moonlight that flowed through his tattered curtains. Her hips swayed in time to the scratchy Coltrane on vinyl seeping from the turntable in the corner. It was the first time he watched her two pallid seashells bob up and down as she walked exposed across his apartment.
‘There’s Brita in the fridge. Don’t drink the tap,’ he said to the ceiling.
‘We live in the same city. Thanks though,’ dryly.
A beach in Mexico he saw in Surfer’s Journal was what she looked like as she was gorgeous in front of the refrigerator; her Pacific shadowed back met at the ribs her pale sand stomach, swathed in fridge-bulb sunlight. The door closed and she was aqueous. She inspected his desk, bending at the waist while fingering pictures. She totally knows how sexy she is, Jacob thought as he bent back his head and took a devouring glance.
‘Who is this?’
‘I don’t know,’ staring at the brown watermark islands from the apartment above. She cocked her head, then hovered six inches over his face a picture of a tan wrinkled man with an ashen beard and a gangly awkward teenager, both with inflatable guitars and posing like Mötley Crüe.
‘Oh, that’s me and Rabbit at the Sunfest Carnival six, seven years ago, something like that.’
‘Rabbit?’ placing the photo next to a binder printed with VM430: Film Production Workshop Coursebook.
‘Yeah. Idunno either, never got a clear answer. He’s one of the oldheads from back home, the guy who taught me how to surf.’
‘Ahh. And…’
‘And me, Rabbit, and his kid Brer doing our Dick Dale photo is the one next to it.’
She put her glass of water on his desk and lay next to the older, but just as gangly, version of the teenager, sliding her right leg from ankle to knee between his.
‘So your friends are “Brer” and “Rabbit”?’ and bit her lip to not snicker.
‘Yeah, well, his name is really Barry, so they called him Bar, which turned to Brer, because of, well, Rabbit, you know.’
‘Ah, so,’ wistfully into the bicep nestled under her head. ‘Did you have any friends within 15 years of you or just Uncle Remus and company?’
‘No, jerk. I had friends my own age with normal names. They were just twerps. The old surfheads took me in and I would’ve rather hung out with them anyway.’
The room fell quiet, save for velvet saxophones and soft breaths, refrigerator humming and vinyl crackling, then a quick harsh noise from the corner when ‘Giant Steps’ scratched to the end. Kirsten sauntered to the record player, tossing over her shoulder, ‘What next?’ which bounced off Jacob’s forehead and landed on the floor as her hips commandeered his attention.
‘Hellooo? What next?’
Startled and a bit self-conscious, he tried to play it off. ‘Sketches of Spain. It’s towards the back of the crate.’
She plopped to the floor and rifled his records, eventually pulling out ‘17 Seconds’ instead and put the needle into The Cure.
‘The other one is the longboard Rabbit gave me the summer before I left for Boston. He said I was a longboard, an old soul. Rabbit was a really spiritual guy in his own weird way.’
‘Sounds like it,’ entwined back into him. ‘I’d like to meet him. Maybe he can teach me how to surf, too.’
‘Yeah, maybe. Probably not. He’s getting pretty old. He was 55 or so when I met him when I was, Idunno, 11? 12? Something like that. We could go to San Diego this winter and stay with Brer if you want. The break is better in the winter. And, it’ll be warmer than surfing with Rabbit in Maryland.’
He could see a glint of moonlight flash on her smile. She rolled in closer to him.
*
The beginnings of hurricane swell float under Jacob, sitting passive on his board. Three pelicans skim over the water a few feet away. Down through the murky Atlantic, he peers at his barely visible feet and angles his legs up, hooking his toes on his board behind him.
This used to be one of his favorite aspects of surfing; feeling the slow rise and fall of waves, looking out as far as he can and scouring the horizon for the hump indicative of a good set, trying to discern which hump will actually form into a wave worth riding.
Sitting, surveying, floating and waiting, with nothing to do but let memory ebb and flow like the underwater currents. Stingrays flap the sides of their bodies in slow motion under the black couch of his old apartment while pelicans rocket straight at the water and dive deep down, the bubbles of their wake flowing up and over like champagne on special occasions, and they surface with a beak-full of green tea. Seagulls squawk impromptu living room poetry readings. A mahi-mahi trains its fish-eye Hi-8 lens on another and chases it around the living room then wrestles it to the ground and harasses it until the other is almost crying from laughter.
The shore looks close enough to reach with seven minutes of hard paddling but he makes his neck twist back toward the ocean, makes his eyes focus on the horizon. His right foot slips from its perch on his board, landing in a pocket of water that is almost an ice cube, and slumps motionless in the middle of the current, breathlessly whimpering.
*
Jacob’s pocket vibrated as he walked past three shoulder-high mounds of grey gravel-flecked snow like pedestrian guardrails on Tremont Street. The blizzard had dumped more than four feet of snow on the city in two days, and the removal crews were still slugging it out in a prizefight with Old Man Winter. Boston was beginning to resuscitate itself through short steps over the icy patchwork sidewalk. He pulled his phone out with a gloved hand and it took three rings to hit the answer button.
‘I’m out!’ Kirsten’s voice screamed from his phone.
Jacob hadn’t seen her when she was fully conscious since they met at Grasshopper four days ago. He would walk back to her apartment on Huntington Street after hours of staring at the editing screen to find her at her desk, facedown and drooling over chapbooks, making a Rorschach of her analytic circles, slashes, and margin notes. In the few minutes between rubbing her back and collapsing next to her in bed, he tried to pack for San Diego.
‘Where are you?’ His foot shifted on a mini-pond of ice.
‘I’m skipping down Boyleston like an idiot since I just dropped off all my work!’ she gushed again, making Jacob pull the phone away from his ear.
‘Awesome! I turned mine in earlier today. Isn’t it crazy that we’re finally done?’ he smiled. ‘Hey, I’m almost at Boyleston now, keep your grapes peeled for me.’
He mentally ran through a cursory list of things to do in the next 36 hours before they flew out. The sky was still grey and bitter and though a cloud of steam appeared at every breath, the weatherman hadn’t said anything about more snow.
They were finally at the end of four and a half years of work and dying to see the fasten seatbelt sign, the blue Pacific expanding for miles, the scarlet and canary flames of a bonfire licking the midnight sky. Two minutes of mental ticking-off and he rounded the corner onto Boyleston. His legs stutter stepped in excitement and little winged insects hatched in his stomach.
Jacob scanned both sides of the street for her in between downward glances for ice by his feet. As his head popped up, he spied behind a passing car her scarlet hat with a few chunks of hair poking from the side and front. She looked up and over to him, her cheeks almost cracking from their smile and waved both of her hands spastically.
He beamed back and started across the street so quickly to scoop her up in his arms and swing her around like in a Frank Capra movie, that he didn’t see the cab hurtling down Boyleston.
Her eyes were moons and her hands flapped to say what her mouth couldn’t, when out of his periphery, Jacob glimpsed the cab and grabbed himself less than a tire width from the cab’s hood and threw himself back towards the sidewalk. He faintly heard Kirsten say ‘Oh Shit!’ as his left foot landed on a patch of ice, sliding out and up until he was heels over head in front of her, the latter smacking like a wet potato against the pavement. His head rolled to the side and he blinked the blue dots from his eyes as he tried to heft himself off the side of the street and hold Kirsten, who was in the middle of the street, racing across to scoop him up in her arms, and their eyes locked in a pre-Technicolor gaze as the screeching brakes of a brown car going far too fast locked far too late.
*
He looks back to the shore to check his bags out of habit, though only one other person has been on the beach all day.
Jacob feels his board rise under him. He crests over a double-overhead wave and paddles out to get in position for the third wave of the set. Turning around, he sees the wave roll towards him, then realizes that the hue of the horizon made the wave look smaller than it actually is, and he’s too far inside. His deltoid and trapezium muscles tear themselves into sinew while they push water as hard and quick as they can.
He feels the tail take the wave and in one motion pops to his feet, quickly crossover stepping to the center. The cartilage inside his knees pops and cracks like bubble wrap as he lowers himself as far as the sense of balance allows and grabs the rail to try and salvage this mastodon of ocean water. He pushes his back foot down and inside, inching over until it drags in the face of the wave. The board stabilizes and hurtles him across the middle of the face.
The crest swallows the horizon, spitting and foaming like a washing machine filled with dish soap. He looks back and for a second the wave and the seagulls and the sand mashing on the ocean floor are drowned by the blood in his ears.
And everything is quiet, and still, and dampened enough for Jacob to hear himself say ‘Oh. Shit,’ very calmly.
As the crest avalanches on him and rips the board from under his feet it catches him softly in the trough of the wave and curls him thirteen-feet up the face and throws him back over the falls then throttles him towards the inky Atlantic floor. The rushing of the wave goes silent as he floats without sense of gravity. The sandy floor sprints up to meet the side of his face and turns him upward, his heels lightly dragging against ridges along the bottom. He watches the serene turbulence pass over him. Like from an opened bottle of absolving champagne, a burst of all the guilty bubbles flow out of his mouth and drift towards the surface. And he relaxes his body to the underwater currents, content for just a moment to float and be weightless.
Pugs
I dodged his jab, but dropped my stance and caught his right on my cheek, sending squares of blood across the screen. Lime-green spirals shot from my head as Coach barked syllables and clapped his hands. A hummingbird pulse on the jab button, but I was too tired, or hurt or something. Hands swayed by my waist like Everlast pendulums and left Kieran to finish me off. For three seconds his fingers danced over the buttons, then he said Sorry, Dad, right as his glove turned into an anvil and connected with my jaw. On the screen, I rocketed around the moon, green men snickering at the Xs over my eyes.
‘Wanna play again? I’ll go easy this time.’ His doe eyes could disarm Jesse James.
‘I only see you one blastin’ day a week,’ I said, thinking no decent pug would’ve opened their shoulders like that. I grabbed a drumstick from the bucket sitting on my door-and-cinderblock coffee table. ‘You sure you want to spend the whole time playing videogames?’
He looked up at me and Jesse James fell again; I gave into my eighth ‘last game.’ My fingertips burned like I’d been rubbing them over sandpaper, thumb and forearms cramped from pressing the buttons so hard, even though the boy kept telling me they’re not pressure sensitive. Seven years old, and tossing out phrases like pressure sensitive.
‘Pop,’ he said during the second round.
‘What?’ I tried to jab but kept hitting block, either because of my frequently-broken sausage fingers or the grease on the controller. He landed a cross that sent me to the tarp. The health bar under ‘Kieran’ was full blue; the one under ‘Dad’ laughed at me. I readjusted on the couch and a spring poked me through my work pants. ‘What, Kieran?’
‘Are you letting me win so I tell Mom I had a good time?’
‘What are you talking about? Did she say that?’ I wobbled to my feet and as soon as the ref dropped his arm, Kieran sent me right back to the tarp. TKO. At least I didn’t go into orbit that time.
‘No. I was just asking.’
‘Eat some chicken. Need some meat on you.’ I drank of water from a mason jar, selected rematch before he could ask. ‘Just don’t know how you can play for so long.’
‘It’s easy. When I try to punch you like this—’ my head flew black, red squares on the tarp—‘press the start button and you’ll block it. See?’
‘I get it, Kieran.’ By some freak chance—meaning he let me—I landed a two-one combo and he kissed the boards, only to pop back up like a spring.
‘Don’t worry. I told Neil you were better than him. He’s not very good at this either.’
‘That so?’ Kieran landed five straight. Stars circled my head. Coach barked and clapped.
‘Mom says it’s because he’s darn Irish and they can’t fight.’
I laughed to myself and chewed on the inside of my cheek.
Kieran adds, ‘But he can hit a baseball really far. He’s a good pitcher, too.’
‘Seems you like him pretty well.’
Kieran shrugs. ‘He’s nice. I don’t like it when his dog is over. She eats my shoes and I stepped in her piss three times and once her slobber got into my controller and I couldn’t play. But she’s nice.’
When Carol and I were getting divorced, we took Kieran to see a shrink, make sure he’d adjust. He said Kieran seemed fine, but showed some signs of internalization. Since then, I had a hard time figuring out what Kieran actually thought and what he was tying to make himself believe.
Somehow I’d worked Kieran down to a quarter health, but he rallied with a flurry of shots. Even when I was a top-flight pug, I couldn’t’ve held it, and my computer version was no more fortunate. He went down, stayed down.
‘Dad, are you even trying?’
‘Dammit, Kieran. Yes, I’m trying.’
‘You should be good at this, dad. You did it in real life.’
‘Boy, what the hell you know about boxing?’ I dropped my controller to the carpet padding and retreated to the kitchen. Hanging over the sink, I ran water over my fists and forearms. Inhaled, held it, let it out slow. Beeps in the other room, and Kieran was probably beating my guy to a pulp. I turned the water colder, breathed. Got my head straight. If only I’d learned to do that years ago, I wouldn’t be in this situation, defending myself against some law clerk patsy. I took my work home with me like most men, but I was in the wrong business.
Another breath, then I poured juice and soda water into a Transformers glass for Kieran, grabbed a Coke for myself. The shrink told us to limit his sugar, too.
Kieran was drawing shapes in dust with his finger. I set his glass in front of him. He looked up at me, whispered thanks and held my wrist. His finger ran over a scar on my forearm, leaving trails of grey. Post-fight bar brawl: fighting one of my football buddies, and my aim was off. Bone jutted just like a tree through a frozen lake.
‘Was this from when you were a puta?’
I coughed on my soda, bubbles up my nose. ‘What did you just say?’
‘Did you get this when you were boxing as a puta?’
Laughing, I wrapped my arm around my boy. Me and Carol used to fight in Spanish so Kieran wouldn’t pick up any curse words.
‘It’s pug, Kieran. Like the dog.’
‘Oh.’ He took a bite of my drumstick, set it down on the door. ‘Can we do one more then play football outside?’ He handed me my controller.
Halfway through the first round, he fell. When the bell rung, he was on the ropes, pulling himself up. He hadn’t hit me once. Four uppercuts in the second and he’s wobbling, ready to get sent into orbit. And it wasn’t until he confused me, trying to tell me what buttons to hit, that I noticed. His boxer was now tall with red hair. ‘Neil’ under the flashing health bar. He’d changed it when I was in the kitchen.
‘Get me, Dad! Knock my blastin’ head off!’ His fingertips, white from pushing button so hard. Eyes squinted, face flushed and contorted. Like he’d just gone eight rounds and missed the decision by a few points. Missed the payday by a few points, and his boy was going to have to eat more Wish Sandwiches.
I pressed pause, set the controller down, lifted my boy up by his armpits and carried him out into the sunshine.
###
Thank you for reading. If you enjoyed this, I have other releases, some for free and some for not-too-much. I would be wildly appreciative of any tweets, Facespace-ing, blog entries or just a simple email with ‘Hey Nik, you’re pretty okay.’
Again, thank you for your time. Independent writers would not exist but for people like you.
Stay warmed and bound. Viva la revolucion.