Making Nice (21 page)

A quarter mile down there’s a square of white paint halfway up the trunk of a maple tree on the west side of the bank to mark the channel, and my father insisted that I head across to the opposite shore despite it being high tide and the dinghy he’d bought only drew half a foot.

“Aim for that empty lot there,” he said, pointing.

“Yes sir,” I said, not changing a thing except for my empty beer with a new one.

Another quarter mile down is a small island that was created when the Vanderbilts had the river dredged. The footbridge connecting it to the mainland had been in disrepair for decades, so the only way to access it was by boat or crawl stroke, ice skates in a cold-enough winter. It’s messy and overgrown, but there’s an old bench in the middle of it you can get to if you push through the low growing stuff, and the only reason I know all this is cause my good pal Marc Bachman lost his virginity on that bench to a high school senior named Vanessa Rodriguez. He told us about it the next morning in homeroom, all us idiots in slack-jawed awe at his daring and his triumph.

“How’s Marc doin’?” my father asked.

“Stayed with him last night,” I said. “He’s OK, considering.” It’s all I could think to say.

“Sad,” my father said.

We motored passed Nicholl’s Point, the Snapper Inn, and the Riverview, weaving our way around the million-dollar behemoths that leave their slips just once or twice a year to moor out at the mouth of the river, some of them lashed together in groups of three or four or five with middle-aged women in bikinis sunning themselves on impossibly white decks while their big-bellied husbands drink canned beer in the cockpit of the biggest. I couldn’t help but feel slightly embarrassed at the tiny thing I was steering around them as they waved friendlily, one of the unspoken rules of casual boating: wave at everyone.

“I miss the sailboat, man,” I said. “And Trumpetfish. This thing’s kinda—”

“If you don’t like it swim.”

“No,” I said. “No, you’re right. You’re right.”

Five feet before the piling that marks the end of the no-wake zone he nodded at me, and I throttled it forward as far as it would go, the bow of our little boat raising up then planing out quicker than I thought she would. I backed it down a bit, already feeling better to be bouncing over the wakes of the bigger boats coming in, and soon enough we were free and clear in the windblown Great South Bay, the hot sun shimmering on the surface of the water as far as I could see. I was staring off into the twinkling distance when my father leaned across and shouted, “Where we goin’?!”

“Who cares!” I yelled back, then finished the last of my beer and dropped the crushed-up can to the deck.

*   *   *

Lazyjack’s in Sayville was like most waterfront clam shacks on Long Island, overpriced hepatitis threats run by dickheads. But the view was decent and they had Blue Point on tap, and by the time the steamers came out my father had finished his second and become a different man. It was just this total loosening and release from the white noise of the last few days together and months apart. We were transported, changed, all was forgiven. Two beers, a bowl of steamers, and a boat on the Great South Bay.
Ta-da and wah-lah
, as my mother would say. Magic.

I didn’t dare tell him how great it was to see him like this, lucid and talkative, not completely awful to be around, because I didn’t want to jinx it or worse, clue him into my new theory: he’s a better person when he’s drunk. He’d quit completely six months after Mom died, was sober and unbearable for a full year until he happened upon a tray of weed brownies in the freezer I’d bought to help with her appetite, then forgotten about in my grief and pill-popping. He ate two whole ones not knowing what they were, drove to 7-Eleven for cookies, and spent the entire night in the parking lot.

“I thought I was fuckin’ dyin’
maaaaaan
,” he said over the phone. “And it was great!”

I started sending him edibles from local dispensaries in the mail and feeding them to him on holidays, because it offered him a little escape, a different perspective, changed his life-lenses and all that. But he didn’t take to it like drinking. He enjoyed weed, but it made him retreat into himself and get quiet. Drinking brought him out, made him social, easier to be around. And here he was half-drunk and happy for the first time in a long time, and all of a sudden eager to get somewhere else, a guy who hadn’t been eager to do or see anything for the better part of two years. So, when he was taking another piss I paid the bill and headed back to the boat, him behind me on the dock as I climbed aboard and started her up. He was even moving better now, more ankle, less wobble. How it used to be. The boat tipped under his weight as he stepped down into it, the hull slapping the water as he sat on the cooler beside me, then again as he stood to undo the lines and shove us off.

“Where to?” he said.

“I dunno,” I said. “Ever been to Fatfish?”

“Don’t think so. Where’s that?”

“Bayshore.”

“OK. Let’s go to the Fatfish.”

“The Fatfish,” I repeated, just because. The same reason I asked the two kids fishing at the end of the pier if they’d caught anything as we puttered past. The littlest one, a tiny girl in an oversized orange life jacket and pink ball cap reached into a bucket half as high as her and pulled out one small snapper, its silver scales reflecting the sun like a dull mirror. I hadn’t seen one in a long time, fifteen years maybe, and I hadn’t expected it. She might as well have been holding a tiny dragon.

My father yelled,
Heyyyyyyyyy!
and clapped, and then I clapped, too, and we kept clapping until she bent down and placed it back in her bucket and, still bending, waved goodbye as we headed out and then west, the Causeway Bridge barely visible in the blue and gray distance.

*   *   *

It was his idea, my father’s, his yellows and grays in a grin as he said it, said, “Jump it,” like whatever, like nothing, like pass the salt. But he stood right after and grabbed the windshield as we came up on the thing, the both of us saying oh shit but not at the same time, staggered, one of us echoing the other, and then him just repeating “shit” when it was right in front of us, the wake of the ferries so big that my pals and I would try to surf it on the sandbars off Ocean Beach when the Atlantic went flat, the whole fleet of them eighty- or ninety-foot forty-ton double-deckers built to transport people and cargo across the stretch seeing that there’s no car access, and always followed by a gang of seagulls pitching and diving at tossed pieces of bread by those lucky enough to get a spot topside and stern. Knee-high, easy, one to two feet, in any case more than enough to launch us up and out of the water like a dud rocket, nose-up, the entire boat airborne for one or two seconds that felt like three or four, the engine revving louder as the prop came free and out, the little boat pitching left before coming down with such a thud the windshield cracked up the middle and the bucket and the screwdriver and the Diet Coke can bounced out and into the bay along with some other weight we were leaving behind, spiritual rust but less stupid sounding, the Igloo cooler breaking loose of the plastic bracket as my father fell to the deck laughing, and me laughing too as I aimed us toward the red-and-white awning on the opposite shore.

By now we were a real sight, two sloppy sunburned idiots tying up an ugly little boat between a beautiful-looking Steiger Craft and a brand new Parker, not even bothering with the bumpers anymore, my father doing his best sober-guy on a makeshift ladder of two-by-fours nailed into the bulkhead, and me on-the-ready underneath in case he fell backward. He didn’t. Instead he got his prosthetic leg up and sprawled himself flat-out on the dock, then lady push-upped his way to standing. I followed him up only to climb back down when he told me he forgot his glasses, and by the time I found them and made it to the bar he’d already ordered fried calamari and a round of Blue Points. I once-overed the menu and added a glass of water.

“Only pussies drink water,” my father said too loudly, and the handsomely dressed water-sipping couple to our right leered at us. I smiled and blinked at them till they turned away, then clinked my pint glass against my father’s and poured some beer into my warm feeling face. It was good, and judging by the foam dripping off his beard and the high-pitched noise that came out of his mouth, he thought so too.

But the light had taken on a strange quality. The afternoon thunderheads were rolling in so fast it felt like time lapse, their bottoms eleven hundred shades of gray and their tops billowing bright white, their shadows moving on the surface of the water like giant sea creatures. The gulls were floating on the breeze and fighting over dropped french fries and shitting the pilings white, and the two of us were drinking ourselves drunker and watching it all from a table in the corner where there wasn’t much left to say to each other, the two of us drinking faster in an attempt to salvage whatever it was we could both feel fading, my father every so often repeating a story he’d already told me until the calamari showed up and he stuffed them in his mouth three and four at a time. I suppose I was getting tired, too.

“Look at you,” he said. “You even yawn mad.”

“I can’t help that … that’s my face. That’s what my face does when I yawn.”

“What is wrong with you?”

“None of my girlfriends are good-looking enough,” I said, trying to make light. It was something I read in a Leonard Michaels story, the reason a would-be suicide gave for wrecking his car on purpose. But my father didn’t laugh, just sipped his beer and waited for a better answer, and I sipped mine thinking of one. “Sometimes the whole world seems broken, you and me included. It knots my brain up in such a way I get mad. But I know it’s not like that … look at today. Look at Fatlegs. I’m an uncle now, you’re a grandfather. That’s something.”

“Not enough.”

“Well, whatever it is or isn’t you need to figure what you wanna do. Maybe you should move to Ohio, be closer to—

“I wanna die,” he said.

I looked at the seagulls. Growing up my father called them bay pigeons.

“Yeah,” I said, “you keep saying that.” And then I didn’t say anything, and then he didn’t say anything, and we finished our beers watching the clouds change colors before settling the bill.

*   *   *

We checked the gas, the time, the sky. None looked good but home looked worse so we went, bouncing our way across the suddenly not so Great South Bay toward Fire Island, one too many or one too few, the two us now tolerating each other for no reason except history. I snuck glances at him, marveling at the mysterious thing that was keeping him going, and it eluded me as much or more than it eluded him, same as it did with my mother at the end. She was a nurse her whole life and knew the second she got the diagnosis she was done for, then did everything in her power to speed up the process. She quit eating, refused salt and potassium, whatever she could to help her heart stop. But it didn’t, it wouldn’t, and she outlived and out-suffered the doctor’s predictions again and again, by months and weeks, until in a private moment between us she asked me to bring her my father’s Ritalin. “The whole bottle,” she said. I didn’t say anything, not because I was paralyzed but because I was genuinely considering it. I needed a minute, plus I was drinking and eating a lot of pain pills back then so I was extra slow, and after a quiet while she let me off the hook. “It’s OK,” she said, and squeezed my hand.
Her
comforting
me.
“I don’t want you to have to live with it.”

At the time I was relieved.

So would anyone believe me if I said I thought it was an act of kindness? Of mercy? Would anyone believe me if I said it wasn’t something I’d thought out, that it wasn’t an act of high emotion, of outrage, unlike the countless murderous thoughts I’ve had in the past? This time was different. We’d slowed to a stop, the engine at idle, so he could piss overboard. I simply looked at him there on the gunwale of the boat, the great gray clouds gathering behind him in the sky, his misery returned to him already. My sister hadn’t spoken to him in months, my brother was reaching an end point and had been avoiding him as much as possible, and I’d more than once been reduced to tears at the thought of his what-must-be tremendous pain, and in a more self-pitying way, at the thought of my future. He himself had been telling me, telling all of us for years he wanted to die. I suppose—there on that boat, in the middle of the bay, a mile and a half from any shore and with a good wind-chop on the surface—I was finally convinced. He was seventy-two years old. His back was to me. I looked at his slumping shoulders and his sunburned neck ringed white at his T-shirt, the tufts of hair sprouting from it. I looked at his overpriced toupee, at the back of his head. Up and down and up and down against the salt-smelling gray sky like a playground seesaw, the boat rolling side-to-side in the surface chop. An iron buoy bell rang in the distance. I thought: It’s best. It’s what he wants. I should help him. Seeing no other boats around and with a decent enough buzz to quit my second-guessing, I took one big step across the boat and shoved him over.

He tried to catch himself but couldn’t, went headfirst into the exact circle of water he was pissing on, as if he was marking his intention, his target,
I am aiming for right here
. He bobbed up fairly quickly to flounder on the surface, the confusion on his face growing as he heard the engine click into gear. Then he yelled. “Hey! Hey you asshole!
Hey!
” He slapped water at me. At thirty yards he was already difficult to see, at forty almost invisible, just a head and an occasional arm. At first I thought he was waving, and without thinking I waved back, just once, my hand up high like See ya. Take it easy. Like Nice knowing you. By the time my arm was back at my side I’d realized he was swimming.

This was a man who head-onned a motorcycle into a bus and crushed in his head, had his leg knocked off just below the knee and was gargling so much blood that someone came out of their house and covered him with a sheet. He was in a coma for six weeks and a full body cast for a year, at one point swallowing three weeks’ worth of painkillers in a suicide attempt, then woke up the next morning feeling “well-rested.” He drank, fought, and fucked his way through his twenties in Brooklyn, NY, before it was just
Brooklyn
, a place parent-supported art jagoffs from Ohio or somewhere turned into something people want to name their kids after. This was a man who was there when it was harder to be, when he would bring my mother to the bars he liked and she would start crying. He worked his whole life in prosthetics and orthotics, a field full of plastics and resins, chemical catalysts and dust—he never wore a mask and washed his hands with paint thinner. I’d never seen him drink water, only diet soda, coffee, beer, and cranberry juice. He didn’t exercise, ate whatever he liked, breathed flea-killer, but had just a month prior, at seventy-two years old, gone on a twenty-mile bike ride with my brother. This is a man whose body refused to die, and it was this very refusal—that and the idea of having to explain myself, in any outcome—that led me to circle back to pluck him out of the water.