The Lay of the Land (50 page)

Two years ago, Sally and I set off on one of our cut-rate one-day flying adventures—this time to Moline—with the intention of taking an historic boat trip down the Mississippi, visiting some interesting Algonquian earthworks, seeing a Civil War ironclad that had been hauled out of the muck and given its own museum, and maybe stopping off at the Golden Nugget casino, which the same Algonquians had built to recoup their dignity. We planned to finish the day with an early dinner in the rotating tenth-floor River Room of the Holiday Inn-Moline, then get back on the plane in time to be home by 3 a.m.

But when we got to the departure dock of the romantic old paddle-wheeler, the S.S.
Chief Illini,
a storm began dumping every manner of precip on us—snow, rain, sleet, hail, arriving by turns with a coarse wind at their backs. We’d bought our tickets off the Internet ahead of time, but neither Sally nor I wanted any part of a river cruise, wanted only to head back up the old cobbled streets of the historic district in search of a nice place to have lunch and to hatch a new plan for the hours that remained—possibly a leisurely trip through the John Deere Museum, since we had time to kill. I went aboard and told the boat captain, who was also the concessionaire and proprietor of the cruise business and owner of the
Chief Illini,
that we were sacrificing our tickets due to weather skittishness but wanted him to know (since he seemed personable and accommodating) that we’d be back another time and buy more tickets. To which the captain, a big happy-faced galoot dressed in his river pilot’s blue serge uniform with gold epaulettes and a captain’s cap, said, “Look here, you folks, we don’t want anybody not to have a good time in Moline. I know this weather’s the pits and all. I’ll just return your money, and don’t you sweat it. We’re not in the business here in River City to take anybody’s dough without rendering a first-class service. In fact, since you’ve come all this way”—he didn’t know we’d flown from Newark but recognized we probably weren’t locals—“maybe you’ll be my guest at the Miss Moline diner my sister runs, where she makes authentic Belgian waffles with farm-fresh eggs and homemade sticky buns. How ’bout I just give her a call and say you’re on your way up there? And here’re some tickets to the John Deere Museum, the best one you’ll find from here to South Dakota.”

We didn’t end up eating at the Miss Moline. But we did take in the museum, which was well-curated, with interesting displays about glaciation, wind erosion and soil content that explained why in that part of America you could grow anything you wanted pretty much anytime—forget about the growing season.

When I think about it now, here in the Manasquan—or the Old Squatters—with my window being fixed while I take my ease in these familiar detoxified surrounds, I can almost believe I made it up, so perfect a day did it produce for Sally and me, and so enduring has it been as illustration of how things can work out better than you thought—like now—even when all points of the spiritual weather vane forecast dark skies.

O
kay, I could aks you again, but it ain’t good to wake up de dead.” A small mouse-faced woman with a silver flat-top and two good-sized ears full of tiny regimented gold loops stacked lobe to helix, faces me across the empty bar surface. A look of wry, not hostile, amusement sits on her lips, though her lips also have a permanent wrinkle to their contours, as if harsh words had once passed through but things had gotten better now.

I don’t know what she’s been saying, but assume it’s to do with my drink preference. I’ve decided on the time-honored highball, the all-around drinker’s drink, to commemorate the old divorced men, many of whom have now died. It’s perfect for me in my state. “I’d like a tall bourbon and soda on ice, please.”

“Dat ain’t what I sed. But whatever.”

I smile pointlessly. “Sorry.”

“I aksed wuz you sure you wuz meetin’ your friends in de right place here.” The bartender casts a look around down the bar toward her customers, two large older women elbowed in over birdbath-size cocktails, covertly eyeing me but clearly amused.

“I think so.” Her accent is pure swamp-water coon-ass, straight from St. Boudreau Parish, far beyond the Atchafalaya. She’s trying to be nice, making me know as gently as possible that the atmospheric old Manasquan has become a watering hole for late-middle-passage dykes and possibly I might be happier elsewhere, but I don’t have to leave if I don’t want to.

Except I couldn’t be happier than to be here amidst these fellow refugees. The nautical motif’s intact. The framed greasy-glass heroic fish photos still cover the walls with coded significance. The light’s murky, the smells are congenial, the world’s held at bay, as in the storied Manasquan days. Probably the drinks are just as good. I couldn’t care less whose orientation’s bending its big elbow beside mine. In fact, I feel a strong Darwinian rightness about what was once a hard-nuts old men’s hidey-hole transitioning into a safe house for tolerant, wry, full-figured, thick-armed goddesses in deep mufti (one’s wearing a Yankees cap, another a pair of bulgy housepainter’s dungarees over a Vassar sweatshirt). My own daughter used to be one of their number, I could tell them—but possibly won’t.

“I used to come in here when Evangelis owned it,” I say gratefully, referring to old Ben Mouzakis’s sister’s husband.

“Fo’ my time, dahlin’,” the bartender croons, organizing my highball. I see she has a vivid green tattoo on her skinny neck, inches below her ear. Gothic letters spell out TERMITE, which I guess could be her name, though I’m not about to call her that.

“How’s ole Ben doing?”

“He’s okay. He in the whale-watch bidnus anymore.” My drink set down in front of me, Termite (I’m only calling her that privately) begins giving a sink full of dirty glasses the three-tub, suds-rinse-rinse treatment, her little hands nimble as a card sharp’s. “Dat ole charter boat bidnus played out. He got into burials-at-sea for a while. Den dat crapped. Annend dis whale thing jumped up.”

“Sounds great.” I take a first restorative sip. Termite has poured me a double dose of Old Woodweevil, meaning it’s happy hour. Soon the bar will be filling up with big women fresh from jobs as stevedores, hod carriers and diesel mechanics—happy warriors happy to have a place of their own. I wonder if Clarissa has a tattoo someplace I don’t know about, and if so, what does it say? Not Dad, we’re sure of that.

The two shadowy women from the rear booth, one in a floral print muumuu her belly doesn’t fit into too well, the other in a bulky red turtleneck, stand up and walk arms around each other to the antique jukebox. One puts in a quarter and cues up Ole Perry singing “I’ll Be Home for Christmas,” then they begin slowly to dance to the sweet-sad melody underneath the unmoving disco globe.

“She’d fuck a bullet wound,
that
skanky bitch,” I hear one of the two full-figured gals at the bar—the one in the Yankees cap—saying to Termite, who’s back down where they are, conniving about one of their friends.

“Well, guess what?” Termite is brazenly smirking, rising up onto her toes on the duckboards better to get into the faces of the two women patrons. “Ah ain’t no fuckin’ bullet wound. I heeerd dat. You know what ahm sayin’?” She shoots a sudden feral look my way, then lowers her voice to a big stage whisper. “Ahmo be dat bitch’s worst nightmare.” Termite, I see, wears an enormous Jim Bowie sheath knife on her oversized silver-studded black bruiser-belt that’s drawn up so tight she must have trouble breathing. She herself is entirely in black—jeans, boots, tee-shirt, eyeshadow—everything but her silver flat-top, ear decor and TERMITE tattoo. I imagine she’s already been a lot of people’s nightmare, though she’s been completely welcoming to me and could bring me another highball and I wouldn’t mind it. My car window’s not fixed yet, and the roof’s drumming with sheets of merciless rain I’m happy to be out of.

Termite sees me angling for her eye and leaves the disputers and saunters down to me, still carrying most of her fuck-you attitude with her. She’s skinny-bowlegged in her jeans, with excessive space between her taut little spavined thighs, so that she swaggers like the long-departed Charlie Starkweather, no small-change nightmare himself.

“How
you
doin’? You still thirsty?” She rests her little hands on the bar rail and tap-taps an oversized silver thumb ring against the wood. “You suck dat one down like you needed it.”

“It was good,” I say. “I’ll have another one just like it.” I have to take my piss now. My eye wanders to where the gents used to be.

“Oh yeah, dey good.” Termite’s filling my glass where it sits, using the old ice, lots of whiskey and a quick squirt from the soda gun. “It’s over in dat corner,” she says, seeing where I’m looking without looking there. “Light’s burnt out. It don’t get the use it used to.”

“Great.” I slide off my stool and test my walking stability, which is solid.

Termite flashes a nasty smile down at her two friends as I go, and in the same stagy voice says, “It might be a ole alligator in dere, so you better be careful.”

“Or worse,” one of the girls cracks back, and snorts.

“Okay,” I say. “Will do.”

Inside the
GENTLEMEN
door, nothing’s forbidding. The ceiling bulb actually works, though the grimy porcelain fixtures are decrepit fiftiesera Kohler, the hand-dryer fan’s hanging on a screw, and the woolly old window vent whose outside cover bangs in the wind lets cold mist in onto the layer of brown that gunks up everything. Still, the pissing facility’s perfectly usable. No alligators.

Plenty of messages have been left on the wall for future users to ponder, all illustrated with neatly-penciled, magic-markered or rudely carved depictions of the engorged male equipment, plus a variety of women with miraculous breasts, several demonstrating uncanny coupling postures. Appeals are made for the “Able-bodied Semen,” the “Lonely Hards Club” and “Fearless Fast-Dick Dick-tective Agency.” One, to the side of the urinal, has the nostalgic old 609 area code, with a request for “Discreet Callers Only.” Several messages propose reckless sexual chicanery with members of the Mouzakis family, including Grandma Mouzak and the Mouzakis pet sheep, Mouzy, who’s shown scaling a fence. The only items of unusual note as I complete a long, knee-weakening piss—other than the BUSH-GORE BOTH SUCK, lipsticked onto the scaly old mirror—is a chartreuse cell phone, a little Nokia that’s been tossed in the urinal as a gesture, I suppose, of dissatisfaction with its service. And beside it on the rubber grate is a half-eaten lunch-meat sandwich on white bread. It feels odd to piss on a sandwich and simultaneously into the ear hole of the miniature green telephone. But I’m past having a choice. My time in unlikely men’s rooms has tripled since my Mayo insertions, and I tend not to be as finicky as I once was.

When I re-take my place at the bar, feeling immensely better, my fresh highball’s waiting along with a new twin. Ms. Termite has stayed at my end and wants to be friendly, which makes me even happier to be here.

“So whadda you do? You some kinda salesman?” She hauls a soft pack of Camels out of her jeans, retrieves one with pinched lips and lights it with a silver Zippo as big as a Frigidaire.
Click-crack-tink-snap.
She exhales a gray smoke trickle out the corner of her mouth, skewing her lips like a convict. “Mind if I smoke? Ain’t spose to, but fuck it.”

“You bet,” I say, grateful for the forbidden aroma in my nostrils. When Mike fired up last night, I realized you don’t smell it as much as you used to. I’m tempted to bum one, though I haven’t smoked since military school and would probably suffocate. “I
am
a salesman,” I answer. “I sell houses.”

“Where at? Florida? One-a dem?”

“Right down in Sea-Clift. A ways south of here. Not far, really.”

“Oh yeah? Well ain’t dat sump’n.” Eyes squinted, her smoke in the corner of her mouth, Termite goes searching under the bar and produces a copy of the
Shore Home Buyer’s Guide.
The East Jersey Real Estate Board publishes this guide, and if Mike Mahoney’s done his homework, there’s a boxed Realty-Wise ad in the south Barnegat section showing 61 Surf Road, which the storm outside—vanguard of tropical depression Wayne—may now be washing out to sea.

“I been lookin’,” Termite says.

“What kind of place you lookin’ for?” I drop my
g
’s as a gesture of camaraderie. Termite would be a challenging client, though possibly I could let Mike do the honors. He’d think it was great—and it would be.

“Oh. You know.” She plucks a fleck of tobacco off her tongue tip and in doing so gives me a glimpse of a silver stud punched through her tongue skin like a piece of horse tack. I want it to be still so I can get a better look, but in an instant it’s flickered and gone. “Just sump’n grand, overlookin’ de ocean and dat don’t cost nothin’. Maybe sump’n somebody died in, like what used to be about the Corvette dat girl died in in Laplace and dey couldn’t get the smell out, so they had to junk it. I could live with it. You got sump’n like dat? Where was it you live?”

“Sea-Clift.”

“Okay.” She sucks a molar and rolls her punctured tongue around her cheek at the concept of a town by that name. “Course, I got my momma. She in the wheelchair since I don’t know when.”

“That’s nice,” I say. “I mean it’s nice she can live with you. It’s not nice she’s in a wheelchair. That’s not nice.”

“Yeah. Diabetes amputated her leg off.” Termite frowns as if this was, for her, personally painful.

“I see.”

The two big ladies down the bar are re-animating their conversation at higher decibels. “Every time I get on a fuckin’ plane, I think, This sumbitch is gonna blow up. Makes me sleep better if I just accept it.” The couple from the back booth are still dancing, though Perry has long ago finished his Christmas song.

“Look. Lemme aks you somethin’.” Termite hikes her booted foot onto the lip of the rinse sink and holds her smoke like a pencil between her thumb and index finger. In spite of her tough-as-rivets, knife-wielding personal demeanor—little biceps veined and sculpted, brown eyes slightly, skeptically bulged, ringed fingers raw and probably callused from pumping iron—she is not the least bit masculine. In fact, she’s as feminine as Ava Gardner—just not in the same way as Ava Gardner. Her waist, with her big silver and black belt pulled tight, is as tiny as a dragonfly’s. And her breasts, possibly encased in something metal under her black muscle shirt, are sizable breasts no man would sniff at. I’d like to know what her mother calls her at home. Susan or Sandra or Amanda-Jean. Though she’d pop you in the kisser if you breathed it. “Where you come from originally?”