Want Not (49 page)

“I’m speechless,” he announced.

“I fucking told you, didn’t I? I
told
you it’d be beautiful. Wait’ll the old man sees this thing, right? I
told
you, Doc.”

“You told me,” Elwin whispered.

Whether Big Jerry ever saw the Jeep that morning as Elwin drove it slowly down the driveway—perhaps through the kitchen window, alerted by its adolescent rumble as he sat glowering into his coffee—went unknown. But Myrna saw it, and waved to them meekly through the screendoor. Christopher scooted his butt onto the windowframe and from over the top of the Jeep shouted, “Hey,
Ma!
Check it out, huh?” Whatever she said back, however, was drowned by the engine. “We’re taking it down the Shore!” Someone else’s reaction, however, was dominating Elwin’s mind, and as he merged the Jeep onto the Garden State, headed toward the Bay Head train station where they’d planned to pick Sharon up for the two-hour drive south to Brigantine, with other drivers pulling alongside to take cameraphone snapshots or to confer admiring thumbs-ups, he tried warding off the self-conscious dread. He recalled the way his mother was always berating his father for the condition of their ’65 Plymouth Belvedere, which even in Elwin’s earliest memories was a rustbucket shambles, her asking, “Just what do you think that car
says
about us?” and Elwin Sr. answering, “I didn’t know it was supposed to
say
anything.”
Elwin,
he could hear her saying now, with a light sprinkling of Sharon’s accent stirred in.
You’re a fifty-four-year-old man driving a . . . clown car.
If he hadn’t been the amalgamated middle child, perhaps, he might be bold enough to respond:
So what?
Somewhere near Perth Amboy, in the midst of these thoughts, two boys in a Chevy Tahoe drew alongside, the driver revving the engine as invitation to race. “Doc, we can totally smoke ’em,” Christopher urged, but Elwin, as grand master of his own perverse parade, just smiled and waved. The driver gunned his engine, cutting them off hard while the passenger raised a middle finger out the window.

“Well that was rude,” Elwin said.

“Shoulda fucking
smoked
’em,” Christopher shouted, punishing the innocent glove compartment with a hard whap.

Emerging from the Bay Head train station, with Elwin sheepishly toting her bags behind her, Sharon pressed a hand to her chest in much the same way the woman who’d first raided Elwin’s house had done. She stopped and stared openmouthed at the curbside Jeep against which Christopher was leaning, as if posing for an official portrait, a cigarette balanced not-quite-dashingly upon his lip. Even at idle the Jeep sounded like a thunderstorm.

“This is—yours?”

In a graceless attempt to divert her attention Elwin pointed to Bologna’s jowly face hanging out the rear window, with its curlicue of silver slobber dangling from his mouth, and said, “That’s Bologna, that old guy there . . .”

“Oh my stars,” she said. Her eyes went walking up and down Elwin in what looked like bafflement or possibly remorse. “I wouldn’t have pegged you for . . .”

He sighed. “Me neither.”

“But
this,
” she said, approaching the Jeep in what looked like awe but was probably, Elwin figured, more like distasteful caution—the way people came sidling up to touch a python draped across a handler’s shoulders at some zoo show. She was wearing a crochet-trimmed tanktop above an ankle-length patchwork skirt. Her skin was tanned to the color of paper shopping bags, the muscles of her narrow freckled shoulders defined and redefined with every movement of her arms. She adjusted her cat’s-eye glasses, squinted, and then turning to Elwin with a grin she said, “This is a work of art.”

Elwin muttered, “Oh please.”

“Just nailed her down last night,” Christopher broke in, blowing a thick stream of Marlboro smog from his nostrils. “Doc helped me with some of the work early on, but I’d guess you’d call me, like, the mastermind or something . . .”

“This is Christopher?” Sharon said to Elwin. After his affirming nod she turned to Christopher and said, “Well, from one artist to another, Christopher, let me tell you—this is spectacular work.”

The way Christopher stiffened and straightened—he came off the Jeep as though it’d just delivered him a mild electrical shock, his flattered smile causing his cigarette to droop from his mouth’s sunken middle, his darting gaze pitched toward the sidewalk in ecstatic embarrassment—said to Elwin that no one, himself included, had ever told Christopher that anything he’d done was spectacular. And maybe it
was
spectacular, in its own skewed, heavy-metal, Matchbox car way: what the French called
belle laide,
or ugly-beautiful. There wasn’t time to develop this thought further, however. Sharon was already in the Jeep, tying her blonde-gray hair back in a ponytail while hollering for some highway.

They took Highway 9, which at times threaded them in and out of the Garden State Parkway but for most of the way offered them a narrow pike through the soggy green coastal lowlands, ’70s rock-radio blaring from the beefy aftermarket speakers (Elwin turning it down, Sharon cranking it back up) as they went roaring past low-rise motels and ice cream stands with bleached-out signs and car-repair shops where mechanics slapped one another on the arm and pointed to the Jeep, past Johnny Muffler and the Jersey Hooker, past the Sprinkle Shack and the Shark Fin Inn, Christopher playing air guitar in the backseat and/or complaining about Bologna’s hot Purina breath, Elwin gunning the Jeep southward with his sun-pinked left arm propped out the window, Sharon waving to the legions of Jeep-gawkers and proclaiming, “I swear, it’s like I got off the train and walked into a goddamn Springsteen song.”

“Okay,” Christopher said, when they’d made it to Brigantine island, “turn in here.” They were stopped at the sand’s edge, having made a trivial wrong turn on the way to the rental house. Behind them, the sun hung as low as it could hang in the sky while remaining whole, the calm purple water of Reeds Bay lapping at its bottom. Elwin, who had the Jeep in reverse to turn around, asked, “Turn in where?”

Christopher pointed ahead, to where a sand-track road went curving off between some grass-stubbled dunes. “There.”

“Do you see the sign?” Now it was Elwin’s turn to point, at a wooden sign that read
NO DRIVING ON BEACH WITHOUT PERMIT
.

“Oh, fuck that,” Christopher said. “It’s Jersey. Everything requires a permit but no one ever checks ’em.”

“Oh come on,” said Elwin.

“I vote yes,” Sharon said.

“What about the sand paddles?”

“What about ’em?” said Christopher.

“Isn’t this what you packed them for?” The damn things were taking up two-thirds of the rear compartment, or the “way back” as Sharon called it, and had forced Elwin to leave among other things his cooler back home on the porch. They were also the reason Sharon’s floral fabric suitcase was now coated in dandruffy dog fur, as the only open space for it had been next to Bologna in the backseat.

“Aw, we’ll be okay. Just stick it into four.”

“Whaddaya mean, we’ll be okay? What’d we buy them for, then?”

“In case we’re
not
okay. Just go.”

“So they’re what—sand insurance?”

“Voting yes over here,” Sharon said. “Does women’s suffrage count for anything in this hot rod?”

This last point was hard to contest. With a grumpy exhale Elwin clunked the Jeep into four-wheel-drive, mashed it into first gear, and then grannied it onto the sand. “Give it more juice,” Christopher said. “You need momentum to keep from getting stuck.” Elwin gassed it, the wheels spinning and then with a fierce lurch catching, and Sharon let out an exhilarated squeak as she was thrown back in her seat. “Doc’s on the loose now!” Christopher bellowed, whapping Elwin’s headrest. The trail cut through low dunes to where the beach opened up, where a few lonesome surfcasters stood knee-deep in the shallow surf and where the last straggling sunbathers were bookmarking pages and closing umbrellas and folding up chairs. Elwin skirted left, away from the people to where the beach appeared deserted and more rugged, throwing a breaker of sand off the right side of the Jeep. “Hot damn,” Sharon said, and as if by contagion Elwin mouthed the very same curse,
hot damn,
as the Jeep hurtled forward. Horrified by the prospect of getting stuck, Elwin gunned the Jeep hard and then harder, his morning’s coffee cup shaking so violently as the Jeep went skittering across the sand that the cup came jiggling up and out of the cupholder, splashing cold black coffee onto the floorboards and his feet. He veered rightward, toward the waterline, and Sharon shrieked as the front right tire threw cold salt spray up into the open window. Drifting farther to the right, for the same effect only more, he felt the tires go slumping into the silt and pulled it roughly to the left, toppling Christopher onto Bologna who huffed out an offended baritone woof. He honked the tequila horn, fishing a squeal of appalled glee from Sharon. Elwin couldn’t help himself: A whinnying
yee-haw
of a laugh came pouring out of him, an ebullient and peculiar sort of laugh that surely he’d sounded before in his life—but when? He couldn’t recall. The sun had lowered itself into Reeds Bay by now, the prismatic smear of its passage spread across the entirety of the sky, and Elwin banked the Jeep in a satiny ribbon of surf’s edge sand near the northern tip of the island, still laughing, almost gasping now—though at what he couldn’t say.

Christopher was out first, stripping down to his boxers and launching himself into the waves. Bologna came out next, and then Elwin, evicted from the Jeep by Sharon who said she’d be changing into her swimsuit and wouldn’t “stand for any winderpeepin.” Elwin stood outside with his back to the Jeep watching Bologna plod his way to the water’s edge where for a hesitant moment the old dog stood, the waves lapping his paws, as if trying to hoist this familiar sensation from a deep well of memories. As a pup he’d adored nothing more than rushing the sea beside the Santa Monica pier, Elwin tossing tennis ball after tennis ball into the Pacific and against all natural odds Bologna retrieving them, at times returning with draggled hanks of seaweed on his head or tail, barking at Elwin to throw the ball again and then barking at the waves for his own private canid reasons, a big wet mutty sea monster in love with the surf. Elwin watched now as Bologna hazarded a step farther, a splash from a wave dousing his head, the dog recoiling but then licking at the salt on his droopy gray snout and standing firm as another wave rolled into him, perhaps wondering if at last he was back home. Then Sharon came out of the Jeep, in a skirted one-piece that would’ve taken Elwin’s breath away had he dared give it more than the timid passing glimpse he allowed himself, and like Christopher she went plunging into the water, hooting as she came up for breath. “Get in here,” she hollered, and from deeper waters Christopher howled the same.

He hadn’t counted on this, quite dumbly in retrospect: the swimming, and the near-nudity it required of him. In the preceding decade the only people who’d seen him shirtless were Maura and his physicians, and not one of them had left positive reviews. “Naw,” he shouted back, with a wave of his arm meant to suggest this was all for them, that he was fine, like the way his father used to lurk at the edges of the tree on Christmas morning, ungifted but seemingly content. He saw the two of them out in the water—diving and surfacing, Sharon’s legs scissoring the violet sky as she descended headfirst—as collections of perfect limbs, as fantastical creatures of no apparent relation to his schlubby self, a merman and mermaid he’d just released into the wild. He heard the ocean roar, “Get your ass in here,” aping Christopher’s voice, and watched Sharon urging him in by pulling both of her thin muscled arms toward her, like the signalmen on runways guiding jumbo jets to their gates. “Come
on,
” she called.

They weren’t going to let up, he realized. It was literally sink or swim. And so he emptied his pockets and kicked off his flipflops and, just as Bologna had done, he trudged to the edge of the world and let its cool alabaster frothiness come raging softly toward his feet, while from beyond the breaking surf they continued to shout at him, these two people who just a year ago had been unknown or barely known to him, but who weren’t fantastical creatures at all, he understood—just bycatch like him, cast adrift with their misfit love.

As he waded in deeper, the water now slopping at his shirttails, he was struck by a sudden memory of the shore as it had been in his boyhood, back when the surf was porcupined with floating syringes from all the medical waste dumped at sea and the waterline was sometimes fringed with rainbowed slicks of oil. Him standing above a desiccated fish or the sickly stringiness of a beached condom or a washed-up tire with crabs skittering about its black hollows, with his mother or more often Jane screaming
Don’t touch it El whatever it is don’t touch it.

A rush of water rising between his legs brought a yelp from his throat, and he spun around to block any further sea-nipping of what Christopher would call his “junk,” backing himself out to sea. From this vantage he saw the Jeep in its new coat of armor gleaming at the twilit shoreline, its flanks adorned with those ridiculous flames. He’d give it to Christopher when they got back to Morristown, of course. Maybe he’d known that all along. The water was rising or he was sinking—he wasn’t quite aware of who was driving now, himself or the Atlantic. But he wasn’t terrified anymore, that much he knew. “Out here,” he heard them call, as he came up for air, treading water while spitting it from his mouth in a long childish stream, the seawater briny and almost sweet-tasting. Everything is salvageable, he told himself, as he sank beneath the waves into the cool bruisy darkness and then, turning, began paddling toward their calls. Even you.

O
N THE SAME LATE SEPTEMBER
day when Matty disappeared, Micah felt the baby inside her die. She witnessed its death inside a dream, her still and silent baby being scooped from her open belly by men in khaki uniforms, but when she came jolting awake from the dream, with a single frantic gasp, she knew that the baby was gone—that the dream had been real. This was not unforeseen. The cramping had begun two days earlier, and with it the spotting—light at first then progressively heavier until by the time she’d gone to bed the night before a steady rust-colored stream was draining out of her, like when you pulled the plug on the oilpan of a pickup engine, and every last towel and washcloth and rag in the apartment was soaked and stained from their shifts inside her underwear. After the dream she peeled the bedsheet off her clammy body and made her way to the bathroom where her pee struck the toilet water in gloppy bursts. She shone a flashlight down between her legs into the bowl. Floating in the water, dyed orange from the mixture of blood and urine, were clotted bits of her insides, of her voided womb, of her—child. She turned the flashlight off and let it fall to the floor. She had felt its conception, as Talmadge claimed he had, but now, eleven weeks later, she alone had felt its death, and sitting on the toilet in the humid black bathroom she dropped her head to her knees and began weeping and then—strangely, almost uncontrollably—praying. “For you formed my inward parts, you knitted me in my mother’s womb,” she whispered, her father’s infinite cabin recitations of the Book of Psalms floating back to her on a southerly gust of memory. “My frame was not hidden from You, when I was made in secret and wrought in the lowest parts of the earth. Your eyes saw my substance, being yet unformed, and in Your book they all were written, the days fashioned for me, when as yet there were none.” She banged her forehead against her kneecaps as an ungovernable trickle fell out of her into the bowl, and a great sob engulfed her. “Search me, O God, and know my heart,” she said, in a fevered mutter, “try me and know my pain; and lead me please oh fucking please in the way everlasting.”