I’d spent the week with my friend Trevor and his dog Fred up at Cape Ann, driving along the coastal road in his black MG with the top down, smoking joints and taking it all in, then dropping acid and going for long walks on the beach and up onto the craggy rocks that jutted into the sea. As we sat and watched the tide rush into and out of the long fissures in the rock, I felt in my gut I was part of it and imagined the stone as the molten mass of liquid it once was.
Sitting still, staring at the clusters of barnacles lining the sides, I saw as the clear, blue, cold water surged up and covered them, they opened like small white eyes blinking, and out of them came a tiny, almost-invisible filament, seining the sea for the minuscule organisms they must feed on. The waves receding, the eyes closed up again.
Not sure if I was really seeing it, I called Trevor over.
“The barnacles are alive, watch as the water comes up.”
“The barnacles?”
When I saw that he was seeing it too, we smiled at each other and sat there watching for a long time.
Later we went down to Singing Beach, walking around, gathering wood for a fire, listening to the sounds the sand made with each step—like a zipper being pulled quickly open. The sun going down, the sky turning a deep, almost-violet blue. We, the only ones on the beach now, set up dead center of its crescent, the stars beginning to appear as we kindled the fire. The sky an amphitheater filling with giant warriors growing out of the constellations, doing battle, shooting glowing arrows that arced from one end of the beach to the other. As it grew colder, we drew closer to the fire, the heat on our faces being almost too much to bear, staring into the yellow flames as they died down to red embers sheathed in ash.
Walking back to the car we heard croaking coming from the dock, stopped, stood still, watching until our eyes adjusted, we saw them: black crowned night herons, dozens on the pier and up on the pilings, standing crouched and compact until a fish came near, then slowly, slowly extending their necks, the quick dart of beak into black water, coming up either empty or with silver fins glistening before being swallowed whole.
We tripped three days straight. I hadn’t quite come down yet when I hitchhiked back to New York. The driver dropped me off on the highway under the Weaver Street bridge. I climbed up the embankment, over the chain-link fence, and headed home. Elkan Road seemed changed. I’d never seen it so clear and beautiful, flowers in full bloom everywhere. I saw my brother, went to say hello to him, and for the first time I noticed her, really saw her, his friend Eli. She wasn’t a girl anymore; she had breasts I wanted to touch, milk-blue eyes, and long, wavy gold hair.
She smiled at me, and I talked to her like Drew wasn’t there, an easy rapport. We sat down on the curb under the big oak tree in the Rensons’ front yard. I could smell her clean scent; it made me a bit lightheaded. I wondered, Am I still tripping? I moved closer to her, feeling a slight warmth emanating from her body. It was there with the leaves of the trees still a fresh, new green, surrounded by the bright assault of magnolias and forsythia, that we began to fall in love.
She was sixteen. I was nineteen. Her stepfather was the chief of police in our small town. That was reason enough to rethink the whole thing, but already it was too late, already an unstoppable momentum was moving us forward. We met in secret on those warm spring nights in dark backyards fragrant with lilac and wet earth. When she turned seventeen in August I bought her two heavy Navajo silver bracelets. She lost her virginity on a chaise lounge in my friend Danny’s back yard. It collapsed under us just as we finished, Eli jumped up, a round stain of dark-red blood the size of a small plate on the back of her peasant skirt. She gathered up her skirt, face flushed, ran home.
Her young mother, Pam, was the same age Eli was now when she had Eli. She became our reluctant ally, helping Eli with birth control and preparing the Chief.
I thought for sure the Chief would give me a hard time, but when I met with him, he said little, and Eli later told me he liked me. Surprised by that, like I was getting away with something. Maybe he saw my feelings were genuine, or maybe he figured she could do worse.
Later, I found out he was bald but wore permed wigs and big, tinted aviator glasses, and when he wasn’t in uniform, dressed in wide-lapeled shirts open three buttons, showing his dark chest hair, maybe dyed, and the heavy gold chain hanging there.
Eli’s room was in the attic of her small, attached house, identical to ours. Once when we were up there fooling around I heard the floor creak and, quietly going to the stairs, looked down to see the Chief’s shadow in the doorway. He was listening. I wondered how often he stood there listening.
In her room with its frilly bed and stuffed animals, we learned to make love, what making love is. I’d only known sex. Now we discovered together that thing that can’t be described without losing something, the ecstasy of two beings in sync, every atom interlocked and alive. Blessed. We were blessed.
Eli’s mother, Pam, was petite, with long brown hair framing her fine, chiseled face and big green eyes. She had an accent, Southern and twangy. She married young and had three kids in quick succession, Eli, Laura, Jake, and now a fourth with the Chief, young Owen. Her first husband left her.
Pam and the Chief were having their problems, and what was happening with me and Eli seemed to make it worse. Her seeing in us what she no longer had with him.
While in Florida for the funeral of her cousin Etta’s son, Pam fell in love with the twenty-five-year-old surviving twin, Ronnie. They began an affair. She confided to me and Eli, saying she’d never been so in love, telling us that ever since she’d had Owen, the Chief had changed. “He’s not even good for keeping my feet warm in bed.” Sitting in her small kitchen, she served us sandwiches made with tomatoes and thick slices of Velveeta cheese on white bread with too much Hellmann’s. As we ate, she read to us from Ronnie’s disjointed letters, showing us how he used dashes instead of punctuation, that this meant he was a poet. She was in love with a poet.
As the weeks went by, Pam was scheming for an excuse to go back down to Florida. For cover, she decided she would bring all the kids and call it a vacation. I was sure the Chief suspected something; he was a cop, but he didn’t put up much of a fight.
Once they were in Florida, Eli was calling me every day, saying how much she missed me and couldn’t I come down, that her mother had said no at first but now said it would be okay. Soon I was heading for JFK for my first flight on a jet plane.
That night we were to have dinner at Etta’s. We went straight there from the airport. I left my bag in a bedroom and sat down to eat. Etta was a thin, hard-looking woman whose face wore a mask of grief from the recent loss of her son. Yet her eyes, startling blue crystals, were disarming.
Ronnie’s younger siblings were there. His sister, Dawn, with feathered blond hair and wearing too much blue eyeliner, and two young, skinny boys with dirty faces. I wondered where Ronnie was.
Etta’s husband, Ted, sat at the head of the table. He had a pale, doughy face with dark- brown, almost-black eyes that matched his dyed hair. He smelled of alcohol and Old Spice and avoided looking at me when he shook my hand hello. He wore brown polyester pants too high on his waist and a beige button-down short-sleeved shirt with a small bloodstain on the collar.
Etta brought out a big bowl of spaghetti and meatballs and started filling plates.
Halfway through the meal, Ted stopped eating, his white skin turning even paler, his small eyes darting from side to side. He pushed his chair back, hesitated, stood up and slowly walked off. I saw from the dark stain on his pants that he had shit himself. With the overwhelming odor, no one was eating. “Ew, what’s that smell?” one of the boys whined, then Dawn, “Oh, that’s gross. Who let one loose?”
Etta got up slowly to follow Ted. “Shut up. All of you.”
We got up from the table and moved into the living room. Etta’s dog, a miniature poodle not much bigger than a squirrel, was running around. The kids were laughing at how strange Princess was acting, running fast then stopping abruptly, shivering, then running off again.
I went into the bedroom to roll a joint. My pot wasn’t there. I looked all through my backpack, but it was gone. I signaled for Eli to come in.
“One of your cousins stole my weed.”
“What?”
“It was right here in my backpack, now it’s gone. Looks like my wallet’s gone too.”
As I said it, I stepped on something. It was my wallet. When I bent down to pick it up, I saw pot scattered on the floor. I got down to look under the bed and saw the torn-open baggie.
“Oh, shit. Looks like Princess got into my pot.” I pulled it out and showed Eli where it had been chewed.
“Oh my god, she’s so tiny. What if she OD’s?”
We went back into the living room. Eli’s sister and cousin sat on the couch. “Look at Princess,” they laughed, pointing, giggling. The dog was still running back and forth across the room, but on wobbly legs now. She would stop, lay her head down on its side on the floor, with her rear end up in the air like she was listening for something. Then she’d stand up, look at the girls, turn her head slowly from side to side, before taking off and doing it again.
Even Eli and I had to laugh. After repeating this a few more times, Princess keeled over like a drunk in mid-stride, picked herself up, staggered over to the couch, and lay down underneath, head poking out, glassy-eyed, unmoving.
Eli pulled me back into the bedroom.
“What are we going to do? We need to get her to a vet. What if she OD’s?”
“Don’t worry. She’s just high, she’ll be okay.”
“But what if she isn’t? What if she dies? We have to tell Etta.”
“She can’t OD. She’ll be all right in a little while.” But I wasn’t sure.
We walked back into the living room. Etta was sitting on the couch, holding the dog in her lap. She looked up at us. “I don’t know what’s wrong. My poor baby’s not feeling well.”
“Maybe she ate something she shouldn’t have.” Eli elbowed me.
“What could she have eaten? We did have the exterminator here this week. They say what they use is safe for animals, but I wonder…”
Pam had booked a room at a place called the Colonnades, a run down old pile on the ocean in West Palm Beach. It was owned by a rich old guy who lived in an upstairs suite. Etta worked as a waitress in the restaurant there.
The next day we all went to the beach. There was a storm somewhere out in the Caribbean, and the surf was heavy. I threw myself into the waves, sometimes getting caught and thrashed to the shore. Letting myself be taken by the big ones, I was thrown down over and over to a punishing landing in the churning water filled with bits of shells and sand, running out of breath, not sure which way was up. When my legs grew weak and lungs felt hollow from the salt, I let myself drift in the current past where the waves broke, watching the beach pass by quickly, as if I were in a car driving by. I’d swim to shore, the undertow dragging at my legs, hundreds of yards from where I’d gone in, walk back up the beach, and do it again.
When I was spent, I sat down on the towel next to Eli, watching her as I picked shell from my waterlogged ears. She was asleep, her head turned to one side, lips open slightly, her abdomen rising and falling with the rhythm of her breathing. Freckles forming dark constellations on her pale-white skin. When I put my hand on her thigh, her lids opened. She was not yet awake. Her eyes seemed a deeper blue, as if drawing color from the sky. I looked into them, remembering a line from a song, Her eyes are a blue million miles…
We ate at the hotel that night. The dining room was dark and felt damp, everything about it past its prime, including the waiters and waitresses. Our room had two queen-sized beds. Pam, Laura, and Jake were in one and me, Eli, and Owen in the other. All of us tired and pink with sunburn. The kids dropped off quickly while watching an old Cagney movie. Eli and I stayed up and watched till it ended.
I turned off the TV and sidled up close to her. “Stop, we can’t do it here,” she whispered.
“Everyone is asleep. We just have to be quiet.”
The heat of our burned skin touching intensified our arousal. I moved on top of her.
“I can’t believe we’re doing this. What if they wake up?”
I looked over. They all seemed in deep sleep. Owen’s small body next to us on the bed bobbing up and down gently to our rhythmic movements. Turning back to Eli, I put my lips over hers before she could speak again. Soon it was just the two of us in the room.
The next day we went to the beach again, though we tried to be more careful with the sun. Eli watched the kids while Pam spent the afternoon with Ronnie. A sandbar had formed offshore. The waves were still large, but now had an order to them, rolling in long, even intervals. I rode them in for hours.
Later, Pam wanted to introduce me to Ronnie. I showered and went down to meet them at the hotel bar. He was a tall, slender guy with dark good looks. I saw why she was attracted to him. Something about him made me uncomfortable. I wasn’t quite sure what it was.
Pam was relaxed and happy after spending the day with her lover. She suggested he and I go out together for a drink. She wanted us to get to know each other. He liked the idea; I wasn’t too keen on it, but felt I couldn’t say no.
“What about Eli?”
“Oh, she’ll be fine. I’ll tell her. Go on. Have fun.”
He took me to a dive bar where the bartender knew him. He bought us Beck’s beers. I asked if there was a bowling machine.
“No, just a dartboard, want to play?”
I wasn’t much for darts, but felt like we needed to do something. From the first game, I was unbeatable, hitting the numbers from the outer rings to the bull’s-eye almost flawlessly. I was in that zone an athlete or a drunk sometimes achieves. A pure place where I felt invincible.
“So you never play, huh?”
I shrugged and went to get us another round. The bar was almost empty. We didn’t talk much, just played, listening to the thunk of the darts hitting the felt. I wondered if he would say anything about his brother. Eli had told me he was the one who found him in the bathtub with his wrists slashed. I had a picture in my head of the dark blood running down the white enamel, pooling on the tile floor, Robbie’s head tilted back, eyes open, looking up at his still-living twin.
He started in on Scientology. I didn’t know much about it. He talked about removing blockages and some other stuff I didn’t really get. Then he said, “I think Pam is trying to control me. I don’t think I should be with her.”
I threw my last dart. “We better head back.”
Eli was angry at me for staying out too long.
“It wasn’t my idea. Your mom wanted me to go.”
“What were you doing?”
“Playing darts. I was actually pretty—”
“Yeah, right. Playing darts for three hours? How many girls were there?”
“It was a dump. We were practically the only ones there.”
She kept at it. Who was I with? Who was she? Here we were, alone for the first time. Pam and the kids were at a movie. Still she wouldn’t let up. I was drunk and stoned from the joint I smoked with Ronnie on the ride home. I lay down on the bed and closed my eyes, trying to tune her out.
She pushed me. “Don’t you go to sleep. I’m still talking.”
She kicked me in the ribs and I rolled off the bed, landing hard on the floor. I sat up, pissed off, slapped her face. The pink of her cheek showed white where my hand had hit, then slowly turned redder than the burnt skin.
Eli was crying. I tried to say I was sorry, but she pushed me away. I left the room and walked down toward the shore. The wind was coming hard off the ocean. Illuminated by the lights of the hotel, the palm trees were bending, their fronds slapping against each other like huge, hard wings of birds.
I walked down to the beach, but the blowing sand bit into my ankles, so I went to the empty cabana by the pool, sat on a barstool, lit a joint. Smoking it slowly, I watched the light of the orange ember glow stronger as I breathed in, then slowly diminish to gray ash as I held the smoke in my lungs. The grass roof shivered above me. I watched the lights reflected on the pool’s surface, the wind whipping them into crazed patterns.
On my way back most of the hotel’s rooms were dark. One was lit up bright. A stocky man with short, dark hair stood with a drink in one hand and a cigarette in the other. A woman with long blond hair came into view. The man said something without looking at her, she pulled off her top. He put his drink down and stubbed out his cigarette, undid his pants, letting them drop to the floor. She turned, facing me, unhooked her bra. Her large, pale breasts prominent against her tanned body. I stood on the path under the lights. She was looking right at me. I wanted to move but felt unable to. She turned away slowly, walked over to the man, who now held a TV remote in his hand. She knelt in front of him. I could see only her head now, moving back and forth, her blond hair blue in the television’s spastic light.
Back at the room, all were asleep. Eli was in bed with her mother and sister. I lay down with the boys. When I closed my eyes, the ocean waves I had ridden earlier that day were imprinted on the back of my eyelids, so real I felt myself in them again, rising and falling with the surf, lulling me into deep sleep.
About the Author:
John Gredler’s writing has appeared in Atticus Review, Narratively, Passengers Review, Westchester Review, Streetlight Magazine, and other publications. He received an honorable mention in Streetlight’s 2018 Essay/Memoir Contest and was the winner of Talking Writing’s 2012 Nature Writing Contest. He’s a frequent contributor to the YouTube channel Writers Read and has contributed over a dozen different readings. John
has attended multiple writing workshops and was awarded the Kathryn Gurfein Writing Fellowship from the Writing Institute at Sarah Lawrence College. He works as an antique dealer and also enjoys spending time
outdoors.
Isele Magazine 