Читать книгу Floyd Harbor - Joel Mowdy - Страница 8

Salty’s

The bungalows on Neighborhood Road, Mastic Beach, had been summer homes, Fire Island a short drive from there via the Smith Point Bridge. Now bicycles built from parts huddled under lock and chain along the concrete stoop of Paul’s Bicycle & Shoe Repair. Their wheels caught clumps of dead leaves in the wind. Baskets of doll heads collected dust among spools of thread and balls of yarn in the neighboring unmarked craft store, where bundles of cotton had been stacked like sandbags in the window display.

Across the street was the bungalow turned into Sweet Magic, its window featuring Maltos, Neccos, Mary Janes, Dum-Dums, Lemon Heads, Fortune Bubbles, Newports, Winchesters, and Marlboros. Oily spots told where kids had pressed their faces and cupped their hands to see inside. Then Sweet Magic closed its doors, the displays disappeared, the sign was vandalized and removed, the window broken and boarded up. Now stalks of thin bamboo bound together were makeshift palm trees, attached to the front of the new store with wire and nails. They reached from the ground to the roof, and leaves made with the tips of cattails and corn husks were stapled flush to the wall near the bottom edge of the rain gutter. The new window was painted blue. The canopy over the steps was thatched river grass. On the front of the canopy hung a sign the size of a license plate that said SALTY’S.

Will kissed Carla Brown right there. For a moment, he was somewhere else.

“What is this place?” she said.

“It’s Salty’s,” Will said. “No one knows what it is.”

Dorian, his roommate, wasn’t home. Headlights threw shadows through the blinds and across Carla. Will kissed her ear and smelled her hair, then kissed her neck where a swirling cowlick hid. He unbuttoned her shirt and pricked his finger on her drugstore name tag. He could taste his pot and beer breath on her breast, her workday in the stubble in her armpit. She laughed when he kissed her there, but then moaned and said, “Come here,” even though he was on top of her already.

“Here,” she said, reaching into her pocketbook on the floor. She pulled out something small and plastic.

“Condom?” he said.

“Meth.”

This was the year before Will walked upon the scene of a naked young man, in the early morning sun, fending off a team of police at the USA gas station. The man was hard to catch, and he didn’t seem to understand what world he was in. He thought he was a fish and needed to get back in the water. He broke out of the plastic ties, so the police resorted to using real cuffs on the man’s sandy ankles, too. He floundered in the backseat of the cruiser. He had been on the high school basketball team.

A commercial for a Long Island college was playing. “Stay close,” it said. “Go far.” Will switched to the cartoon channel. He watched an annoying commercial for lollipops and turned the TV off when a show for babies came on. It was time for work.

The bowling alley was on William Floyd Parkway, about a mile south of Sunrise Highway. The bowling lanes were empty. Will scraped gum and taxi stickers off the pay phones. Later, when the lanes filled with league play, he swept up spilled ashtrays, restocked the bathroom, collected beer bottles, and walked between the gutters to pick up dead wood. Dead wood was a pin knocked out of reach of the sweeper, lost in the gutter. At the end of his shift, he carried trash to the Dumpsters in the parking lot, where on breaks he smoked to the rumble and flush of bowling on the other side of the wall. Soon he’d see Carla at the super drugstore in the neighboring strip mall, between King Kullen and New Rooster.

“Is there a hero in you?” the voice on television said.

Dorian was discussing a proposition to make money. The scheme had to do with mattresses. Will lost the thread of Dorian’s pitch due to the joint they’d smoked. The army commercial was reminding him of the time he’d almost enlisted. He’d gone through with his physical, but he wasn’t home the morning the recruiter came to collect him for swearing in. The baby Rebecca was pregnant with wasn’t his. He’d lost any reason to cling to a sense of duty.

“Are you in?” Dorian said. “We’ll split it three ways. You, me, and the guy with the van.”

“I don’t understand. Say it again?”

“It’s simple. You pay for the mattress, the guy drives to the other store, I return it, we split the profit.”

Will had questions. “Where does the profit come from?”

“Because you switch the tags,” Dorian said. “Are you listening? Remember that mattress I had before I got the futon? Like, right before?” When Dorian bought the mattress at Cody’s on Montauk Highway in Floyd Harbor, he had switched the price code with that of a smaller down-market mattress half the price. He was giving himself a discount. That wasn’t unusual. But then someone gave Dorian the futon, so he returned the mattress, but to a different Cody’s because the friend with the van was going there, and that other Cody’s accepted the returned mattress because of Cody’s unique return policy. Any product exclusive to Cody’s collection could be returned for a full refund at any Cody’s without a receipt, if it was still in its original package.

It was the full refund Dorian wasn’t expecting. He’d paid a lot less for the mattress than the bundle of cash he got back for it. He and the driver tried again that next Saturday. He returned that mattress to the next-nearest Cody’s, in Bellport. Full refund. On Sunday, he tried two more mattresses, which meant switching two tags. That part went fine. Then they had lunch at the pizzeria two stores down, and then tried returning the mattresses to the same Cody’s afterward, thinking it would save on gas.

The woman working customer service punched in the mattress code. “Is that what these things cost?” she said when the price appeared. She reentered the code, getting the same result. She was the employee who had rung up Dorian earlier. Something was almost clicking for her. Dorian was lucky she didn’t feel the urge to look further into the discrepancy.

“So, I can’t do phase one on this again,” Dorian said. “The risk is too high.”

“And you want me to take the risk?” Will said. “No way.”

“Switching tags is your game, Will. This is easy for you.”

“On socks and shirts. Deodorant. A few dollars. You almost got caught flipping mattresses.”

Besides the difference in scale, Will had restricted his game to the super drugstore on William Floyd Parkway, and only when Carla Brown was working. He would switch tags, she would ring him up. Their scheme was tight.

The Caprice Classic looked white or yellow in the dawn. Where would Will go if this car ran? Where would he drive if it were his? He’d never been anywhere. An old white-and-blue bumper sticker attached to the dashboard asked: WHERE’S DA HARBOR?

“What are you thinking?” Carla said.

“I’m not really thinking anything.”

“I watched you sleep last time,” Carla said.

“You watched me sleep?”

“You didn’t look like you were sleeping. You looked like you were thinking with your eyes closed.”

“I was probably thinking about you.”

She smiled. “Sweet. But what else do you think about?”

“Why can’t we go inside your house?”

“The house is off limits. That’s all. Ask me something else.”

“Tell me about when you were in rehab.”

She was quiet for a moment. “Madonna Heights is all girls. There was this one thing at night in the summer. Some guys from around would sneak through the woods behind the grounds and just, like, hang around by the fence. They would try to look in the windows from there and—I don’t know—see what they could see. Their cigarettes glowed in the dark at lights out. They would just sit there, you know, as if the counselors were just gonna let us out and have sex with them all. I don’t know.” She stopped picking at the hole in the car seat. “What’s the worst thing you ever did for money?”

“I work in a bowling alley.”

“I’m being serious,” she said.

“So am I. Why? What about you?” Will said. “What did you do?”

“I fucked once.”

“Oh, yeah?” Will said.

She kept a straight face. Will looked away.

“It wasn’t like it seems,” she said. “I knew him. I went to school with him.”

“Oh.” Will looked down the street through the windshield. There was a tiny crack like a spider’s thread.

“We were going to hook up one time but . . . Well, we didn’t that time. And then this time, yes.”

She was pale, and from that angle her cheeks were sunk in. Did she offer herself to the guy, or did he ask?

“You went to your father’s house for a few days?”

“I told you that on the phone.”

“I know, so what did you do?”

“I’m not saying anything, Will. I’m just telling you something that happened once, like one time. I’m not, like, telling you anything recent.”

“I didn’t say you were telling me anything. Just something that happened one time.”

“I guess I shouldn’t be telling you this at all.”

“No, it’s okay. Tell me everything.”

Something inside her rattled when she breathed in. “That was, I don’t know, the lowest point.” She blinked and there were tears. She put her hand over her mouth to hide the broken tooth. “God, what’s wrong with me?”

Will put his arms around her and held her hands. “It’s okay,” he said into the top of her head. Carla’s body was stiff, her arms tight to her sides. Will wanted to go. He wanted to walk home and forget about her, but he couldn’t just get up and leave her, either. Soon she turned herself over, burying her head into Will’s lap. He stroked her hair. He ran his fingers through her curls until she fell asleep. Shadows in the woods softened. Birds chirped. Light bent around the crack in the windshield. He left her in the car and walked home.

“It’s like I see these people at the bowling alley, and they get excited about bowling. I mean, what else do they do? They go home and think about the next time they’re going bowling. They dream about bowling a perfect game. Probably. I don’t know. Maybe I don’t know what I’m talking about, but it’s just a feeling I have with people sometimes. You know, not just them but everybody. Like people who work a job and—and they do their job, and then maybe they’ll get a better job. Or they dream about making manager someday. Or even people like the guy at Handy Pantry looking for handouts, waiting for something—I don’t know what for. I look at them—all these people—and they’re all the same. They get into these things in their lives, and that’s who they are. I just don’t want to be like that. You know what I’m talking about?”

Dorian was kicking Will’s ass in Backstreet Fight. “Did we order food yet?” He had been out raving for two days and still wore a pacifier on a necklace of plastic rainbow beads. Dorian had been a jock in high school, then a skater punk working as a bowling alley mechanic. He quit that job and tidied his facial hair into the outline of a beard, bought some colorful shirts, a pair of baggy overalls.

“But do you know what I’m talking about?” Will said.

A city of smokestacks loomed in the screen’s background. Will played best when using Sumo Wrestler, but he was no match for either Dorian or the system whatever fighter he chose, or whichever buttons he pressed in whatever order—a strategy that made Will’s character flip or whip out power chops that he couldn’t repeat. Anyway, those moves were always blocked and used against him. Kung Fu Master caught his Sumo Wrestler’s fist, spun him around, lifted him, and slammed him down to the pavement. Will tried to roll back onto his feet, but Kung Fu Master’s jackhammer leg stomped his head into a puddle of pixels the colors of blood and bone.

“You never answered me about the mattresses,” Dorian said.

“We already talked about that. I’m not in.”

“I don’t know what you’re afraid of,” he said.

“Getting arrested,” Will said. “Going to jail.”

There was a knock on the door.

“No one’s going to jail.” Dorian answered the door. It was pizza from down the street. He gave the delivery kid a little plastic baggie as payment.

“Was that ecstasy?”

“Why?” Dorian said. “Do you want to buy some?”

The next round had begun.

Puddles froze into sheets of white ice. Take-out containers cluttered the kitchen area. Dorian slept on the futon. Will played the new video games. When Dorian woke up, he watched Will lose a boxing match. Will offered the control.

“I’m going to start charging rent on games,” Dorian said. He took the control. “What happened to that girl you were seeing?”

“We’re taking a break,” Will said.

“She got any friends?”

“I’ll ask if she knows anyone.”

“I have a girl,” Dorian said. “That’s why I’m out all the time. I just want to know if she’s a loner like you.”

Later, Dorian went out, and Will played until level five. Then he walked around Carla’s block a bunch of times. He wasn’t dressed for the cold. He went home and lost three rounds of solitaire. He put the cards in order. He dialed Rebecca and hung up on the first ring.

Then he put the ecstasy he’d bought from Dorian in his pocket and went out.

When she was sleeping, Carla’s cheeks twitched as though tiny shocks were crawling under her skin. The sky was pink and blue. Will lit a cigarette and held it close to the sliver in the car window. A breeze sucked the smoke into the cold.

Dorian sat on their concrete step with one hand in his pocket, the other holding a cigarette.

“What are you doing out here?” Will said. The owner of the smoke shop rolled the shield from his window.

Doran pointed to Salty’s. “What is that place?”

“I don’t know,” Will said. “No one knows what it is. Are you going inside?”

“I’m waiting here a minute,” Dorian said.

Will went into their apartment and microwaved instant coffee. Dorian disappeared from the step.

It was the Christmas season, a Saturday night. People got off from their jobs and kids got off from school. They needed something to do. There was a disc jockey. There were bowling prizes to hand out. A blizzard had begun. Three inches already covered the ground. Will gave out red strike tickets and picked up dead wood while pop blared through the speakers and high school kids posed and joked in the arcade room.

Then he saw Rebecca in lane three with the father of the kid, but no kid. The kid was probably home with a babysitter. Rebecca wore the blue jeans Will had bought her for her birthday two years earlier. She still fit inside them. She dropped a gutter ball, shrugged, and turned around. Her teammates cheered her. She smiled at them.

Carla slept with the light on. She had snuck Will through the basement bedroom window. The room was warmed by an electric heater, but so dank the pink drywall had spots of mold that split and puckered the paint like wet, parting lips. She slept naked under a blue comforter, her hair spread out across her pillow. She smelled of cigarettes, but she was young, and the broken tooth was farther back in her mouth where he couldn’t see.

On the floor Will found his pants next to her blue apron, his shirt under the bed.

The world had turned to white and gray. The water was dark in the creek and the bay, the bay lined with large chunks of ice the color of the moon. Glassy ice floated in the water, spreading out from the shore of Mastic Beach to the shore of Fire Island. The horizon blended with a gray windy sky that thrust against the trees. Streets flooded with slush a shade of blue he’d seen only in dreams.

He was bundled in layers that restricted movement and saw the world through the fuzzy slit of a scarf wrapped up to his eyes, a hat pulled over his brow. There were no other people. The houses had been vacated with the flood warning. Forward through slush, Ducky Lane turned into a dirt road where the creek met the bay, where houses were built on stilts in case something like this storm should happen. Private docks lining the mouth of the bay had been uprooted, and they jutted out of the water obtusely, crooked planks and railings covered in gleaming ice. This wasn’t the flimsy snow of past winters. It wasn’t smeared into grime on the side of the road. This snow had taken control.

The bay had swallowed Ducky Lane where it curved out of the creek and became Riviera Drive, so Will walked through backyards where the slush came up to his knees. The cold water stung his legs. He passed under the homes on stilts, treaded through a flooded field of cattails, and emerged on Cranberry Drive into more slush, a half-mile from his apartment. Snow flew sideways under the yellow streetlights like flecks of gold and blew off branches in chunks the size of bowling balls. Then the wind died. Will was inside a void, insulated with cotton, sterilized by the cold. It was a space with neither time nor memory. A space to empty himself into, but there was nobody there to listen. He wanted to be home and warm. He imagined living with Carla on a bed under blankets with all this snow outside turning everything into white plush.

At the apartment, Dorian’s stuff was packed by the door. His friend with the van had already picked up the futon. He was moving out, going half/half on a new place with someone named Grady.

Carla disappeared the next day. She wasn’t working at the drugstore. At her house, her mother told Will not to come looking anymore. It took two more weeks to find out that she was back in rehab. He rode the public bus across Suffolk County to the mall and then walked down backstreets and through woods to the fence that divided Madonna Heights from the rest of the world. The snow in the woods was still untouched. When Will stepped on its icy crust, it held his weight for a moment before breaking through to soft snow underneath. The sun was going down. He crouched against the fence and looked at the glowing windows of the stout, unfriendly building. His fingers were numb from the cold, from holding a cigarette. He wondered if the boys Carla talked about would show up, the ones who loitered along the fence. Maybe it was a summer thing for them. Maybe they grew out of it. Maybe they decided it was a waste of time. Will waited for the lights to go off so that Carla could see the glowing cherry of his cigarette and know it was Will she could barely make out in the shadows. He waited all night for some sign, some acknowledgment of his presence, but all that happened was the lights went down and he was alone in the dark with two matches and a quarter-pack of cigarettes.

In two years, he’d have been out of the army if he’d gone. Empty beer cans lined the edge of the coffee table. He reached for his cigarettes. The pack was empty. The stores were closed. The phone was ringing. Will was supposed to be at work. He walked next door to use the cigarette machine at Schultzie’s. The bouncer wouldn’t let him.

“Come on,” Will said. “Greta’s my landlady. I live right there.”

“Listen, buddy,” the bouncer said, “I can smell the alcohol on you. You’re underage. I’ll throw you out on your ass, you try to come in here.”

Will walked away, quietly cursing the bouncer. He stopped in front of Salty’s. The washed-up tropical beach hut covered in crusty snow sat back on the sidewalk in the center of the village business district. Will tried looking through the blue display window with his hands cupped to the glass. The paint was too thick. The doorknob wouldn’t turn. He went back to the apartment and the ringing phone. It was time to quit.

“Hello?”

“I need you to bail me out,” Dorian said.

“What are you talking about? The mattresses?”

“What?” Dorian said, incredulous. Then he whispered, “Don’t talk like that on the phone, dick. You have to bail me out.”

“You’re in jail?”

“Fucking Christ, man, are you listening to me?”

The phone went dead. Will sat on the kitchen chair with the receiver in his hand. He straightened a cigarette butt from the ashtray and lit it. Then he dialed her number.

“Who’s this?” Rebecca said.

“How’s the baby?”

“Who is this?”

“It’s me, Will.”

“Will? What do you want?”

“Nothing. I don’t want anything.”

Rebecca hung up.

Will closed his eyes. Music hummed from the bar on the other side of his wall.

It had been early spring, a Sunday. Rebecca’s parents and little sisters had taken the hatchback on a daylong shopping trip. Will’s and Rebecca’s clothes were on the kitchen floor. A feel-good movie played on the television in the master bedroom. Sunlight poured through the open sliding door to the back deck. Rebecca, naked and sleepy under her parents’ bedspread, had fit herself against Will, her breath on his neck, her hand on his chest. “This is the way it’s going to be,” she said.

Was she talking about the movie, or the moment they were in? It was all the same. He kissed her forehead, held her tighter, and disappeared with her under the covers.