242
The Red Album of Asbury Park
(Remixed)
by
Alex Austin
This book is a work of fiction. Any resemblance to actual events or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
Copyright 2009 Alex Austin
Smashwords Edition
Chapter 1
My father and Larry had been drinking companions for a while, probably because no one else would have much to do with them. A brawl at Maloney’s tavern over the Pope’s infallibility—or maybe relativity theory—had ended their relationship. It was shortly before that incident, my mother said, that Larry had sold my father the gun.
I was taking a chance making inquiries but I knew that neither Glen nor Larry would offer up anything to the cops. I needed to know if the gun was traceable. Over the phone, I hadn’t said anything specific about the .38 revolver to Glen, only that I might need his help.
Now as my Pontiac Safari climbed Hattey’s Creek Bridge, the RPMs sank and the car bucked, slowing to a crawl. I shifted into neutral and turned down the radio. Although Port Beach was only 20 miles north of Asbury, I hadn’t been back to my hometown in seven years. The marsh spread uniformly pale green, except where patches of snow packed tightly against the reeds, fixed there by the bay wind that now whistled through the cracks in the wraparound rear windshield. Along the creek banks, thin sheets of ice melted into the winding olive streams, where gulls foraged for soldier crabs and edible garbage, a hundred gliding now under a dull winter sky. To the east, past a string of sand-swept houses, the bay spread toward the Amboys, gray and wind-blown like wrinkled aluminum foil. For a final test, I rolled down the window. A chill air carried the dense chemical vapors exhaled by the town’s solitary factory, a scent that I carried with me like a scar. Blessedly the engine revved, nearly every cylinder firing, and I rolled on past front yards of rusting appliances, raised cars and chained dogs, rising from the dirt to track my progress across their territory.
I didn’t consider him a friend, but Glen Ketter had gotten drunk with me a couple of times. Often, after fights with my father, I had slept over at his place, always on the floor. The house was built low as a bunker, punctured in a half-dozen places and patched with raw plywood. Seven kids crowded into it, two girls and five boys. Glen was a year younger than me and the oldest; his brothers followed about a year apart, each one more trouble than the one before. Guys without much brains and less ambition. His two sisters, teenyboppers now, I supposed, I didn’t know that well.
Glen’s father, Larry, was a big lazy guy and as mean as my father around his kids. Living on disability, Larry spent his days at the kitchen table reading the National Enquirer and shouting at his wife, a quiet beaten-down woman forever drying her hands. Whenever I stopped by, I would find Larry sitting there, deep into the paper, his scissors on hand to cut out articles of interest. On the kitchen wall, Larry affixed numerous clippings on Martians, Bigfoot and werewolves. Stupid shit, really, but Larry believed every story. He would warn us that the streets would soon be crawling with those creatures, which, he said, were in some conspiracy with the federal government, although he never spelled out the connection.
The Ketter house always smelled as if a large animal had died under the floorboards, especially in winter when the plumbing froze. Their solitary toilet, flushed with a bucket of water from the tub and always threatening to overflow, lent its particular odor to the stench. The Ketter boys pissed out their window, but I held my water and steadfastly avoided that toilet. Larry was too lazy to repair it himself and too cheap to hire a plumber. Maybe he thought the Martians would take it away.
Parking the Safari on the street, I danced around the dead orange cat in the Ketters’ mud driveway and climbed the broken wooden steps. I didn’t bother to try the doorbell. It never worked. “Hold your water,” someone yelled from inside, as if he knew it was me on the doorstep. Glen’s next youngest brother, Jack, opened the door. He wore his hair in an Elvis Presley pompadour, but even in that ancient hairstyle, he struck me as far more handsome as a man than he had been as a boy.
“Who are you?” Jack asked.
“Sam Nesbitt. I lived on Second Street.”
“Look like a girl.”
“I’m in a band.”
“Yeah? I wanna hold your gland, huh? Come on in.”
I followed Jack through the living room where two of his brothers slumped on the couch, eating dry cereal and watching TV. They looked me over suspiciously.
“Who’s the faggot?” asked the older of the two, whom I thought I recognized as Billy.
“Sam Nesbitt,” said Jack. “You remember his brother Tom? Their family lived on Second Street. Sam, this is Billy.”
“Nice to see you, Billy.”
“Hey, man, how the fuck are you?” said Billy. “What’s with the hair? You turn hippie?”
“I’m in a band.”
The youngest brother farted. “There’s a hit for ya.”
“Sam’s a guest,” Jack warned. “You fucking pig.”
We passed through the kitchen where Larry sat at the faded Formica-topped table drinking a beer. He looked twice as big as I remembered him, his eyes sunk in red flesh, throat bulging like a tuber. He wore reading glasses and he had an open National Enquirer laid out on the table, and a pair of scissors.
“Mr. Ketter.”
He dropped the paper, took off his glasses and looked at me with wonder, as if I were one of the Martians that had hopped right out of his news.
“Sam Nesbitt.” I flicked my hair. “I’m in a band.”
“You better be.”
“How have you been, Mr. Ketter?”
“I’ve got four bums for kids. They’re no fucking good. You see their lazy asses? I can’t fucking work. I got a bad back. If I didn’t have a bad fucking back...”
Jack nodded for me to follow him.
“Good to see you, Mr. Ketter.” I pointed to his paper. “That another Martian?”
“Venetian. You see his antenna?”
I followed Jack down the hall, shying away as we passed the bathroom.
Jack knocked on the bedroom door. “Glen, it’s Sam come to see you.” There was no response. “Might be asleep.” Jack knocked again, and turned the handle. “Coming in” he said, easing open the door.
I followed Jack into the room, which smelled of wine and cigarettes. Glen sat up on the bed with a couple grayish pillows at his back. He wore a Guinea T, the stump of his left arm extending two inches out of the sleeve. He had a glass of white wine in his hand and an open book on his lap. On the night table, a bottle of wine sat next to an amber pill bottle and a cigarette burning in a clamshell ashtray.
Glen smiled slowly at me, like new snow melting on a windshield. He set the wine on the nightstand and got to his feet.
“Wow, that’s you, huh?”
In his boxer shorts, he walked across the room and touched my hair, tentatively lifting a few strands as if testing fishing line for a bite. I dropped my gaze to his stump.
“Go ahead. Touch it,” said Glen.
I pinched the stump. “Feels like a hard-on.”
Glen laughed. “You want a glass of wine? This is good stuff. Comes from California. Hey Jack, get Sam a glass, will ya please?”
Jack walked out of the room and a minute later returned with a glass, which he tossed to me. “I’ll leave you two guys alone,” Jack said, backing out of the room and softly closing the door.
“Take a chair,” Glen said, sitting back down on the bed. I sat down and we both took a swallow of the wine. We stared at each other for a while.
“I’m sorry about your arm,” I said.
“My own fault. I should have been more careful.”
“It’s crazy over there, huh?”
“You can’t believe it. I could tell you some stories...” Glen smiled stiffly. “They say we were the good guys, but I don’t know...” Glen sipped his wine. “So what, you moved south?”
“Asbury Park.”
“That’s nice. Uptown, right?”
I turned up the palm of my left hand, where the scar across my fingers glowed like a needlefish fresh drawn from the sea. “I’ve got a band.”
“A band? Never figured that.”
“I’m a guitarist.” I wriggled my fingers down an imaginary guitar neck. “Writing songs, too.”
“No shit!”
Glen got up and poured more wine. On the nightstand was a photo of Glen and a couple of his buddies sitting on a log in the jungle. An enemy soldier lay at their feet. She had a hole in her forehead and one breast bare.
“I was sorry to hear about your father passing,” Glen said. “He was a pisser.”
“Yeah, well....”
“Accident, huh?”
“He was dead before the car hit him.”
“How’s that?”
“His liver was gone. He’d walked out of the hospital just to keep drinking.”
“He used to put it away, didn’t he?”
“If you want to know the truth, I don’t miss him much,” I said.
“I guess not.”
“What I came to tell you is that Tom’s in jail in Freehold.”
“What for?”
“They say he killed a guy during a robbery.”
“Christ.”
“The cops don’t have much evidence.”
Glen put his feet up on the bed and sank back against the wall, where faded little cowboys on galloping horses rounded up dumb cattle.
“The problem is that they’ve got the gun,” I said.
“Wow.”
“I gave it to them.”
Glen snickered, as if I could not be serious. Whatever you do, you don’t betray blood. When I nodded in confirmation, his eyes wandered the room for a few seconds before they came back to me, waiting. But before I explained why I provided the police with the murder weapon that might send Tom to prison for twenty years, I wanted Glen to know why I was here.
“I think it was your father’s gun,” I said.
“My father never had a gun.”
“Twelve, fifteen years ago.”
“Nope.”
“Why are you so sure?” I asked.
Glen closed his eyes. When he opened them, he slipped off the bed and walked to the closet. He rummaged around the pile of boxes. After a minute, he brought out a wooden checkers box. He set the box on the bed, undid the latch and opened it. He drew out a pellet gun. Glen raised the gun, took sight on a wallpaper cowboy, and pulled the trigger. There was the sound of a quickly drawn breath, followed by a soft pop. A hole marred the cowboy’s face.
“Remember this?” Glen asked.
“Sure. It got you kicked out of school.”
“My father wouldn’t come to claim it. My mother had to get it. Larry’s got a thing about guns. Any guns. He won’t touch 'em.” Glen looked at the pellet gun. “My mother threw it in the garbage.” He set the pellet gun back in the box. “You know how I lost my arm?”
I shook my head.
“Friendly fire. Began friendly, leastways.”
Glen put the box back in the closet. “I’m set for life.” He wagged the stump. “I could move anywhere in the world and get my check. Tahiti, even.” He gave me his slow smile and his eyes got keen. Glen had beautiful, smooth skin, glowing almost. “I’ll probably stay right here anyway.... What do you think of the wine?”
“It’s really nice.”
“Do you taste pear?”
“No, I didn’t notice pear.”
“It says on the bottle that the wine has the taste of pears. Sometimes I think I taste it.”
“I’m sorry I bothered you.”
Glen sat on the bed again and brought his feet up. I thought he was going to smile, but his lips trembled and he started tearing up. I looked away at the damaged cowboy.
“Shit man, shit man,” he whispered, wiping his eyes on the bedsheet. “I’m weepy and you’ve got the problem.”
“It’s OK.”
He took a bottle of pills from the nightstand and shook a few onto the bed. He shoved two in his mouth and washed them down with the wine.
“What do you want me to do?” Glen asked.
“If it wasn’t your father’s gun...”
“You want me to ask him?”
“It would be a favor.”
“Why would you give the cops the gun?”
“I thought I was doing the right thing. I wasn’t. I messed up.”
“Tell me about it.”
“It’s complicated.”
“I don’t have time?”
Glen poured me another glass of his California chardonnay with the taste of pears. The label showed a vineyard stretched out under a brilliant sun.
********************
So I started telling Glen the story; not everything, of course. There wasn’t time for that, and wouldn’t have helped what I wanted to explain. Other parts would have been too personal, and still others might have hurt Glen. I tried to stick to the truth, to what had happened to me in something less than three years; but in the telling you arrive at the truth as much as you start from it, and you learn a few things that you neglected to learn while you lived them.
Chapter 2
Except for the girl who sat across the aisle in the reversed seat, the car was empty. The other passengers had cleared out by Woodbridge, leaving their brown-wrapped beer cans and crushed cigarette packs doubled in the black glass above the wooden sills. In summer, businessmen filled the train, traveling to their summer houses on the shore to meet their families for the weekend. Servicemen would be heading home on leave, as I had done many times, getting off at Hazlet to hitch a ride to Port Beach. But now it was winter, with snow on the horizon, and little to see but the remnant Christmas lights that hung above the dark landscape like birds that had forgotten to fly south. I leaned back into the padded seat, barely feeling the rhythm of the train as the wheels took the separations between the rails. I remembered how I stuck pennies on the track, picking them up after the train passed. The wheels left them flattened to the size of a silver dollar, hot and smooth, too. I’d pluck them from the gravel with the train’s back draft still tugging at my shirt.
“You dropped your postcard,” said the girl.
I scratched the card from the muddied floor, brushed off the dirt and set it back on my leg.
“Thanks,” I said, wasting a smile as she looked down the aisle at the empty seats, maybe noticing for the first time that we were alone.
“How far are you going?” I asked.
“Pretty far,” she said in a careless voice, barely glancing my way. She unbuttoned her military-issue peacoat, just like mine, and spread the sides. A white ribbed sweater revealed the swell of her breasts. Beneath the sweater a pair of faded, flared blue jeans clung tight to her thighs. She slumped down in her seat and put her face back in her book.
“Only goes to Bayhead.”
She looked up, her nose twitching as if for a bad smell. “What?”
“Bayhead is the end of the line.”
“Yeah?”
“There’s nothing to do there but turn around.”
“Well, I’m getting off way before that,” she said, dropping her head as the train rolled past an open stretch of meadow, above which the Manhattan skyline rose like a picture on a pinball machine.
She had long black hair, big brown eyes and smooth glowing skin. Her skin was a shade darker than mine and without a trace of freckle, which I’d always had plenty of myself, though now mostly on my arms and back. I didn’t mind a few freckles on a girl, but they wouldn’t have added anything to this one. Aside from the hair and skin, something else caught my interest as far back as Penn Station. Just off the center of her upper lip was a vertical scar, slightly swollen, that would be hard under a kiss. It may have been a birth defect, or what was left of one—maybe it was just an accident. Either way, I liked her lip better than if it had been perfect.
Italian, I thought, and knowing she wouldn’t give me an excuse to inquire, blurted, “You Italian?”
“Sorry, but I’m...” She waved the book.
“Hey, keep reading.”
Following my advice, she curled closer to her book and sunk deeper into the seat. Now she regretted drawing my attention to the postcard. He’s not in my league, she’d be thinking. Maybe not that exactly, but something like that. Something... I didn’t care really. Once I would have taken it personally, sulkily. Things change when you get a future, especially one that would give you back what you needed of the past. I stretched my legs, gave the girl the finger for practice, and returned to my mother’s postcard on my lap.
In the glossy picture the letter U, like the other letters, had been hollowed out like a stencil. Inside the U, paddleboats skimmed across the narrow curving lake that bounded the beachfront’s rides and amusement complexes. At the lake’s center, a plywood swan running on an underwater track drove its breast against the dark green water, its neck stretching high as a giraffe’s. Five years ago in that swan I held a girl as pretty as the one across the aisle, while the setting sun’s rays flooded the Ferris wheel, cars rising from the roof of the big green arcade—all that romantic shit. With a penknife scooped by a miniature crane from a bed of prizes, I etched our initials in the swan’s side, and figured we’d be two forever.
I turned the postcard over, took in my new address, and then for the tenth time read my mother’s neat script, which told me that my friend Roy had been killed. I turned to the window and a flare-up of Christmas lights. A pocked Santa drove his team back toward Newark, toward that big neon American eagle.
I dug the beer that I had bought at the station out of my peacoat pocket, popped it open, and drank lazily. The first one always smelled like straw. Finishing half, I stuck the can on the windowsill and checked my watch: 10:10 p.m. On the opposite seat, my seabag and guitar case sat upright and slanted inward like a couple resting their heads against each other. It was only 48 hours ago that I’d been released. At the airfield in Barcelona, where they’d placed 20 Marines and sailors on a transport back to the States, a photographer for Stars and Stripes took a picture of me strumming my guitar as we waited to board. He took my name and asked me what I wanted the caption to say. “Watch out, Beatles!” I pulled the guitar case over, opened it and took out the guitar, a black Les Paul Custom that had cost me eight months’ pay. I ran my cupped hand down the neck and then, my ear an inch from the ten-pound solid body, I tuned. With my eyes half-closed I strummed a few chords, and satisfied with the tuning, I played a song. There was no amplification but you could hear enough in the empty car to get the idea.
When I looked up five minutes later, she was smiling. “Is that the new Doors?”
“No.”
“Sounds like them.”
“It’s mine.”
The train slowed for a station. Ahead, blue neon lights spelled out a diner’s name and through the windows, a handful of customers ate alone at the counter. The train shuddered and stopped. A uniformed Marine in the diner turned his head toward the train, chewing on his fork as he studied us. Roy had been a Marine, although I had told the stupid fuck not to do it. He had responded, “How will I kill someone up close, then?” Valves hissed and water vapors swirled at the windows, putting me in a movie. I plucked a string.
“I’m Sam.”
“Jillian,” she said, leaning her chin on her fist as if giving some hard thought to me.
“What’s your stop?” I asked.
“Asbury.”
“Mine too. Sort of. I’m going to Ocean Grove.”
“Oh?”
“My family used to live in Port Beach,” I said, pointing east. “They moved while I was away.”
“It’s a good thing they told you.”
I laughed at that and liked her a little more. “I’ve been to Asbury a couple of times, but I’ve never set foot in Ocean Grove. What’s it like?”
“Quaint, they say.”
The train jerked forward a couple of times, found its traction, and rolled out of the station.
“So, play something else.”
I played for a couple of minutes when she stood up and walked over, leaning on the opposite seat. Her eyes followed my fingers on the strings, knowing something, I thought, sparking when I bent the string or tapped. I slipped my gaze to her upper lip, taken again with its broken center.
“Stop staring,” she snapped.
“I wasn’t...”
“Oh, don’t lie. I’m used to it.”
She smiled self-consciously but her eyes laughed at my discomfort, which I exaggerated for her benefit.
“You get high?”
Grabbing her handbag, she drew out a misshapen joint and a lighter. She lit up, took a couple of soulful drags, and handed the joint to me. She shook off her coat, flung back her hair and pulled up her sleeves. Her arms were slender, wrists no wider than rulers, and the undersides lighter than her general coloring, like the meat of a ripe peach. We passed the joint back and forth, glancing out the window, clouding the glass with our exhalations and not saying more than a half-dozen words as we moved through the black night.
The silence was broken when Jillian laughed at nothing, reached over and touched my arm. A light broke through the trees, catching her teeth.
“You’re a pretty good guitarist,” she said.
“I’m getting better.”
“All the time,” she sang from the Beatles song, her voice sweet, rising and falling on time just like the melody. “You’re in a band?”
“Not yet. Just got out of the service. But that’s my goal. Goal, shit. You know, get in a band.”
“The only thing,” said Jillian, her eyes glinting.
“Exactly,” I said, my heart welling big, the way it always did when I thought about my plans unfolding.
“Do you want a big band or a small band?”
If she was teasing, I didn’t care. “I don’t know. A small band, I guess. Three or four guys.”
“Not two guys?”
“No, three or four.”
“Two would be too small.”
“Yeah. One or two too small.” She laughed, showing me the shiny red hollow of her mouth, where her tongue floated weightlessly, the way it would to let in another tongue.
“You want to be a star?” she said, her voice plain, so that I still couldn’t tell if she was just putting me on.
“Just want to be in a band.”
“That’s easy.”
“Hope so.”
I had only used marijuana a couple of times. Like my father, I liked my drugs in a brown bottle or in a bright can with mysterious symbols. After a few drinks I’d lose all self-doubt and inhibition. At best, marijuana slowed things down. I had never felt more relaxed or aware, just stuck. Stuck in time and going nowhere—like Zeno’s arrow. But now I was stuck in time with this beautiful hippie, with whom I was happy to go nowhere or everywhere, to Bayhead or to anywhere else the Jersey Coastline Railroad might extend its franchise tonight.
She pushed her hands through her black hair and shook it. The movement drew me into the mistake of leaning toward her. She snapped her face from me as if I had slapped her cheek. Brought back to earth, I sat back and adjusted my glasses, blowing on my hand to taste my sour breath. She turned back to me, her face slightly tilted.
“Yeah?”
“Those are scary.”
“My glasses?”
“I know what you’d look good in. Gold wire rims. Like John’s. You kind of look like him.”
That was all right. Anyone of them, except Ringo. No, even Ringo. I made a face.
“I didn’t say you were identical twins.”
I responded with something no more lame than anything else I had said, and the train blasted its horn. It was too soon for a station, I thought, but glad that it had blanketed my words. The horn’s pitch rose to a screech and the car vibrated violently as I floated toward Jillian, who sunk against her seat, her lips drawn back in a fierce smile. I landed atop her, my mouth an inch from hers and my right leg shoved deep between her thighs, her heat radiating through our denim. But the terrific force that had thrown me forward, relented. Our crashed bodies came undone. From far away, I heard metal grinding metal, and felt the train slowing. When the thud came, it wasn’t all that loud. The train slid a few more yards, shuddered, and stopped.
My guitar in one hand and Jillian holding the other, we walked down the sloped, gravel-topped embankment that bordered the tracks to the flat dirt path below. Though our breath blew milky white, it wasn’t much colder than freezing, and gleaming plates of half-frozen water on the path cracked beneath our weight.
The train had stopped fifty yards short of a crossing, its warning lights flashing and bells clanging, while its gates rose and fell like the stammering hands of a broken clock. In front of the locomotive a great brown leg kicked rapidly, each thrust accompanied by a snapping sound. It was a horse split at midsection, its entrails flung twenty feet down the ties. Vapor rose from the big chunks of pink flesh, bright as lipstick under the train’s headlight. The horse’s chest and front legs were intact, as was its neck, which was stretched over the silver rail. It’s head was bent to the gravel, mouth open as if grazing. The moving leg extended to the flank, which had been severed and drawn under the wheel. The leg bent and straightened, a hoof struck the air as if seeking solid ground. The air stunk of blood and shit.
Jillian stood still, fixed on the sight, and it wasn’t until the cop cars and fire engines pulled up that she turned and walked back toward our car. “Do you think horses have souls?” she asked a step ahead of me.
“I’m not sure that people have souls.”
“I didn’t ask about people.”
“Never been a horse.”
“Don’t
be shallow.”
“Fuck you,” I said, letting her walk ahead.
********************
The train didn’t move for another hour while the firemen cleaned away the horse. Then an official, accompanied by the conductor, strode through the cars inquiring about possible injuries to the passengers.
“That horse had a career,” said the conductor, as the train finally got under way.
“Race horse?”
“Diving.”
“Diving?”
“You never saw it? Atlantic City?”
But I had, and I remembered sitting with my aunt in the stands on the Steel Pier, watching the horse and rider climb the ramp to the six-story diving platform.
“How did it get here from Atlantic City?”
“Swam.”
“Shit.”
“There are horse farms all over Monmouth. This one got loose from an estate about a mile away. The police reported trouble there.”
I had another question, but the conductor excused himself to attend other passengers.
I looked at Jillian, who had returned to her reversible seat and laid her head against the window, her eyes closed.
I tried to break through with, “You ever see the diving horse?” She didn’t say a word.
It wasn’t until the conductor announced Asbury Park that she looked in my direction, and even then I wasn’t absolutely sure it was me that she was looking at, for her eyes danced around like she was following a tennis ball. “I know somebody that may be looking for a guitarist. Give Peter a call.” She handed me a slip of paper with a phone number. “Good luck with the music.”
“Thanks,” I said, looking at the number. “I was wondering...”
“Call Peter.” She didn’t look at me again, even as the train pulled into the Asbury Park station. She slung her bag over her shoulder and turned up her coat collar. As she stepped into the vestibule I called out, “I was wondering if you were a musician?”
She glanced back. “The Decisive Moment.”
“Excuse me?”
“Don’t miss it,” she said, leaving me in the dark.
Chapter 3
On the platform, an old black man in a World War II British navy greatcoat greeted the handful of disembarking passengers.
“Spare a quarter?”
None did, but the old man blessed each as they hurried past. When he saw my guitar case he raised his left hand, bent his long fingers, and jerked his right hand across his stomach. “Love guitar,” he said. Rocking his shoulders, he offered to play something, drawing a pint of whiskey from his coat and holding it out to me. When I told him that my guitar had no strings, he winked and told me that his bottle had no booze, and took a hit. I set down my seabag and handed him a dollar. “Almost Johns,” he said.
“Almost?”
“That’s right. What’s yours?”
“Nearly Sam Nesbitt.”
“Don’t bother. I’ve heard it all.”
“Sam Nesbitt, then.”
“Pleasure.”
“You know your way around this area?”
“Sure do.”
I slipped my hand inside my peacoat’s coin pocket, fishing for the postcard with my mother’s address. The paper I drew out was the one Jillian had given me. I dug deeper, but came up empty. I searched my other pockets. Christ, could I have left it on the seat? I set down my guitar case and turned to the train, gliding out of the station. I started toward the last car, where the conductor stood solemnly on the steps, smoking a cigarette and punching holes in the ether. But I was too late.
“Forget something?” asked Almost.
“Embury,” I whispered as I turned around, trying to envision the postcard’s return address.
“What’s that?”
“Is there an Embury Street in Ocean Grove?”
“Embury Avenue. That where you going?”
“128? 821? 8211? Shit.” Did it have three or four digits? I searched my pocket again. “You know how many blocks Embury is?”
“About six or seven. Embury runs east-west.”
“How do I get there?”
“Well...”
I fished out another dollar.
“It’s coming to me...”
“Here,” I said, handing him four quarters. “That’s all I’ve got.”
“Hell, I’ll take you there.”
I followed Almost across the empty parking lot. Glad to be close to home, I hardly felt the weight of the seabag on my shoulder or the gentle swinging of my guitar case—a metronome for the notes playing in my head.
“I used to be head bellboy at the Berkeley-Carteret Hotel,” said Almost as we exited the lot. “Requires a lot of skills. Most people don’t realize that. For example, a head bellboy must be able to procure women.”
“Yeah, I can see that.”
“Carry them up the stairs if need be. You ever piggyback a lazy whore?”
“I don’t think so.”
“They’ll be biting your ear.”
“No shit?”
Almost tilted his head. “You see those white streaks? Whore bites. Eight floors of whore bites. You think the motherfucker tipped me? Gave me a stuffed panda. Now what the fuck I want with a stuffed panda?”
We’d walked a half block on the other side of the intersection when Almost halted and pointed to a store window. “Best pair of shoes I ever had. Buster Browns. You like that name Buster? I kind of do. If I had a child, I’d name him Buster.”
I laughed at that. He gave me a sour look. “You watch that guitar. Keep it close.”
I looked over my shoulder at the empty sidewalk and the empty street, everything still as a painting. Almost grabbed my arm. “Wait here,” he said, striding toward an alley.
“Where you going?”
“Just you wait here.”
I set down the seabag. My stomach growled and I realized how hungry I was. I dug in my pocket, pulled out half an Almond Joy and took my time chewing. A plane droned overhead. The sound stayed at the same volume for a long time, as if the plane were flying in circles.
I was ready to head out on my own when Almost appeared. “Let’s go,” he said roughly, as if I had been the one who’d delayed.
“What you eating?” he asked.
“Candy bar.”
“Got any more?”
“Nope.”
“That’s okay. What else you want to know?”
I shrugged.
“Whores and illegal substances,” said Almost, “that’s the coin of a head bellboy. I had this one gentleman...”
Generally, I steer clear of people who can’t handle a moment’s silence. But Almost, though pretty much a nonstop talker, kept me interested.
Stopping midway through his tale Almost again clasped my arm, but instead of taking off, he pointed back to the traffic light. “Main Street. Say, ‘Main Street.’”
“Main Street.”
“First street you need to know in any town. Asbury’s Main Street ‘specially important. Parallels the railroad tracks for the length of the city. In Asbury, railroad tracks cleave white and black folks as cleanly as a knife. There’s no law that says so, but that’s the way it is and has been. My folks moved to Asbury in the ‘20s, worked in the hotels built after the big fire of 1917. Damn fire burned down whole blocks of hotels, houses and what-not, including the Boardwalk. After the fire, that’s when they built the Berkeley-Carteret. The Convention Center and Casino, too. You know about them?”
“Not really.”
“The same guys who designed Grand Central Station designed the Casino and the Convention Center. Quite a place it was, like one of those European cities. Paris. Can you believe that? Paris. Of course, the people who owned all those beautiful places needed someone to work in them. That’s when the Negroes came. West of the tracks, they built developments for the black workers. Some nice little cottage developments. My family had a fine little cottage. Some are still there, you know that?”
“No, I didn’t.”
Almost led me down Cookman Avenue, pointing out this and that landmark. “That’s the Asbury Park Press building. Put out a paper every goddamn day. Stand out back and you’ll get a free one. Steinbach’s Department Store. That’s real gold plate above the windows. Duke and Duchess of Windsor shopped there. Frank Sinatra, Elizabeth Taylor, JFK and Jackie. Manhattan? Shit. We got Steinbach’s.”
Mannequins posed in the darkness behind the plate-glass windows, elegant in their winter clothes, their features only visible when they seemed to turn their heads to the lights of a passing car, and unoffended at the inattention.
With the exception of a couple of bars, the businesses on the street were dark and shuttered as if they were not only closed for the night but not meant to be seen. More than a few were boarded up or stripped of all identification.
“What’s going on with all the closed stores?” I asked.
“You never been here in winter?” he asked.
“Couple times in summer.”
“Asbury’s a tree. September comes and the tree loses all its leaves. But they come back, don’t they, just like all the pretty girls. You just gotta have faith.”
We passed a darkened Greyhound Station, with a solitary bus parked at the curb out front, empty, lights off, going nowhere. In the window of the bus station hung a doormat-sized postcard, identical except in size to the one I’d left on the train. When I paused to look, Almost traced the letters with his finger and said, “Asbury Park. Named after Tom Asbury. You know who he was? Founder of the Methodist Church in America. That’s right. This town is built on a mighty rock.”
I knew of Tom Asbury from Sunday school at the Methodist Church at Port Beach, which my mother made us sporadically attend. I didn’t sleep though all the sermons, just like I didn’t take all the coins from the offering envelope to please the pinball gods.
“What most people don’t know is that Tom Asbury was a black man.”
“No kidding? I never heard...”
“You go down there,” said Almost, turning and pointing to the north, “you’ll be on Grand Avenue with churches that rival Parisian cathedrals. The founders wanted this town to be something special. When people walked along that first boardwalk (they weren’t nothing but creaky planks), they walked in the Glory of God.” Almost caught his breath. “And the place you’re going? Other side of that lake, Wesley Lake...” Almost faced south toward a still, narrow lake reflecting the streetlights that lined its perimeter. “Ocean Grove. A holy city, some would say. Under the grace and protection of blue law.”
“Blue law, huh?”
Almost pointed to a low white bridge that crossed the lake. “You walk that over to the Grove. You keep going south until you hit Main Street. Two blocks past that is Embury. You don’t know the number, huh?”
“It’ll come to me. I’m lucky that way.”
“I’ll leave you here then. And watch out for that guitar. Don’t be getting lulled into complacency.”
I shifted my seabag on my shoulder, aching under the weight. “Hey, Almost. Where did you get that coat?”
“You dig it?”
“My old man had one just like it.”
“So did mine,” said Almost, walking away.
I crossed the Wesley Lake Bridge into Ocean Grove and followed Almost’s directions toward Embury. My mother drove our family’s old Plymouth, and surely the car would be parked in front of the house. Resisting the urge to toss the seabag behind a hedge, I tottered down the quiet street. I glanced across the porches, bare as winter trees and shyly lit, wondering at the uniformly darkened rooms, and listening to my own heavy breath. I thought of Jillian and imagined her in the arms of some faceless musician. I was sure that was her life.
********************
Julie took my hand and with a soft laugh turned my face from the new girl. Julie’s voice in my ear, I walked south several blocks, throwing out my right hip to bring the seabag closer to my center of gravity.
“What's the matter?”
“I think I've got a piece of sand in my eye.”
Julie pulled down the corner of her eye. “I close my eyes underwater just so this won't happen.”
“If you keep them open the water will wash it out,” I said.
“But then the salt burns my eyes. Would you get me a tissue?” She pointed to a box on the table. I pulled one out and handed it to her. She held her eye open, dabbing the tissue as she rolled her eye upward. “Take a look, huh?”
I stepped closer and smelled her freshly washed body, which still held the familiar scents of suntan lotion and bay salt. Drunk and courageous on her fumes, I looked down into her eye. She had green irises, the edges were jagged and pointed like a child's drawing of the sun, and within them green and splashes of gold.
“Do you see anything?”
“No, not yet,” I said, not wanting to leave those colors, but shifting my gaze to the white of her eye. She moved and her wet top brushed my chest. Through the cloth I could feel the heat of her skin. A faint, warm breeze curled around me. I touched my left hand to her cheek. She flinched slightly at the touch. The warmth of her skin burned against my hand. I nudged down her lower eyelid, peeping inside her. “I think I see it,” I said, spotting a single grain of sand, brown and glistening in the corner of her eye. She held out the tissue. I took it, twisted one corner and gently drew the tissue along the base of her eye. When I finished the pass, the grain was gone.
“I think I got it.”
“Let me see.”
I carefully held the tissue out, but the breeze caught it and snatched it from my hand, dropping it in a puddle beside the shower. I picked up the wet tissue.
“It feels better,” said Julie.
“Want me to look again?”
She looked at me. “No. You got it. It felt big.”
“Size of a marble.”
********************
A dog barked tentatively, confused, as if it were asleep and barking at another dog in its dream. I had arrived at Main Street. It wasn’t darker than the other streets, but it was grimmer and unsettling with its shadowed storefronts and broad empty sidewalks. I should have noticed the oddity then, but I continued south for two blocks and looked up at a street sign that read: Embury Avenue, 600 block. Good. Three digits. Now was it east or west? It was only after I had made the decision to walk east that I finally noticed that the street—all the streets—were empty of cars. I lowered my seabag from my shoulder and let it fall to the sidewalk. Where were the fucking cars?
I returned to Main Street, waiting around for someone to ask about this mystery, but after fifteen minutes of counting the bricks and encountering not a soul, I returned to Embury.
I walked the length of the street until I reached the oceanfront, then I turned around and walked back, hoping for a clue. An engine revved, followed by a thwack. Lights jumped out from the corner. I set down the seabag and guitar and sprinted into the street. The driver flashed his high beams. The tires shrieked, the hood nosed down and the car stopped. The driver stuck his head out the window. “Whatcha want, Mack?”
I walked up to the car. Rolled newspapers overflowed the backseat. “Hey, man. Where are all the cars?”
“Past midnight, buddy. Don’t you know where you are?”
“Ocean Grove.”
“Every car’s gotta be off the street by 12 a.m. Sunday. Can’t drive them back in until 12 a.m. Monday. Methodist law. Every frigging Chrysler, off the street.”
“Except you.”
“People gotta get their Sunday paper.”
“You deliver to an Anne Nesbitt?”
“No customer of mine.”
A second-story window in a nearby house slid up with a bang. Behind the window screen a head appeared. “Who is that?” a voice of unidentifiable gender demanded. “You’re not supposed to have your car here.”
“Newspaperman.”
“No motor vehicles allowed! Who let you in?”
Ignoring the question, he whispered to me, “I gotta go. Blue law. Gotta keep moving.”
“Who let you in?” the voice cawed.
“Good luck, buddy.”
“I demand to know!” the local shouted. But the newspaperman was gone.
I faced the open window. “Excuse me, do you know...”
“Who let you in?”
“No one,” I said, thinking of another time, driving through another place.
“Do you know?...”
“You don’t belong here!” The window slammed shut.
I returned to the Wesley Lake Bridge and stopped at the center to consider my options. Looking north over the lake, I saw the swan’s outline near the shore. I crossed the bridge and followed the path that bordered the lake. A neck muscle twitched violently. I hadn’t slept in forty-eight hours, and there was little prospect that I would end this night in a warm bed. I reached the dock at the end of which the swan floated, surrounded by a flock of miniature motorboats.
A breaker thundered over my shoulder, and I turned toward the sound. In Port Beach the bay would sometimes freeze in winter, extending from the shore a hundred yards, and thick enough to walk on the ice and feel the surge of the incoming tide. Shouldering the seabag and grabbing my guitar, I walked toward the ocean. A ramp that seemed to elevate with each step took me to the boardwalk, where I stopped and caught my breath. To my right, a massive structure spanned the walk. The Casino, I thought, glad of the memory. I stepped closer. Glass doors revealed a dimly lit interior with not much discernable, but inside of any sort looked good. I set down my baggage and tried a couple of unyielding doors, pressing my face to the cold glass, tasting my warm stale breath. Out of the murk, the globular eye of a carousel horse stumbled me back to the bloody tracks.
I loaded up and headed north on the smooth brown planks, watching the surf flash pale out of the formless sea. I walked past a stretch of boarded concession stands and a fenced-in miniature golf course, which was bordered by another ramp that ran back to the street. Beyond that, a hurricane fence sealed off a dozen dismembered and rusting kiddy rides. I dropped my seabag to the wood and sat. Nothing happened for ten minutes until a seagull alighted on Casey Jones’s locomotive, pecked around for some overlooked morsel and, coming up empty, squawked in my direction.
“Ain’t got shit, bird,” I said, rising.
Canvas tarps covered the decks of the boats and the swan’s hull. Setting the seabag and guitar on the dock, I untied the line that held one edge of the canvas tarp to the rail of the swan. Lifting the tarp, I folded it back. There were four seats and then a hollow under the breast of the swan. I sat on the rear seat and looked for the spot where I had carved my initials and Julie’s. It wasn’t that dark but I could see that they were gone. They must have been caulked and painted over. I envisioned the postcard, but in it now were the letters of her name, each one filled with memories of the brief time we had spent together—stuff that I would take to the grave. I grabbed my seabag and hauled it into the hollow. I intended to leave the seabag while I searched out a diner. Instead I went back out to the dock, got my guitar case, stepped back into the swan and pulled the tarp back into place.
In the darkness I shoved the seabag into the hollow, set the guitar case at my feet, and settled my head on the canvas bag. A shaft of light from directly above penetrated the swan’s neck like a silver arrow. I shut my eyes and waited for formless black—instead I got a shape and color.
Like an oyster when that grain of sand slips in, I ordered up those secretions that would finally smooth over the irritant. I may as well have demanded a wet dream. When I opened my eyes that shaft of light hadn’t gone anywhere.
When I had something on my mind my brain resisted sleep with battlefield intensity. I was thinking of that obliterated heart, remembering Julie’s breast against my back, her chin on my shoulder, her breath on my throat, as I leaned down and dug the penknife into the wood. It was foolish to imagine it would have remained, but all the same I expected it. If it was still there, time wouldn’t have mattered at all. I should carve it again, I thought, deeper this time, indelible. I had a knife in the seabag and her name on my tongue. How stupid that would be, carving summer love on a winter night. I shut my eyes and waited again, but the image of myself doing it would not let me sleep. I opened my eyes and sat up, juices pooling in my throat, hungry, realizing I hadn’t eaten much at all since morning.
Sure, I’d carve a heart and there she would be. I undid the seabag’s ties, dug through the clothes and found the pint of Four Roses. I’d drink, dull my memories and then sleep. I uncapped and took a gulp, holding it on my tongue until the burn jetted fire into my nostrils. I swallowed and swigged again. On an empty stomach the alcohol worked quickly and I was soon muttering “Fixing a hole....” and feeling all right about myself, but wide awake.
I’d bought the knife in a Boston pawnshop. It had a pearl handle, a spring action and a six-inch blade, and had cost twenty bucks, although I had no immediate use for it. I had wanted one since I saw a greaser out of juvenile hall flick out his blade faster than the eye could conceive.
I removed the knife from the seabag and snapped it open a couple of times, happy with the mechanism. I took another sip of the whiskey, shoved the bottle back into the bag, and crawled into the swan’s stern, folding back the canvas. The night was bleak, cold and silent. The condensation on the seat soaked though my jeans as I hunted again for the vanished heart. Here, I thought, rubbing the hull with my left hand as I flicked out the blade with my right. I pricked the wood with the knife. Five minutes to do the job, I thought. Envisioning the finished heart, I started at the center, where the two halves joined, working the knife upward to carve the left side, digging deeper as I reached the apex and drove down. The blade cut easily into the wood. I finished the left chamber and began the right, carefully drawing the knife through the wood until the two tapered halves joined, a heart four inches tall and three inches wide, good enough for a Hallmark card. The names required tighter work, “a sure hand,” my father had said, hovering over me as he judged. He was not to be satisfied, ever. Get out of here old man, I thought, back to the grave. I started on the “J”, focusing like some medieval priest copying script from the Bible, finishing the hook with a serif. I rubbed my finger across the letter, pleased with my work and thinking about another swig of the whiskey. No. Get it done. Get some sleep. I cut the “U” and the “L” and lifted the blade to dot the “I” just as headlights swept across the lake. I ducked and dragged the canvas over my head, thinking it was the hour of police patrols. What could they get me for? Trespassing? Malicious mischief? I heard a car pull to the curb. Its engine throbbed for thirty seconds and then died. Doors opened and closed.
Smoke stole under the canvas the way my father’s cigarette smoke would flow from the kitchen and under my bedroom door, to tell me that it was time to get up for school. Cops would be playing their flashlights over the swan, their handsets crackling. Maybe. I dropped lower, slowly extending my legs. I heard the stamp and scrape of a shoe grinding a cigarette into concrete, followed by the click of a lighter. Now they spoke in low, clipped voices, muffled further by the canvas, but clear enough to assure me they weren’t cops but just a couple of men working out a problem that had nothing to do with me. I settled in to wait them out, like I’d done a dozen times from hiding holes.
“You’re an asshole, Mr. Peanut.”
“Save it, huh?” said a second voice that I imagined was Mr. Peanut’s.
“A dumb ass motherfucking retard. Lebetz takes sleeping pills, huh?”
“Every fucking night.”
“Except ... tonight,” said the first man.
“Get-the-shit-out-of-the-trunk,” said a third man in a mechanical voice, like a bad ventriloquist trying not to move his lips.
I wanted to flatten myself against the hull so they wouldn’t see my shape against the canvas. Perhaps the Four Roses had addled my brain. Maybe that’s why I thought I could grasp the blade without consequences. I would have to slip off the seat, bracing myself with my right hand. You can hold the edge of a razor blade against your skin and if you don’t apply pressure, it may as well be a playing card. It was a good knife, good steel, honed to perfection. As I unclenched my right hand, gently clasping the blade with my left, the swan pitched forward. I jerked back, my hand closing on the blade, which sunk into my fingers as smoothly as a surgeon’s scalpel. I tried to reverse the movement and felt the cold like a handful of dry ice. I dropped the knife.
“What was that?” asked the third man.
Shit. Shit. Shit. I felt the warm blood spread across my palm, and I saw it as clearly as if my hand lay under a spotlight.
“Seagull,” said Mr. Peanut.
“No. Something fell.”
With my right hand I found the knife handle.
The dock creaked. The hull slapped. The swan shivered. Under cover of the motion, I crawled back into the swan’s belly.
“Just a chain. There’s a current in this lake. Didn’t you know that, Mr. Peanut?” said the first man.
“I grew up here.”
“That’s your fucking problem.”
A chain rattled. The dock squealed under departing footsteps. There was a click and the yawning sound of a car trunk opening.
“Take everything?” asked the first man.
“Everything but the jack and spare tire.”
“Oh, the gun?”
“Toss it.”
“Ten minutes to Shark River.”
“It’s OK.”
“What, ten feet deep?” asked the second man.
“Mud bottom. I grew up here,” said Mr. Peanut.
A grunt. Silence. A splash. Silence.
The doors slammed, the car engine turned over lazily and then roared. Tires scuffed the pavement. I waited a few minutes before crawling to the rear of the swan and pushing up the canvas.
Snow fell lazily over the swan and lake. Sideways snow. Moistureless snow. Forgetting my hand for a moment, I tracked the swirl around me, which retreated conical to a brilliant point of light atop the green-roofed building, where it drew into itself and disappeared.
I stepped out of the swan and crossed the dock to the sidewalk. Under the streetlight, I opened my hand. Blood pulsed from a wound that extended across four fingers, and filled my palm. But it didn’t spill over, which it would have if it had been an artery. I walked to the lake, stretched out my arm and tilted my hand. The blood splashed on the dark water, which immediately roiled with baitfish. I folded the cloth, pressed it to my fingers, and walked back under the streetlight.
I shredded a T-shirt and wrapped the strips tightly around my hand. With my teeth, I tied a knot free-hand. Before pulling back the canvas, I followed the flight of a seagull along the length of the lake, rising finally as it continued toward the ocean. I pulled back the tarp and slid forward into my bed, wondering how much damage I had done to my hand and how many days it would take to heal. Above me, the shaft of light grew dimmer until it wasn’t there at all.
When I finally woke, in the residue of a dream, was the postcard with my mother’s address. On the postcard’s flipside, a horse’s head had replaced the swan’s, and the hybrid floated on a blood-red sea.
Chapter 4
Under a low, gray winter sky that needed only a poke for the snow to fall, I located my mother’s apartment. It was the second story of a narrow blue and white house with long windows and a steep roof, bordered by identical houses with similar colors. The porch, no larger than a blanket, chirped as I walked to the door. A 317½ in metallic numbers was half buried beneath layers of white paint. Church bells rang out, and between peals, a pipe organ throbbed. I set down my guitar with the seabag balanced on my shoulder, and tried the door handle. A wrinkled face peered through the lace-curtain window of the bottom apartment. Pale, blue watery eyes scanned me and then withdrew as I smiled and pointed to the second floor. I opened the door to the stairwell and adjusted the weight of my seabag (emptied of bloody dress blues and whites), hooked my thumb through the guitar case handle, and climbed the stairs.
A television played loudly inside the apartment. I knocked on the door. Nothing. I knocked again.
“Mom, it’s me. Sam.”
Nothing. I knocked a third time. Zero. I waited until the television quieted. I hammered the door. “MOM, IT’S SAM!”
The TV went silent. I heard the hesitant footsteps.
“Who is it?”
“Sam, mom.”
“Oh.”
A deadbolt slid back. A chain fell. A lock clicked.
The smell of burnt toast and oranges flooded the landing. Below me, a gray-haired woman with worried eyes mirrored my shock. My mother looked 20 years older than the last time I had seen her. The day she had dug her heel into the fresh black dirt that had slopped off my father’s grave, and whispered to me that he was not my father at all.
“Oh, Sam,” she said, grabbing me and stretching on her tiptoes to smother my neck and face with kisses. “You should have told me.”
“I did. A month ago.”
She stepped back, eyed the makeshift bandage wrapped around my left hand and cupped her mouth.
********************
To explain my hand, I made up a story: The blade had gotten open in my seabag, when I reached in for a pair of gloves.... “Stupid, huh, mom?” She led me to the kitchen sink, unwrapped the T-shirt strips, and washed away the blood to reveal a crimson line that ran horizontally across my fingers. Cleaning the wound thoroughly with warm water and honey-colored dishwashing soap, she spit generously upon it, spreading the saliva over the length of the cut. Then finally, with a thoughtful pause, she bent down over the cabinet beneath the sink and drew out a brown bottle of Mercurochrome. She thumped the bottom until two drops fell from its mouth. I didn’t mention that I could not bend my index, middle and ring fingers, which still didn’t concern me all that much. She placed gauze on the wound and, coming up empty on surgical tape, finished my hand in Scotch tape. Satisfied with her treatment, she looked me over.