Act of God (26 page)

I parked the car in front of a motel that had a restaurant next door. The room clerk had never seen Darbra Proft but allowed as how he’d like to have. I asked him about the food at his neighbor, and he told me I’d do better at a seafood place farther south.

I took his suggestion and was glad I did, at least at first. The lot was nearly full, usually a good sign, and the hostess led me past a blackboard with daily specials in multicolored chalks to a tiny table for two in a corner. The cloth was rough paper, and the centerpiece was a Chinese teacup with half-gnawed crayons in it. The place had fishnets on the walls and fans hanging from the ceiling, but the floor was spectacular, richly grained wood in three-inch and wider planks that someone had lovingly fitted in a pattern of lighter, medium, and darker shades of stain. The people around me were mostly families, typically three generations with what looked like grandma, her daughter and son-in-law, and a raft of screaming kids.

I glanced at the menu, which had plenty of choices and a fair wine list on the back. When my waitress came over, she asked if I’d like something to drink.

“Yes, but before I do, can you tell me what kind of wood that is?”

She looked down with me at the floor. “Huh?”

“The wood. I was wondering what it was. Cherry, beech?”

“Oh. I dunno. I never really like noticed it before.”

I decided not to ask her for a recommendation from the wine list. Which was just as well, since of the twelve listed, they didn’t have the first three I asked for.

When she brought me number four, an inexpensive chardonnay, it wasn’t very cold. I took it anyway and ordered the bluefish with garlic butter, rice, and a salad. Using the Block paperback to close out some of the din around me, I was actually surprised when my meal arrived. The bluefish was fine, but the salad tasted as though it had been made a week ago and frozen since, and about one in every ten grains of rice wasn’t cooked, nearly costing me a filling on the first mouthful.

I passed on dessert and left about half the wine in the bottle. Paying the bill, I asked both my waitress and the hostess if they recognized the woman in my photo. Two shakes of the heads.

I went back out to the Prelude, the cars still whizzing by on Route 35. It was pretty early to head back to my room, so I drove south a little more, paying attention when the road became a divided highway of two lanes south separated from the northbound by a block of tiny cottages.

After another five miles or so, the road dumped me into a town called Seaside Heights. There were a bunch of motels and tenement apartments squeezed next to each other. Lots of men and women stood on sidewalks and stoops, the men holding cans of beer and the women one and sometimes two babies. Each small side street ran east/west, ending in T-intersections at Ocean Terrace, the avenue along the beach with a raucous boardwalk beyond it. The north/south avenues seemed to specialize in taverns and discos.

Years ago, I would have stopped in one of the discos, watching the other customers dance, maybe joining in myself. But that was years ago. Even that trip, I might have gone into a tavern to watch the Yankees or Mets in the company of strangers, but in some towns, you never knew what offense a regular might take to an accent from Boston, and I wasn’t in the shape or mood to jam with anyone.

Driving north on the beach road, I found a parking place, feeding all my quarters into a meter. I used the ramp to the boardwalk at Lincoln Avenue, the Beachcomber Bar & Restaurant a landmark for where I’d left the car. Then I went south to the end of the boardwalk, turned around, and walked back, giving my knee a chance to recover from all the driving that day.

There were amusement park rides clumped on two piers jutting into the water, many of the attractions with signs that said, “The following people should not ride this ride,” including “Those with back ailments,” “Pregnant women,” and “Those under influence of narcotics.” A yellow-on-black computer board advertised fireworks sponsored by a cola company. Near it, someone had assembled a “Portable Sport Climbing Wall,” a series of clay-colored slabs stacked vertically with small concavities and convexities for a guy in baggy trunks to scale, tethered to the top by a safety cable. A number of stalls sold saltwater taffy, frozen custard, and fried dough. Even more stalls had games of chance with betting wheels and ringtoss and water pistols as your path to a mountain bike or, more likely, an off-colored stuffed animal.

The clientele was mostly young, the children squealing in genuine ecstasy, the early teens in baseball caps worn backward using the attractions as an excuse to touch each other here and there, the late teens goofing on the whole scene. Sophistication is a very relative concept.

However, if you paid attention, you saw some other things, too. An African-American couple in their thirties, joking and walking on either side of a son who might have been twelve but smallish, sunglasses over his eyes despite the darkness and one hand in each of his parents’, his smile if not his sight alternating between them. A Latino kid, muscular but with a blank expression on his face, rap-dancing alone, not bumping into anybody, a Mets cap on his head, the bill turned up like Huntz Hall used to do on the Dead End Kids, moving to the beat of his own internal music. An elderly couple, Italian from the few words I caught, strolling arm-in-arm instead of hand-in-hand, at about the pace they might have gone down the aisle after a ceremony fifty years before.

Feeling pretty mellow, I sat on a bench with white concrete stanchions and cross planks the same color as the boardwalk. Half the benches looked toward the ocean, but mine faced a bar that seemed to have live music inside and a double line of twenty-two-year-olds outside. They wore mostly shorts and T-shirts, the latter showing their colleges. Rutgers, Drew, Monmouth, Douglass. More than a smattering of New York schools. There was a lot of loud talk and foul words and good-natured jostling. I was about to get up to find a quieter spot when some bad-natured jostling broke out the door and through the line.

A blond guy, hair short on top, locks tumbling down his neck, was pulling a young woman by her brunette hair behind him, another couple about the same age trailing in a hesitating way. The blond guy was the size a major college looks for at tight end, a sleeveless New York Giants blue and red sweatshirt showing arms pumped more for blocking than receiving. The brunette was twisting and yowling a little, saying “Greg … please! … Jesus … you’re …
hurt-
ing me!”

The blond guy said, “Fine. Little pain’s fucking good for you.”

I looked around, hoping for a cop but not seeing any. Given the kid’s size, everybody else, including the couple apparently with him, was backing off before forming a circle in that unconscious, herd-mentality way we instinctively seem to have by fourth grade. That’s when the blond guy stopped and turned. Letting go of her hair, he clouted the brunette on the side of her face with the back of his other hand.

She cried out, then began just to cry. “Greg … I wasn’t … doing …
any
-thing.”

“The fuck do you call smiling at that bartender?”

There was a little blood dribbling down from the nostril on the side he’d hit her. By the time he’d recocked his hand, I’d joined him and the brunette in the center of the circle.

He looked at me. Small, meanish eyes. “The fuck do you want?”

“I want you to knock it off.”

A smile. Crooked, gapped teeth. “Her head or yours, douchebag?”

The girl edged toward the other couple. In ascending order, her boyfriend had me by about two inches, twenty years, and forty pounds.

I said, “Around the time you were learning how to throw up, the Army spent a lot of tax dollars training me to hurt people. Touch her again, and we’ll see if Uncle Sam got his money’s worth.”

Greg seemed to process that. “So what? That make you some kind of hero?”

I liked that he didn’t step toward me as he said it. “Doesn’t take a hero to handle you, Greg.”

He didn’t like my using his first name, but he’d lost the momentum, and as a football player, he could sense it. “Get the fuck out of my face, man.”

“I’m not in it. We’re just standing here talking, everybody watching.”

Greg surveyed the sea of faces, didn’t seem to find what he wanted in it. Then he noticed that the other couple and his girlfriend weren’t there anymore.

“The fuck? Hey, Joey? Annette?”

“Long gone, Greg.”

He looked at me.

I said, “Crowd like this, the cops’ll be here soon, maybe Joey and Annette bringing them.”

He tried to process that, too.

“Wouldn’t sit so well with the coach, your hitting a woman, all these witnesses and a formal complaint to boot.”

The kid looked around now, more wary.

“I were you, Greg, I’d head north. At the gallop.”

He took a last look at me, then started to run, north along the boardwalk, the circle parting for him before he had to shove anybody out of the way.

When I turned around to move toward my car, the black male in the couple with the kid in sunglasses was standing by himself, the woman and the child off to the side.

He said, “Where you from?”

“Boston.”

A nod. “Didn’t sound like from around here. Which department?”

“None.”

He raised an eyebrow? “Never?”

“Just the service.”

Another nod, extending his hand. “Nate Imes. Newark.”

“John Cuddy.” I shook with him. “Wouldn’t have been such a smart thing, you diving in with family here.”

A grin. “No, but if the Boz there started driving your head through the planks, I sort of figured I’d have to, jurisdiction or no jurisdiction.”

“Thanks.”

Imes said, “You’re a little long in the tooth for us, but you ever think about relocating, give me a call.”

“No offense, but not from what I’ve seen so far.”

A sad nod this time. “I can believe that.”

Sunday morning I showered and channel-surfed on the cable while my hair dried. One station was showing
Infectious Disease,
two gray-haired doctors enthusiastically discussing methods of transmittal. Next was something called
Lip Service,
contestants trying to recognize the lips of a “famous” singer belting out a song, after which the contestants got to lip-synch one, being graded on “accuracy,” “body mechanics,” and “overall entertainment value” by a panel of judges including Linda Blair and Tiny Tim. Next was some kind of law prep program, a female talking-head lecturing in a shrill, nasal voice about essay and multiple-choice questions.

My hair still wet, I had breakfast in my motel’s coffee shop and thought about checking out, then decided to burn another night’s worth of William Proft’s money to give me a base of operations for that day. On my way out of the coffee shop, I saw a bunch of kids in Little League uniforms half-running down the hall toward the function room with the show in it. I checked my watch, then followed them.

It was three bucks to get in the door, but things were just opening up, so I figured to kill some time before starting out with Darbra’s photo again. There were tables set up around the perimeter of the room and another group in a square at the center of it, like a wagon train drawn up to defend against Indians. The vendors or collectors already were standing behind their tables, Styrofoam cups of coffee or tea or something a little stronger in their hands but away from their wares. Most of the cards were from the seventies and eighties, encased in plastic or under glass cases like rare gems, which from the prices some of them might have been. The ones that caught my eye, though, were from my time as a kid. Hitters like Mays, Mantle, Musial. Famous pitchers like Koufax and Drysdale, crafty ones like Early Wynn and Bobby Shantz. One man in a Brooklyn Dodgers jersey had a great display of the old Boston Braves, before they moved to Milwaukee in 1953, Warren Spahn and Sibby Sisti and Del Crandall. A woman in a Hawaiian shirt had a ton of Red Sox, including Ted Williams, Jackie Jensen, and Carl Yastrzemski, some of them autographed in blue ballpoint.

“Can I show you anything?” she said.

“No, thanks. Just remembering.”

“Lots of folks do that.”

She said it in a way that made it hard to tell if she was putting me down for not buying.

At the far end of the room, several strapping young men were signing autographs. There were eight-by-ten staged poses pinned to the wall above each table, I guess to tell the fans which line to get on for which player once the lines got longer and the players harder to see. Walking by, I heard a black kid introduce himself to the white player behind one table. The kid was about the same age as Nate Imes’s boy, but tall and straight and skinny as a beanpole, his jeans riding about three inches above his shoes from the last year’s growth spurt.

The player took a baseball card from him. “Seven-fifty.”

The kid looked at him. “Say what?”

“It’s seven-fifty for the autograph.”

The kid fished in his jeans for what looked to be the change from a ten he’d used for the admissions charge. “Ain’t got but seven.”

The player shook his head, but said, “Okay. Discount, since you’re here so early.”

Taking the money, the player dashed off his signature. “See, this way the autographed card is worth more to you, because there’ll be fewer of them. Most everybody else on the team’d hit you for ten, at least.”

“Uh-huh.”

Handing the card to the kid, the player said, “So it’s really helping you, charging for this.”

“Uh-huh.”

The player frowned. “You’re welcome.”

“Ain’t no need to thank you, dickhead. I bought this, you didn’t give me nothing.”

Agreeing with the kid, I made my way to the door.

Moving south, I worked a guesthouse, two motels, and three more guesthouses. Zip. Then I turned back north and caught a break at a small motel on the beach.

Taking off her glasses, the woman with the orange hair and pudgy fingers held the photo up to her face, nearly touching her nose with it. “Yeah, I seen her.” She handed back the photo.

“Do you remember when?”

A finger scratched the side of her head. “Week ago? No, must have been two. I remember because I was thinking about giving her the room Mr. and Mrs. Pejorek had, but we didn’t get that far.”