Beach Music (45 page)

And I admired the courage it took for Elliott to present himself at the doorway of his enemy, and the general seemed grateful that I had opened that door.

When I had given the general his towels and a spare toothbrush, he asked me, “Is Jordan a good priest? Or is it just part of his disguise? A game he’s playing?”

I thought about it and said, “Your son’s a man of God.”

The general shook his head in disbelief and said, “Doesn’t that surprise you? Was I so wrong about my son? Wasn’t he a little bit on the wild side?”

I laughed quietly, remembering, then said, “Jordan Elliott was the wildest son of a bitch I ever met in my life—bar none.”

F
rom the day he arrived in Waterford, Jordan Elliott was known as the “California boy.” To South Carolinians, California was the point where the American dream had started to turn in the sun and go terribly wrong. It was a forbidden country where all human passions were venerated to excess and all restraint pushed to its ineffable limits.

The time was known as the Jordan Summer. No one had ever seen anything like him. His blond hair grew down to his shoulders and he glowed with a radiant, God-given health. Though not conventionally handsome, he wore the hard-cast face of a long-distance runner. He had fearless but broken eyes, and they were breathtaking. Waterford would discover immediately that Jordan Elliott lived life as though it were a free fall from a high-flying plane. He brought revolutionary ideas with him from California and dispensed them freely.

In that summer, I would remember my friends and their souls, light and air-streamed as mallards, set loose among the vast table linen of the great salt marshes, happy among the green riches of a land so full with life that the rivers smelled like some perfect distillate made of spartina and the albumen of eggs. The boys of the low country were accustomed to taking their pleasure from the rivers around Waterford: fishing trips that lasted for days, floating through a dozen tide changes, rubbing baby oil and Mercurochrome on their
sunburned shoulders as the game fish of those moon-leavened waters fought for permission to take their hooks—the sheepshead, the migrating cobia, the spottail bass, the sweet-tasting trout—all those fresh fillets would turn golden in their frying pans and fill their bellies and brighten all the generous upright days of their boyhood. The marsh country satisfied all five senses of a boy a hundred times over. I could close my eyes while throwing my cast net for bait in a tidal creek at low tide, and the summer air would fill my lungs. I could believe that I was a sailor, a merchant marine, a sea-born creature of water and marshes. The black mud of the creeks squirted between my toes and I could hear a porpoise driving the mullet toward a sandbar in the river.

Jordan’s effect on Waterford was cataclysmic, though it would take years to assess either the damage or the benefits of his bold passage through the life of the town. For his contemporaries, he opened up the windows of time, he brought news of the great wide world to their door. Life was fable and theater and myth because Jordan willed it to be so.

Jordan was a military brat, the son of a lieutenant colonel, and one of those migratory, interchangeable, and ultimately invisible children who drifted in and out of the colorless housing of the two Marine bases in town and the naval hospital. The lives of these children were so transient that there was little reason for a native Waterfordian to waste time getting to know them well. They simply passed through the town and its schools each decade, mostly unnoticed and unpraised.

Capers, Mike, and I first saw Jordan on Dolphin Street as we were slowly making our way to an American Legion baseball game at the high school field. We were in no hurry and moved slowly down the main shopping street during one of those fragrant Southern days when the pavement was hot to the touch and all the plants seemed about to burst into spontaneous combustion. The heat lay inside of things. Blasts of cold air came from within the stores whenever a shop door opened and hit the three of us with a welcome coolness. Sailboats were stalled in the windless bay like dragonflies trapped in the amber of a weatherless high noon that would last forever. Time stood still and babies in their carriages squalled from
discomfort and heat rash and the impatient lassitude of their mothers. The summer wrote its name on the sizzling asphalt and there was not a dog in sight.

“What in the hell is that all about?” Mike said, the first of the group to spot Jordan flying down Dolphin Street on a skateboard, weaving expertly and dazzlingly between cars in the stalled traffic.

“Damned if I know and damned if I care,” Capers said, feigning indifference, but there was an edge of uncertainty that both Mike and I caught. Capers was the arbiter of fashion and trends among our group. He welcomed acolytes, but didn’t cotton well to rivals.

“That’s the new kid,” I said. “The one from California.”

I never forgot that first sighting of Jordan Elliott, his palomino-colored hair floating above him as he shot down the street on the first skateboard ever to make it across the borders of South Carolina. I watched in awe as Jordan navigated between Buicks and Studebakers while all the eyes on that Southern street turned their collective, disapproving gaze on the stranger. Jordan wore a bathing suit, a torn-up tee shirt, and cut-off tennis shoes, and he moved down that street noisily and showily, making hairpin turns and reverses that seemed impossible and superhuman. His sunglasses were wrapped around his head and appeared more like a mask of defiance and outlawry than anything to do with the laws of optics. Store owners and customers ran out into the shimmering wall of heat to watch the performance.

Deputy Cooter Rivers was issuing a parking citation to a tourist from Ohio when he noticed the commotion and whistled Jordan to a stop in the middle of the street.

Deputy Rivers was an amply built, dull-witted man who had an amateur actor’s love of crowds and he was delighted by the attention he drew from his townsmen as he approached the long-haired boy. Deputy Rivers said, “Well, well, Little Eagle. What have we here?”

“What’d you want? I’m in a hurry,” Jordan said behind his sunglasses, and he seemed oblivious to the commotion he was causing.

“Put a ‘sir’ on the end of that sentence, boy,” the deputy thundered.

“Which one?”

“What?” the deputy said, confused. “All of ’em, boy. Every goddamn one of them if you know what’s good for you.”

“I’m sorry, sir,” Jordan answered, “but I don’t understand a word you’re saying. Could you please speak English?”

Mike and I joined several members of the crowd as we burst out laughing.

“Boy,” the deputy replied angrily, “I don’t know if you’re considered funny where you hail from, but you try to rattle my cage with your brand of crap and I’m liable to shut your runnin’ gums in a hurry.”

Jordan stared out from behind his sunglasses, unreadable, foreign, in perfect control. “What did this guy say?” he asked the crowd and again there was laughter.

Cooter Rivers’ accent was indeed thick and difficult even for a fellow South Carolinian to decipher. And when provoked, the deputy talked faster than normal and this accentuated a slight speech impediment that the public schools of Waterford never quite got around to correcting. His gutturals were lazy and his labials floated toward incomprehensibility. Agitated, his words ran together in an untranslatable stream. Cussing beneath his breath, Cooter wrote up a ticket and handed it to Jordan. A few men in the crowd clapped as Jordan studied the ticket.

Jordan then said, “Did you finish high school?”

A flustered Rivers answered, “I almost did.”

“You misspelled ‘violation,’ ” Jordan said. “You misspelled ‘moving.’ ”

“I got my point across,” the deputy said.

“What do I do with this ticket, man?” Jordan asked.

As Deputy Rivers made his way through the crowd, he shouted back, “You can eat it for lunch for all I care, Little Eagle.”

The crowd began to disperse and most of them missed the moment when Jordan ate his traffic ticket as easily and deliberately as a carriage horse eating a carrot. He munched on it, then swallowed the last of the ticket with a slight gagging sound.

“You play baseball?” I asked.

“I play everything,” Jordan said, taking his first look at the tall, rangy, flat-nosed boy I was in those years.

“Any good?” Mike asked.

“I can play a little bit.” And in the secret language of athletes Jordan was letting us know that we were in the presence of a player. “My name’s Jordan Elliott.”

“I know who you are,” Capers answered. “We’re second cousins. I’m Capers Middleton.”

“My mother said you would be too ashamed to come meet me,” Jordan said, amused. There was something both charming and off-putting about his self-assurance.

“I heard you were weird,” Capers said. “You just proved it.”

“Capers! What a name. A caper’s a little berry in Europe they put on fish and salads. It tastes like shit.”

“It’s a family name,” Capers said, thornily, defensive. “It’s very important in South Carolina history.”

“Oh gag,” Mike said, pretending to throw up on the curb.

“My father thinks the Elliotts back here are hot shit,” Jordan confessed.

“It’s a fine South Carolina name,” Capers agreed. “Very fine.”

“I knew I should’ve taken that vomit bag the last time I flew Delta,” Mike said and Jordan laughed.

“I’m Jack McCall,” I said extending my hand. “A McCall’s next to nothing in this town.”

“Mike Hess,” Mike said, bowing. “Capers lets us hang around to polish his coat of arms.”

“They both come from very good families,” Capers said.

“Capers thinks we come from white trash,” I said. “But he’d die of loneliness if we weren’t around.”

“You shouldn’t’ve eaten that ticket,” Capers said. “It showed a disrespect for the law.”

“Let’s bring him to practice,” I said. “We’ve got three guys hurt.”

“How’re we gonna explain his hair to Coach Langford?” Capers asked.

“He’s from California,” Mike said. “That explains everything.”

If we had walked on to the baseball field with a Mau Mau chieftain or a Tibetan basketweaver, Coach Langford’s reaction could not have been more incredulous.

“Well, what do we got here?” Coach Langford said.

“Military brat, Coach,” I said. “Came from California.”

“He looks like a Russian Communist,” Langford whispered.

“He’s Capers’ cousin,” said Mike.

“A distant cousin,” Capers quickly said.

“California, you say,” Coach Langford said. “We’ve got a spare uniform, son,” Coach Langford said. “You ever play this game?”

“A little,” Jordan said. “You ever pitched?”

“A time or two.”

“Put a sir on the end of that,” Coach Langford demanded.

“Sir,” Jordan said and he said it with the exact same inflection and feeling as though he had uttered the word “shit.” He had a genius for making an adult feel uncomfortable without resorting to overt discourtesy. Jordan Elliott was the first rebel I knew to enter the precincts of Waterford since the firing on Fort Sumter, the first who treated men in authority as aliens, as interlopers whose job it was to depress the natural joy and ebullience of youth.

As we watched him put on the uniform, Capers said to us, “I think we made a big mistake bringing him to practice.”

“I like him,” Mike said. “He takes no shit. He acts just like I would if I had an ounce of courage. Which I proudly do not.”

“He’s an athlete. That’s for sure,” I said, studying the skateboard. “How’d you like to try to ride that thing?”

“My mother told me all about him. They should’ve put him in reform school years ago,” said Capers.

“Let’s see if he can pitch,” I said.

“He’s just a poor Marine brat. They move every year. Give him a chance,” Mike added.

“None of them fit in when you come right down to it,” Capers said. “They don’t know who they are. Got no place to call their own. I feel sorry for them.”

“He’s an Elliott. A South Carolina Elliott,” I teased.

“From a
fine
family.
Very
fine,” Mike added happily.

Capers smiled as he watched Jordan walk onto the field.

“Pitch, new boy,” Coach Langford said, tossing Jordan his own glove and a baseball. “Where’s your hat?”

“The hat didn’t fit.”

“All that damn California hair,” the coach said. “We gotta do something about that situation. Otis, you bat, son. The rest of you boys spread out in the field.”

The catcher, Benny Michaels, finished fastening his gear, then crouched behind the batter’s box and started taking warm-up pitches from Jordan. Jordan warmed up slowly, but you could tell it wasn’t his first time on a pitcher’s mound. There was nothing fancy in his delivery; it was workmanlike and competent. Then Otis Creed began to run his mouth.

Otis was the first boy in Pony League to chew tobacco on a regular basis without throwing up. His father ran the marina on the inland waterway and Otis carried with him that freckled, sunburned look of someone who had grown up around boats and the good mechanical smell of small engines being repaired. He could tear down a boat’s engine as easily as a recruit could assemble a field-stripped M-1 rifle. Otis could not diagram a declarative sentence or find the value of
X
in the simplest algebraic equation. Waterford was a town famous for its street fighters, and Otis Creed moved with the slack-jawed swagger of the natural bully.

“I never batted against no girl before,” Otis said loud enough for even the outfielders to hear. “She’s kind of purty too.”

The laughter spread through the ranks of the team, but it was nervous reflexive laughter.

Jordan started his windup and threw his first pitch straight at the fillings in the upper part of Otis Creed’s mouth. It was with that pitch that the boys of Waterford learned about the speed that Jordan brought to the task of hurling a baseball. Benny never came close to catching that first one. It hit the chicken wire backstop with a solid twang as though a string had broken on an overtuned guitar.