Beach Music (71 page)

Mike made gagging sounds behind Jordan and whispered, “Hey, name-carrier. Can I borrow some Juicy Fruit after I puke?”

Jordan passed him a stick of Juicy Fruit, then shot Mike the finger. Mike said after class, “One can tell from the line of my dick that I’m descended from one of the most distinguished bagel makers on the Upper West Side.”

“Have sons, Mike. Have sons,” I cried out happily.

“I’d rather watch a jockstrap mildew than listen to that woman’s voice,” Jordan said. But Mrs. Seignious had found her champion in Capers and he defended both her pedagogy and the content of her course to all comers.

“It’s important to know where you’ve come from,” Capers said.

“Why?” I asked. “What possible difference could it make? America’s a democracy. Everyone gets a fair shake.”

“Nonsense,” Jordan said. “Half this town’s black. Tell me the color of your skin doesn’t make a difference in this stupid part of the country.”

“Their time will come,” Capers predicted. “They haven’t earned it yet.”

“You sound like such an idiot, Capers,” Jordan said. “You’re talking like you’re a hundred years old and you’re only in ninth grade. You believe everything your parents believe.”

“I have more respect for my parents than any two people on earth,” Capers said. “I owe everything to them.”

“You’re the unhippest, uncoolest kid I’ve ever met, man,” Jordan said, appraising his cousin with a clear, unstinting California eye. “You’re lucky you were born so deep in the sticks. Your show would close in a week out on the West Coast.”

“You’re calling me a square, aren’t you?” Capers demanded.

“It’s far worse than that,” said Jordan. “You’re square root, man. You’re the kind of guy that likes to wear socks at the beach.”

“Maybe I’m just proud of who I am.”

“Maybe you’re just a Southern asshole,” Jordan shot back.

“Have sons, Capers. Have sons, Jordan,” I said, trying to cut the tension between them.

Mike said, “This course’ll help me when I write my memoirs,
Jewboy in the Confederacy
. Do you think Mrs. Seignious ever heard of Ellis Island? It’s just a hop, skip, and a jump down from Plymouth Rock.”

“South Carolina history,” Jordan said, shaking his head. “What a contradiction in terms. I’ve lived all over the world and I’ve never heard one person ever mention this state’s name. It’s nowhere, man. A loser state if there ever was one. Nothing’s ever happened here.”

“The state of South Carolina seceded from the Union first,” Capers bristled. “We fired on Fort Sumter and were the first to answer the call to arms.”

“Then the North came down and kicked your Confederate asses from Richmond to Vicksburg.”

“We gave as good as we got. Our generalship was superb,” said Capers, moving toward a relaxed Jordan with clenched fists.

“One never reads about Lee’s March on New York, but one does come across Sherman’s March to the Sea. I’ve studied Civil War battlefields with my father, Capers. I know a lot more about this subject than you do.”

“You’re not a true Southerner,” Capers announced.

“I’m an American, pal, and proud of it.”

“Your family arrived in the New World in seventeen-ought-nine. Mine came here in seventeen-ought-six. What went wrong with you?” Capers asked.

“When did your family get here, Jack?” Mike asked facetiously.

“Nineteen-ought-eight. Something like that,” I said, laughing, and Capers thought the laughter was directed at him. “How about your family, Mike?”

“Very early, my family,” Mike said. “They arrived on these virgin shores the same year the Edsel was introduced in Detroit.”

“Have sons. Have sons,” Mike and I sang together, laughing in each other’s arms.

For another class, Delia Seignious read a chapter from William Elliott’s 1859 book,
Carolina Sports by Land and Water
. Her reading voice was as monotonous as the sound of a running toilet. Half the class was asleep and the other half daydreaming while Delia labored to bring life to the serviceable prose of Jordan’s great-grandfather and Capers’ great-great-uncle on his mother’s side. Delia read the first chapter, the showcase feature of the book that had once dazzled Yankee fishermen, in which the Honorable Mr. Elliott describes the pursuit of the great manta ray, or devilfish, through the waters of Waterford Sound. Only Delia Seignious, with her genius for monotony, could have rendered the hunt for the two-ton manta ray with its great black-backed wings and bat-shaped body to a colorless tale whose words settled over her class like a sleeping powder. She could make the “Charge of the Light Brigade” sound like the directions for folding a napkin in a debutante’s handbook. When Mr. Elliott placed a harpoon near the spine of a devilfish and the enormous creature towed his slave-powered boat through the choppy waters off Hilton Head, the soft snoring of cheerleaders and football players
intermingled and I felt the sweat soak through the back of my shirt. Great heat and mediocre teaching have done much to lower the collective IQ of the South over the centuries.

But one of her students listened to her with breathless attention and drank in every word she uttered. For Capers Middleton, what Delia Seignious offered up from the dusty granary of her knowledge played a central part in his image of himself and his world. He not only felt a close personal connection to South Carolina history, he thought of his own life as an enhancement and extension of it. From the day of his birth, he had enjoyed a highly developed sense of entitlement and privilege that had accrued to him through the accomplishments of his ancestors.

That Christmas, Capers received from his parents a first-edition copy of
Carolina Sports by Land and Water
. The book thrilled Capers with its spirited accounts of fishing and hunting expeditions that had taken place in a less-populated, pre–Civil War low country. The land Elliott described was a green paradise teeming with game and fish. Capers made a spiritual connection with William Elliott and hunted the same animals his ancestor had hunted and fished for the same fish at the exact same locations so lovingly described by this energetic forebear.

Capers’ father commissioned a black metalworker from Charleston, who was expert in the repair of wrought-iron fences, to fashion a harpoon for Capers exactly like the one wielded by William Elliott when he took to the channel and sounds in search of the great manta rays. Capers held this weapon and imagined the wild, dangerous rides that ensued after one of the enormous beasts was harpooned and turned in agony toward the high seas. He called upon the spirits of his ancestors when he tracked bobcat or white-tailed deer through the vast acreage of old rice plantations. He designed a secret task for himself: he wanted to kill every fish and animal that William Elliott had named in his book.

I
n 1964, Jordan’s father, now a full colonel, would be sent to a top-secret assignment overseas in a country called Vietnam. At that time none of us had ever heard of Vietnam.

Celestine Elliott took a home on the Point three blocks away from my house and a block away from both Capers and Mike. That summer we were inseparable. It was also the summer that Mike, Jordan, and I wished we had paid more attention in Delia Seignious’ South Carolina history course.

In April, on every Sunday, Capers had been borrowing his father’s eighteen-foot Renken fishing boat and taking to the river for an all-day fishing trip. All of us were competitive fishermen who took great pride in our gear and tackle; we changed baits and lures frequently as conditions changed and teased each other relentlessly as we went from oyster bank to deep drop in our pursuit of game fish. We baited our hooks with iced-down eels, then cast them in front of the great swishing forms of cobia hunting along the surface. The cobia were torpedo-shaped and powerful and they were my favorite fish to cook and eat at a campfire.

Capers’ harpoon had proved a symbolic but useless gift. During a flounder gigging trip on a moonless night, he had tried to use the harpoon to gig the flounder exposed in the soft mud flats and sandbars by the light of a lantern on a johnboat. We would let the boat drift over shallow water and take turns gigging flounder that had buried themselves in sand to await prey passing overhead. The flounder’s silhouette was as distinctive as a pretty woman’s profile in a cameo. A three-pronged gig brought the flounder into the boat cleanly. Capers’ harpoon was so large that the fish was mutilated and its flesh ruined by the blow. Once Capers used the harpoon to land a fifty-pound sand shark, but even then it proved too much weapon for not enough fish. And so it lay unused that summer in the gunwale of the boat tied to a hundred feet of thick marine rope. From time to time Capers would justify its remaining there by reminding Jordan that the descendants of William Elliott never went to sea unprepared for any emergency. But there were too many fish to catch with regular tackle and we even landed a cobia weighing over forty pounds. I cooked those cobia steaks over a campfire with corn oil, butter, and lemon juice, and that became the first recipe I ever sold to a newspaper.

In the first week of August, Mike hit a triple off the wall at College Park in Charleston, driving in three runs and winning the
Lower State Championship for the Waterford American Legion Team. Capers had been on third, I was on second, and Jordan on first when Mike teed off on the first pitch by the Conway relief pitcher. The four of us were growing strong together, coming into our season as athletes at the same time. When Jordan pitched, nothing was safe if the ball went to the outfield where Mike played a swift left field and Capers covered an amazing amount of ground in center and no one dared test my now-legendary throwing arm in right. Jordan knew we played a cunning outfield; little got by us, nothing through us, and we always hit the cutoff man.

After the baseball season was over, we moved into my family’s fishing camp on the southwest side of the Isle of Orion for the rest of the summer.

During the first week, we loaded the Middletons’ eighteen-foot Renken with extra tanks of gas, chose a day of superb calm and a weather report that called for nothing but clear skies, then struck out with our seventy-five horsepower motor for the Gulf Stream. The older fishermen spoke of the Gulf Stream in reverential tones as a great secret indigo river born in the South bringing a warm current and the traffic of marlin and whales toward the North Star and England. Out there the waters were silver or cobalt blue and the fish weighed as much as automobiles. All fishermen who returned from the Gulf Stream told stories of wonder and exhaustion about the strength of the great fish coaxed up from the depths.

It took us an hour to get to the open sea and we had told no one of our plans because no adult would have allowed such a long trip in such a small boat. Before sunrise, we had passed the last buoy marking the channel opening. The sea was lakelike as the first light hit it and the bow of our boat was pointed in the direction of Africa. We felt as adventurous as though our destination actually was Cameroon or the Ivory Coast. In a cooler, we had packed enough food and drink to last for two days. We were averaging twenty knots as we got farther and farther away from the sight of land.

“My mama would kill my Jewish ass if she knew where I was right this minute,” Mike said, as he scanned the horizon and saw only an endless circle of water. “She thinks that I’m crabbing for my dinner with chicken necks as we speak.”

“We should’ve brought a radio,” Jordan said.

“Low country boys don’t need no radios,” Capers said, keeping his eye on the compass and the boat pointed due east. “We were born in the pluff mud with gills and flippers. Man, I was born to go out to the Gulf Stream.”

“We don’t need radios, California boy,” I teased, “because we’ve got gonads big as Goodyear blimps.”

“You’ve got brains the size of houseflies,” said Jordan, surveying the ocean around him. “Lucky this is such a pussy ocean. You wouldn’t stick your big toe in the Pacific without a radio.”

“They didn’t have any radios on the
Mayflower,”
Capers said. “Columbus couldn’t call back to chat with Ferdinand. Nothing to fear, the master mariner’s here.”

“Nobody knows we’re out here,” Jordan said.

“The guy at the marina knows we’re going on a trip,” I said. “We filled up six tankfuls of fuel.”

“We couldn’t go if we told our parents,” Capers said.

“My folks would have a cow if they knew I was out here,” I said.

Capers called over the sound of the engine, “It might drive your father to drink.”

I ignored the remark and looked back at where land was supposed to be.

“I could never be wild enough for my father,” Jordan said. “I could drive up to Spartanburg, impregnate every girl at Converse College, and my father would still think I was a faggot.”

Before we reached the Gulf Stream, we arrived at a vast acreage of sargassum, the grasslands of the North Atlantic that formed a drifting archipelago of brown seaweed, which was more chlorophyll-rich than Kansas. It was the first sign that we were nearing the Gulf Stream itself. In earth science class, our teacher, Walter Gnann, had drawn a chart of the Gulf Stream as it flowed out of the Gulf of Mexico and went up the coast of Florida. Mr. Gnann was one of those introspective scientists who believed that nature simply proved the amplitude and mathematical genius of God. With the Gulf Stream, Mr. Gnann could talk about weather patterns, the movement of fish and plant life from the Caribbean to the coast of
South Carolina, and a natural application of the Coriolis force, the curved angle of lines drawn straight across a spinning surface. The earth spun on its axis, the moon pulled the waters with its puppeteer hands, and the Gulf Stream moved like a secret, warm-water Nile through the heart of the Atlantic keeping England from being a snow-bound kingdom. The Gulf Stream brought good news from the South to the cold, inhospitable countries of Europe, a love letter sent out of Southern waters to melt icebergs in the shipping lanes near Greenland.

The water changed when we entered the Gulf Stream itself, becoming a jewel-like blue that looked as if it flowed out of the heart of some stone not native to the region. The water was clean-looking and moving swiftly as a mountain river. As low country boys we found clear water to be deeply disturbing. As soon as the Renken entered the stream itself the color of the water went from dark to light blue. Once Capers looked down to see we were floating in two hundred feet of water. Glancing down at the depth-finder a few minutes later, Capers was stunned to find the ocean’s depth had plummeted to a thousand feet. He reported this fact to the rest of us and we whistled in disbelief.