Circle View (12 page)

Some nights I stay up to watch them, dozens of the king crabs pulling out of the tide onto the sand. I don't know where they go, what they are headed for. They move blindly, squarish and helmet-gray, inching forward like small machines. They look like the first things that ever rose up out of the ocean. In daylight, the surfline is littered with shells where the breakers have swept the crabs into the rocks. Their shells are like shards of stoneware. They will cut your feet if you let them. I take the live ones out of the sun, dangle them by their tails and toss them into the water.

This one is not crawling. It is on its back, stuck through with a steel butter knife; its spider legs swipe at the knife. I bend down and see small letters stamped in the steel: STAINLESS U.S.A. Some boy has pocketed the knife from a hotel coffee shop. The crab smells of salt and blood. The legs are rigid as toothpicks; they tick against the metal, the hard shell scratching curves in the sand. I push the knife, and it is solid. While I watch, the black legs stop moving.

Dough Rollers is done up in a merry-go-round theme. All around us, bright plastic horses are frozen in mid-gallop. The pizza warms me and the beers go down easy. Tesh wipes his mouth with a paper napkin, then shoots the napkin into his empty beer mug. He goes to the bar and gives the man some money for a case of beer and a pizza to go.

“Come on and drink with me back at the room,” he says. I begin to worry he is up to something, but then he says, “Come meet the old lady. I'm always dragging home strays.” He laughs. I have trouble imagining him with an old lady, the same way I can't see him with kids. He seems comfortable being alone, seems to have already acquired an old man's habit of drinking with strangers in bars. Outside we stand on the boardwalk and the wind slips the seams of my clothes. I say, “Okay.”

His old lady is a dark-haired girl of sixteen or seventeen who tells me her name is Tina.

“Tesh and Tina,” I say. “That's cute.” She laughs and slaps me on the shoulder. I like her right off. She's plain in the face, with muddy brown eyes and thin lips and no makeup. She wears her hair long, and has a hefty bosom that makes her seem chunky somehow. We sit around a folding card table, drinking beer and smoking. The tangle of covers on one of the unmade beds starts to move and shift. I jump, and Tesh and Tina laugh at me. From beneath the covers appears this little girl, about ten, with curly hair so blond it is nearly white. She looks at me with pinkish rabbit eyes and blinks.

“My niece”
Tesh says
. He bends and plugs, in his, tape, deck, turns up the volume on
Rubber Soul
. It is music I haven't heard in a long time. We listen to “Nowhere Man,” and I tell them it is my theme song. Everyone laughs. Tesh tells me his niece is named Becca. She grins and walks over to shake my hand like I've just sold her a car. Tesh gives her a can of beer and she takes a long pull from it, then burps and giggles.

“She's young for beer,” I say. Tesh shrugs.

“No, I ain't,” Becca says. “I'm an orphan.”

“You are not.” Tesh taps her on the rump and looks at me. “We're watching her a couple weeks while my brother-in-law and his wife sort out some things.” I remember that phrase from the lawyers, and know it means trouble. Paul McCartney is singing; I wonder if I could show Becca how to dance standing on the tops of my shoes. We keep popping beers, pulling off slices of pizza.

The TV in the corner is on and again the sound is turned down. I watch for a couple minutes, expecting news to come on and the blurry faces of the men to reappear, thrown in with motocross racing and beer ads, then gone again. It seems to me that a thing can come back as quickly as it goes away, but on the screen there is only a wrestling match—people wearing masks, slamming each other around. Tesh and Tina watch it and start wrestling in the space between the two beds. They are out of breath and laughing before they sit down again. It makes me happy to see that, the kind of knock-around thing people do when they feel good with one another. Becca is laughing too, from the beer, I think. She gives a high-pitched little girl squeal, like a cheerleader in junior high.

“How old are you?” I ask her.

She sticks out her chin. “I'm thirteen.”

“She's eleven,” Tesh says. “But she's getting ‘em.” He tweaks her on the chest, where fleshy bumps slightly raise her T-shirt. Tina slaps his hand. My ears turn hot, and I have the impulse to reach across and hit Tesh in the face.

Tina puts her hands on her hips and throws out her bosom like Mae West, and says, “I guess early bloomers run in the family.” Everyone laughs at her joke, and I'm grateful to her for making it.

Becca puts her hands where in a few years her own hips will be, pushes out her chest, and begins prancing around the room wiggling her butt, saying, “early bloomer, early bloomer,” over and over in this throaty, piano-top voice. I want to tell her to stay a little girl, not to be in too much of a hurry to grow up and find trouble, to find men and greedy love. Even as I think it she makes herself back into a child, throws out her pale arms and begins twirling, spinning a loopy circle with her head tossed back and eyes closed.

The pizza is gone and the beer half warm. I hear wind shake sand against the storm door and window screens. The music plays while our eyes shift between a dog food commercial on TV and Becca twirling herself into dizziness and giggling. On her feet are these little lacey-top white ankle socks, picking up the grime of the carpet as she spins, turning herself to the point where she has trouble standing, her face shiny happy as she staggers near the beds.

“You're gone to crack your skull,” Tina says. Tesh nods his head in agreement. My brain tells me
Get up and catch her before she falls down
, but my legs are too heavy with beer. I tip up a bottle to hide my eyes.

Becca sits on the floor, flushed and sweaty, still giggling. She looks up at me and says, “What's wrong with you?”

It is a question I can't answer. I remember when Shelly asked me the same thing. I sat counting the candy bars inside the vending machine in the waiting area of the emergency room. They sent us there to sit after they carted Billy in for his magnetic scan. The technician told us the big magnet could rip the car keys right out of our pants' pockets. I wanted to keep searching out what came next, so I wouldn't have to go back and think of anything already past. I rubbed at my shoulders, trying to get the feel out of them. All evening I'd sat in a vinyl booth drinking beer and making up scrapbook pictures in my head, then had come home and lifted Billy up on my shoulders, holding his feet in my palms, spinning him around the room. Shelly was shouting, “Stop it, Mitch. He's too young. He's only a baby.” But I heard him laughing and laughing, and I closed my eyes so that everything went purple and the spinning felt warm and liquid and made sound come from my mouth. The small heft of Billy on my shoulders felt as good as anything I'd ever known, and I wanted to tell Shelly. She was a shadow in my turning, a voice around me, circling me like a moon. Her sweet perfume was the odor of the dark behind my eyes, the smell of the heft of Billy on my shoulders. She was shouting and I moved inside my eyes when Billy's laughing came through louder, the rounded edges of it broke off into a sound like a tearing of his lungs. I moved and opened my eyes as the room shifted behind Shelly and there was a dull thump like something dropped on wet sand, then Shelly was screaming with her hand over her mouth as I was still gathering the words to tell her how good everything felt, and I ended my turning and saw the swipe of blood on the beige wall above the thermostat. Shelly moved to the phone and dialed.

In the waiting room I watched people put money in the vending machine. Shelly sat beside me; I felt her watching me. A man across the aisle held a bloody T-shirt and a broken yardstick. I had been in this emergency room once before, when I burned my hand. As I sat remembering that, the doctor came out in blue paper clothes and said Billy would be just fine. Shelly cried and shivered and held the doctor's hands. I was happy, but somehow the fact that he would be fine made what I did seem all the more foolish.

When the doctor left, Shelly smoothed the thighs of her jeans and said, “I don't want you around him anymore.”

I shook my head. “You think that now,” I said, “but it's not what you really want.”

“You won't make it as a father. Not till you grow up.”

My neck slowly grew stiff, like I'd been in a car accident. I knew right then that if Billy had died from his injuries Shelly would have thrown her arms around me, that I would have been forgiven and pitied. “I feel older than anybody,” I said. An ambulance had pulled up outside, its red lights circling along the walls of the waiting area.

“That's guilt,” she said. “It doesn't count for anything. Everything you do is easy.” She looked at me like a bored high school teacher explaining some simple problem of geometry. That look was enough to let me know she was done with me, and the sturdiness in her voice after what we'd been through let me see straight down eighteen years, her raising the baby up decent and strong without much in the way of help from me.

Shelly went upstairs in the elevator to stay with Billy overnight. She had her arms around herself. I went home and put my things in the toe of the sleeping bag.

Tesh takes off to find more beer and cigarettes. I stay behind with Tina and Becca. We dance, tossing ourselves around in a loose-boned way that makes me feel good. The tape plays “Michelle,” and the three of us clasp hands and turn an awkward, slow circle, stumbling over our feet and laughing. It has been a while since I've held a hand or seen happy females. Becca asks where I live, and I tell her on the beach, in a giant red seashell. The words float up out of the beer I've drunk. She shakes her curls and laughs and calls me silly, so I tell her that big, white dinosaurs come growling every night and wake me up. I tell her animals crawl out of the ocean when the moon is out; I say that in France, people find picture books washed up on the beach. Tina says I sure can tell a story.

“They're not stories,” Becca says.

I say to her, “Would you dance with me? I'll be real careful.”

Tina is distracted by the TV, pictures of waving flags and fighter jets. I guess the station is signing off with the national anthem. “You don't have to be careful,” Tina says over her shoulder, “I trust you.”

Becca takes hold of my hands and spreads her feet across my insteps, her white anklets atop my black sneakers. She is as tall as my chest. I balance her arms up and out while we turn a stiff box step, watching our feet. She smells of baby shampoo and sweat. The eyelets on my shoes press into my skin. Tina waves her arms around like an orchestra conductor, laughing, keeping time with our slow dance. When the music quits, I hear sand whisk against the storm door. Becca steps down off my feet. With her weight gone, I feel myself drifting up toward the ceiling.

“I liked that,” Becca says.

“Well, good. I liked it, too.” I hold out my hand and she gives me five. Tina claps for us, and we bow.

The door opens, smacks open with the wind, and Tesh walks in carrying a grocery sack.

“Road trip!” he says. Another man steps in behind him, young, with short hair and leather biker clothes, a wallet chained to his belt. Tesh reaches in the bag and begins tossing cans of beer to us. The biker goes to the empty pizza box to nibble on bits of crust. He has acne on his pink skin; I want to tell him his clothes are all wrong for his face.

“Where are we going?” Tina asks.

“Up to Assateague,” Tesh says. “Spook the ponies. Run the sons of bitches in the headlights.”

“What ponies?” Becca says.

“You'll land your ass in jail,” I tell him. “Signs say to leave them alone, and rangers patrol all night there. National park.”

“Them horses were there before people,” the biker kid says. “Swam up shore off of pirate ships. They won't mind us much.”

Becca squeezes my hands. “You go with us.”

Instead I say my goodbyes and head for the beach. I tell Becca I have to feed the dinosaurs, that I have to sleep in my seashell and look for story books. I have never really believed that Dr. Beckworth's book might wash back up on shore, but there are times when anything seems possible. During Fourth of July weekend, the tide carried in a bale of marijuana and a survival kit from a Navy life raft.

Outside, wind pulls at my clothes, blows grit into my mouth. My nose runs, and I shiver. By the time I reach Fourteenth Street I'm too cold to sleep, too dizzy with beer. The sky turns from dark to pale gray. I walk on the damp sand above the retreating tide, stepping around beached jellyfish. It is too early for the old people with their metal detectors and dogs. Mine are the only footprints in the washed sand. The tide has brought up rusted cans with the labels worn away, plastic toy soldiers, the broken shells of horseshoe crabs, dirty band-aids and sections of plywood. I walk up three blocks, then back down, my shadow beginning to take shape.

When I look up from the sand, I see Becca. She stands on the boardwalk, waving to me. She walks toward me, breathing white breath, her hair the color of sea oats in the pale light. I push my hands into my armpits and wait for her. The air smells of heavy oil.

“I found you,” she says. “It was easy.”

“I thought you went off to spook horses.”

“I'm scared of horses. When everybody drove off I said I was sleepy.”

“You go on off to bed, now. You shouldn't be up all night.”

“I want to see the dinosaurs.” She stands in one of the raked tracks made by the scrapers.

“You missed them,” I tell her.

She frowns. “Then show me the seashell you live in.”

I stand and think for a minute, watching yellow foam evaporate on the sand. “Okay,” I say. “Follow me.” We head back up the beach, stepping through washed up seaweed along the slope of damp sand. I walk the down side, toward the water, and it makes it seem as if she has done two years' worth of growing in the half-hour since I've seen her. As we walk, she takes my hand. I steer her around the jellyfish.