Death's Excellent Vacation (30 page)

About two cigarettes later, I heard soft moans rise over the dunes to the east.

I gestured toward her beach bag. “You bring a good book? We might be stuck here awhile.”

She dug into the canvas sack. “Yeah.”

I recognized the burgundy cover:
The Catcher in the Rye.

“Good book,” I said.

“You’ve read it?”

“Hasn’t everybody?”

“Not Donna and Kim.”

I nodded. Fiddled with the label on the Boone’s Farm wine bottle. “I read it when I was like twelve, I think.”

Brenda slid her glasses up her nose. “I actually like books more than boys. Sorry, David, but, most of the time, there’s more going on between the covers of a good book than between most men’s ears.”

I nodded again. Message received.

I jammed the half-empty bottle of sickly sweet wine into the sand and reached for another can of Falstaff. At least my beer had promised me “man size pleasure” tonight.

I choked down a foamy swig and said, “Cool job.”

“What?”

I nodded toward her book. “Being a catcher in the rye. Standing on a cliff in a swaying field of grain, watching out for a bunch of kids playing tag. If they come too close to the edge, I’d catch ’em, too. Save ’em.”

“It’s not a real job, David.”

“Should be.”

She cocked a quizzical eyebrow. “Really?”

“Oh, yeah. Way too many people pushing kids off cliffs these days. Making them grow up too fast. Sending them off to die in pointless wars.”

Her face softened. “So, tell me, David—exactly how old are you?”

“Sixteen.”

“You seem older. Wiser.”

“Is that a good thing or a bad thing?”

“Good.”

“Far out.”

That made her smile grow. Her lips were plump and moist. “You’re not like other guys, are you, David?”

I laughed. “Correct-a-mundo. Most of the other guys I know are over there in the dunes making out with the other girls.” I drained my Falstaff.

“So, Dave? What do you do?”

“Huh?”

“What. Do. You. Do?”

“I go to school. Verona High. Next year, I’ll be a junior.”

“Really?”

“Yeah.”

She moved closer. So close, I could smell the minty smoke trapped inside her tangled hair.

“That’s not who you are, Dave. What do you like to do when you’re you being you?”

I had heard college girls were into philosophical discussions about the meaning of life and stuff. Could shoot the bull all night. So I thought for a second. Gave an honest answer: “I like to draw some.”

“You’re an artist?”

“No. I wouldn’t say that. I just like to draw. I did that clown on the matchbook cover for the Famous Artists Correspondence School. Flunked.”

She grinned and dipped into her beach bag.

“Show me.” She held up a Bic ballpoint pen. “I’ll be the judge.”

“I usually work with a Flair or a Magic Marker . . .”

“Show me.”

Fine.

“You have any paper in there?” I asked.

She handed me her copy of
Catcher in the Rye
. “Draw inside it. On the blank pages up front.”

“Aw, I can’t do that.”

“It’s not a library book, Dave. It’s mine. I own it. I want you to draw in it.”

“You’re sure?”

“Yes.”

“What if I suck?”

“You won’t. Draw.”

So I flipped open the paperback cover. Started scribbling on a blank page near the front.

“You have pretty eyes,” she said.

“Thanks. They’re hazel,” I said without looking up from my sketch. “They change color depending on what I wear.”

“Fascinating.”

She arched up on her knees with both arms pinioned between her thighs so she could lean in and watch me draw.

Her breath was soft and rapid.

I had always had a knack for doodling cartoons. Read a lot of comic books when I was a kid. Really did take that Famous Artist test, only I drew Binky the Skunk, not the clown. Took a couple of their correspondence classes through the mail, too. And every time I hit the mall, I always checked out those humongous Michelangelo and Da Vinci art books at B. Dalton. However, the work of art I created for Brenda Narramore was chiefly inspired by the Bill Gallo School of cartooning as seen in the sports pages of the
New York Daily News
.

I drew her as a baseball catcher with a corked bottle of rye whiskey trapped in his mitt.

“Voilà!”

“Nice,” Brenda whispered, her voice as smoky as her ciggy-boo. “Sign it.”

I did.

“I was thinking about giving him a loaf of bread,” I said as I swirled out what my autograph still looks like to this day, “but the bottle was easier to draw. And how would you know it was
rye
bread? I’d have to dot it with seeds or something . . .”

I was babbling because Brenda Narramore had her warm hand prowling up my right knee, slowly creeping it higher, inching up and down toward my thigh. The front of my cutoffs was a pup tent.

Suddenly, Brenda stood and towered over me like the Colossus of Rhodes if Mr. Colossus had long tawny legs. She peeled her gauzy peasant blouse up over her head. Shook out her scrambled forest of hair.

“Have you ever drawn a nude, David?”

She held out her hand.

And, just like the other boys and girls that Saturday night, we headed off toward the privacy of the dunes.

WE slid down behind a protective bunker of sea grass and sand.

“I’ve never . . .” I mumbled as she unbuttoned my jeans.

“Don’t worry. I have.”

Her heavy breasts swayed as her fingers worked over my zipper.

“What about . . . ?”

She put a finger to my lips.

“Shhh. You’re just nervous.”

I nodded. I was.

“Here.” She dug into her beach bag. Found the crumpled Doral package. “Have another smoke. It’ll calm you down.”

“I thought we were supposed to, you know, smoke afterward.”

She lit two fresh Dorals.

“We will, Dave. We will.”

That’s when I saw it. Behind her. Just above her shoulder.

She held out a cigarette. I didn’t take it.

“Dave?”

I wasn’t paying attention to her anymore.

How could I?

How could anyone?

Ten feet behind Brenda Narramore, lurching out of the shadows, was the demon of the dunes! An ancient, decrepit man—no, the gaunt walking skeleton of an old man, all jagged bone edges and drum-tight skin. He was hunched over in pain as if his spine were fused into a crooked hump. The thing was barefoot and cloaked in a shroud of white that only fluttered down to his knees, fully exposing the dried scabs and weeping blisters tattooing his shins.

I shoved Brenda away. Roughly. The two cigarettes she’d been holding fell like fire-streaking comets to the sand. I fumbled with my zipper.

“It’s . . .”

She looked where I was staring, where I pointed.

“What?” She saw nothing.

If only I had been so lucky.

A malevolent cloud moved away from the moon so it could illuminate the demon’s monstrously withered face. Under the folds of the hooded cloak, I saw sunken, hollow cheeks. A gaping hole for a mouth. No hair. Not even above his hollow eyes. No eyelashes, either. Just the puffed-open, bulging eyeballs of a startled embryo.

I know I whimpered.

“David?”

My whimpering freaked Brenda out.

I didn’t really care.

Panicked, I tried to scrabble backward, to scale the dune wall, to escape over the top of that horrible sand trap and run away from the demon only I could see.

Then I heard the creature’s leathery lungs rasping for breath. Snoring backward, its chest expanded like a balloon—causing its shriveled face to be seized with unbearable pain.

That’s when Brenda abandoned me.

“You guys?” she screamed as she ran away, covering her breasts as best she could. “You guys?”

I wanted to run away, too, but my legs were paralyzed.

The demon of the dunes staggered forward. It wheezed, and I was hit with the rank odor of death. It raised its right arm and pointed one gruesomely long, bony finger at me.

“Who are you?” I stammered, even though I knew the answer: The demon was my drunken hallucination. My emaciated pink elephant. Apparently beer and wine weren’t always fine. Wine and beer could be something to fear. Especially if you polish off a whole six-pack and chase it with a half a bottle of strawberry-flavored rubbing alcohol.

Especially after listening to ghost stories.

This creature had to be a nightmarish manifestation of my latent Catholic guilt. An illusion. A hideous incarnation of my unbridled shame about what Brenda Narramore and I had almost done. This was the thing the nuns had warned us about. Mortal sin manifested in the guise of the Grim Reaper. I wasn’t married to Miss Narramore, but I had seen her naked breasts. I had almost done more.

I deserved to be tortured by the devils and demons of my own imagining.

As the beast lurched closer, I could smell the rancid-meat breath seeping out its mouth hole.

“Stop! Now!”

It croaked the words.

“Stop! Now!”

I move uncomfortably in the bed.

Try not to wake my wife.

Why am I remembering Saturday, August sixteenth, 1975?

Am I, for whatever reason, meant to finally unravel the mystery of the demon in the dunes?

Honestly, it’s something I haven’t thought about in more than three decades.

Long ago, I feared that my actions that hot summer night had riled up a slumbering spirit bent on punishing those who did not adhere to its stern moral code.

I imagined the wizened old man under the wrinkled robe to be the ghost of one of Brenda Narramore’s distant relatives who, like the grandfather in Kevin’s tale, had come back from the dead to protect her chastity and, when he couldn’t persuade me to stop, turned his wrath on her!

For a time, I was certain that the demon lurking in the dunes was Brenda Narramore’s guardian devil.

THE next morning, I remember, Kevin and I went out for breakfast at this deli where they made extremely greasy fried-egg and bacon with cheese sandwiches. Hangover food.

“So, dude—you totally freaked that Brenda chick out last night.”

“Yeah.”

“What’d you do? Pull out your wanker?”

I shook my head. “I saw . . . something.”

“What? Her humongous titties?”

I looked up from my sandwich.

“Hey,” Kevin said defensively, holding up his hands, “everybody saw her running up the beach, man. She let it
all
hang out.”

I didn’t know what to say. I couldn’t tell Kevin about the demon I thought I had seen in the dunes. We weren’t little kids anymore. We weren’t allowed to see prowling phantoms in the shadows or bogeymen hiding underneath our beds.

“I guess I acted like a dork,” I finally said.

“Don’t worry, bro. Plenty of fish on the beach. We’ll meet some fresh chicks. Probably today.” He held out his Kent pack. Two bent cigarettes were all that were left inside the wrinkled pouch. “Smoke ’em if you got ’em.”

“No, thanks.”

“I thought you smoked now.”

“I’m quitting. My lungs still hurt from last night. Feel like charcoal briquettes.”

“You’ll get used to it, bro. You just cough up the phlegm and junk in the shower every morning. That clears ’em right out.”

I waved him off.

Kevin sighed. Put his Kents back in his pocket. “Bummer.”

“Yeah.”

ONE week later, however, Brenda Narramore forgave me.

On the second Saturday of my family’s two-week vacation, she strolled boldly up the beach, wearing nothing but a bikini and big sunglasses, her hair as wild as a brown sea of coiled serpents. She headed straight for the rolled-out towels where Kevin, Jerry, and I had set up shop for the day.

She had her beach bag slung over her shoulder and carried a portable radio like a lunch bucket, swinging it alongside her hip, letting it brush against the stretched fabric of her bikini bottom. I think “My Eyes Adored You” was droning out of the solid-state Sanyo’s tinny speaker.

“I remember my first drunk,” she said softly as my eyes did as the song suggested.

“What was it like?” I asked, my mouth drier than burnt toast.

“I saw giant lizards.” She shot out her tongue. Flicked at imaginary flies. Rolled it back to moisten her lips. “Where are your two little buddies?”

I gestured to the left, where Jerry and Kevin were flirting with two bubbly blondes on a nearby beach blanket. High school girls. They had decided to “aim a little lower” after six straight days of crashing and burning with college chicks.

“You want to blow this pop stand?” Brenda asked.

“Sure.”

“You ever do the Haunted House on the Boardwalk?”

“Once. When I was little.”

“You ever do it with a girl?”

I could only shake my head.

“It’s dark in there, David. Real dark. Nobody can see you doing whatever it is you want to do.”

WE headed down to the Seaside Heights boardwalk.

“My snobbier friends at school call this Sleaze Side Heights,” Brenda remarked as we strolled past buzzing pinball emporiums and the blinking lights of popcorn wagons.

“I take it they’ve been here before?”

She laughed. Tucked her arm under mine.

“You got any smokes, Dave?”

“Nah.”

“You quit already?”

“Sort of. Maybe.”

“Too bad.”

I pulled a soggy dollar bill out of my swimming trunks. “They sell ’em over there,” I said, gesturing to a smoke shop wedged between a French fry stand and a skeeball arcade. “You still doing Dorals?”

She nodded.

“Menthol, right?”

“Right.”

“Don’t disappear.”

“I won’t.”

And she didn’t. Not then, anyway.

IT was easy to buy cigarettes when you were sixteen back in 1975. Everybody smoked. Brenda said at her college, you could even smoke in the classrooms. There were disposable ashtrays on every desk.

I handed her two packs of Doral Menthols.

“They were only forty cents each.”

“Thanks, Dave.” She uncurled the plastic wrapper off a pack, lit up a cigarette fast. I remember her hands were trembling slightly until she huffed down that long first drag. After she finished her smoke, Brenda grabbed my arms and pulled me close. Let me feel her bikinied breasts press against my chest. “Did buying me my ciggy-boos wipe you out?” She exhaled the remnants of stale smoke that had been swirling around inside her gorgeous chest up into my eyes.