They pour drinks into Ray, call him “daddy,” and “the old man,” slap his back, get him good and drunk. As the guys scream, Ray unwraps his gifts: a doll baby wearing a Pampers full of rubber doggie-doo, Doctor Spock's book with Playboy photos pasted on every page, and, finally, an eighteen-pound boat anchor with a thick chain, the anchor pinned in a diaper. The anchor has them rolling, spilling drinks on the rug. In the midst of it all, I watch Ray look up at the stucco ceiling, shaking his head.
“A baby,” he says. “A damn
baby.”
He looks more miserable than I've ever seen him.
“An anchor with a diaper!” Charlie screams. “You get it?” Ray nods; he gets it. So do I.
The house is still all evening till Ray says, “Listen,” and I prick right up. I've been waiting for this since his friends left. He looks at me, his eyes red and drowsy.
“We don't need a baby,” he says. “You ought to have it taken care of.” He looks down, trying to balance the salt shaker on its edge. We sit for a while without saying anything. Then I stand up to walk away. “I'll think about it,” I tell him.
The next afternoon Ray calls to say he's made the appointment for me. As we speak I clove-hitch the phone cord, and understand that the life we have together is no place to bring a baby. There is a long space of silence while I let the clove hitch unwind itself.
“Ray, could you go with me this time?”
“Hey, no problem,” he says.
I take a deep breath. “Okay,” I tell him. My voice stretches out thin over the phone wire; when he hangs up, the connection snaps, like the guy rope securing the lifeboat on Wolf's ship, and some small part of me severs.
At the Family Planning Clinic, the nurse gives me forms to fill out, and I sit in the middle of a big green vinyl couch. The couch is empty (Ray, of course, has not come), but there are others waiting there with me. Two young girls, teenagers, sit with their boyfriends (no wedding rings) on orange loveseats. The boyfriends, skinny and pimpled, remind me of the scouts from knot-tying class. The four of them look like movie-goers waiting for the show to begin.
The forms finished, I'm told to wait, and sit again on the empty couch. I pull the Venetian blind cord into my lap (the room dims, no one notices), and twist it with my fingers. Tonight is to be my last class at the Y, but given the circumstances, I figure to miss it. I rub at my stomach, the baby forming there, a half-hitch of tissue growing eyes, hands. I think, this is the one good thing to come of us, and I am about to undo it. A dizziness swarms over me, this baby already locked in, changing my chemistry. I close my eyes.
“Are you okay?” one of the teenage girls asks.
“I think so.” I lean back into the couch, holding to the thin cord of the Venetian blinds. When I open my eyes I see the work of my hands, that with the gray cord I have made a tiny noose, shaped like the one Wolf wore around his neck the first night of class. It isn't a knot we have studied or practiced. I can't see how I have come to know it. The knot is perfectly done; you could hang some tiny doll with it. The thought stirs up nausea and a heat that sticks my skin to the vinyl couch. I feel lost on the couch, pulled down by it. Panic sets in like a steel wire drawn through me. I close my eyes again, think of ten years of my life, stolen away, of these wide-eyed teens, that they have found this much trouble so young. I think about Ray, that he is not here to be afraid for me. Then everything explodes inside me, shaking my heart with one clear notion: I want to keep this baby, my daughter. I untie the noose and yank on the cord, letting in the light from outside.
At home, Ray is watching taped baseball; I run in and undo every knot in the house, Ray saying “What the hell is this?” over and over, a broken record. I don't answer him. With my clothesline empty of knots I leave for my last class of
Knot Tying For Sportsmen
, run to the car with my hand held over my baby. My picture of her inside me is like those hazy white shapes of whales near the surface. I think that some day, when she is old enough, I could take her out to the middle of the ocean with me and someone like Alex, that we could find whales to show her, dozens of them surrounding us, with waves pitching over the sides of the boat, but everything would be tied down secure, and we would all know we were safe, and that none of us could be washed away.
A
T night the scrapers come. They rumble like dinosaurs to snatch me out of sleep. I sit up with the goosedown bag damp around my knees, moist hair in my eyes, and lean back with a cigarette against the boardwalk to watch them. Their headlights fire the sand and burn mist from the air; moths circle in the light. Beneath me, the ground quivers with the weight of five-foot tires. The machines feed in pairs on the waste of beachgoers: cups, plastic bottles, abandoned blankets and styrofoam surf boards. They churn and sift the sand, swivel their heads and run shiny with spray. In the dark the ocean is tar, molten, running into a tar sky, surging to melt away beach. The men who work the scrapers are invisible inside the plexiglas cabs. I wave at them anyway, wave at the machines chewing at surf's edge, eating footprints. They follow me like stray dogs. They have a taste for the footprints I leave.
When they go they carry away their rumble, leaving tire ruts and clean sand. The noise of the ocean returns, the string of foam on the breakers glows faint blue in the dark. My fingers burn with the cigarette, and I toss it away. Tired by an ache in my shoulders, I slide inside the bag, settle my head in a cobweb space beneath the boardwalk. My sore joints gorge on sleep.
I have a system in doing things. I am not random, not a hobo or a bum. The Assateague Island National Park lets me spread my bag on swept pine needles and sleep with the sounds of backwater streams, wild ponies scratching through brush. A seven-day limit is imposed; they don't want people living there, where families vacation in pop-up campers. After a week I hitch across the bridge to Ocean City, and sleep up next to the boardwalk where the wind and scrapers can't get me. Shelly's tape deck moves with me. I cart it back and forth between the beach and the campground, listening to the one cassette I kept, Dylan's
Blood on the Tracks
. If the batteries go, I'll chuck the whole thing into the surf.
When I left I took a sleeping bag stuffed full in the toe with winter clothes, the jeans and sweat shirt I'm wearing, the book Shelly gave me. October is here, stirring up overcast days and cold breakers, giving me worry over whether I took enough to wear. The girls in the Dutch Bar have thrown flannel shirts on over their bikini tops. All of the amusements are boarded up with plywood.
Mornings pull me back into bright sky and sweat. Overhead, gulls swirl and float, diving at sand fleas. The beach is not crowded this early in the day, this late in the year. A few old people sweep the sand with metal detectors. Spandex surfers test the waves. I smoke, pull on my shoes, roll up the bag and stash it, turn on my tape and hum along. I appreciate the sound of my voice.
I eat dinner at the Paul Revere. In the waiting area, a young couple take pictures of each other locked head and hands in the wooden stocks. I sit and order tea, then make slow movements around the salad bar, reaching under the plastic guard for cherry tomatoes, chicken wings, captain's wafers. For ten minutes I stuff my mouth, then leave without paying. Dishonesty. Stealing. Not things I would want to teach my boy.
After dinner I end up at the Dutch Bar, spending what I've found that day on the beach, pocket change left on blankets. I lean next to some wiry kid, nineteen or twenty. He reminds me of the boys I used to instruct in my Industrial Welding course at Lincoln Technical College, slouched kids with long hair, black T-shirts. He starts talking about motocross racing and brands of beer. I look up and see that is what is on the TV, dirt bikes and beer ads. There is no sound, just the cycles spewing mud. He talks almost without stopping, a long stretch of words then his smile popping up regular as road signs. His teeth are the size of baby teeth, wet and sharp, like they belong to some fast little animal. He tells me his name is Tesh, and lets me win two racks of eight-ball.
I go to the bar to order more beer from the girl in the flannel shirt, and look up to see the motorcycles. Instead there is News 11, a blond woman mouthing words. The screen fills with blurry photos of men's faces, and the caption reads, “Wanted for Delinquent Child Support.” I wonder if Shelly has thought about giving them my picture, then realize she has probably destroyed them all. I kept one picture of the three of us, smiling in front of a Christmas tree. The camera cut off the tops of our heads. The picture marked my place in the book.
“Can we watch something else?” I ask the girl.
She looks up. “Squeezing the bastards,” she says.
For a while I carried the book in the toe of the sleeping bag, but one night I slept out drunk, looking at the pictures, and the next morning it was gone. I'd slept down the beach, away from the boardwalk, and woke up in the dark with the tide inching into my lap. The book was not there. Around me were the tracks in the sand, where somehow the scrapers had missed me. I'd slept through the grind of their engines, their prongs raking the sand.
“What's your story, man?” Tesh asks.
“I could be on TV,” I say. “I'm wanted for delinquent child support.”
He shakes his head. “Man, that's kids for you.” He smiles again with his sharp teeth, pushes his blond hair off his forehead. His flat nose veers off to the left, like a boxer's. I can't imagine that he has any children.
“Where do I cash a check around here?” Tesh asks me.
“Try Dough Rollers Pizza.” I've eaten there before, on buffet night.
“Show me where.”
“Just down the boardwalk. Can't miss it.”
“Show me. I'll buy us a pitcher and a large pepperoni. I need a drinking buddy.”
The pocket change is nearly gone. My stomach rumbles and squeezes. Yesterday I left the island; I never wait for them to tell me. Wind off the ocean is cold, full of mist. Here there are no pine trees to break it up. The cold weather makes me think about Billy and Shelly, about where they might be living now, who might be teaching him to ball his fists, to count to ten. Shelly gave me the book on Father's Day when she was seven months pregnant. It had been four months since I left my job at Lincoln Tech, after burning my hand on a braising rod. By then the hand had healed, leaving a thin, pink scar.
The title of the book was
The Extent of Fatherhood
, by Dr. Samuel Beckworth. Shelly sat on the arm of my chair, pulled from my fingers the book I had been reading. “Enough history,” she said. The spine of the new book gave a little crack when I pulled open the cover, the pages crisp as new dollar bills. The chapters had titles like “The Mechanics of Nurturing” and “The Emotional Tightwire.” I kissed her, patted her stomach, and read the first lines:
Good parenting is often simply a triumph of desire over bad technique. This desire is born of love, and is as old as humankind itself
. The book snapped closed in my hand. I shut my eyes and let a feeling like a sick hangover wash away from me. The words were there, ideas meant to fit inside my head, but these few I'd read jammed me. I was an expert at bad technique; desire died on the couch watching game shows, drinking cheap beer and fingering burn scars. This baby, the rise in Shelly's dress, felt like a test I could either pass or fail, and failing it would prove me to be funneling away instead ofâas my father said when he got me drunkâfull of lost-dog hope and jerky movements. Every Sunday morning, after I'd tossed the classifieds, Shelly said, “You need to work on your self-image.” I told her she sounded like a TV psychologist.
It would be easy to think I forgot about Dr. Beckworth's book, put it in the bottom of a shirt drawer, but I didn't. I dog-eared that book studying the pictures in itâgrainy black and whites showing fathers and children together. A man fishing with his daughter, dancing with her standing on his feet, trying on hats in a store. Father and son bowling, reading stories, sleeping in a rocking chair. Everybody was happy. I looked at those pictures every day, pasting together a scrapbook in my head. Ignoring the words was the easy partâI imagined them as being written in some language I couldn't understand, like cave scratchings or Dead Sea scrolls. Shelly would come home from her job where she soldered wires together on an assembly line, and I would be there on the couch, making up pictures of myself with my boy-to-be. In them, I wore cardigan sweaters and neckties and Hushpuppies, we had a nice living room with a stack of
National Geographics
on the coffee table. Then Shelly would find me and we'd argue over my not working. She'd rub her back and not let me do it for her. I would go to a bar and bounce a check to buy more beer. When we were first married, she thought it was cute that our work was so similar; she called soldering “baby welding.” I thought about that while I drank the beer. Shelly kept soldering wires right up to the day she went into labor.
Tesh offers me a cigarette from his pack. I take it, then say, “I guess I'm pretty hungry.”
“Thirsty too, I bet.”
I laugh and blow smoke up toward the TV. I try not to drink on beach nights. It is part of my system of doing things. If they find you drunk asleep on the beach, the police will run you in instead of just running you off. But this is the coldest night in the three months I've lived here. The tin-snap of winter chill hangs in the air, and makes me realize that the summer smells of boardwalk fries and suntan oil are gone. The buoy that marks the entrance to the inlet clangs like someone hammering ice.
Before I direct Tesh to Dough Rollers, I go to check that my things are still stashed beneath the Eskay clock on the boardwalk at Fourteenth Street. I notice a crowd on the beach, a cluster of heads and arms. Boys elbow each other in a circle, moving in the pale evening light. I walk toward them, and they scatter. There is no one else on this section of beach; the lifeguard stands are empty, tipped over on the sand. A ring of footprints marks where the boys have been. In the center of it lies a horseshoe crab.