At Fourteenth Street I reach beneath the boardwalk and pull out my red sleeping bag. The rolled up thickness of the bag resembles the whorls on the polished refrigerator magnet seashells in the tourist shops. The only shells I've found on the beach are fragments, scattered pieces. I trace my finger around the spiral of the sleeping bag. “This is where I live,” I tell her.
Becca smirks. “That's just a ratty old sleeping bag.”
“You have to pretend.”
She twists her mouth around. “Pretend is for babies,” she says. The wind off the waves lifts her fine hair. She crosses her arms and shivers.
I dig a jacket out of the toe of the bag and snap it around her shoulders like a cape. She looks down at the sand. “Listen,” I say, “help me find my book.”
“What book?”
“A picture book. The ocean took it away one time, and someday it might wash back up and we'll find it.”
She brightens. “Like in France?”
“You got it.”
She walks ahead, my red jacket baggy around her. The sunrise looks like a banked fire on the horizon. Miles out, oil tankers float, small as toy boats. I want the sun to come up and warm me, pull people from their houses and hotels onto the sand. Becca steps at the foamy edge of the breakers unfurling on the beach, staying just out of reach of the water. Then she stops and points up the beach. “There it is!” she shouts.
A hundred yards ahead on the sand lies the dark carcass of the horseshoe crab that the boys stabbed with the butter knife. I see the glint of the knife pinning the black shell to the sand as surf washes around it.
“It's a story book!” Becca says, running toward it.
“No,” I yell after her. I don't want her to see it, so I run up behind her and grab her under her arms, pinching my oversized jacket in folds. I lift her onto my shoulder, run up the slope and around the dead crab. When we are past it, I set her down again, kneel to catch my breath.
“That isn't a book,” I say. “It's something dead.”
She rolls her eyes. “I know,” she says. Then she turns toward the boardwalk and waves, lifting the jacket. I straighten and see Tesh there, hear him call her in a voice made tiny by the wind.
“I have to go,” she says. “We never would've found any book in a million years.” As she runs toward Tesh, the empty arms of my jacket trail behind her. At my feet, her own small footprints are pressed in the wet sand, leading away from me, as if she has come up out of the water. Plumes of dry sand kick up behind her as she heads inland. Her tracks there are pegged divots, like hoof marks. Then I can't see them anymore.
T
HE year I turned twelve, my grandfather died and left my father six hundred acres of worthless, scrub-pine property ten miles inland of North Myrtle Beach. “We could go live there,” my father said, “if we were rattlesnakes.” A month later he received a call from developers who wanted the land for their shopping mall, condos, and golf course (“Those people
are
rattlesnakes,” he said). The deal was made by phone, papers were signed through the mail, and within the week we had all this money where there had been so little before. My father and mother called a family conference in the den to explain the significance of what had happened to us
“How much money?” I asked. I had heard my father tell my mother that he had enough to buy up every vending machine in North Carolina.
“We're filthy rich millionaires,” David said. “We're the Rockefellers.” David was older than me by four years, which meant, he sometimes explained, that he would always be four years stronger, four years smarter. For a time, I believed him.
“The amount isn't important,” my father said. He looked at David and me. “You aren't to tell anyone about this. This is
our
business.” He wore the brown Tom's Vending jumpsuit he always had on whether he was making deliveries or not.
“It's far more than we need,” my mother said. “I think we should use part of it to help others less fortunate.”
My father looked at her and ran his hands through his wiry black hair. “We aren't going to do that, Janice. We're not going to call attention to ourselves.”
She smiled. “We could be anonymous,” she said.
“We're already anonymous,” David said. He looked at me, which was my cue to laugh. I did laugh, and my father glared at us.
The next day my father quit his job with Tom's Vending. He drove his delivery van through neighborhoods where he found children, honking the horn and tossing cases of chocolate cookies to them. Then he parked the emptied truck at the warehouse, and left enough cash to cover the lost food pinned to the clipboard on the steering wheel. At home he grabbed up my mother and danced her around the kitchen singing “The Alley Cat Song.” The phone rang and he said, “We don't have to answer that.” I stood there clapping my hands and helping him meow at the right places in the song.
That night he took us to Woolworth's, to spend some of the money. My mother, wrapped in her new fox stole, stood in the pet department comparing blue parakeets to green ones. The tiny birds chitted and hopped inside fluorescentlit cages. My father studied a tank of goldfish. He tapped his finger on the glass.
“You want one of those little birds, it's yours,” he said to my mother. “And I mean a cage, food, the works.”
“Well, they are cute,” she said.
“Done.” My father snapped his fingers. He turned to David and me.
“One dollar, each of you,” he said. “What'll it be?”
“That's complete bullshit,” David said. A clerk glanced up and frowned at us. David pointed at my mother.
“You bought her a new fur coat, a new hairdo, a new pearl necklaceâ”
“Your mother has learned the value of a dollar,” my father said. “She doesn't have to be taught the way you two boys do.”
David rolled his eyes and thumped the front of an aquarium full of damp half-dollar-size turtles. “There's nothing here for a buck except these shitty turtles.”
“Then I guess you get a turtle. Or nothing,” my father answered. “And you watch your mouth.”
“I've decided against the bird,” my mother said.
“Carlton, tell him there's nothing here for a dollar,” David said. I looked down at the packet of sea monkeys I held in my hand. The label showed giant cartoon sea animals wearing crowns and jeweled saddles, with golden kings and long-haired princesses mounted on their backs.
Grow Them In Water!
it read. The price was seventy-nine cents.
“David's right,” I said. “I mean, Mom got all that stuff.” I thought she had never looked prettier. Her auburn hair had been done up in ringlets, and for the past two days she'd worn the pearls. Her skin, she said, made them shine. My father went red in the face, and he whispered.
“One dollar. Take it or leave it.”
When we got home, David walked in the door, down the hall to the bathroom without taking off his coat, and flushed his turtle down the toilet. When he came out of the bathroom, my father stood waiting in the hallway.
“Why, David?”
“Just trying to learn the value of a one-dollar turtle,” David said. He was taller than my father, his hard shoulders wider.
“David wanted to make a point,” my mother said. “But
I don't
think
he
should be so ugly about it.” My parents
were used to the way
David acted, as if his behavior were some defect he'd been born with, like a limp or a withered
hand. But to me it seemed that during
the last few
years David had come to hate us for nothing more than being his family. I couldn't understand why. We stood there, cramped in the hallway, until finally David shrugged and looked at me. I stared down at my packet of sea monkeys, at the kings living in the ocean, living in tiny castles.
By the next day the sea monkeys smelled like rotten fish, and I poured them down the sink.
“Son, you don't just throw in the towel that easy,” my father said. He brought home books for me on aquatic life and tropical fish. I ignored the books, but my father began spending whole days reading them at the kitchen table. He continued wearing his Tom's Vending jumpsuits, as if reading about fish were his new job. Before long, packages began to arrive by mail: synthetic sea water, protein skimmers, filter systems, submersible heaters. In the den my father set up three large aquariums which bubbled noisily and filled the room with violet light.
Our family no longer spent Saturdays raking leaves or trimming hedges, work David had always despised and I had always loved. Instead my father hired a company called “Lawn Medic,” whose workers arrived once a week in a green van, wearing lab coats. David and I watched them mow and trim while we tossed a football in the street. “Let's kill the grass,” David said once, “then they'll have to hire Lawn Mortician.” I laughed.
Inside, my father would sit on a milk crate, observing his fish. He filled their tanks with plastic diving men and shipwrecks, tiny treasure chests, skulls that blew bubbles. He bought a fourth tank, and before long he and my mother were discussing buying a bigger house (“Who's to say we shouldn't?” my father asked at dinner one night). He began ordering blueprints, which came in the mail with his aquarium supplies. His days were divided between the kitchen table, where he went over house plans, and his milk crate, where he fed and spoke to his fish. My mother circled photographs of walk-in closets and conversation pits in her
House Beautiful
. She signed up for a correspondence course in interior decorating.
One night, David leaned down out of the top bunk, his brown hair swaying. I sat in the lower bunk, reading comic books by the light of a gooseneck lamp. “Here's a prediction,” he said. “When we move, we'll go to Irving Park.”
“I don't think so,” I said. Irving Park was a section of Greensboro we saw only at Christmas time, when we all piled in our Dodge and crept behind lines of other cars to look at the houses decorated for the holidays. The houses (“showplaces,” my father always called them) loomed over sloping lawns, guarded by iron fences along narrow tree-shaded streets that circled the golf course. Most of the houses were of white-painted brick, topped with ivy and wide slate roofs, lit up inside with chandeliers we could see from the street. When we drove through at Christmas, security guards stood at each intersection, directing traffic in white gloves.
“That's your problem, little brother. You never think,” David said. “We're
rich
, man. We can do whatever we want. Look.” He waved a pair of hundred-dollar bills. “A year's worth of allowance.”
“Where did you get that?”
“Where do you suppose?” His face turned red with the effort of hanging upside down, the veins in his forearms thickening. He fluttered the bills through the air.
“You don't have to worry about being ugly anymore, Carlton. Help has arrived. Money plus women, and the door to the world flies open.”
I watched a sweep of headlights move across the bedroom wall. I shook my head. “I don't get the connection.”
“Just wait a couple years,” David said. “You will.”
“Dad'll kill you if he finds out you stole from him.”
He looked at me, his face steadily darkening. “How's he going to know, Carlton?”
I moved my arm in and out of the light from the gooseneck lamp, static sparks snapping off the cotton blanket.
“I guess he won't,” I said.
“There, that wasn't so hard, was it?”
“I still don't think we'll move to Irving Park. It's not us.”
“This is the new us,” David said. “You better get used to it.” He smiled and lifted back up into his bunk, where I could no longer see him, just his faint outline pressed between the slats in the thin mattress above me.
During the next week there was no more talk of new houses. For dinner one night we ate a meal my mother had prepared using her new KitchenMagic Home Workstation. All the food was mashed or chopped into tiny pieces. I couldn't tell what anything was.
David held up his fork. “Can I trade this for a straw?” he said. This time I laughed without being cued.
My father frowned at us. “The food's delicious, Janice,” he said.
She blushed. “Well, the machine did all the work.”
“I expect that machine will look just fine,” my father said, “in your new kitchen.” He kept his eyes on his plate, chewing. This offhand method was his way of springing surprises on us.
“New kitchen?” my mother asked. David looked at me across the table and nodded.
“Janice, I talked to a contractor today. We can redo every square foot of this houseâadd on rooms, finish the basement, new appliances, carpetsâfor half the cost of buying. We'll be building equity.”
My mother smiled. “I never wanted to leave this house anyway,” she said.
“When the work is all finished,” my father said around his food, “I guess we'll be the only house in the neighborhood with a new swimming pool.”
My mother clapped her hands while I jumped up and down and shouted. My father went into the next room to get the sketches the contractor had made.
“Well,” my mother said, her face flushed. “I suppose we'll have to learn to swim.”
“I can hold my breath underwater in the bathtub,” I said. David looked at me and narrowed his eyes.
“Remember this, Carlton,” he whispered from his bunk that night, “if you paint over shit, underneath you still have shit.”
For the next month we lived with the noise of power saws and hammers. David and I camped on the den floor in our sleeping bags, watching TV late into the night. When the work was finally completed, it looked as if someone had taken away our old house and left a different one in its place. The outside was covered in yellow aluminum siding. Paper runners guided our steps over thick baby blue carpets. The basement had been redone, with rows of saltwater tanks recessed in the paneled walls. All the rooms smelled of paint and caulking, the plastic wrap covering unfamiliar furniture. Heavy brass deadbolts had been placed on all the doors and windows.