Authors: Ty Roth
“Hey” was my feeble-voiced conversation starter. I had tried but somehow still had failed to put two and two together.
A rapid turn of Shelly’s head met my greeting. Mine was
not
the voice she—not so much expected, but had hoped, to hear.
“What are you doing here?”
“I came to see you; I thought you were working.”
“I’m not. How’d you get back here?”
“I asked for you and the woman led me back.”
“She must think you’re the father,” Shelly mused, more to herself than to me. A half-smile flickered for a moment, then evaporated from her face.
“The father? Whose father? What are you talking about?” I paused in contemplation. Wait for it. Wait for it. Four. And … there we go.… My jaw dropped to my chest. “You’re, you’re …”
“Pregnant,” Shelly finished.
“You mean … Then you …”
“Are having an abortion. Am waiting for the doctor.”
“Here?”
“Not in this room, no. There’s a sort of operating room for the procedure farther down the hall.”
“Wow” was my stupid response. Then something even more inane like, “Are you sure?” Then, before I could stop it, “Can I help?”
She smiled at what she knew was my sincere concern.
The smile reassured me that it, she, even I, would be okay. So Shelly.
“Wait. What about your father? Does he know?”
Suddenly stone-faced, she said, “No. He doesn’t even know I’m pregnant, and he can never know.” Her tone was not ironic. “John, this baby. It’s … it’s my …” She stopped herself, then began again. “My responsibility. This is my choice. Okay?”
“Sure,” I said. “But don’t you have to be …”
“Today is my birthday,” she interrupted. “I’m seventeen.”
“Happy birthday,” I said. “But that’s still not old enough. You need your parent’s permission.”
“I got something called judicial consent. Planned Parenthood helped me get a lawyer and petition a judge. It’s perfectly legal. They’ve been wonderful. I couldn’t tell my father. I just … couldn’t.”
Just then, a petite short-haired blond doctor with a stethoscope draped snakelike around her neck entered the room, carrying Shelly’s chart. “Oh,” she said when she saw me, obviously unaccustomed to finding her patients accompanied. “You must be the father.”
Shelly tried to correct the doctor, but I dwarfed the volume of her voice with my own. “Yes. I am.”
Shelly smiled and raised her left hand to draw me nearer. I took her hand; she pulled me to her and whispered, “Thanks.”
“It’s time,” the doctor said to Shelly. Then, to me, she said, “You can sit in the waiting room. The procedure doesn’t take long, less than a half hour.”
“No,” Shelly said, turning her head to me. “You go home. You’ve done enough.”
The message was clear; she didn’t want my company, or anyone else’s. She was going to see this through on her own.
As I exited the room, Shelly called me back to her side. “John, promise you won’t tell Gordon.”
“I won’t.”
After a carefully monitored in-clinic recovery period, Shelly took a taxi home from the clinic. Since it was Friday, she didn’t need to be in school for two days, and since this was her father’s honeymoon weekend with his new bride, there was no one at home to ask questions (as if her father would have shown that much interest). Shelly’s father and Mary Jane had gotten married at the courthouse that same Friday morning and had driven to Detroit for a weekend of casino gambling. Shelly stayed in bed all weekend. She watched her favorite movie,
Harold and Maude,
repeatedly on her portable DVD player; listened to the entire R.E.M. catalog, and edited a short story she’d been working on for the upcoming edition of the
Beacon;
but mostly she cried.
On Monday morning, she woke early, took a long shower, shook her Etch A Sketch of short-term memory, and returned to Trinity one soul lighter.
After about forty-five minutes, I finally spotted the outline of the three south-to-north-aligned Bass islands. It was a good thing, because the pretzels and the can of Sprite were no longer warding off my seasickness. I needed to put my feet on stable ground soon—or else.
Clearly, I was no expert mariner, but I could tell that Gordon had already tacked away from what I thought was our intended destination: North Bass Island. Sure as shit, the blip on the GPS representing the Corsair was veering left from the charted path.
“I thought we …”
“Detour.”
We were headed for the southernmost of the Bass Islands, the infamous—in these parts anyway—South Bass Island, and the harbor town of Put-in-Bay, originally Pudden Bay but morphed into its current form through phonetic sloppiness. In sixth-grade Ohio history, we had been taught the
“significant” role South Bass had played during the War of 1812. It was off the northwest coast of South Bass that Colonel Oliver Hazard Perry fought and defeated a British fleet for no apparent reason, except, after a major naval upset, to provide a stage on which to pronounce heroically, “We have met the enemy and they are ours.…”
I had never visited the island, but the stories of the bacchanalian revelry that takes place there during the boating season are legendary throughout the lower Great Lakes area. (There are only two seasons on the islands: boating season and preparing for boating season.) South Bass is New Orleans at Mardi Gras; spring break on South Padre; Las Vegas; Sodom and Gomorrah; Caligula’s Rome; the sultry Greek Islands; and Dodge City in amalgam, microcosmically offered in two stacked E-shaped docks and the three-block strip of bars in downtown Put-in-Bay.
For Gordon, the happiest place on earth … or so I supposed.
Me? I was scared shitless.
As I stood on the dock waiting for Gordon to stow away the Corsair, he reached into the captain’s bin again; this time, he pulled out his notorious human skull drinking cup, which I’d heard about but had never seen, and a handful of purple, gold, and green strands of cheap plastic beads, which he threw to me.
“What are these for?” I asked.
“They don’t flash ’em for free, junior” was his cryptic answer.
I soon discovered the beads’ function as we walked the docks, pushing our way through the filled-to-capacity public marina. Powerboats ranging from fourteen to fifty-plus feet (many of which bore the Byron Boatyard logo) were jammed inside the steel docks. They rafted off one another three and four deep as we neared land. Each boat was a floating frat house/strip club. The men outnumbered the ladies by at least three to one, but the women seemed to be enjoying the ratio and encouraging the attention. During our trek from where we tied off to the dockmaster’s small wooden booth/office on shore, I saw my first real topless woman—that is, the woman was real, not the boobs. I’d learned to discern the difference by the time I’d reached shore and depleted my supply of beads.
Gordon never slowed down or turned his head to look, even when a “girl gone wild” craving his attention called out to him, “Hey, Cutie. I’ll show
you
for free,” or “Take a look, sugar,” or invited him to “party.” He couldn’t have been less interested.
“What’s the matter?” I asked, confused.
“They disgust me. I hate this place.”
But we were in his element. Weren’t we?
“These people have no class, Keats. No style. They’re barbarians. The women are sluts. They pay ten grand on a credit card for a boob job; then, to get their money’s worth, they flash them in the face of any pecker head who’ll trade them a set of fucking fifty-cent beads. It’s pathetic.” Gordon looked over my shoulder at the flotilla behind me.
“And these guys, what assholes.” He paused to absorb the beer-bellied baseball-capped board-shorted scene. “These
losers’ idea of seduction is slipping one of these already half-drunk whores a roofie, waiting for her to start feeling woozy, then offering, all gentlemanlike, to walk her back to her boat or her hotel or wherever, where she passes out and the ball-less piece of shit generates enough self-confidence to pull out his pencil dick and fuck the corpse. It’s sick. There’s no talent here.”
I think that was what really bothered Gordon. It wasn’t the lack of morality but the lack of artistry. But by the time Gordon had finished his diatribe, I wanted to rush back to the docks and collect all the beads I had given away and throw a towel around each one of the bikini-topped women.
He must have read the guilt on my face, for he said, “Not you, Keats. I don’t mean you. You
need
your cherry popped.”
I wasn’t completely sure what that meant, but I figured it had something to do with my obvious lack of experience with women. I couldn’t even begin to imagine what he had in store for me.
After paying the dockage fee, Gordon led me through a downtown park that by day served as a picnic and children’s play area but by night became a sort of demilitarized zone/piss stop/make-out area/detox center between the bars and the docks.
“Gordon,” I called, incapable of matching his pace. “Where we going?” He ignored my question. “What are we doing here?” No answer. “What does this have to do with Shelly?” He stopped. His patience with my ignorance had reached its limit.
“Have you ever been to
North
Bass, Keats?”
“No.”
“I have. Lots of times. The majority of it is a state park. The only marina is state run. What do you suppose the ranger at that marina is going to think when two kids carrying an urn and still dressed in their funeral clothes come cruising in around midnight looking for a dock? Don’t you think it might raise a few suspicions? Don’t you think he might make a few phone calls? By now they’ve got to be looking for us. Shelly’s old man has to be searching for our asses. If there’s one place that we can lose ourselves for a couple hours, this is it. People here are anonymous; the things they do here … they don’t want to attach their names to. So they don’t ask or answer many questions, but for the right price, they
will
tell any lie you pay them to tell. I slipped that dockmaster a hundred bucks to register us under a false name and boat and to play dumb should anybody come asking.”
My hangdog expression showed that I’d had my nose sufficiently rubbed in my stupidity.
Gordon’s tone mellowed. “We’ll do what we came to do,” he said. “We’ll keep our promise to Shelly and spread her ashes on North Bass, but we’ve got to be smart. We’ll disappear here for a while, sleep a little. Just before dawn, we’ll cruise over to North Bass, slip into the marina, and finish this. All right?”
I nodded in agreement.
It was just approaching six hours since we’d ash-napped Shelly, but it seemed like a lifetime ago.
“Wait here,” Gordon said.
We had just entered a railroad-tie-enclosed pit that contained a pair of high swing sets; the ground was layered with bits of recycled rubber still warm from the day’s heat. (One
ten-year study reported nearly 150 deaths in the United States due to unsafe playground equipment, strangulation and swing impact being the most common causes.)
“Where you going?” I asked, more nervous about being abandoned than sincerely curious about Gordon’s destination.
“Just wait here. I won’t be long.” He handed me his skull cup.
The swing had one of those rubber strap seats that fold up around your ass and hips. The oaks and maples in the park blocked much of the moonlight, so as far as I could tell the chains holding that seat climbed past them and attached to stars. Waiting, I didn’t swing so much as I swayed, looping in small ovals in the air. Occasionally, a group of revelers stumbled past me in either direction.
The park itself seemed beastlike and sentient, alive with all sorts of cathartic grunts and groans. I tried not to imagine the spewing forth of bodily fluids that were taking place all around me, or their sources of origin, but I instinctively lifted my feet onto the swing and tried to think of something else.
The skull cup.
I had always assumed that Gordon’s infamous skull cup was a novelty item that he had purchased cheaply at some souvenir shop, but feeling the cool hardness of its uneven surface and observing its more-yellow-than-white coloring, I knew it was authentic, a real dead man’s skull. I almost dropped it at the thought, but my curiosity won out. I began to study it as best as I could in the limited light. Though smaller than I would have thought, it clearly was an adult’s.
In order to drink from the cup, the skull had to be turned upside down and the eye and nose sockets used for gripping, like the holes in a bowling ball. Gordon had hollowed out as much of the bone as had been needed to mold a plastic container inside the cavity, so that the top of the skull served as the bottom of the cup. As I pantomimed the act of lifting and tilting the skull to drink, it was eerie to watch the fleshless face come noseless to nose with me.
“Is that him?” A female’s voice from the surrounding blackness startled me, ending my stare-down with the near future. But the pronunciation wasn’t right, more like “Es dat heem?”
“That’s him.” The second bodiless voice was Gordon’s; he was speaking in a condescending tone, almost as if he were talking to a child.
“He’s cute,” she said.
“I told you this would be easy,” Gordon said as he emerged from the darkness and the trees. His arm was around the shoulders of a tall dirty-blonde. She wore black high heels that sank an inch deep into the soft turf with each step, a denim miniskirt, and a pink sleeveless tank top whose spaghetti straps had fallen to mid-bicep level, leaving her black bra straps exposed. It may have been the moonglow, but her skin seemed pale, almost pasty, as if it were midwinter rather than the start of summer. If not for Gordon’s assistance, she would have fallen flat on her face.
It was pure Gordon; he couldn’t have been gone fifteen minutes, and he had already picked up a girl.
“Keats, meet Nadia.”
“Hi, Keats,” Nadia said with a windshield wiper wave of her hand, which sent her listing heavily to starboard, only to be righted by Gordon’s quick grasp.
“Nadia here is looking to party,” Gordon explained. “She has a place above one of the bars and would like it if you would spend some time with her.”