Travelers Rest (12 page)

B
y now Dewey had eaten not one but two pieces of chocolate cream pie, which was actually maybe half as many as he wanted, since he had what his mother called a terminal case of sweet tooth, and still Hugh and Lorraine hadn't gotten around to explaining anything. Oh, sure, they'd asked him
questions,
lots of
questions,
but what did asking
him
questions accomplish?
Nothing.
He had dutifully plowed through the story of how the massive snowstorm had forced his dad off the road and into this odd and scary town. Hugh made him go over all the details about the hotel slowly and carefully until Dewey finally said he was really tired right now so he really didn't know, but what he did know was that his degenerate uncle Robbie, who was always causing trouble, disappeared and then everyone disappeared, and then Hugh had a lot of questions about that, and still Hugh hadn't told him much of anything.

They were just sitting there across the Formica table from each other and there was no more pie to eat and nowhere to go, what with the snow and all, and it was pretty clear even to the Dooze Man that Lorraine was
not
going to let Hugh get up from the booth until he had told Dewey
something,
and yet they went on sitting there for what seemed like about forty-seven hours, until Dewey felt like the loneliest person in the world.

Last summer, they had gone on vacation to a place called Saint Simons Island, Georgia, and on the first morning, before Dewey even knew where he was at, before he'd even had a chance to get
acclimated,
as his father always used to say, they had gone to the beach down the block from the house they were renting and his mom and dad had pulled out their beach chairs and beach towels and lain there with their eyes closed, which was one of the few things they both enjoyed doing, Dewey had noticed, one of them usually being interested in one thing while the other was interested in something else. There they were, his mom in her beach chair and his dad on the towel, both of them wearing their sunglasses (which always bothered Dewey slightly because, ironically enough, when he couldn't see their eyes it was as if they had in some way vanished), and Dewey out in the water, where he had been told not to go above his waist. He waded in, and the little waves next to the shore rippled over his feet and the sun shot through the water so that there were little flashes of light everywhere, and the movement of the waves, when they were going out, made Dewey feel like he was walking sideways very fast, and conversely when they were coming in, so that overall it was such a puzzle of varying perceptions and shifting sensations that Dewey became quite fascinated and, he realized later, went into one of his spells where time disappeared. All he could remember was the bright sky and the pulsing sun and the quick silent passage of clouds, until at some point he became aware of himself and, turning back to find the beach in the distance, realized that he had walked out much farther than he was probably supposed to. But he was still not in over his waist.

Other than a few mottled clouds that passed swiftly overhead, the sky was a dazzling blue and the sun a white-hot bulb hung overhead and the light it cast down so sharp and bright that the waves popped like fireworks. The scene on the shore was laid out like a seaside painting by one of those impressionist guys his mother was fond of. To his left and right lay the other islands in the chain of islands off the Georgia coast, the dark green line of trees flat against the horizon, the thin strips of sand, the rows of hotels and condominiums. On the shore of Saint Simons, the brightly colored houses, three and four stories of balconies and windows facing the sea, shimmered in the light. Off to his left stretched a long bridge with tall cable towers that led to somewhere (Jekyll Island, he learned later) and in the nearer distance stood the Saint Simons lighthouse emerging from a green thicket of oak and palm trees. And far away to the east, very small against the horizon, a line of people appeared to be walking on the water, out to sea. Later he would hear of the sandbar that ran from the town's East Beach, but for the moment he thought that he was witnessing some strange miraculous happening, the exodus of some superrace of people in the process of leaving Georgia and walking across the ocean to an unseen shore, perhaps in another world.

His father, he knew, would be interested in this, and Dewey's plan was to rush back through the shallow water to alert him, but he stayed for a moment to savor a feeling that came over him, a feeling that he was experiencing this moment, this unusual moment, all by himself, as a person separate from every other person, and the things that he saw—the sparkling ocean, the towering lighthouse, the special people marching into the sea—were things that only he was seeing at this one certain time, and each sight, each individual second, was being stored in his own memory and would never exist anywhere else. And at the same time he felt achingly lonely, as if, in discovering this place inside himself that was in its own self a whole world separate from everyone else's world, he had also discovered his own isolation in that world, how all his specific memories and all his thoughts about the future and even—especially—what he was feeling right now could never be shared or acknowledged and in fact didn't exist as far as anyone else was concerned.

He knew in a distant way that for a long time he had been seeing his mother sitting back in her beach chair reading a book and his father lying on a towel, turning over and over like he was cooking himself on the grill, and that they had, maybe for the first time in his life, forgotten him entirely. This somehow,
paradoxically,
ballooned him with a sense of his own importance, reinforcing the notion of singularity he had just discovered, but at the same time making him nervous, as if his father was right and something bad really
would
happen to him if he wasn't under constant supervision. As he struggled with these mingled feelings of pride and anxiety he saw for the first time a group of older kids, probably high school or maybe even college age, carousing along the shore and out in the water, the boys yelling hoarsely, the girls screaming shrilly, everybody happy with everybody else and happy with themselves in the way Dewey imagined people mostly were in life, and the way he was himself, too, when he was, say, at basketball practice, but not the way he was, for instance, when he thought over and over of the polar ice caps melting, chunk by chunk, cracking and bending and snapping in the arctic waste, or the forests dying, being chopped and sawed and bulldozed, or, the worst, when he had the recurrent visions of the sun exploding. But he also saw that there was one kid apart from the others, standing sheepishly with his legs wide apart and his arms crossed over his chest, looking uncomfortable and going completely unnoticed for the moment. He was a fat kid, wearing nothing but a pair of gym shorts and a Georgia Bulldogs baseball cap. The other guys in the group were loud and active, splashing around in the water, shoving one another, performing for the girls in the group, who shrieked in feigned fear. But the fat boy just stood at the edge of the water in his gym shorts and his Bulldogs cap being fat. There wasn't anything else for him to do. No matter what he did, whether he ran out into the water and tackled one of the other guys, or splashed a lot of water around and pretended to be a whale, or attempted to drown himself by keeping his face down in the shallow water, or even caught a crab or a fish with his bare hands, he would still just be the fat kid doing whatever the fat kid did.
Hey,
someone would say,
did you see the fat kid catch that fish?
There was no way to get around it, being the fat kid. He would be the fat kid every second and every minute of every dog's-ass day (a favorite expression of Dewey's father when he was tired or when, like on the day every year that the students showed up after summer vacation, things were especially bad at work). The fat kid every dog's-ass day. What a life.

Dewey was the kid who could do anything. He won the Charleston County Spelling Bee last spring and he was the shortstop on the baseball all-stars and the point guard on the basketball all-stars and he finished third in the state ten-and-under tennis championships—and he hadn't even
tried.
He
hated
tennis. He had no clear idea of what it meant to be the fat kid, and he never would, and it made him sad for just a minute. It made him wonder about the various paths in life—how it would be very different, for instance, to be the fat kid than to belong to a superrace of people marching across the sea—and how you couldn't take all of them.

The fat kid walked slowly, without anyone noticing, back through the water and up onto the beach, apparently with some plan in mind, the execution of some action he had mulled over while he stood statue-like in the surf, something that, he had determined, might change the course of things forever, might make his life more like the lives of those iridescent figures skimming off across the cresting waves, oblivious to the force of gravity. He strode purposefully, Dewey thought, over to a towel where two tanned girls lay talking, and they didn't pay any attention to the fat kid either, even though it was clear that they were part of the same large group to which the fat kid belonged, and slowly, while Dewey held his breath in anticipation of what might occur (would the fat kid shout at the girls, accuse them of ignoring him? Would he declare his love for one of them? Would he do a giant belly flop onto the towels, crushing the girls underneath?), of what stupendous and monumental decision the fat kid had made and what the next crucial moments held in store, the fat kid raised one flabby arm and…took his Georgia Bulldogs cap off and tossed it onto the sand. Then he walked back to the water, waded in past his ankles, and resumed his position on the outskirts of the group, where he could quietly keep being the fat kid. It was depressing.

Then all hell broke loose, as his mother would describe it later to her friends on the phone.
All hell broke loose, Laura, you should have seen. All hell broke loose, Beth, all hell broke loose, Alicia.
What happened was that his dad, who, under the influence of the sun and the sand and several beers that Dewey had watched him down, uncharacteristically, the night before, out on the screened-in porch of their beach rental, and likely distracted by his mother's newly purchased and rather embarrassingly (for Dewey) revealing swimsuit, had relaxed his guard where Dewey was concerned, maybe for the first time in Dewey's whole young life. Dewey had gone—what—ten, fifteen minutes without being the object of his father's scrutiny? And then Dad, good old reliable, dependable Dad, had rolled over on his beach towel, tuned in the radar to discover Dewey's whereabouts, and had found that he was a rather distant figure across a long stretch of sunlit water, standing, as his father described it later when his mother was explaining how and why all hell broke loose to Laura, Beth, Alicia, etc., “like a dead man,” or, more explicitly, on one memorable occasion when his father had grown really tired of the story being told over and over again to Beth, Laura, etc., and wanted once and for all to establish the level of potential danger as he had perceived it in the moment, like a dead man “who had been propped up with a stick, standing loosely in the waves, arms dangling lifelessly at his sides, soggy and inanimate.” And so, Dewey's dad did what his dad always did, namely overreacted, namely panicked, and began to sprint across the sand into the shallow, surf-less, absolutely 100 percent undangerous water off the coast of Saint Simons Island toward Dewey, shouting his name as he came nearer. And Dewey, freshly awakened from his surreal experience with the superrace of water-treading people and his existential ruminations on the life and times of the fat kid, groggy with the wind and the dancing light on the waves and the philosophical headiness of it all, grew more than a bit alarmed due to his father's shouting and splashing and general haste, and came to the conclusion that there was something (shark? Pirate ship?) in the water right behind him, and that he was in imminent danger of an attack. So he began to thrash through the water, half swimming and half stumbling, toward his father, “shouting his little lungs right out of his mouth,” according to his mother's subsequent eyewitness account.

The incident, which had by now drawn the attention of everyone for hundreds of yards along the beach, including, Dewey noticed, the fat kid, ended with father and son rushing awkwardly into each other's arms about shin-deep in the harmless waters of the Atlantic off this piece of the Georgia coast, Dewey shaking from head to toe, his dad frantically examining him for injuries, feeling no doubt that he had rescued his son from some terrible and as yet still unspecified disaster, Dewey himself feeling very much rescued from something, although he wasn't sure what at the moment, and soon enough determining that there was not now, nor had there ever been at any time during the adventure, anything wrong. This was the point of the story at which, once, talking on the phone to Aunt Josie, his mother had laughed so hard she almost peed her pants.

And right now, sitting across the table from silent and gloomy Hugh, in a town that seemed to be constructed about 90 percent from snow—mesmerizing, muffling, sleepy snow—he felt just as alone as he had that time out in the ocean when he saw those shimmering figures walking across the water in the distance, holding hands. And he realized that he had never told his father about those people, or about the fat kid whose life was, by comparison, so dull and sad.

Dewey stood up to leave. He felt very tired, and he wanted to go back to the only place he had to go, the creepy hotel, where he could fall asleep to the creepy images on the TV screen.

“Wait a sec, wait a sec,” Hugh said.

Dewey wobbled on his feet. He rubbed his eyes and saw, briefly, two of Hugh, both exactly the same, both beckoning him back into his seat. He sat down. In fact he lay down, the cool orange Naugahyde of the booth against his cheek. He lay still, his eyes open just barely to a blurry vision of the green and pink gum stuck to the underside of the table. He could hear Hugh get up and shuffle over and sit down next to him and he could feel the weight of Hugh's thighs against his feet and then he felt Hugh's big hand, which smelled like French fries, descend upon his shoulder, where it rested with surprising lightness, and then the hand retreated and he heard the fingers drumming nervously on the tabletop, and then the hand returned and rested on his shoulder again, moving slightly, rhythmically, as if the movement were somehow connected to the beating of Dewey's heart.