“Okay, sir. I just need you to…” Corporal Alyss begins his “just-turn-’er-around-and-head-your-ass-on-back-across-the bridge” spiel. As I suspected, he’s not seen me properly. Though a sneaky smile’s awakening, and he shifts his big face to the side, leaning toward my window, like a kid (a big kid). “All right. All right,” he says, his smile breaking through, becoming in an instant the jolliest of gendarmes. I’m outed as a friendly. (He takes plenty of ribbing about his name — Alyss/Alice — and has clearly grown into his job.) His big Ukrainian earlobes, I notice — fat, pendulous, and pink — do not have the hint of a crease. He obviously lacks a care in the world. All his needs are met with his tidy Silverton family, a badge, and a gun. “I guess you’re down here to teach us all how smart you are to get out when you did,” he says. He’s beaming, his big, blue Slavic eyes wide and intense as he peers in and around inside my car. He is only thirty-five, played tight end at Rider, then spent a year in Ecuador on his Pentecostal mission, bullying the natives into accepting Jesus. His old man was a beat cop in Newark and paid “the ultimate price.” You get to know such things in the realty business. His wife, Berta, was one of the nurses who looked after me when I got shot and stayed a long time in the hospital.
“I’m just going down to counsel an old client, Pete. His house got blown away.” No need to tell him it was my house. Just the facts, here.
“Yeah, well, tell me about it,” Corporal Alyss says, his smile fading. He is not a handsome boy — all his features way too big, too pink, too fleshy — a cross between a Minnesota farmer and one of his animals. He’s lucky to have a wife. His little shoulder microphone sputters, but emits no voice. Even though he might not say it — and though he himself moved years ago — it probably rankles him that I moved away. “Your old office is an empty lot,” he says. “Back wall just blew in.” He’s all police business-y now, as if some training session he’s sat through has flashed up into his thick head. Our friendship is paling.
“I heard,” I say up through the window. Chill air has rushed in, carrying sour odors of ocean and diesel and Corporal A’s leather rigging. Another cop, a black, hatless NJ state trooper in jodhpurs, has appeared at the trailer door, watching us gravely. He takes note of my license plate, then steps back inside, where they’re probably playing hearts. “Did you guys survive okay,” by which I mean him and his brood.
“Just lost our electric. Some roof coping,” he says soberly, extending his lip. “Nothing like down here. Insurance won’t pay ours either, though. Ours is supposedly wind, not water.” He inserts a big thumb knuckle into his ear canal for a scratch, cocks his mouth awry, while his other hand rests on his police issue. He’s most at ease not moving. “The wife’s having repetitive thought patterns. Just worrying, you know?” He’s forgotten I know her and know her name. All is policing to police. The rest of the world is like groceries on the shelf.
“I guess it’s natural.”
“Oh yeah.” He looks confident and says nothing more, as he thinks about what’s “natural” and what’s not.
“Okay if I drive on down to Poincinet Road?” I try to act like I’ve already been there twenty times and am going back to resume whatever I was doing before.
“That’s all changed down there,” he said. “The storm, and before the storm. You prolly won’t recognize it. But yeah. Just be careful.” He takes his thumb out of his ear and wipes his nose with it, then backs away from my car door. He produces a tiny red notebook from his flak-vest pocket, and with a ballpoint notes down my license number. “I’ll write you down in case you get in there, and we never see you again. We’ll know who to call.” He smiles at his note-taking. He is a mystery — even for all that’s plain about him. It’s not easy to balance his life: one minute friendly; one minute a hostage situation; and all the time in between longing to be home with the kids, cooking brats on the Weber and smiling at the day.
“Great,” I say. “I’ll be safe.”
“No worries.” (… On my inventory; a two-word misnomer meaning “You’re absolutely welcome. I’m really glad to be able to assist you. After all, we seek each other in these dire times. So know that I’m thinking about you. And do be safe.”) No worries is maybe better.
I run my window back up. Corporal Alyss steps farther back, drags the NJSP sawhorse to the left, waves me through past the skull ’n’ bones and the message from Ozymandias. I give him my two-hand fellowship wave and drive on. His back is already to me. He’s forgetting I exist. I’m here. He’s here. But, in another sense, we’re not.
SEA-CLIFT, WHEN I DRIVE SOUTH ON CENTRAL, gives to the world the sad look of having taken a near-fatal punch in the nose. Power poles are mostly up but lacking wires. Sand has eddied up over everything low-down. Houses — even the now-and-then ones that look unscathed — seem stunned to stillness. Roofs, windows, front stoops, exterior walling, garages, boats shrink-wrapped in blue polypropylene — all look as if a giant has strode out of the gray sea and kicked the shit out of everything. Here are all places where people have lived. And not just smarty-pants, foggy-shuttered summer renters who stay ninety days past Memorial Day, but a sturdy corps of old-time “Clift-dwellers” plus happy retirees, alongside an older echelon of hedge-fund, coupon clippers who’ve bought in since the ’70s and call it “home.” Each in his own way patronizes the pizzerias, the mom-and-pops, the car-repairs, the Chinese takeout, the fried-seafood eateries where the TV’s never off in the bar and a booth’s always waiting. A bracing atmosphere of American faux egalitarianism long has reigned here — which drew me two decades back, when I moved down from Haddam. I arrived when seven hundred thousand still meant seven hundred thousand and could buy you a piece of heaven. With Sally Caldwell as my helpmate I couldn’t have been happier.
All that life has now been poleaxed and strewn around like hay-straw, so that even a hardened disaster-tourist who sees opportunity in everything would have to ask himself: “What can you do with this now? Let it settle back to nature? Walk away and come back in a year or ten? Move to Nova Scotia? Shoot yourself?”
Here, too, the morning’s bustling with cleanup-removal-and-teardown, line re-stringing, front-loader and backhoe operations. Citizens are about — though many are just standing, hands-on-hips staring at their ruined abodes. As Corporal Alyss has said, it’s easy to see how a person could drive down on a reconnoitering mission and simply never show up again; as if calamity had left a hole in the world on the rim of which everything civilized and positive-tending teeters — spirits, efforts, hopes, dreams, memories… buildings, for sure — all in jeopardy of spiraling down and down. I do, in fact, feel smart for having gotten out when the getting was good. Though when you sell a house where you’ve been happy, it’s never that you’re smart. In all such moves one feels the bruise of defeat.