She would begin to look for the house; she would track it down intuitively. What she knew was only what she remembered from coming down; there was an old lumberyard in the town where she would turn right, gloomy old storefronts empty of wares and falling into disrepair, a store that sold party items and gags and magic tricks wholesale, and then, after that, an old public library, stately and grand up along a sloping hill. There she would turn down the narrow road that, from what she remembered, sloped toward the river; at a street called Ross she would turn right into another road, narrow and elegant; she would go back to the old house and sit alone and find a way into something else, she thought; the weeds outside would give under the wind and sway softly and it would be beautiful; the soft tarry smell would arrive from the road; the house would heave and creak softly under the hot sun, and she would go from room to room and examine them for clues, for some long-lost remnants of the life that had gone on there before it was reduced to broken glass, to long cracked wounds in the plaster that showed the lath behind; she would bow down on all fours to God; she would find herself in the basement amid the dusty light from the window wells and the smell of heating oil and the earthen floor, compacted into the corner there, under the old table, in the cobwebby recess she knew was there because she had gone with the men when they explored the house and Byron had bonged on the old tank while August, heaving his weight around, did a dance and sang “Sympathy for the Devil”; she’d feel an urge to spend the rest of eternity there in the dark and the cool, because right now, driving in the car, her desire was to get away from the bright sun and the sensation of the wild passing landscape that seemed so surfaced with light that it was impossible to look at; then in the morning if she saw some kind of new light from the window, sifting down through the motes of dust, she might go up and out again into a new world, entering with bare feet and walking the dew-wet road down to the river, where maybe if all was right and the world was back into some order she would find a cool cove loaded with myrtle and elderberry, and sit and watch the currents move and the boats far off. Maybe there, in that place, she would be located and identified and brought forth into the world of men and justice the way Byron said she would; then fate would play its hand and she’d be where she was intended to be, she thought, holding the wheel, driving carefully, avoiding speed traps, passing through a town named Newburgh that seemed depleted of all life and grace except where a few old grand homes hung on, big and robust, kept up nicely; she was a good and careful driver when calm, and she knew that one way or another she would get back to the hideout and fulfill the vision she had of how this whole thing would come to an end.
All Wondering
Let’s say the beach erodes fifty yards in at the rate of a yard a year, give or take a few. By the time the Atlantic reaches his body — by then nothing but bones, if even that — it won’t matter, Carl said. Unless his body works its way up and out, like a seed in reverse. You know, remember those old biology films showing in slow-mo stop-action the way certain seeds wiggle into the ground, taking advantage — I guess that’s the way to put it — of their natural designs in relation to the winds, wending down until they’re deep enough to root. All manipulation of form in conjunction with nature. Except, knowing Dad, his body might respond the other way, twisting up and out of the sand until some hiker comes upon a toe, or a brow. Just imagine his body emerging under a moonless sky with only the sweep of the lighthouse for company. Just imagine old Pop, old Dad, wondering where the hell he is, or at least theoretically wondering because presumably his wondering days are over. All his wondering has been relegated to some other realm, in the best of circumstances, or to the void, in the worst. Just imagine his bald pate exposed to the salt air — just about impossible to see in the sand, or a toe, already mentioned, coming up and out of the razor grass, or the brambles, and moving, depending on the freezethaw cycles, too slow for the human eye, but over time — if you could see the slowed-down action speeded up — wiggling softly in the manner of resurrected flesh, as one imagines it, Carl argued; or maybe even rising up, stiff-jointed, like a marionette in the quiet of the off-season, jerked around by invisible strings stretching up to the Holy Father. Or it’s just as easy to imagine the body doing the seed routine properly, Carl said, his voice suddenly husky and deep, caught up in a madness that came not so much from Dad’s body, it seemed, but from the lack of logic his argument was taking, gathered up into the sack of his grief, his voice barely audible. Burn the bastard. Freeze his ass. Shoot him into space. Plunge him into the center of the earth. At times, his thoughts, like perfectly out-of-phase sound waves, nullified themselves for a moment into a pure silence. Or the body might dig itself down into the soft pliancy, the liquescence of sand, yearned by gravity, twisting itself with the contraction of drying sinew and cartilage in the bright fall heat, during those clear Cape days before Thanksgiving (Carl said) when the snap of leaf mold and the scent of musket smoke hangs in the air, at least theoretically, because Miles Standish musket smoke is still up there, man, somewhere. (Carl lifted his hand and pointed vaguely in the direction of First Encounter Beach, where, almost four hundred years ago, the first hostile American shots were fired.) The corpse might spiral down (Carl said) until, with toes pointed and head haut, it drove hard to the bedrock. (He forcefully landed on each syllable, dividing the word into two.) Then, when he looked up at me with the mute, inaccessible eyes of a man sealed in the vacuum of stalemate, I saw that he was a chip off the old block. What Dad had contained, he contained. Now the original block was just solid matter, and Carl was the live chip leaning into his shovel to rest, looking out over the Atlantic while between us came a mutual agreement — unspoken — that the hole would have to go down at least fifteen feet to give the body a chance, to find a depth of equalization (as Carl later called it, groping retrospectively for the proper phrase), where the forces drawing our father up would meet on equal terms with the forces drawing him down. From that point it was all digging and digging, widening the hole against the sliding sand, working furiously, one taking a turn with the shovel while the other dug with his hands, working for several hours until we got down fifteen feet, stopping only on occasion to rest, to look out over the roar of surf — big, lazy-edged waves coming in on an angle, rolling themselves against the hook of the beach from one end to the other, each producing a shush sound from right to left while the sun, for its part, sank against the sharp horizon — invisible, over the verge behind us, paring away at whatever light remained of the day.
The Spot
Jack Dunhill, a.k.a. Bone, a.k.a. the Bear, a.k.a. Stan Newhope, a.k.a. Winston Leonard, a.k.a. Michigan Pete, a.k.a. Bill Dempsey, a.k.a. Shank, said, Not those waves but that little pucker on the surface out there is where the Cleveland water supply is drawn in, right there, and if you were to dump enough poison on that spot you’d kill the entire city in one sweep. Believe me, I’ve thought it out. You’d just have to hit right there, he said, pointing again, and then he turned to examine her gaze, and in doing so presented his face, weathered from years of picking blueberries and cherries in Michigan, and, after that, a merchant marine gig during Vietnam. You see, the water is unsuspecting until it hits that spot. It has no idea it’s gonna be collected, drawn under the streets, cleaned up, and piped into homes. Not a clue. But when it touches that suck, its future vanishes. No chance of becoming a wave after that, no kissing the shore and yearning back out into the lake. Instead, it ends up pooled on somebody’s lawn, or slipping down a throat, or spooned into a bowl of baby cereal. That’s the mystery of chance. One minute you’re one thing, the next you’re another, and choice had nothing at all to do with it. He paused, pointed one last time at the spot, shook himself free of his reverie, and pulled her close while she searched the water, tried to find the spot, and, failing to do so, said, I see it. I do. It’s right where you said it would be.