17

I stumbled on a train track in the dark, and scratched my hand on a tumbleweed that grew out of the sand like a huge, shaggy head. Sand filled my shoes, so I sat on a short wall and took them off. I took off my socks, too, and carried them in my hand toward the surf.

The spray glowed in the dark as the waves crashed and grumbled at each other, and flattened quietly. I sat in the sand where it was only a little damp from the spray and eased the bottle out of my jacket pocket. It was a full liter, and carrying it down the sidewalks lined with porch lights had been like carrying a small cannon in my clothing, but now I was where no one could see me, sitting, I realized with pleasure, at the very edge of a continent, with nothing between me and, say, Japan. The wind shivered my clothing from time to time, and a whisper of spray would touch my eyes and make them weep. I fit the top of the bottle in the cup of my hand and turned the cap, loving the crisp rip of the tax seal as the cap unscrewed.

I drank hard, until my eyes crossed and my throat wriggled like a hooked fish. The rum smacked of faraway islands, and sun so hot people couldn’t stand to walk in it, but had to sit in the shade of trees watching an ocean like this one break and flatten with the kind of regular, gentle crunch that is better than silence. It also had that tough-guy throttle-hold of straight liquor, like it said to your body, “I taste good, but I also taste terrible, too, because that’s exactly what life is all about.” Out on the water, across a stretch so dark it was like a canyon of outer space, a light blinked on and off with the movement of the waves. A boat, I reasoned, perhaps a fishing boat, although what did I know about anything like that.

Nothing. I didn’t know anything. I drank again, hard, and looked at the bottle when I released it from my lips. It was a line of light, a reflection of the yellow lights of the house behind me across the beach, and the streetlight near the railroad tracks, but aside from that, it was invisible, like a hand gripping a thing that wasn’t there, lifting it and drinking from it, liquor out of nothing.

When a wave broke, and the flat shelf of water petered out and withdrew itself, so much feebler than it had arrived, it left little holes, bubble holes, it looked like, that winked and shivered. They grew still within seconds, and then another wave broke, and there they would be again, in different places. I watched the surface of the sand, wondering why there were no shells, and no stones, either, just sand.

After a while, I did not think of Mead, or of my father and his empty, needful life, hungry to have things in it: a son, a wife, maybe new children, and certainly some furniture. He needed a lot of things, my father, but he knew he needed them. I had the feeling that whatever happened, my father would think of me as something he used to accept as a thing to be ignored, but which now had become important through some change not in me, but in him. Maybe, I thought to myself, drinking, my father wanted too much. Maybe a person can’t stop his life and reorganize it like someone deciding to remodel a guest house.

A pair of headlights wobbled and jerked over the darkness, making two spears of light across the footprints and bits of charred wood. Imagine, I thought: a car driving along over the sand. I shook my head and sighed. The world was composed of wonders. I managed to get the bottle into my jacket as the headlights stopped beside me and the sound of an engine buried the sound of the surf. The headlights backed away, and a jeep turned sideways so a face could look at me.

“Beach closes at ten,” said a voice.

“What time is it now?” I said, climbing to my feet, ready to correct any misunderstanding that might exist between me and the world, or between me and the clocks anyone might have available.

“Eleven-thirty,” said the voice, and I could think of nothing to say.

I thought, for a moment, of running into the surf, plunging into the face of a breaking wave, and swimming. I would swim hard, toward the place in the water where the light had appeared, but I would not reach it, or, if I did, I would swim on by the fishing boat, with its distant murmur of Spanish and scent of cigarettes, and swim until I could not move my arms, and then I would sink.

“I’m just leaving,” I said, and stepped closer to the jeep. The driver was a young man with white teeth. He wore a T-shirt, and I was surprised for a moment that the police dressed so casually. “I don’t live around here,” I said. “I’m visiting my father.”

A radio spat static and numbers from somewhere under the dash, and I understood that conversation was no longer required, or even smart. “So I’ll be heading back,” I said.

The jeep’s engine spoke and sand arced into the air where the jeep had been one moment before: the jeep fishtailed across the sand and then I could see only the tiny spark of a taillight. “Gone to get help,” I said to myself.

And then I understood that he had not gone to get help. The conversation had ended. The man talked with his jeep. The arc of sand from his rear wheels had said something, something that I did not like.

I drank some more rum, but the fun was gone. I was a rum drinker on the run, now, and I had no sense of belonging where I was. The ground grew hard as I left the hiss of the surf, and I was careful not to stumble on the train tracks.