The Blizzard Party

by Jack Livings

  Don’t worry about me, he had said.

  Of course, that was all she did.

  There was a little light now. Down the white slope of the yard, Lake Montauk was a snow-feathered plane of ice. Bo’s twenty-one-foot Boston Whaler, a fiberglass ballet slipper outfitted with a Mercury 175, was moored ten minutes away at the marine basin, where the commercial fishermen kept their vessels. He owned, in addition to the Whaler, a larger cruiser with an enclosed cabin, heat, a small fridge, but it was the naked, simple banana boat that he wanted for this excursion. Bo intended to take them deep, in search of blues, a probably quixotic expedition he was insisting on purely for the audacity of putting the other two through the Nordic hell of air so cold that spray from the bow would turn to ice pellets before it hit their foul-weather gear. Their boots would freeze in place on the deck. Their monofilament would sag with ice and lock up the reels. Should one of them be lucky enough to haul something out of the depths, they’d be treated to the spectacle of watching the fish freeze solid within a minute or two of landing on the deck. What sort of man was Bo? Like most men, one trapped by his idea of what he should be.

  They drove through the dark to the harbor, again in the freezing, spine-shattering Land Cruiser, Feeney having insisted my father take the back bench so he’d have room to stretch his legs, though yet again he’d been pinned in by all the gear. Something still reeked. Bo backed down to the pier and started unloading. Everything my father carried down to the boat had to go back. Appreciate the help, Bo said, but you can leave the wet gear up there. Easier to get into it by the Cruiser. My father ended up standing guard by the vehicle while Feeney made trips back and forth, carefully selecting tackle boxes, rods, buckets, plastic containers in some preordained order that eluded my father, who moved to help at the apex of every trip only to have Feeney wave him off. No, no, get your beauty rest. Eventually Bo came thumping back up the pier and hopped in the driver’s seat. He revved up the engine and popped it into gear before my father, leaning against the back, could react, and the Land Cruiser slipped out from beneath his hip, sending him sprawling onto the gravel.

  Great shit! Feeney said. Always seeking the horizontal, aren’t you, Saltwater? He offered a hand.

  You think this is good, wait until we get out there, my father said.

  You’ll be fine, Feeney said.

  He climbed the gravel track to the parking lot a few steps behind Feeney, who ascended in a sort of crouch. Near the lot, Feeney turned back to my father. My goddamn prostate. I’m either so jammed up I can’t walk or it’s leaking like a screen door.

  My father nodded as though this information explained anything.

  They got into the wet-weather gear, my father in a new set of rubber boots, rain bib, and foul-weather jacket, all in duckling yellow. Bo’s bibs and boots were the same somber blue as Feeney’s, scarred and caked in fish scales and blood. Feeney’s jacket was dusky red, cracked at the elbows from age and exposure; Bo’s was orange, with a Swedish flag patch on the left chest. It had been his companions’ foul-weather gear he’d smelled in the back of the Land Rover, more powerful than the grease from the reels or the gasoline sloshing around in the jerricans. Mildew and seawater, rotting fish. A Precambrian sense of foreboding, that smell.

  The sky to the east was fading to white, a peaceful dawn blooming, and the men’s breath rolled from their mouths in long streams of vapor. Piles of dirty snow took shape at the edges of the lot. The security light flickered off.

  All right, gentlemen, Bo said, slamming closed the rear hatch. They walked silently across the lot and down the slope to the pier. Bo boarded the boat first, then Feeney, carrying a battery under his arm, who momentarily summoned some dormant athleticism for the leap down, and then my father, who hesitated as he stepped, his boot levitating above the gap between the frosty dock and the white gunwale, while his brain ran a last-minute calculation, then overcompensating so that his foot shot forward, the wavy gum of his sole’s heel catching the slick fiberglass just long enough to allow him to get his other foot atop the thin edge, where he tottered, Chaplain on the verge, juking and weaving, his boots squawking against the laminate. Bo’s hand shot out and grabbed the front of his jacket and pulled my father down into the boat.

  Mother of Christ, you weren’t kidding, Feeney said.

  Tide’s running, Bo said, unmoved by the near overboarding. He’d turned his attention to securing the tackle boxes in a compartment below the center console. At the back of the boat, Feeney worked the battery into its compartment, strapped it down, affixed the leads, and scrambled back onto the dock, nimble as a mountain goat, to uncleat the ropes. Bo turned the key, trimmed the prop into the water, and fired up the engine, which chugged three times and then blasted alive with a cough of blue smoke. My father had moved to the bow, where he felt he might do the least damage, and Feeney tossed the bowline to him. He held the damp weight in his gloved hands and, not knowing what else to do, coiled it and stashed it in the cutaway along the inside wall.

  All right? Feeney said, and Bo made a swirl with his finger. Feeney tossed the aft line into the boat and leapt in behind it as Bo clicked the throttle to reverse out of the mooring. They drifted gently back, parting the glassy water, and he clicked the lever forward. The prop dug in, gurgling, the water churning. As they swept out into the channel, Bo waved at my father and patted the gunwale next to him.

  You don’t want to be up there, he said.

  My father complied.

  Bo opened up the throttle at the mouth of the breakwaters. There was light enough to see the swells out before them, rolling gray seas not quite capping. Lacy tatters of foam rode the surface of the water. The boat commenced a gentle arc, heading northwest, directly into the wind, and my father, who’d dutifully glued himself to the gunwale, holding tight with his left hand, repositioned himself in a crouch, leaning forward as the bow rose up, grasping the rail on the pilot console with his right. Just past Shagwong Reef, the chop picked up, and when Bo speared the peak of a wave, spray exploded over the bow, splattering their jackets. Feeney caught the icy shower with a whoop. He was seated on a small shelf at the aft. My father noted that one bad bounce was all it would take to send Feeney flying overboard.

  Bo at the wheel was some kind of orange-hooded Washington fording the Delaware. His orange glove was steady on the throttle as they dove into the valleys, climbed the rising faces, and sailed off the crests, the prop breaking free of the water, the engine whining like an Indy car’s, before burying itself again in the froth when the hull smacked down against the surface. They were heading for the deep water of the Block Island Sound. If there were blues, that’s where they would be. This was as close as Bo Vornado came to nervous, this single-minded focus driving him toward the fish he’d promised his guests would be there. He’d will them into existence if he had to. Nothing was fun unless there was a chase, but he wanted to stay cool around the older men, so he’d gotten up especially early and smoked a sausage of a joint in the garage.

  My father lasted about five minutes before he felt it rising up in the back of his throat, that unmistakable tang in the spittle accumulating on his soft palate, the popping in his ears, the den of snakes in his gut. His jaw went slack and the base of his skull throbbed. Nothing but a full stop was going to save him. The wind in his face did nothing to the sweat oozing from his forehead but push it stinging into his eyes. Sweat was flowing down the small of his back. There was sweat between his toes. Sweat on his lips. His flesh felt as if it had shrunk and drawn tight as a cured hide. His organs had disintegrated into undulating liquids. His eyelashes fluttered. No, no, no, no, no.

  Retroperistalsis began.

  * * *

  In 1944, my father was admitted to the U.S. Naval Convalescent Hospital in Santa Cruz, California. It was there that, on an afternoon pass, he’d taken a two-minute ride on the Giant Dipper, a wooden coaster at the boardwalk, conveniently located just across Beach Street from the hospital. As roller coasters go, it was ab
out as wild as a Shetland pony, but my father’s ride had been an adrenal Gettysburg, a real eyeball-peeler to the untold horrors his already unfriendly brain had waiting backstage, and he hadn’t been able to shake the eschatological specter that had shadowed him after he’d climbed out of the cramped car, heart racing and palms wet, a sudden hangover crushing his temples. He started babbling about Hobbes and Dostoyevsky to his date, who capitalized on her opportunity to escape when he turned around to leer yet again at the carnival death trap flinging another group of suicidees against the crystal-blue sky. Something had cracked loose within him, hatched and emerged whole into the light of day. It was the thing that had put him in the hospital in the first place, diagnosed as malaise—an aristocrat’s disease, a wilting of the spirit, an inability to sleep, treated with a Benzedrine/veronal dose pattern to reestablish the proper circadian rhythms—but now he saw that the thing had only been incubating, awaiting its monstrous rapture. He’d been insane to risk his life on that contraption. Even back on solid ground he winced as the wheels screamed and thunked behind him, the weathered wooden crosshatching creaking like a rope bridge over a gorge. It was the noise of imminent destruction, the terrible scream of an incoming munition. His eyes saw a changed world. Gulls hovering against the blue sky were agents of disease, the children’s cries oscillating as the coaster whipped around a turn nothing more than civilization’s death rattle. He had put his life in the hands of strangers for the sake of a quick thrill, to get the girl hot. What if some old carnie had half-assed his morning maintenance check, missed a loose assembly in the elbow of one of the oh-so-gentle sweeping banks, and though it had held for the first sixty-three rides of the day, a nut had been incrementally vibrating ever looser down the bolt’s shaft, and finally, at ride number sixty-four, it spiraled free of the last micron of thread as the wheels clattered through the turn, the little hexagon of steel ricocheting down through the superstructure like a pachinko ball, and though good luck and friction had held the beams together, it had been my father’s fate to be on the very next ride, the sixty-fifth, the one under which the crosstie had slipped, the rail distended, leaving the wheels of the leading car free to navigate the open air, and they all went plunging like a speared dragon to the boardwalk fifty feet below?

  What if? What if? Of course the maintenance checks were half-assed!

  Just because the roller coaster hadn’t collapsed in a splintering, shredding implosion of wood and steel didn’t mean it wasn’t loaded with potential. He understood now. Every man-made structure was a collapsing machine, held in check only by the crews crisscrossing the beams and catwalks looking for cracks, banging on wires and listening for off-key responses. Architecture was nothing more than the art of creating things that fall down very, very slowly, so slowly that we might even forget the inevitability of decay.

  The coaster had seven hundred thousand nails in it. Warehouses’ worth of nuts and bolts. Millions of opportunities for the two eyes of the maintenance man to miss something. And how many mechanical elements had to fail at once to guarantee an accident? Two? Three? The potential combinations that led to mechanical failure were infinite. Therefore, infinite possible causes of death. To reverse the tape, an infinite number of non-failures had to occur every second of the day in order for my father to go on living.

  He had never been known for his nerve. As a boy, he’d avoided swimming at the quarry, explorations of abandoned houses. He was quick to imagine the aftermath of a slip from atop a stone wall. He served as human ladder and, after boosting the last friend through a broken window, lookout, as they climbed out onto the roof of the Uniroyal warehouse, pretended to lose their balance again and again, tottering on one foot, windmilling their arms, while my father’s breath caught every time he managed to bring his eyes up to see their black shoes and drooping socks, their pale white legs.

  Putting himself in harm’s way wasn’t exhilarating, it was terrifying; hiking in the mountains with his father, he kept himself well back from the cliff’s edge, so powerful was the call of the void. His head swam when his father, perched on a splinter of rock jutting over a thousand-foot drop, turned his back to the emptiness and called for his son to come on over and enjoy the view.

  No, he’d say. No. He couldn’t go to the edge because he couldn’t trust himself not to jump. He wasn’t suicidal, so why couldn’t he trust himself? He trusted his present self—it was his future self, the one who lived five seconds from now, the one who stood at the edge of the cliff, whom he didn’t trust. That future self had lived through a span, however brief, of unpredictable events. How could my father know what he might experience in those five seconds and how those experiences might shape his behavior? Why offer his future self the opportunity to jump? In every situation, the film raced forward to a dire outcome.

  He spent the remainder of the afternoon lying flat on his back on the sand. Only there in the constant sun, the waves breaking predictably at his feet, did he feel calm enough to think.

  The world was a slave to pressure and velocity, to the calculus of spinning rods and belts and gearwheels, to the transformation of circular motion into linear motion. All vacuum tubes, pipes, valves, flanges, whether taken individually or in system, as in an internal combustion engine, were potential bombs. Cars were nothing more than harnessed violence: beneath the hood, fan blades spun like saws, pistons fired, belts whipped by at blinding speed. The rotational force of the four Goodyears humming along at highway speed translated to potential destructive energy on par with a case of land mines, each wheel loaded for the moment of puncture when hunks of rubber would shear away, shattering windscreens to the rear, cars to the left and right inscribing twin-black sine curves across the tarmac as their drivers lost control, steel tonnage smashing into steel tonnage into concrete dividers, flying off overpasses, the helpless little meats inside pulverized. And what if an entire wheel disconnected, rim and all? He tried to calculate the stress placed on the shanks of the wheel studs, on the lug nuts holding the rim to the axle. How many thousands of pounds of pressure? And how many hands worked on an automobile production line? A hundred? Two hundred? Each set of hands was a new opportunity for a bolt to be over-torqued, under-torqued, mis-threaded—or, god help us, forgotten entirely.

  An acute mental problem, unquestionably what was known to professionals in the field as a neurosis. He wasn’t hallucinating, and he wasn’t hearing voices. He simply couldn’t stop his mind from compiling new ways to die.

  Thirty-five years later his shrink, Dr. Asher Schiff, suggested that my father had wanted to die.

  That doesn’t compute, my father said. Not everything is a reversal. If I wanted to die, all I had to do was jump off the roof of the hospital. But I was afraid of dying.

  Of course you were afraid of dying, Schiff said. Come on. Why can’t you both fear and desire death? Are you a machine?

  Because I wanted to live, full stop. A desire to die would have been easier to deal with. No conflict there. I jump off the roof.

  And did you jump off the roof?

  I did not jump off the roof.

  Look, I say crazy things sometimes. I probably shouldn’t even have started down this road with you, Schiff said.

  This again, my father said.

  Schiff had been on the pro tennis circuit before enrolling in the psych program at CUNY, and he had that ex-athlete’s way of moving to avoid pain, every bend or stoop the sum of a careful calculation. Joints gone to hell, every ligament a bit too tight, every muscle on the verge of rupture, he usually sat draped over his leather chair, utterly slack unless movement was absolutely necessary. He had a big head that my father found comforting. His forehead had executed a sort of continental drift across the top of his skull and what hair he had left he kept stubble-length with an electric razor. He transmitted boundless waves of security and empathy. A cardigan over a button-down shirt, button collar, corduroys, big brown Earth shoes. My father had always assumed Schiff was good with children, and then, because Schiff h
ad trained him well, he followed that assumption with a lengthy explication of why he wanted Schiff to be good with children, and whether or not he wished he were Schiff’s child.

  Schiff said, You fantasized that the bicycle you rode around the hospital grounds might suddenly become structurally unsound, snap in two, and spear you in the chest, is that correct?

  And the inside of the thigh. Femoral artery, my father said.

  And the roller coaster? You repeatedly returned to watch the very roller coaster that set the whole thing off?

  Yes.

  What do I know, but it sounds like you were looking for a way to die. Maybe hoping? Is hoping too strong a word here?

  No, it’s just the opposite. I never wanted to die. The fear tied me in knots. It made me a nonfunctioning human being.

  Look, you want something from an old textbook? Say you’ve got a teenage boy who says he hates his mother. He storms out of the room whenever she walks in, won’t speak to her, does everything in his power to stay as far away from her as possible. He’s a raging asshole to her. When he does speak, he says vicious things. Every time she tries to give him a kiss on the cheek, he repels her. He drives her away at all costs. Why? His behavior tells a story. He doesn’t understand it himself—here he is, pushing away the woman who has nurtured him for fourteen, fifteen years, a woman he wrote mash notes to when he was six. What’s changed? Why would he behave this way? Because suddenly he has hard-ons for her. Her image invades his fantasies when he’s jerking off. And what’s worse, he’s physically powerful enough to act on his desire. He has the equipment now, and for the first time in his life he’s physically bigger than she is. He knows he could take her if he wanted her. And, oh boy, he does want her. Well, he doesn’t have to have read Oedipus to know how Oedipus turns out.

  I never had a thing for my mother, my father said.

  Sure you did, but I was only offering an analogous illustration.