Beach Music

by Pat Conroy

  “These drivers are highly pissed,” Dallas said as Dupree bullied an elderly woman into backing up until her bumper touched the Toyota Corolla behind her.

  Dupree honked his horn loudly and forced his way into the empty lane going in the opposite direction from the bridge. He raced past the stalled line of cars and disbelieving drivers and gunned it until he reached the two squad cars also parked in the wrong lane. The four of us jumped out and joined the line of police officers who stood facing a defiant John Hardin across an expanse of water. John Hardin, alone at last, confronted the rest of the world.

  When we reached the bridge’s edge, we saw Sheriff Arby Vandiver trying to negotiate with John Hardin. But all of us knew John Hardin had entered that untenable zone where the voices inside him and the buzzing confusion on the bridge made him obedient only to the authenticated world of his own interior. He had long ago created his own island and he was his own bully pulpit when the extraordinary and unruly flash of madness overcame him.

  “Hey, Waterford,” John Hardin was screaming. “Fuck you. That’s what I think of the town and everyone who lives in it. What a rotten little excuse for a town. Everyone who grows up here, or is forced to live here even for a small amount of time, becomes a complete, worthless asshole. It’s not your fault, Waterford. You can’t help it that you’re rotten to the core. But it’s time. You’re just not worth a shit and it shows.”

  “Makes you proud to be a McCall,” Dallas whispered.

  “Okay, John Hardin,” Sheriff Vandiver ordered through a bullhorn. “Hit the switch and let the bridge swing back. You got traffic backed up for miles.”

  “They should never’ve allowed this bridge to be built, Sheriff. You know better than anyone. Remember how pretty these islands used to be before they built this bridge? You could walk for miles without ever seeing a house. Wild turkeys were all over the place. You couldn’t throw out a baited line without catching a fish. But now? Hell no. A thousand generals live out here by their stupid golf courses. One million retired colonels and their stupid wives built their tacky retirement homes. There are seven golf courses between here and the beach. How many golf courses do these assholes need?”

  “He’s got a point,” someone said in the crowd beginning to swell on the bridge behind us. Another crowd was forming on the ocean side of the bridge.

  “I got to get my bridge back, kid,” the sheriff said.

  “This used to be a fabulous town,” John Hardin shouted, appealing to what he supposed to be the sheriff’s shared sense of nostalgia.

  “Yeah, kid, it was heaven on earth,” the sheriff said wearily, his voice oddly distorted by the volcano-shaped instrument. “Hit the switch and bring Daddy’s bridge back to him or I might have to hurt you, John Hardin.”

  When he heard this, Dupree moved in to take over the negotiations by saying to the sheriff, “Hey, Vandiver, get this straight. You ain’t hurting John Hardin.”

  “Won’t be me,” the sheriff said. “Regulations say I got to call the SWAT team from Charleston during a siege situation. They’re on their way by helicopter.”

  “What’ll they do to John Hardin?” I asked.

  “They’ll kill him,” the sheriff said. “Especially since he’s armed.”

  “Call the SWAT team off, Sheriff,” Dallas said. “Tell them to turn back. We’ll get John Hardin to close the bridge.”

  “It don’t work that way,” the sheriff said.

  “Then tell them his brothers are here and are going to talk him out of it,” Dupree said.

  “I’ll tell ’em that,” the sheriff said, walking back to his car.

  John Hardin was watching us carefully as this discussion went on, and he followed the sheriff with his eyes.

  “I know what you’re saying, Dupree,” he shouted. “You’re telling everyone I need my shot and then I’ll settle down. The world may think I’m crazy, but I think the world’s crazy—so who’s to say who’s right? I’m never letting another car cross this goddamn bridge. Fuck you, Waterford. Fuck you, little town. There’s a reason small towns are small. You’re small ’cause you’re not worth a damn. A boat should never have to wait for a car. A car’s an inferior mode of transportation. I’ve liberated the Waterford River for all the boats in the world.”

  Dupree stepped forward, the one who loved John Hardin the best and the one John Hardin hated the most.

  “Close the bridge, John Hardin,” Dupree demanded.

  “Eat a big hairy one, Dupree,” John Hardin answered, using his middle finger to give his words fuller effect. “This town is so shitty it gave my poor mother leukemia. When I was a kid, nobody died of cancer. Now everybody’s got it. Explain that, would you, you stupid sons of bitches. None of you grinning idiots care about how you’re screwing up this town. It started with this bridge. Too many assholes crossed this bridge with their golf clubs. They didn’t know what matters. Beauty matters …”

  “I’m going to lose every client in this town tomorrow morning,” Dallas whispered to me. “There won’t be one left.”

  “That’s all,” John Hardin screamed. “Just beauty. You people been to Hilton Head lately? They’re gonna sink that poor fucking island with concrete.”

  “Close the damn bridge, John Hardin,” Dupree said, just loud enough for John Hardin to hear him. Commuters began beating their horns in frustration until the noise was too loud for anyone to hear anything else. John Hardin fired a shot into the air and then the sheriff and his deputies began ordering the protesting horns rendered silent.

  “That’s my brother Dupree,” John Hardin screamed from his island of steel. “If they had a contest to find the biggest asshole in the world, I guarantee he’d be a finalist.”

  “Nevertheless,” I shouted back, taking up for Dupree, “please close the bridge, John Hardin. It’s me, Jack, talking and asking you to please close that bridge.”

  “My brother Jack left Waterford and his family to go to a country that only eats lasagna and pizza pie and that kind of shit. So how does he expect to understand I’m not closing the bridge because beauty matters. It really matters.”

  “Fuck beauty,” Tee screamed, exasperated and embarrassed by the ordeal.

  “Easy, Tee,” Dallas said. “We are face to face with pure madness.”

  “Great diagnosis,” Tee whispered sarcastically.

  “When I was a kid there wasn’t one new house built on the Isle of Orion. Now there’s not a vacant lot on the front beach. Erosion everywhere. Loggerhead turtles can hardly come up on land to lay their eggs. Just imagine what these poor mother turtles think,” John Hardin said.

  “Turtles don’t think. They’re just turtles,” Dupree said. “You’re talking like a dope, John Hardin.”

  “I never understood why you lived in Europe,” Dallas said, “till this very moment.”

  “Lots of rentals,” I said.

  “What a loser,” Dupree screamed back at John Hardin. “You’ve been a loser and a phony since the day you were born. Mama just told me that. She’s out of her coma.”

  “Mama’s out of her coma?” John Hardin said. “You’re lying. Fuck you, Dupree McCall.” John Hardin’s voice was as poignant as a train whistle now. “I won’t close this bridge until everyone shouts, ‘Fuck you, Dupree McCall.’ ”

  “Organize the cheer, brothers,” Dupree said. “He means it. And if the SWAT team gets here, they’ll kill our brother. They don’t play.”

  We ran down a line of cars and enlisted volunteers from the crowd to pass the word from driver to driver. The sheriff shouted instructions to the large gathering on the other side of the bridge as the tension surrounding the siege began to mount and the very air felt dangerous to breathe.

  The sheriff took his bullhorn and said, “On three. One. Two. Three …”

  The town chanted, “Fuck you, Dupree McCall.”

  “Louder,” John Hardin demanded.

  “Louder.”

  “Fuck you, Dupree McCall,” the crowd thundered.

>   “Now close the bridge,” Dupree shouted. “Before I come over there and whip your ass.”

  “You gonna pole-vault, asshole?” John Hardin shouted.

  “There are ladies present on the bridge,” Dallas said, changing tactics.

  “I apologize to all the ladies I might’ve offended,” John Hardin said, and there was true contrition in his voice. “But my mother has leukemia and I’m really not myself today.”

  “Mama’s out of the coma,” Dupree shouted again. “She wants to talk to you. She won’t see the rest of us until she talks to you. Close the bridge.”

  “I will under one condition,” John Hardin said.

  “This’ll be good,” Dupree said to us, his lips as still as a ventriloquist’s. “I’ve never seen him this bad.”

  “I want all of my brothers to get stark, buck naked and jump into the river,” screamed John Hardin, and there was some laughter in the crowd.

  “I’m an attorney in this town,” Dallas said. “People don’t take their problems to a man seen naked on a bridge.”

  “We got to do it,” Dupree said.

  “Fuck you, Dupree McCall,” Tee said. “I’m a public school teacher in this state. I can’t do it. I just can’t.”

  “If we don’t, the SWAT team’ll shoot John Hardin.”

  Dupree had started walking toward the opening of the bridge and was already removing his clothing. The rest of us followed him, also removing our own clothing.

  “We get naked,” Dupree said, “then you throw the gun in the water. We jump in the water. You close the bridge. Deal?”

  John Hardin thought a moment, then said, “Deal.”

  Dupree stepped out of his underwear, followed by Tee, then me, and finally a very reluctant and grumbling Dallas.

  John Hardin grinned happily as he savored the sight of us, his naked and humiliated brothers. “All of you’ve got little dicks.”

  Laughter erupted from those within earshot. Even the sheriff and his deputies laughed.

  “Are there reporters here?” Dallas asked.

  I turned around and saw a photographer with several cameras around his neck and another with a camcorder.

  “Photographers too,” I reported.

  “My career’s dead,” said Dallas, his despair deepening.

  “This news’ll go statewide in a flash,” Tee said.

  Dupree looked up and surveyed the sky, then shouted, “Throw the gun in the water. That was part of the deal.”

  John Hardin hesitated, then threw the pistol into the saltwater river.

  “We’re going to jump in,” Dallas said. “Then you close the bridge. Deal?”

  “The drinking water in this dump of a town gave my mother leukemia. You get your water from the Savannah River, you dumb bastards. It’s got nuclear waste, garbage from paper mills …”

  “Is it a deal?” Dupree repeated. “Mama’s out of the coma. She asked about you first. She really wants to see you.”

  “Mama. Mama,” John Hardin cried out.

  “A deal?” Dupree said once more.

  John Hardin looked back at us. Suddenly his eyes filled with malice, then he screamed, “Jump, you naked bastards, jump. And I hope the sharks eat your tiny little peckers right off. Jump and then I’ll close the bridge.”

  “I’m afraid of heights,” Tee said.

  “Then I’ll help you,” Dupree said, as he pushed him off the bridge.

  Tee screamed in pure terror all the way down until he hit the water. When he surfaced, the rest of us jumped off the Waterford Bridge together and I think we did it with a fine sense of style.

  I hit the April-cool water and went deeper underwater than I’d ever gone in my life, so deep that when I opened my eyes I had to swim blindly upward toward the light. The water was opaque and cloudy with the rich nutrients that grow so abundantly in the jade-bright marsh. When I burst out of the surface of the water, my three brothers’ eyes were fixed on the steel girders of the bridge above us and as I looked up the bridge began its ponderous, inanimate swing as John Hardin kept his part of the bargain. The sheriff waved down to us and shouted out his thanks.

  The tide was incoming and powerful and we were already a hundred yards upstream when we saw the sheriff and his men put John Hardin in handcuffs and place him in the police car.

  “What now?” Tee asked.

  “Let’s let the tide take us to Dad’s house,” I said.

  “My career’s finished,” Dallas moaned.

  “Go into something new, bro,” Tee said. “Like synchronized swimming. Naked.”

  We laughed and Tee and Dupree immediately dove underwater and their two hairy legs came out side by side with their toes pointed and they kicked in unison a time or two before emerging coughing and blowing water out of their nostrils. But still laughing.

  “We do have little dicks,” Tee said.

  “Speak for yourself, son,” Dallas said.

  “I can see your dick. We’re all hung like chipmunks,” Tee said, floating on his back, sadly examining his barely sufficient genitalia.

  “Question,” I said, dog-paddling and relieved that the siege was over. “How often does John Hardin go off like that?”

  “Two or three times a year,” Dupree said. “But this is new. He’s never used a gun before and he’s never gone up on a bridge. I give him an ‘A’ for creativity on this one.”

  “It’s sad. So pathetic,” Dallas said, floating on his back.

  “Yeh, it is,” Dupree admitted. “But it’s also funny.”

  “Tell me the funny part,” said Dallas. “Our brother’s being taken to an insane asylum in handcuffs.”

  Dupree said, “You ever think you’d jump off a bridge stark naked with the whole town watching?”

  I roared with laughter and with love of my brothers as I began to backstroke through the water. For a few moments we swam in silence, and I was lost in thoughts of both exhilaration and sadness. We were low country boys, strong swimmers, good fishermen, who had grown to manhood in a household of secret terrors that had marked each of us in different ways. We carried a strange darkness about us composed of mistrust and distortion. We used laughter as both a weapon and a vaccine.

  As we moved, the water felt like cold silk on my body and I had never known such a clean, animal nakedness. I listened to the small talk of my brothers and drew closer to them with every word they spoke. Through them, I could study some of the flaws I brought to bear in my own life. Like me, they had scratchy, muffled temperaments, but were courteous to everyone they met almost to a fault. All were no-nonsense and rough around the edges, but they could look me in the eye, express affection with their laughter, and never appear eager to make it to the nearest door or the next assignment when I was in their company.

  We waved to people on the riverbank, and as the tide moved us, I could tell my brothers did not want this day to end any more than I did. Taking turns, we told stories to each other, and my brothers, like me, mark time by cherishing the details that stud the layers of each great story. They were Southern boys and they knew how to make a story sizzle when it hit the fat. Their voices bloomed around me and I loved the sound of my native tongue as it came out of Southern mouths. My brothers talked all at once, shouted each other down, as we floated through the heart of our river, the one that had sung to us as boys. Like evening smoke, I listened to my brothers’ speech, their sugary accent with its soft kittenish purr of consonants, its hissing, cottonmouth sibilants, the tenderness of all words passed through the dewdrop illusions of my native tongue.

  In a small armada of brothers, I stroked through the waters that led to my father’s house aware that I would be on a plane headed for Europe and my daughter the next day and that I had just lived through a week that would change the course of my entire life. I felt ties to this river, to this town, to this open indwelling sky, to everything around me.

  My daughter knew none of this or none of what made this so inexpressibly vital to me. Tomorrow, I would return ho
me, tell Leah everything I saw and heard and felt, then trust her openhearted, hungering, and motherless spirit to forgive me. I had taken her away from what we both were. I had given her everything except the South. I had stolen her calling card.

  Mike Hess and Ledare drove me to the airport in Savannah the next day and I signed on to do the movie project. Mike had caught me in a weak moment when I found myself fully in love with my own story all over again.

  Chapter Seventeen

  In the deranged but honored light that shone down on those years I call my childhood, I grew up in a three-storied, many-roomed house that made me fall in love with impractical architects who conjured alcoves and oddly shaped rooms large enough to spread out in during the most deadly quarrels of my parents. I was a nervous boy and a secret staircase was my favorite room. Because of his love of the law and good bourbon, our father took the house for granted. But my mother breathed the house in through the pores of her skin, knew every inch of it by heart, and would even talk to the house on occasion when lost in her own thoughts during the labors of spring cleaning. To my father, the house was a place to hang his hat and his clothes and store his collection of books, but my mother treated it as a prayer answered by a generous world.

  It had been constructed in 1818 in what became known as the Waterford Style; its solid foundations were of stucco over tabby and its two stories of verandas faced east to catch the cool breezes that lifted off the river even during the hottest summer days.

  The rooms were spacious and high-ceilinged and there was an attic that smelled of mothballs and cedar and was crammed with enough discarded furniture and chests and piles of drapery to hide a small city of children in peril. But the house had come into the hands of Johnson Hagood and Lucy McCall out of controversy and by accident.

  From the beginning of their marriage, we were told that our parents acted like two storm fronts moving against each other. There was something mismatched and synthetic about their union. My source for this disturbing information was my voluble grandmother, Ginny Penn, who always let me believe that my mother had fallen off the back of a cabbage truck and had somehow lured my callow father to the altar. Perhaps reacting to this snobbery of his mother, my dad had brought my mother, Lucy, to Waterford as his lawfully wedded wife before he had mentioned her name to his parents. No one knew her and not a single citizen of Waterford had ever heard a thing about her people. Nothing is more important to a Southerner than origins and Lucy’s were counterfeit the moment she met my father in an Atlanta burlesque club. My father had been drinking and did not know that Lucy was a stripper off duty. Johnson Hagood had just returned from fighting in the European Theater during World War II and had seen enough carnage for a dozen lifetimes. He was looking for a fresh start and Lucy was looking for a way out when they stumbled across each other. Their marriage took place in the office of a justice of the peace near Fort McClellan, my father in his dress uniform, Lucy in a loose, high-necked white dress. I was born five months after their wedding ceremony and my mother used to refer to me as her “love child” until Ginny Penn broke her of the habit. I liked being called a “love child” by my mom.