by Drew Perry
All I could really see right then was our kid, the one we’d have to bring home, thirty hours old and arranged in one of those glass brownie pans at the hospital, sporting a pink watchcap and planning already to move in with her boyfriend. I pulled on the rumble bar up in the ceiling. Changing table. Car seat. Evenings full of word problems, of Train A leaving the station in time to roar by Train B at a point as yet undetermined. Veronica wears woolen scarves and speaks Portuguese, but can’t sit next to Michelle, who eats only fish. The whole of it a flip book, a shoebox diorama. I watched our headlights pick up reflectors embedded in the road.
“I didn’t mean to go off the reservation like that,” Mid said.
“Are you alright?” I said.
“Mainly.” He took both hands off the steering wheel, then took hold of it again. “Thank you for coming with me,” he said.
“It was the least I could do,” I said.
“How about you? You hanging in there OK?”
“Sure I am,” I said, and we kept pushing south, two liars in a ridiculous car.
Robbie was high. Very. We stood in his bombed-out kitchen, watching him roll a couple of extra joints for the road. “You guys want any of this?” he said, and I couldn’t help but wonder where he’d bought it.
“I think we’re cool,” Mid said.
“Yeah,” said Robbie. “You totally are.” He put the joints in a bag. “You guys want any of this?” he said again.
Mid said, “It’s OK. Let’s just go.”
“You ever been to the Grand Canyon?” Robbie asked me.
“No,” I said. “Why?”
“I don’t know, man. It’s just really, really something to think about.”
“You’re sure you know how to get to this place?” Mid asked.
“Nic’s? You can’t really miss it, if you know what I’m saying. Once you get there, you’re good.”
“You’re certain,” Mid said.
“Undeniably,” he said. “Let’s do this.”
He talked a lot about the Grand Canyon while we rode back toward Devil’s Backbone. He’d seen some special about it, about rafting down the Colorado. “I’m planning on doing that pretty soon,” he said. “But not alone. I gotta get some other people in there to help me paddle. You guys want to go?”
“Why not?” Mid said, and I thought, of course you do.
“That is so badass,” Robbie said. “I try to tell them that at Me Kayak, what a badass you are.”
“Thanks,” Mid said.
“That reminds me. We got three boats stolen last night.”
“We got what?”
“When I counted up this morning, three of them had walked away.”
“You didn’t call.”
“Well, they were still gonna be stolen, right?”
Mid looked at him in the rearview. “What do I pay you for?”
“I don’t really know, you know? You’ve got too many of us down there, anyway. Place only needs like one or two guys at a time.”
“Are you trying to quit?” Mid asked.
“No. I need a job bad. But you should let some of the others go. There’s kids down there who don’t know one end of the paddle from the other.”
“I’ll send Walter down to look things over,” Mid said.
“Yeah,” said Robbie. “Send in the muscle.”
“Send in the clowns, is more like it,” I said.
“Clowns scare the shit out of me,” Robbie said. “I don’t get what their deal is.”
“When’s your next shift?” Mid asked.
Robbie said, “Friday.”
“Big Walt, why don’t you stop in on Friday and take a meeting with young Robbie? Get him to spin you through the inventory?”
“Aye-aye,” I said.
“Don’t bring any clowns, man,” Robbie said. “I’m serious.”
When we got to Devil’s Backbone, Hurley was sitting out by the iguana cage drinking a beer. He had a fluorescent on in the bait room, and a thin white light was pooling in the air behind him. A pontoon boat was tied up at the dock. Cindy Rella. The letters leaned across the back in red cursive. I felt like I was either drunk or dreaming. “Hatchet Man,” Hurley said, when we walked up—his nickname for me. We’d had to pull the foundations entirely down, and I was the one who delivered the news. “Hatchet Man and Money Man. Who’s the kid?”
“What?” Robbie said.
“Who are you?”
“I’m Robbie.”
Hurley waited for more information. When there was none, he said, “That’s fine. You’re Robbie.” He tossed his beer in the water. “Y’all ready?”
“Thanks for doing this,” Mid said.
“I was just sitting. This is as good as anything else. Climb aboard.”
There were benches down each long side, plus a couple of chairs bolted into a stainless crosshatch floor. Hurley got himself arranged behind the wheel while the rest of us chose up places. I sat near the back. Mid sat in the front, behind Hurley. Robbie stood, holding onto one of the roof supports, while Hurley backed us out away from the dock. He let the motor idle. He said, “Well? Who’s the man with the map?”
“Oh,” Robbie said. “Cool. South. Toward the inlet. Down past Marineland a little ways. You know Cortez Creek?”
“You can show it to me.” Hurley flicked a switch and a spotlight came on up on the roof. He flicked another, and low yellow lights lit the perimeter of the floor, like in a movie theater. He swung the spot back and forth, got it pinned down pointing straight ahead, then throttled up the engine and eased us down the waterway, toward the river, toward Delton.
Robbie sang to himself, something I couldn’t place. Mid rode along and stared off into the dark. He looked confused. Not angry, and not sad—more surprised, like the world had turned out, somehow, to be a slightly different place than he thought it was. And who could argue with that? I wasn’t totally sure I had good track of the days of the week any more, the time of day. I wasn’t sure any of us did. I listened to the sound of the water against the boat and couldn’t help but picture the BOJ riding in Alice’s belly, turning around in there, floating. And I worked over what Delton being gone might really mean for Mid, after all: Was this the catastrophe, the spaceship come crashing back to earth? Or was it just another outlier, a small thing unexplained, the car keys turning up where you least expect them? Even confused, up there in the front of the boat, even guilty of misdemeanor and felony and whatever else might be on the docket, he still looked like he believed he could fix this, or fix things in general. Like whatever we were doing right then was give or take what we should be doing. Which was what I did not have. Sure, there were things that were recordable enough, and countable: height, weight, number of weeks, kinds and colors of birds, the parachutist flying by. But there was not much left that felt at all solvable anymore. I was as lost, I knew, in that condo, in my whole life, as I would be in the Intracoastal if I fell out of the boat and had to swim back home.
We passed the inlet bridge, passed Marineland all shut down for the night. I had a crazy idea about breaking in, setting all the dolphins loose. We passed a creek off to the right-hand side and Robbie let out a series of low whistles. Hurley did not slow down. “That was it,” Robbie said. “Right there.” He pointed out the creek as we passed.
“Why didn’t you say so?” Hurley said.
“Didn’t you hear me give the signal?”
“Hear you give the what?”
Robbie whistled again.
Hurley squinted at him. He said, “What the hell do you think this is?”
“I thought you’d want a signal.”
“A signal?”
“Yeah.”
“OK, Spenser for Hire.”
Robbie said, “Who’s that?”
“Forget about it.” Hurley swung the boat around, doubled back, and made the turn. Once we were in the creek the water got still, and seemed to get thicker, like oil. It was less a creek than a tidal finger. Every few hundred yards
wooden docks pushed out from the land, fishing huts on the ends. Sometimes they were lit, sometimes not. Sometimes you could see a house deep back in the trees.
Robbie said, “It’s not too much farther, I don’t think.”
Mid said, “You don’t think?”
“I haven’t been this way in a while.”
“I thought you said it was easier by boat,” Mid said.
“It is.”
“But you don’t go by boat?”
“I don’t have a boat.”
I said, “How could the road be that bad?”
“It’s just low,” said Robbie. “If you go at high tide it’s real soggy. You can sink a car down in it, so you have to pay attention.”
“Kid’s right,” said Hurley. “I got a buddy lives back in one of these. Go at the right time, you’re fine. Get it wrong, you’re swimming.”
“What tide is it now?” I said.
“Coming in, looks like,” Hurley said. Robbie fished in his bag, lit up one of the joints. “You sharing the wealth there, A-Team?” Hurley asked him.
Robbie passed it to him. “I know what The A-Team is, by the way.”
“Good for you,” said Hurley. He pulled on the joint, held it out to look at it. “This is very solid,” he said.
“Thank you,” Robbie said, and took it back. We passed a refrigerator up on the bank, white with the numbers 209 spraypainted on in silver. “See?” Robbie said. “It’s just up here.”
“Was that an address?” I asked.
“That was a refrigerator,” Robbie said.
I didn’t ask any more questions. Neither did Mid. Robbie and Hurley passed the joint back and forth, talked TV—Cagney and Lacey, WKRP. Hurley quizzed him a little. Robbie somehow knew Hill Street Blues. I sat in the sweetness of the smoke and wondered if I was getting a contact high or if, instead, it was possible I was riding a pleasure boat named Cindy Rella down a saltwater creek with a fully stoned twenty-year-old guide and the black-market saffron king of north Florida at the helm.
Robbie said, “So do you want to sneak up on them? Because it’s right up here. It’s that dock.”
Hurley slowed us down to let Mid think. “Yeah,” Mid said. “That’d probably be the best thing.”
Hurley shut the engine off and sent a trolling motor over the front bow, let that pull us along. He cut off the spotlight. We slid past the dock and there was the house, a huge wooden thing up on stilts, low, somehow, even though it was up in the air. There were lights on inside, the yellows filling out the windows against the blue of the night. The cicadas were so loud they couldn’t have heard us coming. Hurley cut the running lights, too, and we sat in the dark watching nothing, watching empty windows. And then there were two people in one window, and then it was clear those two people were Delton and Nic, and they were doing something we couldn’t quite see, though the motions were familiar, and then I had it—we all had it, though Mid was the first to say it: “They’re in there cooking dinner?”
They were standing in what was now clear was the kitchen, and they were washing vegetables, chopping, telling each other jokes. Nic disappeared, came back holding something green. Lettuce. He held a leaf out and she took a bite, shook her head no, then yes. She leaned down, got a tray out of somewhere, put it on the counter. I wanted a camera, wanted to snap a few quick pictures so I could show Alice later on. “They were cooking dinner,” I’d say. “We just watched them do it.”
Delton looked up suddenly, looked right at us. I think we all thought it had to be too dark for her to pick us out, or if it wasn’t, that she’d think we were any other boat going by. We felt like we had some kind of dazzle camouflage going. She picked up a towel and dried her hands. She kept looking at us. She didn’t really have any expression on her face. Then she left the window. Lights came on along the edges of the dock. She opened a door onto a back landing, walked out toward us. When she got to the end of the dock she folded her arms, stared out at us. Hurley turned the trolling motor off. Delton was still holding the dishtowel, orange with white dots. She said, “Dad?”
He said, “Hey, Livvy.” I wanted to vanish. I wanted us all to vanish.
“What are you doing here?” she said.
“We came to get you.”
“But I didn’t want that. I told Mom.”
“I know.”
“We’re making chicken,” she said.
He said, “I didn’t know you knew how to do that.”
“Nic has cookbooks. They’re really old, but we think the recipes still work.” She seemed to notice the rest of the boat right then, seemed to take in the fact he had people with him. “Uncle Walter?” she said. “You came?”
“I think so,” I said.
“Are you mad at me, too?”
“I’m just here to help,” I said.
“Who’s everybody else?”
“It’s me,” Robbie said. “Robbie.”
“Nic’s friend,” she said.
“Yep. Sorry.”
“And that’s Hurley,” Mid said. “It’s his boat.”
“It’s a nice boat,” Delton said.
Hurley spit in the water. “Thanks,” he said.
Mid said, “Why don’t you want to come home?”
She shook her head, stared down at her feet.
“You told your mother you were scared.”
She said, “You guys don’t get it at all.”
“Get what?”
“Any of it it.” She was rocking from one foot to the other. “Ground me tomorrow, OK? Please. You can do whatever. Just let me do this.”
“Olivia—”
“Delton.”
“What I don’t get, Delton, is what ‘this’ is.”
She said, “I don’t know how to explain it.”
Mid looked at me. I had nothing. I had less than that. I was terrified of this. He turned back to Delton. “Sweetie,” he said, “I can’t just leave you here. Surely you know that.”
“You can, though,” she said, and instantly, impossibly, that felt like what was true. How that was, I didn’t know, but there it was anyway.
“You mother would kill me,” he said.
“She always wants to do that.”
“But you’ve got to see where I’m coming from.”
Nic opened the door, stood in the frame. She turned around. “Wait,” she told him, and he went back inside.
“Who runs away to cook chicken?” Mid said, to nobody specific. None of us answered. “Shit,” he said. “Motherfucker.”
“Daddy,” Delton said.
Mid looked at the house, then at Delton again. He tapped his shoe on the floor of the boat. He nodded. He closed his eyes. “Fine,” he said.
“What?” said Delton.
“Tomorrow morning,” he said. “I’m coming back to get you tomorrow morning. Eight o’clock. This doesn’t go any further than where it is.”
“Really?”
“Don’t ask me questions. Don’t say anything. Don’t give me a chance to think about it.”
“I’ll come home,” she said. “You don’t have to come get me.”
“Eight o’clock,” he said again. “Just try to be—Just don’t do stupid things in there, alright?”
“Daddy,” she said, wrapping the towel around her hand like a mitten.
“Don’t kill each other,” he said. “Make sure the chicken’s cooked through.”
“Nic said you were supposed to use a thermometer.”
“Good. That’s right. Read those cookbooks.”
“He’s really smart,” she said. “You’ll like him when you get to know him.”
“If I get to know him.”
“He’s going to be a teacher,” she said.
“Everybody keeps mentioning that. Deaf kids, right?”
“That’s what he wants.”
“He’ll be in all the magazines. He’ll be Man of the Year.”
“Tell Mom I’m sorry.”
“No. You tell her yourself.”
“I will.”
“Tell me, how about.”
“I’m sorry,” she said.
“Say it like you mean it.”
“I did.”
“I know,” he said. Then, “I love you, sweetheart.”
She wound and unwound the dishtowel. “I love you, too,” she said, and she turned around, walked back up the dock, opened the door, went in the house, and that was all.
Out on the river, heading back, the hum so present I could feel it buzzing my jaw, Hurley said, “How old’s your daughter again?”
“Almost sixteen,” Mid said.
“And how old’s the kid inside?”
Mid said, “Older.”
Hurley said, “Damn, dude, I’m not sure I could have done that.”
Mid said, “I’m not sure I could have, either,” and the sound of the water off the back of the boat filled in whatever other space there was. I kept looking away to make sure nobody saw me trying to keep from crying.
Alice wanted to know what Mid said, what Delton said, what the boat looked like, what the house looked like, how in hell we’d managed to get all the way out there and then come back without her. She said it didn’t make enough sense. I said I knew that—but that also there was something about watching it happen, something I wanted to explain but couldn’t. If you’d been there, I kept saying, you’d have done it, too. If you’d seen her. If I’d seen her what? she said. No what, I said. Just if you’d seen her.
When Mid and I came back to the house that night, it was Carolyn who’d opened the door, who stood there, taking the two of us in, back home with no Delton. “No,” Carolyn said. “No, no, no, no, no.”
“Yes,” Mid said, and something burned up between them right then, some supply line. But he went and got Delton the next day, like he said—he still had to draw the line somewhere.
That week, Alice started spending more time with Carolyn. At dinner, back home, she’d talk about how tired Carolyn was, how worried Carolyn was, how nobody could quite get a read on what the fuck was going on. She’d ask about Mid, how he was acting. He’d been going quiet, I told her—he’d check out for a few minutes while we rode between Me Kayak and Island Pizza, while we drove out to the Twice-the-Ices. “Quiet how?” she asked.