The Outer Cape

by Patrick Dacey

  “Hey!” Nathan, startled, looks across at a yellow-haired boy.

  “You’re bleeding, Mister.”

  “Bleeding?”

  “From your nose,” the boy says.

  Nathan swipes his finger under his nose and examines the runny red liquid.

  The boy hands him a tissue.

  “I get ’em sometimes, too,” he says. “Ma says to plug it in there to stop the bleeding.”

  “My mother used to say the same thing.”

  Nathan breaks off a piece of the tissue and stuffs it in his nose to stanch the bleeding.

  “I look ridiculous, don’t I?”

  “Yup.”

  The boy gets off at the Quincy Adams Station.

  “See ya later,” he yells back, and how sweet, the way he runs, trying to keep pace with the train, Nathan struggling inside his head to become a memory or to be lost forever, because, surely, they will never see each other again unless in remembrance.

  Between the shadows in the light of the station, Nathan looks at his nose, the tissue hanging, like a petal unfurling from his nostril. The muscles in his rib cage tighten under his left breast, the pain like a sharp blade twisting into his skin. He sits again and pops a few more pills, no longer discerning between colors—they all seem to have the same effect.

  When the train reaches the Braintree stop, Nathan pulls the tissue from his nose. On the station platform, two men stand together holding their hands up against the wind to the flame from their matches as each lights a cigarette and exhales the gray smoke upward. Nathan bums a smoke, and the three stand together like transients with nowhere to go, connected by smoke and idle time.

  “You ever see the purple martins in Virginia?” says one of the men.

  “Haven’t,” the other man says. His arm is in a cast up to his elbow and the right side of his face looks to have been badly burned some time ago.

  “You?” the man asks Nathan.

  “I’ve never been to Virginia,” Nathan says.

  “What about ’em?” says the man with the burn scar.

  “No reason to tell you if you haven’t seen them.”

  “If we’d seen them, what would you tell us?”

  “It’s a feeling. I can’t explain.”

  “Look at that,” says the burn scar.

  “A beauty,” says the other man.

  “Better than those goddamn purple martins, I bet.”

  Nathan follows their gazes toward the fully decked black BMW that has inched its way into the lot.

  The horn sounds.

  The three men stare, lovesick for something they will never have. The door opens and Andrew’s face appears, full and puffy under his too-small Red Sox cap. He flicks his wrist for Nathan to come over.

  The other two men start, and Nathan grabs the one with the burn scar by the shoulder.

  “Hey, bud,” says burn scar, turning and putting up his fists.

  “At ease,” Nathan says. “That’s my ride.”

  TWENTY-SIX

  Andrew hasn’t seen his brother since the wedding more than ten years ago now. He was big then, in the shoulders and chest, and when he hugged Nathan after the toast, Andrew could feel the hard muscles in his brother’s arms packed in his suit jacket. He’s surprised now by how thin Nathan looks. For as long as Andrew can remember, Nathan had always been big, his torso a solid block, his neck a column of stone, chest wide and thick. His greatest asset, and the thing Andrew had admired most, was his strength. But here’s his older brother now, tall and ratty-looking, field-stripping a cigarette before stepping off the curb. The same Nathan who one afternoon, when they were boys, cutting through the Dunkin’ Donuts parking lot on their way home from school—Andrew walking his bike, and Nathan carrying a plastic bag of sweaty clothes from phys ed—were stopped by a group of high schoolers, who ripped Andrew’s bike away from his hands and tossed it on the pavement, where it bounced and landed in a crooked position, almost instantly taking on the look of something thrown in a trash heap, pounding their chests like apes. Nathan, calm, too calm, turned to Andrew and said, “Go home.”

  “But my bike.”

  “I’ll get your bike.”

  The older boys spat at Andrew as he walked in the other direction. Nathan bull-rushed the biggest of the three, and he was knocked down by a blow to his side. The boys kicked him in the arms and head, pushed his face in the mud. By the time he blew the dirt from his nose and wiped the mud out of his eyes, the boys had reached the other side of the street. Andrew had watched it all through a split slat in the fence that separated the doughnut shop from the empty field in back. Nathan’s face was covered in mud, eyes dark and mean. He pushed the bike across the parking lot. Andrew ran home. He didn’t know why. Nathan was trying to protect him, but Andrew was scared.

  He gives Nathan a brief hug, feels his brother’s hip bone sharp against his side.

  “You look good, Andy,” Nathan says. “Can I still call you that? Andy?”

  “I’d prefer you didn’t.”

  “Okay. Right.”

  Nathan, sitting in the passenger seat of Andrew’s BMW, cheekbones jutting out, chin sharp and distinct, shoulders slumped forward, reaches in his pocket and pulls out a crushed pack of cigarettes.

  “You can’t smoke in here,” Andrew says. “I’m leasing this. Not that you could if I wasn’t.”

  “Understood.”

  His brother puts the cigarette pack on the dash. Andrew stares at it as though it’s a weapon. The seat belt signal begins to flash, drawing his attention away.

  “Do you mind putting on your belt?”

  “A lot of rules here.”

  “Does it remind you of the army?”

  “Not even close.”

  Nathan puts on his belt.

  “Ready to roll,” he says.

  Andrew pulls out onto the highway and drives south toward the Sagamore Bridge.

  “How was the trip?”

  “Uneventful.”

  “Spend some time in the city?”

  “A little. The chaos appears to be in relative order.”

  “Not as bad as the Middle East, though, I’m sure.”

  “You’d be surprised at how easy things move when there aren’t any rules.”

  As they hit the bridge, Andrew notices how his brother’s leg twitches, and how he gnaws at the hard skin around his fingernails, bringing his hands to his face in short, blunt motions. He’s on something, but Andrew can’t tell what.

  “You look good,” he says.

  “I look like shit,” says Nathan. “Hey, remember counting the boats on the canal?”

  “Yeah. You always cheated.”

  Nathan doesn’t seem to hear him, or else ignores the comment, looking out the window as the dark draws down and begins to meld with the water below.

  There were times when Andrew had felt a certain emptiness that came from missing his brother, his presence really, his whereabouts, not only here but elsewhere. He wanted to place him, picture him, and know for certain he was still alive.

  When Nathan had set off across the country to find himself, or whatever you wanted to call it, he would e-mail Andrew and tell him how amazing it was to stand at the top of Big Sur and watch the ocean crash against the rocks, or the thin big-breasted women in bikinis on the beaches in San Diego, how in the Sonoran Desert the stars were so close and bright it felt like you were living in outer space. Deep down, Andrew knew that his brother’s drifter lifestyle would not last long, and though at times, especially in the brutal cold during his freshman year in college, he envied his brother, he also pitied him. Nathan could never really sit still.

  “How is Mom coping?” Nathan asks.

  “She has her moments of clarity. Sometimes you can tell she’s not all there, the way she looks at you, she’s not really looking at you but at something else, like a memory, like you’re already gone.”

  “To know you’re dying,” Nathan says, “I almost kind of envy those guys that caught a bu
llet or an IED, quick and painless, let the living suffer.”

  Andrew sighs.

  “If you wouldn’t mind limiting the darkness to your own thoughts,” he says.

  His brother raps his knuckles on the window.

  “Pull over for a second, will you? I need a smoke.”

  “Nobody smokes anymore, you know that, right?”

  “I do,” Nathan says. “Or is that what you meant?”

  Andrew waits in the car as his brother stands outside, the night nearly settled, the orange glare of his cigarette end glowing then dulling like a warning signal.

  The day before graduating from Cornell, Andrew had been up all night with Kirsten, holding her hair back as she retched in the toilet, most likely from the fried rice and tofu she swore had pork in it at the Chinese buffet they’d gone to downtown. During the brief recess between her bouts of vomiting, he received a collect call from Nathan.

  “Hey, bro.”

  “Where are you?”

  “El Paso.”

  “Texas?”

  “Things didn’t work out in Cali. Boring story. I thought I was in love. I wasn’t. I’m joining the service.”

  “What are you talking about?”

  “They give you a free watch and benefits.”

  “Are you joking?”

  “About the watch?”

  “Be real for a second, will you?”

  “Don’t worry about me, Andy. I just wanted to congratulate you. I wanted to tell you how proud I am of everything you’ve accomplished. I wanted to tell you that I love you.”

  Nathan wanted to tell Andrew, or he was telling him? Either way, Andrew had never heard his brother say those words to him before.

  “Thanks,” he said.

  “No problem. Now go get drunk or something.”

  Nathan had hung up, but Andrew stood there with the phone in his hand, listening to the silence on the other end; his brother gone. He could see only Nathan’s strong, wide back and bulging shoulders, and the brown, leathery faces of the people walking past and around him, as though he was somehow carving a trail through this place where he did not belong. He heard his name crack through the bedroom door, and Kirsten’s dry, sad cough. He felt the weight of responsibility, not as a chore, but as a remuneration, because here, in his helping, he was valued.

  Andrew turns up the radio using a pad on his steering wheel. He speeds through the tiny villages, past the colonial meetinghouses and churches and general stores, and down the industrial lane, passing slow-moving trucks on the left, then free for a stretch, kicking the speed up to seventy, eighty, nearly ninety miles an hour. The hum of the engine has a calming effect. He lets up on the gas and eases into a full stop at a traffic light, waiting with his head resting on his straightened forefinger, thumb shortened and pointed upward. The dense, muddy smell of the salt marshes sweeps through the open windows as they pass over the wooden bridge toward the beach. He slows before the raked land in front of the dilapidated Tidewater Hotel. When they were boys they would raise each other up to look into the bathroom windows at women showering behind plastic curtains. Empty cartons of food and soda bottles and beer cans are strewn across the property. The building looks as though it’s about to fall inward at the slightest touch or breath of wind.

  “Let’s get a drink,” Andrew says. “Mom’s probably in bed by now.”

  The sky finally clears; the pale glow of the moon is rounded by rings of light. All the world’s fantastic possibilities lie before them.

  * * *

  Kerrigan’s on the harbor, the bar in a shed with its weathered slats of wood, stripped paint, ropes tied around the cleats on the dock holding whalers in place. The grounded tugboat has been turned into a seating room where children explore the console while their parents wait for their overpriced fried clams, and though there are signs commanding patrons not to feed the seagulls, they had always and would always toss the undercooked fries from the bottom of the pile into the water and watch the birds dive after them.

  Andrew orders a shot of Jameson and a Bud Light. Nathan asks for water with a slice of lemon.

  “You’re making me drink alone?” Andrew says.

  “I’m on certain medications.”

  “Probably for the best then.”

  Not that the medications are the problem. Drinking whiskey in the same glug-glug way they used to drink apple juice at the dinner table when they were kids had made both Kelly boys nasty as sin. He can’t help but remember when he was sixteen, and Nathan was just about to graduate from high school. Andrew had been half-asleep, listening to his brother bang around downstairs on his way back from a Friday night party in the Pines, where everyone in Wequaquet used to go after the football game, and he broke through Andrew’s bedroom door, lifted the lid of his hamper, and urinated on his dirty clothes. The time Nathan had to drive out to Truro and pay a fifty-dollar fine to have Andrew let out of protective custody wearing one shoe. Together they had once spent an entire afternoon drinking from a bottle of Southern Comfort, then pulled up a half-dozen lobster traps, and brought them back to the house and poured the lobsters out into a pair of beach coolers in the garage, and passed out on the back lawn laughing as they traded turns screwing up dirty tongue twisters. Later that night, their mother refused to let them back in the house, called the police. One of the cops punched Nathan in the gut and the other whacked Andrew in the knees with a switch. They took the lobsters and left the brothers out front—Nathan with his face in his own vomit, Andrew curled up in the mud, as if to embarrass their mother even more, as if to say, with swift violence, “Can’t even take care of your own kids.”

  Andrew clicks Nathan’s plastic cup of water and downs the shot, then cringes and chugs back the beer. A golf tournament is on television. A player in pink and gray plaid pants lines up a putt like a rifleman with one eye closed. He addresses the ball, then steps away again, kneels, stands, sets his feet, and strokes the ball toward the cup where it hits the edge and spins in then out. The player snaps the putter over his thigh and carries the two pieces in either hand like torches toward the hole, lowers to a knee, and, with the piece that held the putter head, taps the ball into the cup. It strikes him as kind of sad, this skinny little guy whose entire world revolves around a ball and a cup.

  “What’s the saddest thing you’ve ever seen?” he asks Nathan.

  “The saddest thing?”

  “Yeah, like something that just made you feel empty inside, like there was no hope for anyone?”

  “Probably this guy got his dick blown off.”

  “That’s too obvious.”

  “I thought it was sad.”

  “Wasn’t everything over there sad?”

  “Pretty much.”

  “Out with it then.”

  “Okay. You want to know the saddest thing I’ve ever seen? And I’m not bullshitting, either. The saddest thing I’ve ever seen was out in California, before the army. This childish-looking man alone on a bench along the boardwalk, dressed in a yellow collared shirt that barely fit over his belly and made it look like he had women’s breasts, eating a chocolate-dipped ice-cream cone.”

  “Why is that sad?”

  “Because the guy had given up and it made me think, still makes me think, about at what point do you finally give up?”

  Andrew feels a surge of electricity hit his side. He is no different than that man, just in better shape.

  He watches as a pair of golfers hit their approach shots onto the green. Then he finishes his drink and puts a twenty on the bar.

  “Time to go,” he says and slides his keys across the bar. “You drive.”

  TWENTY-SEVEN

  “Tomorrow you will be a new person,” his mother used to tell Nathan. Sometimes the thought was so frightening, he couldn’t get back to sleep. She’d follow what she had said with a kiss on his nose, or, when he began to cry, holding him tight against her chest. She meant what was past would stay past. But that is false. His remembering her lie makes i
t so.

  The following day, the first he has been home in ten years, Nathan wakes early and passes his mother’s door, ignoring her coughing fit, carrying his boots out onto the front step, where he ties the laces, stretches, and then takes his brother’s car out for a ride. He has an idea to keep busy around the house with repairs. He returns an hour later with three giant bags from MegaWorld.

  “I bought steaks and deodorant and house paint and coffee and an electric screwdriver,” Nathan says.

  “I’m guessing you forgot to pick up a crossbow while you were at it,” Andrew says.

  “What are you, un-American?”

  “Give me a break.”

  “Here, I got you something.”

  Nathan reaches inside one of the bags and pulls out a stuffed monkey. The monkey is holding a half-unpeeled banana by its groin and makes spastic jerking motions when Nathan pushes the button on its rear.

  “What am I going to do with this?”

  “That’s the point.”

  Nathan replaces all the bulbs in the house. He brings the old ones out back and stomps on them with his boots.

  That afternoon, while Andrew is out, their mother’s coughing gets so bad, Nathan brings her a cup of ice chips. What can he say to comfort her? Since Iraq, he has simplified death. You are here, then you are not. When he was a boy, had he felt nurtured? Loved? He can’t say, can’t remember. His mother spends most of her time in bed. But she isn’t interested in having the television on or reading a book; she simply wants to lie there. He fluffs up her pillows and tucks in the sheets. She kicks the sheets out.

  “Don’t put me in a coffin just yet, honey,” she says.

  He sits on the edge of her bed, their hips touching, and tries to smile, but looking at her wide, yellow eyes and crooked wig and white, cracked lips, it is too sad.

  If he had escaped death during his years in the army, it was a miracle. Since he returned home, he has simply been lucky. The day he’d gone riding ATVs out in the desert and rolled over a half-dozen times and walked away with only a few scratches on his arms and knees; the pilot light in his neighbor’s house that blew him back on the ground and singed his eyebrows; the stick-up kids at Cherry’s Donuts who put a gun to his head while he sat in a booth on a sleepless night, staring out the window at the glare of the sign on the sidewalk as though the sun had fallen flat, and when the one kid pulled the trigger a stream of water shot into his partially opened eye, and they laughed and ran out of the shop with forty bucks and change.