Harbinger

by Jack Skillingstead

  I lay on my back, fingers laced behind my head. Moonlight ivoried Nichole’s face, her cheek squashed and lips puckered in sleep on the sofa cushion. I was going out, and I thought about touching Nichole, waking her to come with me. But I decided to let her sleep.

  I walked the night beach. The surf was luminous. At this hour there were only a couple of fires. I removed my sneakers. The dry sand was cold under my feet, the wind off the water blew sharp. Was it here that Nichole’s mother had seen a bubble like the one Glinda The Good Witch had ridden down to Munchkin Land?

  I gazed upward, not really anticipating a visitation. The wind whipped my thin hospital pants. I hunched inside the comforting bulk and dusky smell of my brother’s army coat.

  Sensing someone behind me, I turned. A figure walked toward me from the direction of the cottages. At first I thought it was Nichole. I mean I was all but positive it was Nichole. She looked so much like her mother.

  “I thought I saw you come out here, Ellis,” Mrs. Roberts said. And I wondered how that could be. Her bed was in the back of the cottage where no windows faced toward the beach.

  “In my dream I saw you,” she said, as if reading my mind. “And then I sat up and realized it wasn’t a dream anymore.

  “Okay,” I said.

  Mrs. Roberts was wearing a rain parka. She produced a pack of Salems and offered me one. I shook my head. Back then it seemed like practically everyone smoked, but not me. Even later, when I knew for a fact that nicotine held no lethal threat over me, I refrained from the habit. I learned to smoke other things, but not cigarettes.

  I watched Mrs. Roberts light up, the way she cupped her hand over the lighter to protect the flame and inclined her head, cigarette between tight lips, toward it. The light flickered briefly on her face—and there was Nichole’s future of lines, of slightly pouched skin under the eyes, of a jaw gone soft. Time’s alchemical insult, slowly transforming precious youth into something withered and mortal. It was more than a simple resemblance between mother and daughter. It moved the blood coldly through my heart.

  She let the lighter go out, raised her chin to the stars and drew on the cigarette.

  “I know what you are, Ellis,” she said, wind tearing smoke from her lips.

  “What do you mean?

  “The Harbinger told me.”

  I stared at her. “So what am I?”

  “You’re one of the impossible things. A pointer. You’re like a crop circle or a UFO. You’re a precognitive dream, synchronicity, something meaningful and inexplicable. Something that is but shouldn’t be.”

  “I don’t understand.”

  She chuckled, blowing smoke that the wind tore away. “To tell you the truth, neither do I. And please call me Adriel. That ‘Mrs. Roberts’ stuff makes me feel old.”

  “Sorry.”

  “You’re such a boy, Ellis.”

  My face turned hot. “Are you serious about the Harbinger?” I asked.

  “Serious how? That he told me about you?”

  “Yeah.”

  “That part was in a dream I just woke up from. It was a dream about the future.”

  “I’ve had dreams, too,” I said.

  “What kind of dreams?”

  “I think I saw something like that bubble you talked about. The Oz bubble. And there’s something about trees, or things that look like trees. They scare me, and I don’t think that part was a dream. I know it wasn’t. After the accident and I was lying in the street, I saw my dead brother and he was talking to one of them. Do you think it was a Harbinger?”

  “Maybe.”

  I was cold, even inside the duffel coat.

  “Let’s go back,” Adriel Roberts said.

  I put my shoes on and we started back. We came through the dunes and within sight of the cottages. I had an instinct to halt and I obeyed it. Nichole’s mother walked ahead a few paces then stopped and looked around at me.

  “What’s the matter?”

  “There’s something wrong.”

  Her hesitation was significant and almost too brief to be noticed. But I noticed it, all right.

  “What is it?” she said.

  “Did you call them? How would you even know who to call?”

  “He called me,” she said. “But—”

  I ran. Which was fairly idiotic, but there you go. Some kind of dread was upon me, and I wanted to get away. Not knowing my way around Long Beach, I simply struck out at a dead run. I found myself in a landscape of Kozy Kabins, Motor Courts, and various hotels/motels with seafaring themes. At this hour the streets were mostly deserted, and I felt conspicuous as hell.

  A car roared behind me, its headlamps throwing my funhouse shadow capering over the street at the end of impossibly attenuated stick legs. The car drew alongside me, and through the rolled-down passenger window Nichole said, “Get in!”

  chapter three

  We lived two months in one of those pay-by-the-week motels. This was in Bremerton, a Navy town on the western side of Puget Sound. The red neon VACANCY sign was always on. It developed a short, and for a couple of weeks in October it was an “ANCY” sign, which pretty much described my state of mind.

  We both got jobs. Nichole worked the counter at a Donut Hole franchise and I washed dishes in the kitchen of a roadhouse called The Wild Boar—an occupation I wouldn’t have been surprised to find in the want ads of Hell. Our lives became sub-ordinary and limited. Nichole never mentioned school and neither of us ever mentioned the future. We were Now, and that was all.

  It had been my dad, back in Long Beach.

  There was this waitress at The Wild Boar. She was a tall girl, around thirty years old, with big hair. Really big hair, like a Fourth of July fountain of strawberry blonde curls. You’d have to call her striking. She wore faded blue jeans the way most people wear their own skin. And every pair she owned had an artful rip, usually on the back of a taut thigh, just below her ass. When she bent over the rip opened like a big welcoming smile with a pink panty overbite.

  Darcy. She always said Hi when she brought a tray of beer glasses into my little cubby of steaming stainless steel hell. And it seemed like she always tried to join me when I took my miserable ten minute break on the loading dock.

  At first I lived only for the hours I spent with Nichole in our motel bed, especially after we turned the lights off and didn’t have to notice things like the blind eye of the little black and white TV on the cigarette-scarred dresser, or the assorted water stains on the ceiling that made me think of the room as having some kind of disease that might eventually infect us (of course it already had infected me; I simply didn’t recognize it). But in the dark, in our creaky, narrow bed, it was a world composed only of our skin and our smells and the myriad inarticulate intimacies of our touching. It was the place where there was no place and no Time. But eventually I began to withdraw, experiencing the touching and tenderness on the outside only. I hated this withdrawing and couldn’t understand or deny it. Certainly I never associated it with the deaths of my mother and brother. Especially in the dark, I began to experience Nichole as something separate and other, girl flesh and bone and an enclosing intimacy that was like a straightjacket.

  And then there was Darcy on the loading dock.

  “Are you really eighteen?”

  “Sure,” I said, then realized it wasn’t a lie anymore. October twenty-fifth had come and gone almost unnoticed, and I really had attained the age of majority. If the war hadn’t recently concluded I would have now been eligible to get my guts shot out in Vietnam.

  “I mean I really am,” I said. “Now.”

  Darcy grinned. She had one of those mouths that seemed over-crammed with very white and very even teeth. A Carly Simon mouth, to mention a performer popular at that time. A mouth designed to gobble you right up.

  “When was your birthday?” Darcy asked.

  “A couple of days ago.”

  “We’re both Scorpios!” she said. “I’m a Halloween girl.”

  “
Great!”

  “Did you get any good presents?”

  “Not really.” Of course I’d gotten no presents, since no one in my little Bremerton world even knew the day had occurred. Not even Nichole.

  “Do you have a girl, Ellis?”

  “Yeah, sort of.” Even this mild equivocation struck me guiltily as a betrayal of the quasi-mystical bond between Nichole and me. But a battalion of suddenly aroused hormonal soldiers had their own ideas of betrayal and conquest.

  “Oh,” Darcy said. “I guess you wouldn’t want to come over after work for a birthday drink, then?”

  “I don’t know. I mean I guess it couldn’t do any harm.” At this point I wasn’t really in charge of my tongue—or much of anything else.

  Darcy smiled toothily. I remember it didn’t smell very good on that loading dock. The dumpster’s lid was open and fat bags of garbage overfilled it. One of the bags had split. A ripe, wet smell, underlined by the indolent buzz of the flies.

  The apartment was a one bedroom with wall-to-wall carpeting, burnt orange. The drink was rum and Coke. I’d been drunk exactly once in my life, in a tent at Saltwater State Park with a bunch of other fifteen-year-olds. All I retained from the experience was the popping sound of rain on canvas, the smell of human sweat, and the taste of bile in my throat, where it didn’t belong. Oh yeah, and when I’d closed my eyes the spinning sensation had intensified. So in the present situation I planned to take it easy with the rum; the weak self-deception that it was a drink I’d come seeking at Darcy’s apartment had dropped to the wayside even before I left work and got into her Charger for the ride over.

  “China Road” was on the radio in her apartment. Framed travel posters (Hawaii, Bali, Cayman Islands) hung on the walls. In the bathroom a blue macramé thing with wooden beads supported a spider plant in a kiln-fired bowl.

  After splashing my face with cool water, I stared at myself in the bathroom mirror. My eyes failed the trustworthy test. Howdy, wretch. I couldn’t even claim inebriation as an excuse. The rum and Cokes went down like Coke that had never even heard a rumor of Mr. Bacardi. Taking it easy wasn’t an issue. At the time I ascribed this weird resistance to alcohol as “nerves.” But of course my body was processing that rum with preternatural alacrity and efficiency, just like it had the pain killers.

  Back in the living room I said, “I have to call somebody.”

  “Surely. Phone’s in the kitchenette.”

  Darcy had opened a few buttons on her white peasant blouse. She sat on the puffy yellow sofa with her legs crossed and a big tumbler of Bacardi and Coke in her left hand. There was so much rum in the mix that the Coke wasn’t much more than a diluted suggestion of moderation. The curvature of Darcy’s breasts appeared in the loose V of her blouse, swelling from pink bra cups.

  I called Nichole, standing next to the refrigerator with an urgent hard-on in my pants. I had to call her, though, or she would worry at my absence. Portrait of a conflicted moron. Maybe I should have placed the call before leaving the roadhouse.

  “It’s me,” I said.

  “Hi, Me. How am I?”

  She had to be cute. Guilt clouted me in the solar plexus.

  “I’m going to be a little late,” I said.

  “How come?”

  “A bunch of us are going out after work.”

  “A bunch of you, huh? Where are you going? I wanna come, too.”

  “We’re—” Darcy appeared in the kitchen doorway. Her blouse was completely unbuttoned and she had unsnapped her jeans and dragged the zipper down revealing her creamy belly and the pink waist of her panties. A few shiny pubic hairs curled over the top. She leaned against the jamb, cupping her right elbow in her left hand and sipping from the almost clear glass of rum and Coke. I very distinctly heard the ice click against those bright white teeth. “You’re what?” Nichole said in my ear.

  Darcy’s belly button squinted at me.

  “Ah, going to this bar? One of the guys thinks I can get in. I mean he knows the guy at the door and he says he won’t check my I.D. But I mean he might check yours. I don’t know.”

  Darcy raised her eyebrows, took a big swallow of her drink, placed the tumbler on the counter and walked over to me. She did something with her walk, too. Something obvious and fairly devastating.

  “Is something wrong?” Nichole asked.

  Darcy stood in front of me and stroked her hand between my legs. There was plenty wrong, all right. All you required was a loose definition of “right.”

  *

  I wound up walking back to the motel. Darcy had pounded the rum until there was nothing but a clear puddle in the bottom of the bottle. I doubt I could have wakened her. Nor would I have been stupid enough to climb into a vehicle with her behind the wheel. I’d had one big accident and didn’t feel like tempting Fate any further.

  The industrial stretch of road on which the motel stood appeared particularly dismal in the aqueous light of dawn. A discarded Slurpee cup from a nearby 7-11 store rolled around the parking lot, playing coy with the cigarette butts, candy bar wrappers and other assorted trash.

  Speaking of butts, I felt like one myself, and was at my lowest ebb. It wasn’t even five o’clock in the morning and the burgundy Mercury was not parked outside the familiar green-painted door with the tarnished #7 nailed to it; Nichole was gone.

  I let myself into the room. One of the dresser drawers stuck out like an idiot’s drooping lip. Nichole had taken her clothes and personal stuff but left the little touches she’d applied to make the cheap room more welcoming and homey. The garlands of gold and silver tinsel she’d thumbtacked in loops around the walls and window. The Happy New Year cone hats she’d topped the TV’s rabbit ears with. A plastic bowl full of glitter and rainbow confetti. The Richard Nixon Halloween mask on the door to the bathroom. All this acquired from a novelty store near The Donut Hole.

  And there was a Donut Hole box on the dresser, too. On Fridays Nichole always brought a box of doughnuts to the motel for us to eat while we lay in bed watching Johnny Carson or Nightmare Theater—our low rent version of decadence. Christ, we were a couple of kids, that’s all.

  I flipped the lid up on the box. Three plain cake, two maple frosted, and this week’s Surprise Fat Bomb: a strawberry Danish. There was always one Surprise Fat Bomb, and I was supposed to guess what it was. Staring into the box now I realized she must have hated doughnuts, after working in that place all those weeks. Yet she kept up the Friday night ritual. I pictured her waiting for me, short legs stretched out on the bed, watching TV. And then I pictured her calling The Wild Boar and asking where Ellis and his pals had gone. And then I noticed I was crying. Liars always think the people they’re lying to aren’t clever enough to figure it out. But in the case of someone who loves you (and aren’t they the ones we most often lie to?) that isn’t the case at all. It’s because they want to believe you. You’re like a story of goodness they are telling themselves, and they strive to suspend disbelief.

  I stared at the bed, where we’d turned even cuddling into a transcendental experience. I was not alive. Once, between bites of doughnut, Nichole had told me about her alcoholic father. “The AA people are always saying fake it till you make it,” she said. “That’s me, Ellis. I’m not a drunk, but I always fake it, like with Roy. You’re the only one I never had to fake it with. I guess that’s why you used to scare me, before that night. I always thought faking it was better.”

  Her lips dusted with white powder.

  *

  So I was eighteen. That meant the contract or whatever my dad had signed as my legal guardian was no longer enforceable. I picked up the phone and made my first long-distance call since moving to Bremerton. Fifty miles or so due east a phone rang in the house where I was once a baby, and no one picked up.

  It was time to go home and straighten out whatever was straighten-out-able about my life. I didn’t bother giving notice at The Wild Boar. They paid me in cash, and I kept my earnings in an envelope taped to the frame of
the motel bed. Walking out of room seven for the last time, I left the door open.

  Half a dozen newspapers littered the porch of my North Hill house, each rolled up tight and bound with a rubber band. My dad’s Plymouth sat under the carport on tires with low pressure and shallow tread; I knew how they felt.

  The back door key was in its usual hiding place in the garden under a cement gnome my mother had years ago placed there in one her infrequent capitulations to suburban kitsch.

  Inside, it was the smell and the flies that confirmed what I already knew: I was an orphan. Can an eighteen-year-old “adult” be an orphan? I certainly felt like one. Dad lay in his bed, and a week ago he probably would have appeared to be sleeping. Now he just looked like what he was: a corpse. Something switched off inside me. If it hadn’t switched off it would have shaken me to pieces. I turned away.

  Jeepers was gone. I looked in every room but he wasn’t in the house. Probably a good thing. Some time later I found myself, in some kind of shock, slouched on the living room sofa. For all I knew Nichole was back at her father’s house two blocks away, but I lacked the will to go see. Who knows how long I would have sat there? It was twilight when someone knocked on the door, a sound so startling in the ticking quiet that I jumped. Whoever it was knocked again.

  Somehow I directed my body to stand up. At the front door I hesitated. Someone was out there, only a few feet away. Opening the door would also open the next part of my life, and I wasn’t sure I even wanted a next part to occur. In my mind I saw myself standing there like a zombie while the mystery knocker went at it again. That was too depressing.

  I opened the door.

  Standing on the porch was an ordinary man of about sixty (I later learned he was seventy-two), taller than me, maybe six foot and change, fit and handsome with well-defined features. A soap opera “distinguished gentleman.”