When you look back on choices, some you can recognize were the best you could make at the time. Some leave you wondering how you could have been so stupid. Distancing myself from him the last few years of his life, when it was obvious he had so few years left, fell into the less than intelligent category. Dad hadn’t helped, but he was my father and a lot of good years stood behind those that seemed so miserable.
I stood in a cold neon light, looking at the envelope, afraid to open it, afraid I would either lose it completely or find another criticism echoing through my brain in his dry, rough voice. What I found was simple.
“She’s yours, William. Take care of her and she will take care of you. It’s bad luck to rename a boat. I figured mine has run out so I had FantaSea stripped off. I know you always thought it a dumb thing to call a boat. Take her home and think of a good name for her. Remember the days on the lake. If you ever get a chance, put her in the big water. There is freedom left in life, son. You just have to reach out and grab it.
We didn’t get along well the last few years, but you’re still my son and I love you. Enjoy the boat. I spent a long time getting her ready.”
I don’t know if it was the sense of giving up that his words carried, of a dream unfulfilled, or the sudden knowledge that I’d never see him again that finally turned on the emotion. Maybe it was all three. Either way, hours passed before I walked out of the garage and most of them filled with tears. I knew what I’d call the boat before left. I had a lot of angels around me. I leaned against the gleaming fiberglass with its new paint and cried for them all, for what I had lost, for lives torn apart that could never be put back together again. By the time I walked out of the garage, I’d left enough tears behind to give the boat a taste of saltwater. Not an ocean of it, but enough to leave her decks shining and wet.
To an outsider, my choices after his death may have seemed angled toward an attempt to both reconcile the space between us in his last years and to somehow find approval when there had been precious little of it while he was alive. Half of that assumption had some truth to it. The rest however, fell on barren ground.
I needed to reconnect with him, but I wasn’t trying to find approval. I just recognized what he had seen in me all along - that William Hill was more like his father than he wanted to admit.
I don’t want to make it sound as if he possessed some sort of precognitive ability either. Life is about training. Induction into society starts early in learning the basics of speech, reading, math, and simple etiquette like not pitching a fit at the dinner table and throwing your food in the floor, like not wetting your pants after you realize why the potty exists. About the time you start enjoying life, you get to start school, where they spend another twelve years teaching you not only higher concepts, but also instilling all the basics that will enable you to not be a square peg in the round hole that society provides for you. This is the important crap in life, like showing up on time to a place where other people tell you what to do, like obeying authority, like eating on schedules, and finding someone to listen to your problems.
My father had been big on the authority concept, but he raised me to take care of myself. A decade and a half of wearing a suit and handholding clients paid well enough, but left me recognizing why he had such a dislike of not people, but the structure that held us all together.
He and Mom had brought me into the world. Both were dead already. Mom had gone ten years before Dad, succumbing to a type of cancer for which, neither hope nor cure existed. I figured I could spend the last days with them, even if all I had were memories.
Becky had been gone for a couple of years by then. She had moved on. So had I. She ventured farther, acquiring a new husband, a new life, a new baby. I had Jayne, a sometimes girlfriend who came and went as she pleased. We did well together, but commitment proved a sore spot for both of us. She, like me, had a bitter taste lingering from a broken marriage and neither of us had any intention of venturing into another for a while yet. Our time together could be summed up in two sentences. We didn’t fight. We had great sex. Beyond that, our time fluctuated between her staying with me a few days at a time and then fleeing back to her own house half an hour away.
The memory of the last few months with Becky still clung strong enough to not mind. Jayne had a lot of dark aspects about her, dark eyes, dark hair, and occasionally a dark mood. I let her come and go as she wished, choosing to let her work through her emotions rather than try and fix them myself. I would have brought her with me, but she said no with a skittish look on her face as if she could feel the ropes of another binding relationship sliding around her just from the offer.
So I went, on my own, with nothing but memories and ghosts of the past riding shotgun. I didn’t set out to make enemies, but I did. I didn’t set out to save myself either. I went because the island seemed like a good place to die.
I just didn’t realize how good.
Chapter II - Little Things
My first meeting with Sheriff Dwight Little didn’t go well. I can’t say that the second, third, or many of the rest did either - some of which I will admit, was my fault. I don’t dislike people. I get along with most just fine. I’d never tolerated assholes or idiots well though, and seemed to have a particular gift for offending those afflicted with arrogance or swimming in their own egos. I wasn’t sure where D. Little pegged on the intelligence meter. When it came to asshole though, he stood out like a searchlight on a moonless night.
I did have one thing going for me. I wasn’t stupid. After all, he had the badge, the gun, and a mountain of law behind him. I had an old Dodge Durango, a twenty-three foot sailboat named Angel, and a date with an island. Try and blend that together all you want. The mix is like oil and water. Nothing about any of it goes together.
According to the TomTom, I’d made it to the halfway point between Beaufort and Williston, two little seaside towns on the coast of North Carolina, when he passed me going the other way. That particular stretch of road hadn’t changed much since the first time I’d traveled it twenty years before with my father. Despite two decades of highway taxes and road crews, it still held the same gritty sand dunes, the same spindly sea oats, and the same bleached out asphalt baking even whiter in the hot sun.
The sailboat rode well behind me. Empty, she tipped the scales at twenty-five hundred pounds. I had several hundred pounds of gear and supplies stuffed inside her though. Add a fifteen horsepower outboard, eighteen gallons of gas, twenty gallons of water, and three gallons of kerosene, and she sat half a ton heavier at least. Even then, Angel still weighed in a good bit lighter than most boats her size. She sat high and perfectly balanced on a double axle trailer nearly fifty years old that my father had kept in tip-top shape. The combination of the light weight and well-maintained trailer made the task of pulling her down the road simple and easy.
I looked down instinctively when the sheriff’s car went by. The needle on the speedometer sat frozen at fifty, five miles an hour below the posted fifty-five, obeying a cruise control that seemed happy to be out of the mountains I had driven through the day before. Rollercoastering through the ridges and valleys of Western North Carolina hadn’t challenged the old SUV. The engine still purred with a deep throated roar and pulled like a steam engine, charging up hills with ease. I let the cruise control handle the ups and downs, figuring it would work out the best gas mileage while traversing the mountainous terrain. Best turned out to be not so good. The Durango had never been an economical vehicle. Crossing the Appalachians, it guzzled fuel like a frat boy at a beer drinking contest.
Back in the mirror, the police car had almost slid behind the bulk of the sailboat when the taillights flashed red. I leaned out for a better look and cursed at the sight of it swinging around in a wide turn.
Rather than wait for the blue lights I knew would come, I tapped the brake and eased the Durango into a gentle curve towards the emergency lane. The boat and trailer followed obediently. My last hope, that some unrelated emerg
ency had occurred at the moment he passed, died completely when I saw him angling off the road behind me.
The air streaming through the window had been cool and inviting on the road, but turned warm and humid as the Durango slowed. I pulled the vehicle to a stop no more that twenty feet from a road sign proclaiming Williston to be another four miles ahead, flicked the ignition switch off, and started digging in the center console for the registration slip and insurance card. Once I had them both, I half turned in my seat and reached for the wallet in my back pocket. I had no idea why the Sheriff had felt the need to swing around in the middle of a deserted road and come barreling back to pull me over. Not that it mattered. The demand for paperwork would be the first words out of his mouth.
I looked them over while I waited. The address on the license and the registration belonged to the house where Becky and I had fought our way into marital oblivion. I’d meant to change it for months. Tennessee frowned on bad addresses. Everything had to match: license, registration, and the county of residence printed in metallic letters on the tag. Mix any of them up and a traffic stop usually ended with your name written across a ticket and a hefty fine at the bottom. North Carolina frowned on misleading addresses as well, but never pursued the issue with as much vehemence.
The fear of a ticket hadn’t been the driving reason for changing the address though. The words spelled out below my name carried the last official link to both Becky and my old job. Becky had left compliments of U-Haul and enough arguments to leave us both feeling relieved. I’d walked away from the job on my own, and in the process accepted something I had spent most of my life rejecting. I’d never held a disdain for the civilized world like my father and never would. Time had taught me however, that at the core of his arguments lay more than a kernel of truth.
Schools, even colleges to a lesser degree, are not designed to produce winners, but survivors. We’re taught a profession, bundled into the workings of a career, but in virtually every case, end up using our skills for someone else. A top tier exists, and the battle to climb upward fierce. The majority never make it anywhere close.
John Walker Hill called it The Bee Hive, a busy little place where workers scurried, slaved and died while the ruling class grew fat and complacent.
“Think of it this way, William,” he told me. “All your life you’re trained to be a good worker bee. The moment you’re born, the momentum swings towards steering your sleeping habits, eating habits, when and where you shit, all of it into socially acceptable molds. You’re taught to do the right thing, work hard and pay your bills, all while the scoundrels who control the purse strings work out ways to either tempt more money from you or hold you upside down and shake it out.”
I must have had a blank look on my face because he shook his head. “Just wait until you’re in the working world. One day, you’ll wake up and realize that most of what you make goes into paying someone else for the simple privilege of living. It’s not the way life was meant to be.”
More than two decades passed before I realized how honest and accurate those statements proved to be. I carried no grudges as my father had, nor resented the structure as he did. I understood why he had though.
Movement flickered in the side mirror. The patrol car sat hidden by the outward curve of the boat’s hull. I’d pulled Angel nearly five hundred miles with a dead spot directly behind me. If I hadn’t watched the car ease off the road, I’d have never known the cruiser was behind me. I could see the car door swing open, however, despite Angel’s bulk.
Seconds later, a monster clambered out. No, monster might leave the wrong impression. Leviathan better described the apparition approaching in the side mirror. The man walking up the road in yard-eating steps had to be close to seven feet tall and easily went three hundred pounds. Confirmation of his height came when he walked past Angel’s gunwale. I knew for a fact it sat almost six feet off the ground. When he glanced over in passing, he had to look down.
I leaned out of the window for a better look and knew immediately where graphic novels erred. Artists liked to paint heroes and villains as larger than life, accentuating expressions, muscles, everything right down to size 24 shoes. The man closing in on the Durango offered the same study in extremes, from hands that looked big enough to palm a beach ball to a chest so wide it blocked out the road behind him.
The problem lay in the accessories. The Sheriff might be massive, but the items he carried hadn’t been fashioned in a land peopled by giants. The gun looked like a toy pistol stuck on his hip, not like a handheld cannon. The badge drew a glittering oval above his breast pocket, marking a tiny bright spot in what had to be several yards of the crisp brown cloth that covered his torso. Perfectly centered below the metallic shield, a nameplate scored a thin black strip just wide enough that the edges lined up with the outline of his shirt pocket. All three, pocket, plate, and badge had been aligned with military precision. Mirrored sunglasses glinted from the shadow of a broad-brimmed hat like bright alien eyes. The hat, like the rest of the uniform, bore no awkward creases and looked as if it had just been pulled from the rack at the dry cleaners.
The name plate read D. Little, the letters etched in neat white lines against a shiny black background. Another confirmation of his height came when he ground to a halt in front of me. I had to look up to see his face.
I studied the last name and shook my head. If I had been choosing descriptive names, I’d have gone for something that implied a little more mass after watching him approach in the side mirror. I don’t know, maybe something like Mountain, or even a hyphenated Tidal-Wave. He turned, planted his feet wide apart and put his hands on his hips. The badge flashed on his chest like a signal mirror.
Other than a drop of sweat trickling down the side of his face, he stood like a statue, motionless, squared jaw so stiff and stern it could have been chiseled out of an exotic, amber-colored marble. He looked tanned, healthy, and pissed. The glinting sunglasses hid his eyes, but down below a nose that had been broken at some point in the past and never fixed, his lips drew a taut, angry line across his face. Everything about him screamed military, not backwoods deputy, from the flawless creases etched down his shirt to hair cropped close and neat.
Heat rolled in through the open window. The ocean lay cool and blue just across the protective line of rolling dunes. The roar of breakers smashing against the shoreline boomed dull and distant like far off thunder, the sound tantalizing in its promise of windswept vistas and water stretching from one side of the horizon to the next. Behind the sandy little hills though, the scene reminded me of pictures of the desert, with bone white sand running off into the distance, hot air rising in shimmering waves off the asphalt, and most of the greenery relegated to short, twisted shrubs that looked as if they hadn’t seen rain in a year.
A quick glance either way showed nothing but empty road. I looked back in the officer’s direction, my gaze ending up on a wide expanse of chest and that little black nametag.
I studied the D beside Little while I waited for the inevitable demand for me to prove who I was. As improbable as the last name was, that single initial gave rise to a couple of equally improbable names to go along with it.
“Do, Dam.” I mused out loud.
He leaned forward in a perilous imitation of the Eiffel Tower, “What did you say?”
His voice rolled forth in deep and liquid tones when he spoke, the kind of sound a smoker makes when he coughs, only it kept coming and forming words.
I blinked. “Um, sorry. That’s an expression my grandma used when she had screwed up.”
His sunglasses flashed as he canted his head to one side, the blank expanse of glass both unsettling and unnatural. I leaned a bit to one side and felt better just seeing myself reflected in them.
“Do,” I imagined him saying. “That’s my name. Do Little, like the doctor. And my middle name is Dam. Cause that’s what I do, Dam Little.”
“Need to see your license and registration,” he said in his w
et voice.
I handed both over. Glints of blue pulsed in his mirrored glasses, reflected no doubt from the lights on top of his car. The thought of alien eyes fell away in favor of a flatlander version of RoboCop.
Beneath my ball cap, my scalp began to prickle with my own offering of sweat. Do Dam studied my papers with the same intensity of a researcher poring over a papyrus scroll.
If it hadn’t been for the badge and sheen of sweat beading on my forehead, I might have laughed out loud. The combination of my own subdued discomfort and that shiny piece of metal promising peace and safety for all reminded me just how close the edge lay between driving down the road with thoughts of wind filling Angel’s sails and riding down it in a police car with my hands cuffed behind me.
I swallowed hard and looked away from the nameplate with its tempting scrawl of letters.
The last fifty miles, driven with the ocean clinging to one side of the road and a dense swamp on the other had left the windshield crusted with salt, the surface a pockmarked graveyard of wings, yellow and green smears, all of it punctuated with bright streaks of red stretched long and thin like bloody exclamation marks. The splashes of color overlaying a lacy white patina reminded me of a painting I’d seen a few months back when Jayne had dragged me to an art show where I’d watched well dressed and apparently intelligent people fawn over equally random splotches of color. The thought crossed my mind that I could probably open my own gallery simply by changing windshields every couple of hundred miles.
I closed my eyes and imagined them, pristine walls covered with black backgrounds and littered with hundreds of windshields, each curved glass sporting its own wistful title. I wondered what I’d call them. Maybe Flight of the Mosquito or Echoes of the Rainbow. I decided I’d have to think on that one. The more self-absorbed and pretentious the title, the more likely some snobbish connoisseur would find meaning in the irregular patterns displayed in salt crystals and bug juice.
The Island - Part 1 Page 3